Certain Prey (7 page)

“So come back,” Black said. “Nobody’s gonna hear about this from us.”

“Ten o’clock tomorrow morning,” Carmel said. “I assume you’ve already talked to Louise Clark and suggested that she not talk to anybody about it. Including me.”

Sherrill nodded: “Of course.”

“Of course,” Carmel said.
S
HERRILL
CALLED
L
UCAS
a little after three o’clock: “We’re going over to the bureau office, if you want to come.”

“Let’s go,” Lucas said. He tossed the Equality Report on the floor. “Let me get my jacket.”

The sunlight was blinding; another good day, Lucas thought, as he slipped on his sunglasses. A great day up north—a day to stretch out on a swimming float, listen to a ball game on a tinny transistor radio and let the world take care of itself.

“. . . thought she was gonna kill him,” Sherrill was saying. Lucas caught up with the conversation. “So Carmel didn’t know?”

“No. She wasn’t faking it, either. When we hit her with it, her eyes actually
bulged
,” Sherrill said happily. “I didn’t see what happened out in the hall, but when they came back in, he looked like a sheep that’d been shorn.”

“Huh . . . any vibe off the affair? Was he hiding it?”

Sherrill shrugged, but Black shook his head: “I didn’t get a goddamn thing. He looked surprised—like, surprised we’d even ask. He didn’t look scared, he didn’t look like he was covering . . .”
T
HE
HEAVILY ARMED
male white-shirt-and-tie receptionist rang them through into the FBI’s inner sanctum, where they found a lightly sweating assistant agent-in-charge waiting in a conference room with a man who looked like an economics professor, a little harassed, a little unkempt, the lenses on his glasses a little too thick; on the other hand, he had a thick neck. He smiled pleasantly at Lucas, looked closely at Sherrill, and nodded at Black.

“I’m Louis Mallard,” he said, pronouncing it Louie. “Mallard like the duck. You know Bill.” Bill Benson, the assistant AIC, nodded, said, “Hey, Lucas.”

“What’s going on?” Lucas asked.

“The Allen killing,” Mallard said. “Anything at all?”

Lucas looked at Sherrill, who looked at Mallard and said, “We’re looking at her husband, a lawyer here.”

“Mafia connections?” Mallard asked, breaking in.

“No, nothing we’ve seen. You have information . . . ?”

“Never heard of him,” Mallard said. “Couldn’t find any record of him at all in our files—he never served in the military. Never even got a traffic ticket, as far as I can tell. A dull boy.”

“We’ve been looking at his wife, too,” Sherrill said. “Trying to figure out something in her background that might get the attention of a pro, if this was a pro . . .”

“It was,” Mallard said.

“What . . . ?”

“Go ahead with what you were going to say about the wife.” He had a precise way of speaking, just
like
an economics professor.

“We’ve been looking at her,” Black said, picking up for
Sherrill. “We’ve had some of our business guys looking over her assets, but there’s nothing there. Her money’s been managed for decades. No big losses, no big gains, just a nice steady eleven percent per year. No changes. We looked at this charity she works with, too. Her grandfather set it up, and she and her parents are on the board, with some other relatives. But it’s mostly taking care of old folks. We can give you all the stuff if you want it, but we don’t see anything.”

Mallard looked at Lucas, then at Benson, the assistant AIC, then said, “Goddamnit,” in a professorial way.

“Tell us,” Lucas said.

“The woman who did it is a pro,” Mallard said. “She’s not very tall—maybe five-three or five-four. She once lived in St. Louis, or the St. Louis area. She might have a Southern accent. She became active about twelve or thirteen years ago, and we think she’s killed twenty-seven people, including your Mrs. Allen. We think she’s got some tie with some element—maybe just a single person—in the St. Louis Mafia crowd. And that’s what we got. We would
really
like to get more.”

“Twenty-seven,” Lucas said, impressed.

“Could be more, if she’s taken the time to get rid of some of the bodies, or if it took her a while to develop her signature—the silenced pistols, close up. But we’re sure it’s at least twenty-seven. She does good research, gets the victim alone, kills them and vanishes. We think she does her research to the point where she picks out the precise spot for the murder, in advance . . .”

