Certain prey

Chapter Twenty-Three

Allen's body was found by his secretary, who first called Carmel to find out if she'd seen him.

'Well, no, I haven't,' Carmel said. She felt a crawling sensation on the back of her neck: this was it, the beginning of the end game. 'Not since day before yesterday – I had to work last night. I did talk to him last night, though.

Sometime about 11 o'clock, I think.'

'Well, I don't know what to do,' the secretary said. 'He missed a closing this morning, and people are upset. He could miss another one if he's not here in die next twenty minutes. That's not like him.'

'How about his cell phone? That's permanently attached to him.'

'It rings, but there's no answer.'

'Huh. Well, maybe we ought to check with a neighbor or something,' Carmel said.

'I'd go, but I don't have a key, and I do have a court date.'

'I've got a key,' the secretary said, the concern right on the surface of her voice. 'He keeps an emergency key in his desk drawer. I can go over…'

'You don't think anything's happened, do you?' Carmel asked. She put concern in her own voice. 'I bet he just lost track of time somewhere, he was talking about buying a new sport coat…'

'He was supposed to be here at nine o'clock. That's a lot of time,' the secretary said.

'Now you've got me worried,' Carmel said. 'Keep me posted.'

As the secretary, whose name was Alice Miller, hung up, it occurred to her she'd just had her most congenial conversation with Carmel Loan, who tended to treat secretaries like unavoidable morons. Allen, she thought, was known for a certain mellowing effect he had on women…

When Allen didn't show up for the next closing, she apologized for him, told the participants that she was very concerned, that he hadn't been heard from; that she was going to his house to check on him. She felt increasing concern as she drove out to Allen's house. And once there, she called back to the firm to make sure he hadn't shown up in the meantime. He hadn't.

Miller got out of the car and looked up the driveway. Remembered what had happened to Allen's wife; started up the drive. The house felt occupied, but quiet: a bad vibration. She stopped in the driveway and said, 'Oh, God,' and crossed herself.

The front door was open an inch, and she called, 'Hale? It's Alice. Hale?'

No answer. She stepped inside, and some atavistic cell deep in Alice Miller's brain, a cell that had never before been called upon, triggered, and Alice Miller smelled human blood.

Knew what it was, somehow, deep in the brain. Clutched her purse to her breasts and took three more steps into the house, leaned sideways, looked into the hall. ..

At Hale Allen's shattered skull.

She may have screamed there, inside the house. Later, she couldn't remember. For sure, she turned and ran toward the front door, still clutching her purse, turned just before she got to the door to look back, to see that Hale Allen's corpse wasn't following her, and ran straight into the door jamb.

The blow nearly knocked her down. She dropped the purse, dazed, struck out, and pushed her hand through the glass window on the storm door. Now she did scream, a low wavering cry, and clutching her bleeding arm, she managed to get outside, where she ran down the driveway. A man was walking his dog along the curb, and she ran at him, whimpering, bleeding badly from the arm cuts.

'Help me,' she cried. 'Please please please…'

The responding cops thought Alice Miller probably had something to do with the shooting, as cut up as she was. But the patrol sergeant who was second at the scene took a moment to walk through the house, to note the drying blood on the floor and the fresh blood on the door. He listened to Alice as she sat on the grass next to the squad car, and finally said, 'Call

Davenport. And somebody ride this lady into the hospital.'

Sherrill and Black got to Hale Allen's house five minutes before Lucas. Black looked at Allen's body and said, 'Totally awesome. Somebody shot the shit out of him.'

'Poor guy,' Sherrill said. Her lip trembled, and Black patted her on the back.

'How long was Carmel loose last night?' Black asked. 'You didn't go back, did you?'

'No, but John Hosta did. She came downstairs at one o'clock and went right home.'

'This is a little different than the other ones,' Black said, looking closer at the gunshot pattern. 'Not a. 22 for one thing. Bigger caliber. Still not huge, but bigger. And whoever shot him, really unloaded…'

'Lover's quarrel,' Sherrill said.

'Jesus, if we hadn't been watching Carmel, she could be in trouble,' Black said.

'I don't know,' Sherrill said. 'To tell you the truth, they were still running pretty hot. I don't think they were at the shooting stage.'

