Certain prey

Her phone rang, a private outside line, and she started, found herself, took a breath and pulled herself back to the day. 'Carmel,' she said. Not many people had this number.

'You remember me?' the voice asked.

'Sure.'

'Why don't you send me a few bucks?'

'Whatever you say, pal. At twenty percent?'

'Carmel Loan-Shark, hey?' He laughed at his own pun. 'But I'm selling, not borrowing.'

'I don't think I'm in the market for anything right now. But whattaya got?'

'First of all, ya gotta agree not to do anything about it for a day or two. Not many people know about this, and if you come charging over here, they could figure me out as your source.'

'Okay, so what it it?

'Lucas Davenport, Tommy Black and Marcy Sherrill put together a photo spread for some witness to look at, in those killings over in Dinkytown.'

'Okay…' She was casual, but she felt a chill.

'Guess whose face was in the spread?'

'Uh, the Virgin Mary's.'

'Very close, but no cigar. Actually, your face was in the spread.'

'Mine?' She was shocked, and let it show through. The guy on the other end of the line was a cop.

'Yup. I don't know why. Maybe because they had a picture, because there were a bunch of other faces in there. The weather girl on Channel Three was in there. .. they were looking for tall blondes.'

'Maybe that's it,' Carmel said. 'But it pisses me off.'

'Thought you'd like to know.'

'Watch your mailbox,' she said.

'I will,' he said, with a purr of pleasure.

Some people, Carmel thought when she hung up, get hot at the prospect of cash.

Not because of what it can buy, or what it may represent, but just with the pure, smooth, slightly greasy feel of currency. The cop was one of those. She didn't understand it; but then, she'd never tried very hard. She was grateful the need existed, and that she could fill it. A couple of cops had been useful over the years.

After she thought about it for a while, she took a walk out to a pay phone, punched in Rinker's number, and left a message.

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.'