Certain prey

Chapter Twenty-Five

Sherrill agreed with Malone. 'That is the goofiest thing I've ever heard.'

Black disagreed: 'How about the Tracy Triplets and the thing with the gourd? You said that was the goofiest thing you'd ever heard. That you'd never see that peak again.'

Sherrill's eyes stayed with Lucas, but she spoke to Black. 'Okay, this is the second goofiest thing I've ever heard. The Tracy Triplets are still first, but only because of the midget. If it wasn't for the midget, this would be goofier.'

Lucas wasn't smiling. 'This is not goofy. You're starting to piss me off.'

Sherrill was waving her arms. 'Lucas, how'n the hell can you convict an innocent dead woman of something she didn't do?' -

'Shouldn't be too tough,' Lucas said. 'We do it a few times a year with innocent live people. How hard could it be to do it with a dead one? She certainly won't care. And we will get Carmel.'

'Jesus, man, I don't know,' Black said. 'This ain't a game.'

'I know. But maybe we'll break something loose.

So what I want, is I want everybody out working on connections between Louise

Clark and Carmel. They were about the same age – did they ever go to the same school? Did they ever hang out at the same place? They must've known each other, so let's make them into friends. Let's put together some ideas that'll tighten up the story on Clark, something we could take her to court on. ..'

'If she were alive,' Black said.

'Yeah. If she was alive.'

'This won't work if Carmel doesn't hear about it. We want her to react,' Lucas said. A half-dozen detectives were crowded into Lucas' office: Sherrill, Black,

Sloan, a guy from drugs, two from sex. Lucas wanted people he'd worked with and could trust. 'We know she's got at least a couple of sources inside the department, so we want you to blab. Gossip. Homicide is tying Carmel Loan to

Louise Clark, and through her, to the killings.'

'Why don't you call some of your pals at TV3?' Black asked.

'I'd rather have them ask me about it,' Lucas said. 'I don't want it to be an obvious plant. Rumors are better than actual stories. In fact, if the newsies hear about it, I'll probably deny it.'

'Refuse to comment,' Sherrill said. 'That always makes their little weenies hard.'

Carmel heard about it almost immediately. 'They're what?'

'They're tying you to Louise Clark. If they can tie you to her, you could be in trouble.'

'But I didn't do anything,' she said with asperity.

'Yeah, well, whatever. Listen, things are getting a little warm around here. I'm getting out of the information business for a while, okay?'

'You mean, "Don't call,'" Carmel said.

'I'm not trying to be an asshole, but they're pulling out all the stops. They've got a half-dozen guys working on it. Davenport told somebody that they'll have you inside by the end of the week.'

'That's absurd.'

'I thought you'd want to know… so I'm signing off, okay? This last one's a freebie.'

'Fuck your freebie,' Carmel snarled.

Black found an invitation to a lawyer's Halloween Ball organized by members of several downtown firms. A photo of four of the women who organized the ball, including Carmel, was on the back of the program, and Louise Clark's name was in the list of people who'd volunteered to help out.

'What you should do,' Lucas told Black, after he'd seen the photo, 'Is get in touch with these other women, and ask them about the relationship between Carmel and Clark. How closely did they work together? That kind of thing.'

'I think Clark was probably a flunky – Xeroxed the invitations, or something.'

'That's fine, but ask anyway,' Lucas said. 'One of the people you ask will call Carmel, and tell her you're asking.. .'

Then Sherrill came up with a strong tie, one that surprised everybody: Louise

Clark's phone records showed two calls to Carmel Loan's unlisted home phone in the week before Clark was killed. Both calls were late at night.

'I can't think why they would be talking – why Clark would be calling her. But it's an amazing tie,' Sherrill said.

'It's almost enough by itself,' Lucas said. 'You know what? I want you to go over and brace Carmel about this, face-to-face. Tell her it's part of the Clark investigation, and we just want the question answered… no big deal.'

Carmel's face was the color of her fabulous bloody-red silk scarf: 'She never called,' Carmel shouted. 'She never called.'

'Ms. Loan, somebody called – from her house to yours. This isn't bullshit – this is the list straight from the phone company. I brought a Xerox copy for you.'

Sherrill was sitting in front of Carmel's desk, and she unfolded the Xerox and pushed across the leather desk pad. '… and you can call the phone company yourself, if you don't think this is accurate.'

Carmel snatched the Xerox copy from the desk, looked at the two underlined phone calls. She shook her head angrily, said, 'No. This is…' But then she trailed off, and her head swung sideways and down, a pensive look crossing her face.