'Maybe he blew her off, maybe…'

A cop at the door called in to them: 'Davenport's here.'

'All right,' Sherrill said. 'Let's talk.'

Lucas was in a cold rage: he should have thought of this. He should have understood that Hale Allen might be in trouble. Had Allen discovered something? Had Carmel told him something in pillow talk? Something that led to accusations?

Sherrill walked him through the house, watching him. 'Take it easy,' she said, once. 'You're gonna have a goddamned heart attack.'

'I'm not gonna have a goddamned heart attack,' Lucas grated.

'Your blood pressure is about two hundred over two hundred. I know the signs, remember?'

'Off my case,' he said. 'And tell me about Carmel.'

'She was loose for a while last night,' Sherrill said. 'More than an hour.'

'It'd take a hell of a coincidence,' Lucas said.

'It'd take more than that,' Sherrill said. 'She would have had to leave the minute we did, get over here, work herself into a rage, shoot him, get away without any neighbors hearing the shots… it's bullshit.'

'Maybe the other woman did it, the shooter,' Lucas said.

'Look at the wounds,' she said. 'That looks like somebody who was pissed off, not a cold-blooded professional killer.'

'But look at the group in the forehead… that looks like a pro.'

'Yeah, but…'

'This is ludicrous,' Lucas said. 'I don't even believe it. What happened to the woman who found the body? Alice…'

'Alice Miller. She's getting her arm sewn up. She saw the body and took off and ran right through the door, put her hand through the glass.'

'She's not…'

'No. She came here looking for him, because he'd missed a couple of serious appointments, and she couldn't get through to him,' Sherrill said. 'Besides, even if she was a put-up deal, did you ever hear of anybody slicing up their arm for verisimilitude?'

'Veri what?' Lucas eyes slipped over to her, and she caught the unspoken amusement, out-of-place as it might be.

'Fuck you,' she said. 'I know some multi-syllabic words.'

'I've just never heard that spoken before,' Lucas said. His minuscule grin slipped back into the cold stare. 'I need to talk to Carmel.'

A uniformed cop stuck his head in the door: 'The Miller woman is calling from the hospital. She wants to talk to whoever's in charge.'

'Probably you,' Lucas said to Sherrill.

Sherrill nodded and went to take it, and somebody laughed and yelled at somebody outside the door: crime-scene crew was coming in. Lucas met the crew chief at the door and said, 'About a million people have already trampled through, but nobody's been past his feet. I need every goddamned thread and hair and print and stain you can find.'

'Bad news?'

'This is very bad news,' Lucas said. 'The newspapers are gonna tear us a new asshole.'

Sherrill was back, moving fast: 'You remember Allen had a girlfriend, Louise

Clark, had an affair with her, before his wife was killed? Before he started seeing Carmel?'

'Yeah?'

'Miller was calling to tell us that Louise Clark also didn't make it into work today. And as far as Miller knows, Clark didn't call in to tell people she wouldn't make it. Miller isn't her supervisor or anything, just heard she wasn't around, and didn't really put it together with Allen…'

'All right,' Lucas said. 'Let's get her address and get over there. Goddamnit, what is this? What is this?'

Louise Clark was a fine picture of a murder-suicide, stretched across her bed in her pretty pink negligee, the gun fallen away from her hand on the pillow. The gun had a silencer screwed onto the snout.

Lucas brought a kitchen chair into the bedroom and reversed it at the end of the bed and sat down, his arms on the back of the chair, his chin on his hands, and stared at her. Another cop came in and looked at him, and then at Sherrill:

Sherrill shrugged and the cop made a screw-loose gesture at his temple, and backed out of the room.

After two minutes of staring at the body, Lucas said, 'It's perfect.'

'Perfect?'

'Someplace in this house, we're gonna find either a gun, or shells, or something else, that'll tie her to the earlier shootings. The only thing we won't find is, we'll do some swabs and there won't be any semen.

Usually, there's semen, and there won't be any, because they couldn't do that.

And we'll get the ME to check Allen, and he won't have had sex in the last twenty-four hours, because they couldn't do that, either.'

'By they, you mean…'

'Carmel and the shooter-chick.'

