Certain prey

Chapter Thirteen

Bright and early the next morning – a cool morning that promised heat in the afternoon; with pale blue skies that went on forever – Mallard called Lucas from

Washington. The call came in an hour before Lucas had planned to get out of bed; he took it in the kitchen.

'We have some news on the Tennex connection,' he said, as Lucas yawned and scratched. 'I've also got a question. Two questions.'

'What's the news?'

'There is no Tennex Messenger Service, as far as we can tell, and never has been.'

'That's nice,' Lucas said.

'That's what I thought. The phone number goes into a suite of short-term offices. There're a couple of receptionists out front from eight o'clock in the morning until seven at night. In the back, there're a couple more women running a high-tech switchboard. The switchboard works around-the-clock. The offices are rented by the week or the month, mostly by businessmen here to lobby the government. They're about two-thirds full at any given time. Each of the offices has an individual number, which the switchboard women answer with the name of whoever is renting it at the moment.

The answering-service calls come in on separate numbers, which the switchboard women answer with a specific name, depending on which number rings. Tennex only has the answering service. No office.'

'So who pays the bills? Where do the checks come from?'

'We don't know, yet. We want to listen on the Tennex line for a couple of more days before we talk to the people who run the place. But I'll tell you what – and this is my question… Did one of your people, a woman, call Tennex from a payphone yesterday evening?'

'No.'

'Somebody from Minneapolis did,' Mallard said. 'The only phone call that came in all day.'

'Huh… what time?'

'Around five-thirty, our time.'

'Huh. We took a photo-spread over to a little girl who actually saw the shooters

… you probably read about her, in the files.'

'Yes.'

'We had a photo spread with the face of our suspect inserted in it. We got nothing, but that would have been about an hour-and-a-half before your call. And

I'll tell you what: this woman's got some contacts inside our department.

Probably inside yours, as far as that goes.'

'Ours didn't know about the photo spread.'

'All right – if there was a leak, it was us. If there was a leak. .. but damn it, I would have leaked to her myself, if I'd known she might call. Do you have a recording of the voice?'

There was a brief pause, as if Mallard were contemplating the stupidity of the question. 'Of course,' he said.

'I want to hear it,' Lucas said. 'I know the suspect personally, I've spoken to her in the past week. Maybe I could nail it down.'

'Which leads to my second question,' Mallard said. 'What's her name?'

'Jesus…'

'I've got to have it. This is turning into something. As long as your case was nothing more than an intuition, it was one thing. Now it's another.'

'She's a well-connected defense attorney here in town. A millionaire, probably.

And I know she gives money to the politicians – U.S. senators, congressmen, you name it. If you fuck this up, they could find us both buried in the back yard.'

'Three people here will have the name. That's all. If we're buried in the back yard, the other two guys'll be buried under us, I guarantee it.'

Lucas sighed, hesitated, and said, 'All right. Her name is Carmel Loan. I can't tell you how nervous this makes me.'

'The woman who called yesterday identified herself as Patricia Case.'

'I'll check around, but I've never heard of her,'

Lucas said. He picked up the St. Paul phone book, thumbed through it to Case.

'Could be some kind of code,' Mallard said. 'Although that's pretty far fetched.'

' Tennex Messenger Service is far-fetched… did you get a location on the pay phone?'

'Yeah, just a minute. Uh, it's at 505 Nicollet Mall.'

'Five-Oh-Five,' Lucas muttered, as he ran his ringer down the Case listing in the phone book. He said, half to himself, 'There aren't any Patricia Cases listed in the St. Paul phone book. I don't have the Minneapolis book here at the house.'

'We already checked, and there aren't any Patricia Cases. We also checked the

505 number, and got some department stores. There's a Nieman Marcus.'

'That's an easy two-minute walk from Carmel Loan's office,' Lucas said. 'I can check, but it might be the closest pay phone to Carmel's office.'

'Interesting,' Mallard said.

'Please don't let anything out about Carmel,' Lucas said urgently. 'Not yet.'

'Nothing will come out of this end. I swear to God.'

'One more thing,' Lucas said. 'When are you going to hit this place? The office suite? Go in and talk to the people?'