'You know what this is?' she asked finally, looking up at Sherrill. 'That sonofabitch was calling me from her house. He was sleeping with me three nights a week, and when we weren't together, he was sneaking over to her place.'

Sherrill looked doubtful: 'Well…' She stood up. 'If you say so.'

'That's what it is,' Carmel shouted, shaking the Xerox copy in Sherrill's face.

Lucas was not amused by the story. He shook his head, fiddled with a sport-coat button. 'I'm starting to feel sorry for her,' he said. 'Almost.'

'My question is, where are you going with this? I mean, exactly where?' Sherrill asked.

They were alone in Lucas' office, streetlights coming on outside the single window; a soft glow lingered in the sky. A perfect summer night, a night for walking around the lakes, Sherrill thought. Lucas said, 'You're the only one who knows about the shell I found in her bedroom closet.'

'Unless you told somebody else,' Sherrill said.

'No. It's just you and me,' Lucas said. He pulled out the typewriter tray on the top corner of his desk, leaned back in his chair and put his feet up. 'But something happened to get that shell in there. Somebody dropped a box of shells, somebody ejected a shell and didn't pick it up, or somebody was punching a bunch of shells into a clip and fumbled them… If Carmel sees me find a shell there, and if I find it in just the right circumstances, I think she'd come after it. Either her, or the shooter.'

'You mean like… any shell.'

'Sure. Any shell. Any. 22. Whatever happened to get that shell in the closet,

Carmel will know about. If I find a shell in the closet, she'll know she's fucked. Especially if she hears about the scratches on the back of Rolo's hand and our other corroborating evidence, whatever it might be.'

'What'll she do?'

'Suppose I find the shell on a Friday night. Suppose everybody has left her apartment, except me, and I find the shell while I'm taking a last look around.

I know where I found the original, so I'll find this one in exactly the same place. I show it to her, and she claims I planted it, or whatever. And I say,

"The only shells I have to plant are already fired. If we get a metallurgical match on these slugs and some of the killer slugs, Carmel, you're all done." And then I tell her I know she's involved… from the phone messages, or something.'

'And…'

'And I say, "We'll let you know first thing Monday morning." Then I put the shell in a baggie, and I leave. I go home. Drive slow, give her a chance to catch me. And we put a net around the house, and I hang around.. .'

Sherrill frowned. 'You think she'd come after it?'

'If she knows that it'll match. And she probably knows that. If we give her the whole weekend to stew about it.'

'Boy. The whole thing smells a little like entrapment.'

'Look, you and I know she's involved,' Lucas said. 'If she comes after me, then we've got her. If you try to entrap somebody, and their response is to shoot you

… I mean, you can't defend yourself against entrapment with attempted murder.

And, in fact, we can outline some of this to the other guys – tell them that we're trying to lure the killer in. That we'd never use the fake shell. That way, we avoid the entrapment charge.'

'But we won't tell them that there once was a real shell.'

'No…'

'It's getting trickier by the minute.'

'Mmmm. Be nice if we could find a few more things to tie Clark to Carmel…'

'Well, hell, we're inventing the shell, and the whole relationship, we could invent a few ties, too,' Sherrill said. 'Like… suppose we find out where she took a vacation, and we leak the word that Clark took a vacation there at the same time. There's no way for Carmel to know that she didn't.'

'I hope this is getting through to her,' Lucas said. 'I hope her leak in the department's still good.'

'We need to write a script,' Sherrill suggested. 'When we get the warrant for her apartment, we could drop all of these little nuggets. You could say something, I could drop something, Sloan…'

Lucas nodded, looked at his watch. 'Good idea -think of some stuff. And I'll think of some. But right now, I've got to go to the Reality Commission, we're talking about non-certifiable minorities tonight.' He thumped the Report which sat on one side of his desk. He was on page four hundred and thirty.

'Non-certifiable… what is that?'

'Well, you know: minorities that don't fit into racial, handicapped, sexual determinant, age-determinant, religious, ethnic, or national-origin groups.'

'Jeez, I would have thought that covered everything.'

'Oh, no. There was a case in Wisconsin of a white, Episcopalian male in his early thirties, non-handicapped, heterosexual, English heritage. ..'

'A perfect WASP…'

'Wouldn't even pee in the shower,' Lucas said. 'Anyway, he was a member of one of the animal-protection groups, and his co-workers tormented him by displaying photographs of pork chops and link sausages in the workplace, and they'd talk about going to McDonald's for cheeseburgers. He got 8750,000 from the city of

Madison for emotional imperialism.'