“How would you know that?” Black asked.

“Because the caliber of the pistol is always appropriate for the spot. If it’s out in the open, it’s usually nine-millimeter or a forty. If it’s enclosed with concrete, like it was here, and a few other places, it’s always a twentytwo—you don’t want to be in a concrete stairwell with
nine-millimeter fragments flying around like bees. She uses standard-velocity twenty-two hollowpoints which turn the brain into oatmeal but stay inside the skull, for the most part.”

“That’s it? That’s what you’ve got?” Black asked.

“Not quite. We think she
drives
to the city where the hit takes place. We’ve torn passenger manifests apart for the airlines, all around the suspect killings, looking for anything that might be a pattern.”

“And nothing,” Black said.

“Oh, no. We found patterns,” Mallard said. “All kinds of patterns. We just didn’t find
her
pattern. We’ve looked at several hundred people, and we’ve got nothing.”

“She always works for pay?” Sherrill asked.

“We don’t know what she works for. Some of the hits have been internal Mafia business—but some of them, maybe half, look like straight commercial deals. We just don’t know. Twenty-seven murders, and there’s never been a conviction,” Mallard said. “There have been a couple of situations in which wives were killed, and we suspect the husband was involved, but there’s nothing to go on. Nothing. In none of the cases was it even remotely possible that the husbands were present for the killing: they were always in some well-documented other place.”

“Can we get your files on her?”

“That’s what I’m here for,” Mallard said. He reached into his coat pocket and took out a square cardboard envelope, and slid it across the table at Sherrill. “Duplicate CDs: everything we’ve got on every case where she’s been involved. Names, dates, techniques, suspects, photographs of everybody and all the crime scenes. The first file is an index.”

“Thanks.”

“Anything you get,” Mallard said. “No matter how thin it is,
please
call me. I
want
this woman.”

• • •

L
OUISE CLARK
DECIDED
that she could talk to Carmel only after Hale Allen convinced her it was okay. “I’m a
lawyer,
Louise,” Allen said. “It’s
all right
to talk to Carmel—the cops are just busting our balls.”

“If you’re sure,” Clark said anxiously. She was a thin, mousy woman with lank brown hair, a fleshy nose and nervous, bony hands. “It’s just that the police said . . .”

Clark did not look like any sex machine Carmel had ever seen; but, she thought to herself,
you never know.
“He’s sure,” Carmel said abruptly. They were sitting in Denny’s and had been talking for ten minutes and the woman had started whining. Carmel didn’t like whiners. She looked at Hale Allen. “Why don’t you take a walk around the block. I want to talk to Louise alone.”

So Hale Allen went for a walk, his hands in the pockets of his light woolen slacks, wearing a great blue-checked sport coat over a black t-shirt. The coat emphasized the breadth of his shoulders, and both women watched him as he held the door for a woman coming into the restaurant with a child; the woman said something to Allen, who gave her the great grin, and they had a little conversation in the doorway.

After a few seconds, Allen continued on his way; and Carmel and Louise had their talk.
C
ARMEL HAD
a king-sized bed with two regular pillows and a five-foot-long body pillow that she could wrap her legs around when she slept. Although she told people that she slept nude—all part of the image—she actually slept in an extra-large Jockey t-shirt and boxer shorts. With the shirt loose around her shoulders and her legs wrapped around the pillow, she lay in bed that night and reran mousy Louise Clark.

For the most part, Clark’s story was the same ol’ story.
She and Allen spent time alone, in their work. They shared a lot of stress. His wife didn’t understand him. They developed a relationship based on mutual respect, blah-blah-blah-blah. They fell into bed at the Up North Motel. Then the Mouse stuck it to Carmel.

“The first time I saw him naked in the motel there, it was afterwards. Really, after we made love, he was just so . . . beautiful. He’s a beautiful man.” Then her eyes flickered, and she added, girl-to-girl, a little giggle, a half-whisper, “And he’s really large. Beautiful and really, really large. He filled me up.”