'We'll give it another day, anyway.'

'Call me the night before. I'm three hours away: I'd like to be there when you do it.'

'No problem. Anything else?'

'One other thing… one of the victims, Rolando D'Aquila, used to be a heavy drug-dealer. The word from our drug people is that he bought his coke out of St.

Louis, a Mafia connection down there. Not Colombian or Mexican, but old-line

Mafia. And this shooter, his woman, she seems to tie in down there.'

'Damn,' Mallard said, 'I'm letting something happen here that I've never let happen before.'

'What's that?'

'I'm getting my hopes up.'

Then for two days, nothing happened. Carmel didn't get a call-back. She stayed close to the magic phone, but she never heard from Rinker. Was there a problem with the contact phone? Was it tapped?

The FBI was equally frustrated. There were no more calls to Tennex: nothing. At the end of the second day, Mallard called Lucas back. 'We're going in tomorrow, if nothing happens to slow us down. We want to get in before the end of the week.'

'I'll get a flight out tonight.'

'We can cover that, if you want,' Mallard offered.

'No thanks, I'll do it from here.'

'All right. Anything new?'

'I sent one of my people, Marcy Sherrill, down to St. Louis to schmooze their organized crime people. There's nothing going on up here.'

'If SherrilPs the one I remember from the meeting, she oughta schmooze pretty well.'

'One of her many talents,' Lucas said. 'See you tomorrow.'

Lucas called his travel agent, got a business-class ticket on the nine o'clock

Northwest flight into National and made a reservation at the Hay-Adams. He liked the Hay-Adams because, the half-dozen times he'd stayed there – even the first time – the doorman said, 'Nice to see you again, sir.'

Then he called Donnal O'Brien at D.C. Homicide and said, 'Hey, Irish.'

'Jesus Christ, the outer precincts are heard from,' O'Brien said. 'How'n the hell are you, Lucas?'

'Good. I'm coming to town tonight. I'd like to get together tomorrow, if you've got the time.'

'Want me to get you at the airport?'

'I'll be really late,' Lucas said. O'Brien had four kids to take care of. 'I'll get a cab down to the Hay-Adams. I'll do my thing with the Feebs tomorrow morning, and make it over to your shop by when? Three o'clock?'

'I'll plan on three. Maybe go out for a couple beers, huh?'

'See you then,' Lucas said.

The flight to Washington was a nightmare: nothing wrong with the plane, the flying conditions were perfect, and the trip was on schedule, but airplanes – winged planes, not helicopters – were the only really phobia that Lucas was aware that he had. He dreaded getting on one, sat rigidly braced for impact from the time the plane backed away from the departure gate until it nosed into the destination gate, and was never really convinced that he'd survived until he was walking through the terminal at the other end.

As they came into Washington, he had a postcard view of the Washington Monument.

He ignored it. There was no point in looking at the view when you were only seconds away from flaming death. Somehow, the plane got down, and the stewardesses suppressed their panic well enough to smile at him and thank him for flying Northwest.

The Hay-Adams was excellent, as usual. The White House, framed in the window over the desk, looked like an expensive 3-D photo reproduction, of the kind found in commercial aquariums – until you understood that it was real.

He slept very well, having been properly welcomed back.

Mallard arrived at ten o'clock in the morning in a blue Chevy, followed by another blue Chevy carrying three more agents. Lucas was waiting just inside the door, and when he saw Mallard step out of the car, pushed through to the sidewalk: 'Nice hotel,' Mallard said, looking up at the Hay-Adams facade. 'I once got to stay in a Holiday Inn with suites. I didn't get a suite, but I walked past the door to one.'

'If you guys treat me right, I'll let you stand in the lobby while I have dinner tonight,' Lucas said.

'You're all heart,' Mallard said. He was wearing a blue suit with a dark blue necktie with tiny red dots on it. He had a stainless-steel cup full of coffee in the Chevy's cupholder. He took a sip and said, 'If you want some, we can stop at a Starbuck's.'

'I'm fine,' Lucas said. 'Why all the troops?'

'There are five of them – the two receptionists, the two women on the switchboard, and the manager -so I thought there ought to be five of us.'