'Well – Madison.'

'That explains a lot of it, of course,' Lucas said, nodding. 'But apparently we need a policy. You know, covering non-religious ethical minorities.' Then he closed his eyes, rubbed them with a thumb and forefinger. 'Jesus Christ, what'd I just say?'

Carmel could feel the rage building. She knew what the cops were doing. They were building a 'just in case' case – hoping to build a good enough story that a jury would put her away, just in case she was the killer.

Somehow, she thought, Davenport had fastened on her as the killer. And, she had to admit, it had never occurred to her that in eliminating any possibility that she could be tied to Rinker, she'd thoughtlessly incriminated somebody to whom she could be tied. And there was no way for her to explain that Clark wasn't the killer. How could she know?

Carmel had tried forty-four murder cases in her career, winning twenty-one of them. That was considered an excellent average, since most involved a man found standing over his dead wife with a handgun, and when asked why he did it, had told the cops, 'She was gettin' on my ass, you know?'

Three of the cases she'd lost still haunted her, because she shouldn't, in her opinion, have lost them. She'd broken the state's case, she'd thought, and after-verdict interviews with the jurors had suggested that she'd lost only because the jurors wanted to believe the cops. They hadn't had the evidence, but they'd convicted because the cops suggested they should.

That could happen to her…

Fuckin' Davenport…

Worse, the word was getting out. She might be going psycho, she thought, going paranoid, but she thought she could see it in the eyes of her colleagues. The questions: did you do it? Did you help? Did you drill those little holes in Rolando D'Aquila's kneecaps?

An interview with one of Carmel's friends produced the casual information that she'd been in Zihuatanejo the November before last. 'Save that,' Lucas told

Sherrill. 'When we shake her apartment down, we'll drop the information that

Clark was there at the same time – we'll jump her about it.'

'All right.'

'What else you got?'

'Not much – it's really thin. Clark took a course in legal writing at the U, at the same time Carmel was at the law school…'

'So they were at law school together.'

'Not exactly.'

'Close enough for government work,' Lucas said. 'Get more.'

John McCallum, managing partner of the firm, stopped at CarmeFs office and asked, 'What the hell is going on, Carmel? We hear the police are looking at you in connection with all these murders.' He was using the same whiny voice that had caused him to lose half of the consumer liability cases he'd once tried,

Carmel thought.

'It's all crap, John,' Carmel said. But she could feel the blood rising in her face, and the impulse to rip McCallum's. larynx out of his throat. 'The cops are trying to put pressure on me – I don't know why.'

'Yeah, well, make them stop,' McCallum said.

'I'm working on it.'

'You know the firm will stand behind you…'

'Bullshit. You'd drop me like a hot potato, if you could,' Carmel said. 'Of course, I can beat any charge diey bring against me, and then I'd make a hobby out of suing you for damaging my career. You might get out of it with your oldest car and a pair of shoes.'

'That sounded almost like a threat,' McCallum said.

'Excuse me, if I wasn't direct enough,' Carmel said. 'That was a threat. If the firm doesn't back me up on this, I'll personally take you to court and pull your testicles off.'

'I don't have to listen to this,' he said. His eyes flinched away from her wolverine's gaze, and he turned to go.

'You don't have to listen,' Carmel said, her voice as deadly as a razor. 'But you better think about it. 'Cause I'm serious, John. You've seen me at work: you don't want to piss me off.'

Sherrill typed all the ties into a memo, and dropped it on Lucas' desk. 'Enough for a warrant?'

Lucas looked down the list, and nodded. 'We'll need a photo of the cuts on the back of Rolo's hand, and the phone records.'

'Both office and apartment?

'Both. But we'll! do the office fir§t. Seal her apartment, so that she can't get in to destroy anything, then brace her at the law firm. We'll need a dozen guys, a crowd, to make it really inconvenient… look through all her paper files, and we'll need a computer guy to copy her computer records. We'll need to subpoena the firm's phone records, too.'

'Might be some court problems with that.'

'Yeah, but we can nail them down, anyway. Let the county's attorney's guys argue about what we should get.'

'When?.'

'Write up the warrant now, we'll walk it over to the county, let them know what's coming,' Lucas said.

'What if they're shaky?'

'Fuck 'em. Besides, they don't mind seeing us fall on our asses from time to time – and this'll all be on our heads.'

'So we go in…?'

'Tomorrow. Friday'

Sherrill looked down at her memo: 'This is gonna be somethin'.'