Carmel squeezed the pillow between her legs and tried to squeeze the image out of her head. Hale Allen and the Mouse. Large.
T
HE ALARM WENT OFF
at seven o’clock sharp. Carmel pushed out of bed, slow and grumpy, robbed of her usual sound sleep. Large? How large? She scratched her ass, yawned, stretched and headed for the bathroom. A half-hour later, she was drinking her first cup of coffee, eating her second piece of toast, and checking the
Star-Tribune
for leaks about Allen and Clark, when the phone rang.

“Yes.”

“Miz Loan? This is Bill, downstairs.” Bill was the doorman.

“What?” Still grumpy.

“We got a package for you, says
Urgent.
I was wondering if we should bring it up.”

“What kind of package?”

“Small one. Feels like . . . looks like . . . could be a videotape,” Bill said.

“All right, bring it up.” Bill brought it up, and Carmel gave him a five-dollar bill and turned the package in her hand as she closed the door.
Bill was right: probably a video. Plain brown wrapping paper. She pulled the paper off, found a note written with a ballpoint pen on notebook paper. All it said was, “Sorry.”

Carmel frowned, walked the tape to the media room, plugged it into the VHS player and brought it up.

A woman’s image came up, and Carmel recognized it immediately. She was looking at herself, sitting in the now-understandably bright light of Rolando’s kitchen, just a little more than a month before.
T
HE ON-SCREEN
C
ARMEL
was saying, “Only kind I drink.” And then, “So you made the call.”

A man’s voice off-camera said, “Yes. And she’s still working, and she’ll take the job.”

“She? It’s a woman?”

“Yeah. I was surprised myself. I never asked, you know, I only knew who to call. But when I asked, my friend said, ‘She.’ ”

“She’s gotta be good,” the on-screen Carmel said. The offscreen Carmel decided that the camera must have been in the cupboard, shooting through a partly open door.

“She’s good. She has a reputation. Never misses,” the man’s voice said. “Very efficient, very fast. Always from very close range, so there’s no mistake.” A man’s hand appeared in the picture, with a mug of coffee. Carmel watched her on-screen self as she turned it with her fingertips, then picked it up.

“That’s what I need,” she said on-screen, and she took a sip of the coffee. Carmel remembered that it had been pretty good coffee. Very hot.

“You’re sure about this?” asked the man’s voice. “Once I tell them yes, it’ll be hard to stop. This woman, the way she moves, nobody knows where she is, or what name she’s using. If you say, ‘Yes,’ she kills Barbara Allen.”

The on-screen Carmel frowned. “I’m sure,” she said. The offscreen Carmel winced at the sound of Barbara Allen’s name. She’d forgotten that.

“You’ve got the money?” the man asked.

“At the house. I brought your ten.”

The on-screen Carmel put the mug down, dug in her purse, pulled out a thin deck of currency and laid it on the table. The man’s hand reached into the picture and picked it up. “I’ll tell you this,” the voice said. “When they come and ask for it, pay every penny.
Every penny.
Don’t argue, just pay. If you don’t, they won’t try to collect. They’ll make an example out of you.”

“I know how it works,” on-screen Carmel said. “They’ll get it. And nobody’ll be able to trace it, because I’ve had it stashed. It’s absolutely clean.”

“Then if you say, ‘Yes,’ I’ll call them tonight. And they’ll kill Barbara Allen.”

Carmel, offscreen, had to admire her on-screen performance. She never flinched, she just stood up and said, “Yes. Do it.”

The tape skipped a bit, then focused on a black telephone. “I’m really sorry about this, but you know about my problem. I’m gonna have to have twenty-five thousand, like, tomorrow,” the man’s voice said. “I’ll call and tell you where.”
T
HE
TAPE ENDED.
Carmel took a long pull on her coffee, walked into the kitchen, poured the last couple of ounces into the sink, and then hurled the cup at one of the huge plate-glass windows that looked out on her balcony. The cup bounced, without breaking. Carmel didn’t see it; she was ricocheting around the kitchen, sweeping glasses, dishes, the knife block, a toaster, silverware off the cupboards and tables and stove and onto the floor, kicking them
as they landed, scattering them; and all the time she growled through clenched teeth, not a scream, but a harsh humming sound, like a hundred-pound hornet.