'Yeah? Well, if they charge, go for the lead one,' Lucas said, as he got comfortable in the lumpy front seat. 'If you can turn the lead one, the rest of them usually follow.'

'You'd be dead in an hour, in Washington,' Mallard said. 'In Washington, the leaders are at the back of the stampede.'

The office suite was off Dupont Circle, a nondescript granite building that might, on close inspection, pass as ordinary. Lucas, Mallard and the other three agents went into the building like a mild-mannered rugby scrum – a tight little group of conservatively dressed, short-haired men, all reasonably large and athletic, who, if they were mistaken for anybody at all, would be mistaken for the Secret Service.

Lucas had seen FBI scrums before, but had never been part of one.

Mallard held up his ID to the receptionists, one bottle redhead and one real blonde, and said, 'We're from the FBI. We'd like to speak to Mrs. Marker.'Two of the agents had peeled off from the group as Mallard stopped at the desk, and gone through a door into the back. Covering the switchboard, Lucas thought.

The blonde receptionist was a carefully coiffed middle-aged woman whose glasses had blue-plastic frames with silver sparkles embedded in the plastic. When she saw Mallard's credentials, her hand went to her throat: 'Well, yes,' she said.

'I'm not positive that she's in.'

'She's in,' Mallard said. 'Dial 0600 and ask her to come out.'

The receptionist asked no more questions: She picked up her phone, punched in the numbers and said into the mouthpiece, 'There are some gentlemen from the FBI here to see you.'

'Thank you,' Mallard said.

Louise Marker was a chunky young woman with only one eyebrow, a long furry brown stripe that sat on her brow ridge above both eyes. She had exaggerated cupid's bow lips, colored deep red, beneath a fleshy, wobbly nose. In Alice in

Wonderland, she would have been the Red Queen.

Tennex had been a customer for seventy-two months, she said, and paid the rent and phone bill each month with a cashier's check or a money order. She kept the recipient's receipt for all seventy-two checks in a green hanging file. Most of the checks and money orders came from different banks in each of the cities of

St. Louis, Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Kansas

City, Missouri. Four checks came from Dallas-Fort Worth and three from Denver.

Two checks came from Chicago and from Miami, one each from San Francisco, New

Orleans, and New York.

'How does she find out how much she owes?' Lucas asked. 'The phone bills are always different?'

Marker shrugged: 'We add them up and put a message on the voice mail, on the twenty-ninth of each month. A few days later, the check comes in. End of story.'

'And the voice mail goes through the phone company, so you wouldn't even handle that call.'

'That's right.'

'Why would you bother with your service at all? With a receptionist?'

'Well, you gotta have a phone – the phone company won't let you in on the service if you don't have a phone,' Marker said. 'We're the phone.'

'That's nuts,' one of the FBI agents said. 'They pay you all this money for a phone?'

'It is not nuts,' Marker insisted. 'We don't explore the backgrounds of our clients, because we don't have the resources, but we know what they are, most of them. They're mostly trade associations who can't afford a full-time office in

Washington, but want people to think they can. People like politicians. So if a politician calls here, a receptionist answers, we tell them that nobody's in, and switch them to voice mail. Then somebody at the real office out in Walla

Walla or wherever, calls here a couple of times a day, gets the message and returns the call. And if they have to actually come here, to

Washington, we can rent them a suite and all the business machines, the whole works. We're not the only people who do this, you know; there're a half-dozen others…'

Lucas prowled the office and found an airline magazine, and opened it to the map of the national airline routes. The Midwestern and Mid-South cities that were the sources of most of the checks – Kansas City, St. Louis and Tulsa – lay in a neat circle with Springfield, Missouri, at its center. On the other hand, if the sender of the checks came from Springfield, or close by, and mailed the checks from neighboring large cities to avoid pinpointing herself, why hadn't she ever gone to Little Rock? It was hardly further than the others, at least on the airline map.

And the other checks were so scattered that they probably indicated that the killer either traveled a lot, or arranged for different people to send the checks. Though it was unlikely that she would ask other people – that'd be too much exposure. So she traveled.

'… never talked to her,' Marker was saying. 'I don't even know if it's really a her, I always thought it was a him.'