Sherrill looked at him for a moment, wordlessly, then turned and walked back out of the room, only to return three seconds later: 'Lucas, I could make a pretty good case that Louise Clark is the shooter-chick. She was sleeping with Allen; she's a low-level secretary, and if she gets rid of the old lady, and she marries Allen, she goes from being poor and single to rich and married. She's got the motive… she's got the gun.'

'Where'd a goddamn low-level secretary get a silencer like that?' Lucas snarled.

'You buy a silencer like that on the black market, it'd cost you a grand. And who did the tooling on the muzzle? Did you find a machine-shop in the basement?'

'No, but Lucas… what if she's the shooter, and she knows Carmel that way?

What if Carmel's her lawyer?'

'And Carmel starts screwing her boyfriend, knowing that the woman she's kicking out of the saddle is a professional killer? Bullshit. Nope: this is a set-up.

That's why there won't be any semen, and that's why we're gonna find a gun,'

Lucas said. 'When you said you could make a pretty good case that Clark is a shooter, you're exactly right. You could. And a pro defense attorney like Carmel could make an even better one. She could make a perfect case. Trying to get anyone else for these murders is pointless: we'll never do it.'

'What're we gonna do?'

'I don't know what you're gonna do,' Lucas said, standing up. 'But I'm going up north. You can handle this fuckin' thing.'

Lucas arrived at his cabin a little after five o'clock, driving back roads most of the way to dodge the Wisconsin state patrol, the most rapacious gang of weasels in the North Woods. As he drove, the image of the dead Louise Clark hung before his eyes.

Then, just before the turnoff for his cabin, he saw a neighbor, Roland Marks, driving an orange Kubota tractor along the side of the road. The tractor had an oversized loader on one end, and a backhoe on the other. Lucas pulled off and climbed out of the car, and Marks rode the throttle back to idle.

'What the hell are you doing?' Lucas asked, walking around the tractor. Louise

Clark began to fade.

'Gonna clear me off some snowmobile trails on the back,' Marks said. Marks had forty acres of brush, gullies and swamp across the road. He called it his huntin' property.

'You don't know how to drive a tractor,' Lucas said. 'You're a goddamn stockbroker.'

'Yeah? Watch this.' Marks drove the backhoe down a shallow slope into the roadside ditch; did something with the controls, set the brake, turned his seat around backwards, lowered hydraulic support pads on both sides of the tractor, and raised the bucket. With one slow chop, he took a couple of cubic feet of dirt out of the bottom on the ditch.

'How much did that thing cost?' Lucas asked, impressed despite himself.

'About seventeen, used,' Marks said, meaning seventeen thousand dollars. 'Got four hundred hours on her.'

'Jesus, you're starting to talk like a shitkicker.'

'What're you doing this evening?' Marks asked.

'Going out in the boat.'

'Why don't you come over? I'll check you out on this thing.' He carefully dumped the dirt back in the hole where he'd gotten it; only half of it slopped over the edge.

'Yeah? What time?'

'Half-hour?'

'See you in a half-hour.'

Lucas turned the pump and the water heater on, got a light spinning rod and carried it down the dock and flipped a Moss Boss out into a shallow area spotted with water lilies. The Moss Boss slid and skated frog-like through the lilies and reeds, back up to the dock.

He threw it out again, then again, and on the third cast, a bass hit. He fought it in, unhooked it, dropped it back in the water. A twelve-incher, and fun; but he didn't eat bass.

He flipped the Moss Boss around the dock for twenty minutes, taking three small bass, tossing them all back, feeling his shoulders loosen up. Louise Clark was almost gone. After the last cast, he walked back up the sloping lawn to the cabin, got four cold Leinies out of the refrigerator, put them in a grocery sack, and had one foot out the door when the phone rang.

He stopped, thought about it, shook his head at his own foolishness, and went back.

'Yeah?'

'Sherrill. I'm down at the ME's. They're doing the autopsy on Louise Clark.'

'Anything, yet?'

'Yeah. She'd had sex shortly before she was killed. The semen hadn't been dissipated yet, and they got a pretty good sample. But to tell you the truth, I figure there's only one place it could have come from.'

'Man! I don't believe that,' Lucas said. He was shocked. 'What about Allen?'

'They haven't started on him, but I'll let you know. If you want to know.'

