Certain prey

'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'.'

Chapter Twenty-Six

All the paperwork was done by noon Friday. Lucas took Sherrill, Sloan and

Franklin to lunch, after leaving word for the rest of the search team to meet at his office at three o'clock. Sherrill, Sloan and Franklin knew about the warrant, as did Black, who'd gone to St. Paul to get photos of Rolando

D'Aquila's self-inflicted scratches.

'Why don't we just go?' Sherrill asked, as they settled into a booth at the Grey

Kitten. A waitress hustled over, dropped four menus on the red-checkered vinyl table-cloth, and moved on.

'Because I want it later in the day,' Lucas said, when the waitress was gone. 'I want people starting to go home. I want the process harder for her to stop. And maybe she'll be a little more tired this way. She went to work when? Seven this morning?'

Another cop drifted by, a uniform guy on his day off. He was wearing grass stained shorts and a t-shirt with a moose on the front. He smiled at Sherrilclass="underline"

'Hey, Marcy.'

'Hey, Tobe,' Marcy said. 'You look a little scuffed up.' He looked down at his shorts, nodded and said, 'Softball.'

'Good, good,' she said, and her eyes drifted back to Franklin. After a moment,

Tobe said, 'Well, see ya,' and drifted away. Lucas glanced at Sherrill, who smiled, well-pleased.

'She got there at seven o'clock,' said Franklin, who'd been working with the surveillance crew. 'First light in her apartment was five-forty-five.'

'So we go into the office at three o'clock, and put a man on her apartment door at the same time,' Lucas said. 'We stay at her office until about five, and then we move the act over to the apartment. I want both the office and the apartment taken apart. Everything in the computers, all records showing phone calls, money spent, safe-deposit numbers, everything.'

'We'll need a new warrant to get into the safe-deposit boxes,' Sloan said.

'By that time – Monday – we'll either be done with her, or completely fucked,'

Lucas said. 'Although we ought to get the warrant anyway. If there's something in one of those boxes, it'll put a little more pressure on her.'

'You really think she'll come after you?' Franklin asked. He didn't know about the cartridge that Lucas had found; he knew only that Lucas would drop one, and pretend to find it.

Lucas shrugged. 'I think she'll do something. If we do this right, she oughta feel pretty cornered by the time we're done – and the only way out of the corner will be to get that shell back.'

The waitress came back and they ordered. And when the waitress was gone, Franklin asked, 'Has anybody here ever been on one of these things, when everything went just like you thought it would?'

They all thought about it for a few seconds, then Lucas shook his head, and

Sherrill said, 'Never happen.'

At three, the surveillance team put Carmel at her office. Lucas sent two men to camp out at her apartment door – 'Nobody goes in without my say-so. And if there's anybody inside when you get there, they don't leave until I see them' – and led the rest of the group in a ragged line three blocks across downtown to

Carmel's office. Another two drove over, in a van, to carry any items seized as part of the search.

Carmel was in the office of another partner when Lucas presented the search warrant to the secretary, and started feeding men into Carmel's office. Lawyers started coming out of adjoining offices and one of them yelled, 'Hey, what are you assholes doing?'

'A search,' Sherrill said, facing off.

'You got a warrant?'

'We've served it,' Sherrill said.

'You're assholes,' the lawyer shouted, and then another one started to boo, and five seconds later, the office was a raucous cacophony of boos, catcalls and hisses. A few seconds later, Carmel pushed her way through the crowd and faced off with Sherrill.

'Out of the fuckin' way,' she said.

'I'll let you in, but you are not to touch anything or interfere in any way,' Sherrill said. 'If you do, I'll throw you out.'

'Yeah?' Carmel pushed closer to her. They were chest-to-chest, not quite touching.

'Yeah,' Sherrill said. She didn't budge. 'And if you touch me, I'll knock you on your ass, and haul you downtown on an assault charge.'

Carmel almost faltered. 'Never stick,' she said.

'Tell that to your teeth when you're digging them out of the back of your throat,' Sherrill said. She waited another beat, then stepped aside. 'Don't touch, don't interfere.'

Carmel stepped past her, and a few of the lawyers in the hall started cheering,

'Go, Carmel.' Inside her office, Carmel spotted Lucas, who was standing, hands in pocket, watching a computer technician slip copy software into the floppy slot on Carmel's computer.

'What is this?' she hissed.

'We're searching your office, looking for any information or physical articles concerning your involvement in the murders of Hale Allen and others. When things are under control here, we're moving over to your apartment.'

'My apartment?' Her hand went to her throat.

'Your apartment. Right now, it's sealed. You can be present when we enter it, if you wish.'

After a long moment of astonished silence, Carmel said, 'You're nuts.'

'No, but I'm afraid you are,' Lucas said. 'We've got quite a bit of the picture with you and Louise Clark.'