'Why'd you think that?' Mallard asked.

'I don't know. Because he ran a messenger service, I guess. You kind of think that's like a guy job.'

Mallard and his three agents began in-depth interviews with all five women, taking them one at a time.

Lucas stood outside of Marker's office for a while, watching her talk with

Mallard; her eyes would flick out to Lucas, then back to Mallard, and then out through the door to Lucas again. After ten minutes, Lucas stuck his head in the door: 'Thanks for letting me ride along. I'll give you a call this afternoon.'

Mallard said, 'Hold on a second.'

Out in the hall, away from the five women, he said, 'Not too exciting.'

'I gotta think about it,' Lucas said.

'The problem is, we don't have an edge, a crack, anything we can get a hold of.

We'll have our local agents run down these checks: maybe somebody'll remember her.'

'The most checks she got from one bank is six, and those were months apart,'

Lucas said. 'I'd bet she went to a different teller every time, paid cash.'

'Maybe we can run down the actual paper checks, and get fingerprints. We're gonna process all the paper we got here. And when the next check comes in…'

'Do everything,' Lucas said.

He turned back to look at the building as he walked away, and saw Mallard looking after him. The call-in arrangement was clever: it was also not quite right.

Donnal O'Brien was a husky black man with a small brush mustache and four kids at home: his wife had gone out for a loaf of bread one night, and never came back, he said, 'Just too quiet in that convenience store, I guess, with none of the kids around.'

She was now living in North Miami Beach with a retired DC cop named Manners:

'The drug guys called him Bad Manners. I think he retired with a little more than the regular pension, seeing as how he didn't bust anybody for the last three years he was on the force.'

Lucas had met O'Brien at a computer training conference when Lucas was still hawking his police-simulation software. They'd had a few beers, shared information a couple of times. When O'Brien was still married, he and his wife had once spent a week at Lucas's Wisconsin cabin.

O'Brien was sitting in a small grey-walled cubicle reading a People magazine story about a lesbian golfer when Lucas leaned in the doorway: 'Did you know that Kitty Veit is a lesbo?'

'I don't know who Kitty Veit is.'

'She shot a sixty-three in the final round of the women's grand-am last weekend, at Merion, and won three hundred and twenty thousand dollars. She's the only woman who ever shot a sixty-three there.'

'You mean golf?'

O'Brien sighed. 'Never mind. Anyway, she's a lesbo.'

'And that offends your golfer's sense of propriety?'

'No, it makes me wonder if I got an operation, I could shoot a sixty-three.'

'You'd probably just sit home all day and play with your tits.'

'Mmm. Hadn't thought of that.'

'How ya been?' Lucas asked.

'Tired. Let's go get a Coke.'

They found an empty booth at a small, moderately greasy diner with Formica table-tops and cracked red plastic booth seats. The counterman drifted toward them and O'Brien called, 'Big Coke and Big Diet Coke.' Lucas told O'Brien that he was thinking of buying a golf course, and O'Brien didn't believe him. Five minutes later, when he did believe him, O'Brien started fishing for a job as a greens keeper.

Lucas laughed: 'I haven't bought it, yet.'

'Keep me in mind, I'd be great at it,' O'Brien said. 'I'm two years from retirement if some asshole doesn't shoot me first. Work in Minnesota? Hell, yes.' Then, his voice pitched down, he asked, 'What's going on. You're working, right?'

'Yeah. We had some people executed in the Cities…' Lucas gave him a quick rundown, left Carmel Loan's name out of it, and concluded with the FBI entry at the answering service.

'Never heard of the place. Louise Marker?'

'Yeah. Just like it sounds, like Magic Marker, M-A-R-K-E-R.'

'Four dead. Never heard of a pro going in for something like that

… You might get three or four dead all at once, but not in a series, like they're hunting them down.'

'There's something going on,' Lucas said. 'It could be something really simple – a money thing. The hit goes sour, somebody gets a name or a connection, and then this killer chick has to come back and clean up.'

'Impossible to prove, though,' O'Brien said. 'I get pretty goddamned depressed about it sometimes. Crooks are getting too smart, they move too fast. Hit here, gone tomorrow.'

