'You don't do it by yourself,' Carmel said. She pulled gently on Allen's ear, guiding him a little to the left. 'I'll help.'
'Can you get out?'
'Yeah. But I'm in the middle of something right now, I can't really get into the details… Call me tomorrow morning about ten o'clock.'
'You with somebody?'
'Yeah.'
'Hale Allen?'
'You got that right,' Carmel said.
'Talk to you tomorrow,' Rinker said.
Carmel said to Hale, 'Come up here, you.'
'I like it down here. It smells like bread.'
She whacked him on the side of the head and he said, 'Ow, what was that for?'
'Not very romantic, like a loaf of Wonder Bread, or something.'
'I was just joking.' He held his hand to his ear; she had hit him a little harder than she'd intended.
She smiled and said, 'Okay. I'm sorry. Come up here and I'll make it better.'
Sherrill was sitting in her own car, alone, a block from Allen's house. A radio beeped, and she picked it up: 'Yeah?'
'Another light just went on in the living room.'
'Thank God. There might be something left of Allen after all.'
The guy on the other end chuckled: 'We'll take her back home, if you want to join the parade.'
'I'll be two blocks back.'
She dropped the radio, picked up her cell phone and dialed Lucas' number from memory. He picked it up on the first ring.
'You up reading?' she asked, without identifying herself.
'Yeah.'
'I think we're about to take Carmel home,' Sherrill said. 'This is obscene.'
'Not a flicker out of her, huh? Not a move?'
'Nothing. Damnit, Lucas, we might have lost the chance.'
'I know, but we've got to hang on for a while,' Lucas said.
'And I'm getting kind of lonely.'
'So am I,' Lucas said. 'But I'm not going to invite you over.'
'I wouldn't come anyway,' Sherrill said.
'Good for both of us.'
After a pause, Sherrill said, 'Yeah, I guess. See you tomorrow.'
Ten minutes later, Carmel came out of the house and walked briskly to her car. A little too briskly, on a nice night like this, a little too head-down, Sherrill thought. Of course, everything Carmel did was slightly theatrical; there was no way she could know she was in the net…
The next day was brutaclass="underline" Lucas talked to Mallard, who had nothing new, and checked on the Carmel net a half-dozen times, and got cranky with everyone.
Carmel talked with Rinker twice on the magic cell phone. 'See you at ten fifteen,' she said.
Carmel went home at six, as she usually did; called Hale Allen at six-thirty, and told him that she'd have to work on the Al-Balah case that night: 'I've got to go back to the office. Jenkins ruled that the cops can have the tire as evidence, and I'm trying to put together an instant appeal.'
'Well, all right,' Allen said. She thought she might have detected just a hair of relief in his voice. 'See you when? Thursday?'
'Maybe we could catch lunch tomorrow… and I'll give you a call tonight.'
'Talk to you,' he said.
Carmel got out of her business dress, put on a short-sleeved white shirt, jeans and tennis shoes, and a light red jacket. She pushed a black sweatshirt into her briefcase. This was July, but it was also Minnesota. She didn't feel like eating, but she did, and carried the microwave chicken dinner to the window and looked out over the city. If they were actually watching her, from one of the nearby buildings, they should see her.
When she finished, she tossed the tray from the chicken dinner in the garbage, went back to her home office, disconnected the small digital answering machine from her private line, and stuck it in her briefcase with the sweater. A little after seven o'clock, she rode the elevator down and walked out of the front of the building, looking at her watch, carrying her briefcase. She wasn't absolutely sure the cops were there, but she thought they were: not looking around, trying to spot them, nearly killed her. She walked to her office building, enjoying the night, used her key to get in the front door, signed in with the security guard, and rode the elevators up to her office.
The entire suite was silent, with only a few security lights to cut the gloom.
She turned the lights on in the library and in her office, turned on the computer, and went to work. Jenkins, the judge in the case she was working, had ruled the cops could have a spare tire owned by Rashid Al-Balah, and, unfortunately, there was blood on the tire. The only good aspect of it was that the cops had had the car and tire for almost a month before the blood was found, that they'd often taken it out for test drives – once to a strip joint – and,
Carmel argued, the blood could have been anybody's, given the general unreliability of DNA tests. Or even if it did belong to Trick Bentoin, Bentoin could have cut himself before he disappeared, and simply was not available to testify to the fact…
She got caught up in the argument, moving back and forth from the library to her office, and nearly jumped out of her skin when the security guard said, 'Hi, Miz
Loan.'
'Oh, Jesus, Phil, you almost gave me a heart attack,' she said.
'Just making the rounds… you gonna be late tonight?' She could already smell the booze: Phil was an old geezer, but he could drink with the youngest of them.
'Probably. Got a tough one tomorrow.'
'Well, good luck,' he said, and shuffled away toward the entry. She heard the door close, and the latch snap, and looked at her watch: twenty minutes. Time to start moving.
She got the answering machine out of her briefcase, carried it into the library and plugged it into the phone there. Back in her office, she pulled the black sweater over her head. She left the computer on, and turned on the small Optimus stereo system. The system played three disks in rotation, and would play them until she turned it off. She left the red jacket draped over her chair.
Ready.
The building had a five-story parking garage. Carmel stepped out of the suite, checked to make sure that the security guard had moved on, and then trotted briskly down to the stairwell at the far end of the hall, and down seven flights of steps. The cops might be watching every entrance and exit to the parking garage, but, she thought, they couldn't be watching all of it. Of course, if they were, she was screwed…
But it was a good bet, she thought. She poked her head through the door on the fourth floor, saw nobody. A single empty car, a red Pontiac, sat halfway down the ramp, but she'd seen it before. Not a cop. She glanced again at her watch: one minute. She waited it out, hearing nothing at all along the concrete corridors of the building, and then opened the door again.
Here was the only spot that she'd be in the open: she walked quickly across the top of the floor, and stepped into the corkscrew exit-ramp. She heard a car moving up the entrance ramp: had to be Pam, she thought. She listened, heard the car turn into the exit spiral, and nodded. The car started down, made the turn toward her… A grey-haired old lady was looking through the windshield. Carmel recoiled, then saw the hand waving her forward: 'Get in.'
'That's you?' The car stopped, just for a half second, and Carmel jerked open the back door and flopped on the seat, pulling the door shut without slamming it. 'Get under the blanket,' Rinker said.
Carmel was already doing that, rolling onto the floor, her head on the driver's side. She pulled the blanket over her legs and lower body, and lay quietly beneath it. The entrances and exits from the building were on opposites sides: and even at this time of night, there were always a few cars coming and going.
With any luck at all, the cops on the entrance side – if there were any – wouldn't be calling out the cars coming and going, so the cops on the exit side wouldn't notice the odd fact that a grey-haired old lady in a Japanese car had gone in one side and come right back out the other…
She heard Rinker lower the driver's side window; heard the cashier mutter something, and a minute later, they were rolling out of the building.