'Of course, I want to know…'

'Okay. And there's more stuff. We found the gun, just like you said. It's a Colt . 22 with a silencer. Stuffed inside a boot in the closet. And we found a couple hundred bucks worth of cocaine in the bedside table.

There's the connection to Rolo. Crime scene found some pubic hair in Allen's bed. In fact, they've got three different samples. Most of it comes from Allen, but some of it's blonde, and that'd be Carmel – but there's a third sample that's this mousy-brown color. We don't have the lab work yet, but I know it came from Clark. I know it.'

'All right. Call me back when they get to Allen. Keep pushing the ME, don't let them put anything off until tomorrow. We need it now…'

'You going fishing?'

'Actually, I was on my way out the door. A neighbor's gonna teach me to run a backhoe.'

'Speaking of backhoes…'

'What?'

'You never told me that special agent Malone of the FBI was a woman. And a woman with a sexy voice who wants to dance with you.'

'Didn't seem relevant,' Lucas grunted. 'Our relationship is purely professional.'

'She wants you to call her, in Wichita. I've got a number.'

Malone picked up the phone on the first ring. 'Hello, Lucas Davenport,' she said. 'I'm told you're off rusticating.'

'Fishing,' Lucas said.

'I wanted you to know that I'm moving up to Minneapolis with my group, and

Mallard is coming in from Washington. We're very interested in this

Louise Clark. Very interested.'

'There's something wrong with the whole thing. Did Sherrill tell you about the semen?'

'No, nothing…'

Lucas summarized his conversation with Sherrill and Malone said, 'If the semen checks out, if the DNA checks out… that's it.'

'Makes me feel weird,' Lucas said. 'It's not right. This Clark isn't a pro killer, not unless she was doing it for the fun of it. Because she didn't have any goddamn money.'

'Could have had it hidden away.'

'Bullshit,' Lucas said. 'She kills people, but hides it all away? The inside of her house looked like a cut-rate motel. She had a TV set that couldn't have been worth more than a couple hundred bucks, new. Everything in the place said she was a secretary, and struggling to keep her head above water.'

'All right. Well, I'm coming in tomorrow. Maybe, when you get back, you can take me out for a nice little foxtrot somewhere – some place where you won't spend all of your time dancing with the waitress.'

Lucas carried the sack of beer next door to the Marks' place. Lucy Marks was snipping the heads off played-out coneflowers as her husband maneuvered the

Kubota in and out of a shed. The shed showed splintered wood at the side of one of the doors, evidence of a recent impact.

'Role tells me you're gonna learn how to run the tractor/ she said, shaking her head. 'I'm glad I bought the quart-size bottle of peroxide.'

'Hey…'

'Lucas, you gotta encourage him to be careful. I'm afraid he'll roll it over on himself. He's like a kid.'

'He'll be all right,' Lucas said.

'That wouldn't be beer in that sack, would it?'

'Couple Leinies,' he said, guiltily.

'Yeah, well, I'll take the Leinies, you go figure out the tractor. When you get back, we'll fry some crappies and we can have the beer then.'

'Well…' She gave him a look and he handed her the bag.

The Kubota was… different. Running wasn't a problem, but maneuvering the joystick for the back-hoe took a little practice: 'I'll have you buttering your bread with this thing before we're finished,' Marks said, enthusiastically. 'I figure with a few hours practice, I could do all the driveways for this whole area, come winter.'

'Jesus Christ, Role, you make what, a half-million dollars a year selling stock?

And now you're gonna pick up an extra two hundred dollars a month doing driveways?'

When Lucas was checked out, Marks showed him where he was going to hide the key in his shed:

'Anytime I'm not up here, you're welcome to use it.'

'Maybe I could help you brush out a couple of those trails,' Lucas said; he liked the backhoe.

'Terrific'Then, as they walked back up toward the cabin, 'You gettin' any?'

Lucas could see Lucy Marks on the lake side of the house, cleaning up the grill.

'Overtime? I don't get overtime any more…'

'Pussy,' Marks said. 'Crumbcake. You know? It sorta looks like. ..'

'Yeah, yeah. As a matter of fact, I just took a call from a nice-looking forty ish FBI lady who's coming to Minneapolis and wants me to take her out to foxtrot.'