'Be nice to pull this chick down, though,' Lucas said. 'I'd like to see if you've got anything local on this Marker, or any of the people who work there.

Even word-of-mouth. The Feebs don't have anything that's not on paper…'

'I'll check around,' O'Brien said. 'And I'll tell you what: I know this guy named George Hutton, he works in fraud…'

They caught Hutton standing at a bus stop where a desk sergeant said he might still be, if they hurried.

'George,' O'Brien called across the street. A bus was rolling down the block.

'Wait.'

They crossed at the corner and Hutton looked at his watch and said, 'Two minutes and I'm out of here, gone for the week. Then the local Black Irish shows up with some guy in an expensive suit and I get this really bad feeling. ..'

'All we need is a name,' O'Brien said. 'Let me tell you a name.'

'One name,' said Hutton. He looked at his watch.

'Louise… Marker.' O'Brien had moved to one side of Hutton so he could speak directly into the other man's ear. Hutton closed his eyes and tipped his head back, so that he'd have been looking at the sky, except that his eyes were closed. He stood like that for a moment, then opened his eyes and looked at

Lucas and spoke to O'Brien.

'Who's the guy?'

'Lucas Davenport, a deputy chief from Minneapolis. Davenport Simulations.'

'I know that,' Hutton said. Then: 'Look up Maurice Marker, formerly Marx, of

Marker Dry Cleaners, Inc. New Jersey. He had a daughter named Louise. How old is your Louise?'

Lucas said, 'I'd say early middle age – forty, maybe. A little chunky.'

Hutton nodded: 'That'd be about right. What's she doing?'

'Running an answering service.'

Hutton nodded. 'Yeah. Look up Maurice Marker.' He peered down the street:

'That's my bus.'

Lucas said good-bye to O'Brien, caught a cab to the FBI building and called

Mallard, who came down to get him.

'We need to look up a dry cleaner named Maurice Marker or Maurice Marx,' Lucas said.

'Where'd you get the name?'

'From a cop here in DC – some kind of savant guy, he knows names.'

'Huh. Well, let's go punch it in.'

Maurice Marker, now retired to south Florida, had a short FBI biography. He had once owned a chain of dry cleaners in New Jersey, with a sales staff consisting of a dozen men with severely bent noses. The bent noses were not around much, but they made nice salaries, with excellent benefits, including full dental and medical, as well as life insurance and retirement plans.

'These guys would bring in a chunk of cash from dope or broads or gambling or whatever, give it to Maurice, he'd run it through the cash register, write off their salaries against taxes, take a chunk for himself, and everybody was happy,' Mallard said. 'He had thirty-three dry cleaners when he retired. He sold the stores to another guy, who did the same thing until he went away.'

'Where'd he go?'

Mallard peered at the computer: 'About four miles east of Atlantic City.'

'Is Louise in there?' Lucas nodded at the computer.

Mallard ran his finger down the monitor screen: 'Yep. Not necessarily the same one, of course. Just a minute.' He opened a spiral notebook, flipped through to the back, ran his finger down a page of chicken-scratch handwriting, then looked at the screen. 'I'll be damned. Same birth date. That's our girl.'

Lucas turned away, paced a few steps, paced back, turned away again. 'So. She's connected. Could be a coincidence, but probably not.'

'Probably not.' Now Mallard got to his feet, and started following Lucas in the pacing. 'Goddamn it, Davenport, I'm getting a hard-on.'

'You haven't gotten any more calls since the one from Patricia Case?'

'No…'

'Then it's possible that was some kind of a warning call. A code

…'

'It's possible that Tennex only gets one call a month…'

Lucas was shaking his head: 'No. You know what it is? The answering service is a blind. Or partially a blind. That's why it's not just a phone ringing in an empty apartment somewhere. I mean, why not that? It'd be easier.'

'So what are you saying?'

'That one of those women there is a cutout, somebody the killer can go to for more information. One of the women is really an alarm, and we probably rang it.'

'It'd have to be Marker,' Mallard said. 'There are ten different women who work on those switchboards, either full or part time, and they rotate shifts…

There wouldn't be any way to know which operator would be answering which call, so they'd have to have some special instructions from Marker if anything unusual came up on Tennex.'

