John Sandford - Certain prey

'Carmel, I don't…'

'Ah, shut up,' she said. She turned away, took a couple of steps, then swung around to face him. 'I oughta quit. If I weren't a friend of yours and

Barbara's, I would quit.'

'I'm sorry,' Allen stuttered. 'I've told you everything else, honest to God.'

Carmel let out a breath. 'All right. I can yell at you later. And I will. Now tell me about this Louise Clark. Are you gonna marry her?'

Allen shook his head: 'No, no, it was never like that. It was physical…

She's really… into sex. She's a goddamn sex machine – what can I tell you?

She kept hitting on me and finally one day we had a closing on a motel over in

Little Canada and one of the rooms was unlocked…'

'Ah, man…' Carmel pressed the heel of her hand against her forehead.

'What?'

'You've heard the word motive, right? It's a legal term, often used by lawyers?'

'I didn't know Barbara was gonna get murdered, for Christ's sake,' Allen said, his voice rising. A little angry now, flushing, tousled hair falling down over his forehead.

'All right, all right. Is it done with this woman?'

'If you say so,' Allen said.

'I say so,' Carmel said. 'But I've gotta talk to her.'

'All right. I'll call her.'

'We'll have to talk to the cops about it, sooner or later, but not right now.

Maybe tomorrow'

'How do we avoid it?'

'Gotta work 'em,' Carmel said. She chewed at her thumbnail, tasted blood, spit and chewed some more.

Carmel walked back into the Homicide office with Allen trailing behind. Black and Sherrill were still sitting at the desk, Black with his feet up. Before

Carmel could open her mouth, Sherrill asked, 'Wanna hear a horse-walks-into-a bar joke?'

'Sure,' Carmel said.

'Horse walks into a bar, sits down, and in this sad voice, says, "Give me a bourbon, straight up." The bartender gets the drink, slides the glass across the bar and asks, "Hey fella – why the long face?" '

Carmel showed an eighth-inch of smile and said, her voice flat, 'That's fuckin' hilarious.'

'I don't get it,' said Allen, looking worried.

'Sit down,' Carmel said. To Black and Sherrill: 'My client tells me that he has had a sexual relationship with Louise Clark. He hadn't told me earlier because he assumed it wasn't relevant. He's right: it's not relevant. On the other hand, we can see how you might think it is. I've got to talk to him some more, and also to Louise Clark. If you don't leak any of this to the papers, we'll come back tomorrow and answer your questions. If you do leak it, then screw ya: we're done cooperating.'

'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.

Sherrill called Lucas 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 sun glasses. 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…'

The heavily armed male white-shirt-and-tie receptionist rang them through into the FBI's inter 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 wh^t 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. 40. If it's enclosed with concrete, like it was here, and a few other places, it's always a . 22 – you don't want to be in a concrete stairwell with nine millimeter fragments flying around like bees. She uses standard-velocity. 22 hollow points 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.