'Foxtrot? Foxtrot, my ass. If it was me, I'd drop about nine inches of the old

French-Canadian bratwurst on her,' said Marks, who talked big but was the most faithful man on earth. As they came around the corner of the house, he hollered at his wife: 'Lucas is gonna jump an FBI agent.'

'A female, I hope,' Lucy Marks said. She was spraying something on the grill, turning her face away from the coals.

'She wants to foxtrot with him,' Marks said. 'She called him up.'

'Sounds promising,' Lucy Marks said. 'How'd this happen?'

'I was down in Wichita, and we were in this bar and she didn't dance to rock music, so I was dancing with the owner…'

He trailed off, and after a few seconds, Lucy Marks said. 'Lucas? You still in there?'

'Excuse me,' Lucas said, 'But I gotta go. I'm sorry.'

He jogged away, across the lawn toward his own place, leaving the Marks at the grill, looking puzzled. At the cabin, he fumbled out the number Sherrill had given him for Malone, and dialed it. One of the FBI agents, a man, picked it up and said, 'John Shaw.' Lucas said, 'Let me speak to Malone.'

'She just left… I could try to catch her.'

'Catch her, goddamnit…'

The phone on the other end clattered on a desk and Lucas hung onto the receiver, eyes closed, rubbing his forehead. Could this be right?

Two minutes later, Malone picked up the phone and said, 'Malone.'

'This is Lucas. Did you get the composite of the shooter?'

'Yes. Pretty good.'

'Close your eyes, and think about the woman I danced with at that club in

Wichita, whatever it was. The Rink.'

'My eyes are closed. I… hmm. Gotta be a coincidence.'

'Hey, I'm a great-looking guy,' Lucas said, 'I know that, but just between you and me, Malone, not that many thirty-year-old women are coming onto me anymore.

And with this one… I had the feeling she was more interested than she should have been, and maybe not in sex. I didn't know why…'

'… Or maybe you thought it was sex…'

'Maybe I did, whatever. But I tell you, from talking to the people up here who saw her, and looking at that picture, something kept knocking at the back of my head,' Lucas said. 'I finally figured it out: if she's not the same chick, she's her twin. And if she was up here, she could very well have seen me on television. And if she did, and I walked into her place in

Wichita, and then just sat down for a cheeseburger and a beer.. .'

'All right,' Malone said, reluctantly. 'Sounds like a loser, but give me a couple of hours. I'll check it out. You'll be up at your cabin?'

'I don't know,' Lucas said. Out through the screen, he could see the lake, flat, quiet, a perfect North Woods evening coming on. And he'd just gotten there. 'I think I'm gonna head back to the Cities. I'm telling you, I think she's the shooter.'

He was out on 1-35, driving way too fast, and still a long way north of the

Cities, when the cell phone burped. He picked it up, and heard the first two words, then lost the signal. He punched it off; three minutes later, it rang again, and he answered it: Sherrill, breaking up, but audible.

'Your FBI friend called; she's all cranked up. That woman you danced with has disappeared – cleaned out her apartment, quit her job at the bar. ..'

'… I thought she owned it.'

'… So did everybody, but she was really just the manager. It's really owned by a guy named James Larimore, who is also known as Wooden Head

Larimore, who is really connected, really connected, in guess-where?'

'St. Louis.'

'Yup.' The cell connection was getting cleaner. 'So your FBI friend freaked, and got a crime-scene crew into the apartment, and guess-what again?'

'It'd been wiped.'

'Top to bottom.'

'Got her, goddamnit,' Lucas crowed. 'We got her. What's her name?'

'Clara Rinker.'

'Rinker. Fuck those FBI pussies, Marcy. We broke this fuckin' thing right over their heads.'

'Yeah, well… want to know where Wooden Head got the name Wooden Head?'

'Sure.' The adrenalin was pumping; he'd listen to anything.

'He was once in a bar when people started shooting, and he caught a ricochet, and the slug stuck in his skull bone, in his forehead above his nose. Made a dent, and stuck, but didn't go through. They say everybody was laughing so hard, the gunfight stopped. Even Wooden Head was laughing.'

'So he's a tough guy.'

'Very tough. And they ain't gonna get much out of him. He says he don't know nothin' about nothin'.'