'So let's bring her in,' Lucas said.

'On what?'

'Nothing. Scare the shit out of her.'

'That's, uh, sort of not our operating procedure,' Mallard said.

'Fuck your operating procedure. Bring her in, let me talk to her.'

'Let me make a call,' Mallard said.

Marker demanded an attorney, and Mallard was happy to give her all the time she needed.

'If we're not out of here by seven, I'm gonna miss my plane,' Lucas said.

'I'll have my secretary see if there's another flight out,' Mallard said. 'Gimme the ticket.'

Marker's attorney, who showed up two hours after they'd taken her in, was a cheery blond named Cliff Bell. He wanted to know what the hell was going on.

'Your client is a front for a professional killer we're tracking,' Lucas said.

'I don't think…' Bell started, but Lucas stopped him.

'Wait, wait,' Lucas said. 'Let me make my little speech, here. This woman, the killer, has murdered almost thirty people in more than a dozen states. A lot of them are those nasty southern states with those strange ways of executing people

– like Florida, where the guy's eyeballs went up in a puff of smoke when they pulled the switch on OP Sparky…'

'That's unnecessary,' Bell said.

'No, it's not,' Lucas said. He leaned toward Marker. 'That's what we're talking about here, Miss Marker. The electric chair. The gas chamber. Lethal injection.

When we nail this woman, we have the complete option of taking you with her. You connected the people who were contracting the killings, to the killer – and you knew about it.'

'I didn't know it was a killer,' Marker sputtered, but Bell snapped, 'Shut up,

Louise.'

Louise didn't: 'I thought it was some kind of political or real-estate scam, for

Christ's sakes…'

'Shut up, Louise,' Bell said. To Lucas: 'What's the deal?'

'The deal is, we don't have to take her. We can, we don't have to. She can go home right now, if she wants. But we won't make this offer again. Right now, if she tells us everything she knows about Tennex, we're willing to assume the best: that she may have guessed that she was facilitating some kind of criminal enterprise, but thought it was a minor political deal. I can't see her doing any hard time for that. If she doesn't take the deal, right now, while the trail is hot, then tough shit. We'll get this woman some other way, and we'll take Louise with her.'

'We need some time in private,' Bell said. Mallard found them a private room.

When he came back, Lucas noticed that he seemed to be sweating.

'I'm not used to this kind of stuff. Police stuff. We usually have four specialists and three lawyers doing the talking. Spend a couple of weeks prepping for the thing.'

'Sometimes, if you keep the momentum going, keep people talking, you get something you'd never get when everything's a formal tit-for-tat,' Lucas said.

'I know the theory,' Mallard said. 'We usually operate on a different one… and I'm just hoping we don't get our tit-for tat in a wringer.'

Bell brought Marker back fifteen minutes later: 'We want a letter from Mr.

Mallard, outlining the deal as laid out by Agent Davenport. Then we'll give you a statement.'

The letter took another half-hour: Bell turned a little sour when he learned that Lucas worked for the City of Minneapolis, but Mallard smoothed him over.

'So tell us,' Lucas said. He had his feet up on Mallard's desk, a tape recorder running in the middle of Mallard's blotter-calendar. Marker and Bell sat in wooden visitors' chairs, while Mallard sat back on a couch with his legs crossed, drinking from his endless mug of coffee.

The connection, Marker said, had been set up by a man named – so he said – Bob

Tennex, although he sounded like East Coast Italian. 'Sounded? You didn't see him?' 'No. It was all done by telephone…' 'You set up the account without seeing the guy?' 'That happens, from time to time. If we get a check, and the check is good, we offer that service…'

Since the connection was set up, Marker said, she'd spoken to a Tennex representative several times, and it was always a woman. Marker had Caller ID on her phones, purely as a matter of course, and had noticed that the calls came in from all over the Midwest, and sometimes from other parts of the country. Kansas

City was prominent: four or five calls had come from there. Another name that stuck in her head was Wichita, because, while only two calls had come from there, the woman had been angry both times about problems with the phone company's answering service.

