Certain prey

'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'.'

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.