'She wanted us to get on them – they had a couple of breakdowns,' Marker said.

'But that's not the only thing she asked about, is it?' Lucas asked. 'You had some other agreement with her. About people making inquiries about the messenger service, about the police coming in.'

'She really just thought it was some kind of minor political hustle – those things go on all the time here,' Bell said.

'So what was it?' Lucas asked.

'Uh, well, if somebody came snooping around, I wasn't supposed to do anything, except… wait.'

'Until what?'

'Until she called me,' Marker said, her voice barely audible.

'You're gonna have to speak up,' Mallard said.

'Until she called me,' Marker said.

'And then what?'

'She'd call and ask, 'Is Mr. Warren in?' And if nobody had been around, if I didn't know anything, I'd say, 'You've got the wrong number: this is Marker

Answering.' But if somebody had been around, I'd say, 'No, but Mr. White's here.

Would you like me to put your call through?" '

'How many times did you do this?' Mallard asked.

'Two different times. About three or four years go, something must've happened, and she called me every day for two weeks.' Marker said, her voice dropping again.

'Ah, shit,' Lucas said. 'Then she called you yesterday or today, didn't she?

This afternoon?'

'She's been calling for a week, every day. And today, about an hour after you left the first time. Before you came and got me again,' Marker said. 'She was calling from Des Moines, a pay phone, I think. I could hear the cars.'

'And you gave her the Mr. White line.'

'Yes,' she squeaked.

'Did you get the job because of your father?'

'Maybe. Tennex said he knew Dad.'

'Where's your father living now?' Lucas asked.

'Well, he's not,' Marker said. 'He died of colon cancer last year.'

'I'm sorry,' Mallard said.

'They said it was all the chemicals from the dry-cleaning,' Marker said. 'I'll probably go that way myself. A lot of us do.'

There was more, but nothing significant. They released Marker, and Mallard drove

Lucas to the Hay-Adams, retrieved his bag from the luggage room, and took him to the airport.

'So you think she's gone,' Mallard said.

'Yeah. And I think I'm the guy who tipped her off by calling into Tennex.'

'Nothing to do about that,' Mallard said. 'You were just running checks on a list of phone numbers. It was a long shot.'

'Yeah, but Jesus. That close.'

'We've still got a lot to work with – all those checks, all the phone calls.

We've got something, now. I'll bet we have some kind of description of her in a week. I'll bet we unravel some kind of connection.'

'How much?'

'What?'

'How much will you bet?'

Mallard sucked on his teeth for a moment, then said, 'About a dime, I guess.'

Lucas nodded. 'Get me to the plane on time.'

The plane, as it happened, was going to Minneapolis – with a stop in Detroit.

'Aw, no, I gotta fly direct,' Lucas told the check-in attendant.

'Nothing tonight, except through Detroit,' the clerk said, punching up her computer. 'We could get you on a flight tomorrow morning that goes straight through…'

'Aw, man…'

He went through Detroit, miserably suffering through two take-offs and landings.

He was surprised at the safe landing in Detroit, but quickly convinced himself that it would be the second half of the flight, the unnecessary half, that would kill him, so achingly close to home…

As miserable as he was, two things occurred to him:

Wichita, Kansas, was a large enough city that it might attract the eye of somebody who traveled out-of-town to make her calls; but Marker had said the killer was angry when she called from Wichita. Was it possible that she lived close to Wichita, and made spur-of-the-moment calls out of anger when something went wrong with the answering service? He got the airline flight magazine out of the seat pocket in front of him, and looked at the flight map again. Wichita, he thought, would be as viable a home town as Springfield. Something to think about…

The second thing came to him as they were landing in Minneapolis: he was looking down at one of the lakes where he'd expected the impact to occur – he could see himself struggling to get out of the flooding cabin, but his legs and arms were broken and he couldn't unfasten the seatbelt – and the name Des Moines popped into his head.

If the killer came from either Springfield or Wichita or virtually anyplace around those cities, and if she were driving to Minneapolis, she'd go through

Des Moines.

If she had done that, he thought, she'd be here now.

He looked down at the broad multi-colored grid of lights that made up the Cities and thought, 'Somewhere?