'Never heard of the place. Louise Marker?'
'Yeah. Just like it sounds, like Magic Marker, M-A-R-K-E-R.'
'Four dead. Never heard of a pro going in for something like that
… You might get three or four dead all at once, but not in a series, like they're hunting them down.'
'There's something going on,' Lucas said. 'It could be something really simple – a money thing. The hit goes sour, somebody gets a name or a connection, and then this killer chick has to come back and clean up.'
'Impossible to prove, though,' O'Brien said. 'I get pretty goddamned depressed about it sometimes. Crooks are getting too smart, they move too fast. Hit here, gone tomorrow.'
'Be nice to pull this chick down, though,' Lucas said. 'I'd like to see if you've got anything local on this Marker, or any of the people who work there.
Even word-of-mouth. The Feebs don't have anything that's not on paper…'
'I'll check around,' O'Brien said. 'And I'll tell you what: I know this guy named George Hutton, he works in fraud…'
They caught Hutton standing at a bus stop where a desk sergeant said he might still be, if they hurried.
'George,' O'Brien called across the street. A bus was rolling down the block.
'Wait.'
They crossed at the corner and Hutton looked at his watch and said, 'Two minutes and I'm out of here, gone for the week. Then the local Black Irish shows up with some guy in an expensive suit and I get this really bad feeling. ..'
'All we need is a name,' O'Brien said. 'Let me tell you a name.'
'One name,' said Hutton. He looked at his watch.
'Louise… Marker.' O'Brien had moved to one side of Hutton so he could speak directly into the other man's ear. Hutton closed his eyes and tipped his head back, so that he'd have been looking at the sky, except that his eyes were closed. He stood like that for a moment, then opened his eyes and looked at
Lucas and spoke to O'Brien.
'Who's the guy?'
'Lucas Davenport, a deputy chief from Minneapolis. Davenport Simulations.'
'I know that,' Hutton said. Then: 'Look up Maurice Marker, formerly Marx, of
Marker Dry Cleaners, Inc. New Jersey. He had a daughter named Louise. How old is your Louise?'
Lucas said, 'I'd say early middle age – forty, maybe. A little chunky.'
Hutton nodded: 'That'd be about right. What's she doing?'
'Running an answering service.'
Hutton nodded. 'Yeah. Look up Maurice Marker.' He peered down the street:
'That's my bus.'
Lucas said good-bye to O'Brien, caught a cab to the FBI building and called
Mallard, who came down to get him.
'We need to look up a dry cleaner named Maurice Marker or Maurice Marx,' Lucas said.
'Where'd you get the name?'
'From a cop here in DC – some kind of savant guy, he knows names.'
'Huh. Well, let's go punch it in.'
Maurice Marker, now retired to south Florida, had a short FBI biography. He had once owned a chain of dry cleaners in New Jersey, with a sales staff consisting of a dozen men with severely bent noses. The bent noses were not around much, but they made nice salaries, with excellent benefits, including full dental and medical, as well as life insurance and retirement plans.
'These guys would bring in a chunk of cash from dope or broads or gambling or whatever, give it to Maurice, he'd run it through the cash register, write off their salaries against taxes, take a chunk for himself, and everybody was happy,' Mallard said. 'He had thirty-three dry cleaners when he retired. He sold the stores to another guy, who did the same thing until he went away.'
'Where'd he go?'
Mallard peered at the computer: 'About four miles east of Atlantic City.'
'Is Louise in there?' Lucas nodded at the computer.
Mallard ran his finger down the monitor screen: 'Yep. Not necessarily the same one, of course. Just a minute.' He opened a spiral notebook, flipped through to the back, ran his finger down a page of chicken-scratch handwriting, then looked at the screen. 'I'll be damned. Same birth date. That's our girl.'
Lucas turned away, paced a few steps, paced back, turned away again. 'So. She's connected. Could be a coincidence, but probably not.'
'Probably not.' Now Mallard got to his feet, and started following Lucas in the pacing. 'Goddamn it, Davenport, I'm getting a hard-on.'
'You haven't gotten any more calls since the one from Patricia Case?'
'No…'
'Then it's possible that was some kind of a warning call. A code
…'
'It's possible that Tennex only gets one call a month…'
Lucas was shaking his head: 'No. You know what it is? The answering service is a blind. Or partially a blind. That's why it's not just a phone ringing in an empty apartment somewhere. I mean, why not that? It'd be easier.'
'So what are you saying?'
'That one of those women there is a cutout, somebody the killer can go to for more information. One of the women is really an alarm, and we probably rang it.'
'It'd have to be Marker,' Mallard said. 'There are ten different women who work on those switchboards, either full or part time, and they rotate shifts…
There wouldn't be any way to know which operator would be answering which call, so they'd have to have some special instructions from Marker if anything unusual came up on Tennex.'
'So let's bring her in,' Lucas said.
'On what?'
'Nothing. Scare the shit out of her.'
'That's, uh, sort of not our operating procedure,' Mallard said.
'Fuck your operating procedure. Bring her in, let me talk to her.'
'Let me make a call,' Mallard said.
Marker demanded an attorney, and Mallard was happy to give her all the time she needed.
'If we're not out of here by seven, I'm gonna miss my plane,' Lucas said.
'I'll have my secretary see if there's another flight out,' Mallard said. 'Gimme the ticket.'
Marker's attorney, who showed up two hours after they'd taken her in, was a cheery blond named Cliff Bell. He wanted to know what the hell was going on.
'Your client is a front for a professional killer we're tracking,' Lucas said.
'I don't think…' Bell started, but Lucas stopped him.
'Wait, wait,' Lucas said. 'Let me make my little speech, here. This woman, the killer, has murdered almost thirty people in more than a dozen states. A lot of them are those nasty southern states with those strange ways of executing people
– like Florida, where the guy's eyeballs went up in a puff of smoke when they pulled the switch on OP Sparky…'
'That's unnecessary,' Bell said.
'No, it's not,' Lucas said. He leaned toward Marker. 'That's what we're talking about here, Miss Marker. The electric chair. The gas chamber. Lethal injection.
When we nail this woman, we have the complete option of taking you with her. You connected the people who were contracting the killings, to the killer – and you knew about it.'
'I didn't know it was a killer,' Marker sputtered, but Bell snapped, 'Shut up,
Louise.'
Louise didn't: 'I thought it was some kind of political or real-estate scam, for
Christ's sakes…'
'Shut up, Louise,' Bell said. To Lucas: 'What's the deal?'
'The deal is, we don't have to take her. We can, we don't have to. She can go home right now, if she wants. But we won't make this offer again. Right now, if she tells us everything she knows about Tennex, we're willing to assume the best: that she may have guessed that she was facilitating some kind of criminal enterprise, but thought it was a minor political deal. I can't see her doing any hard time for that. If she doesn't take the deal, right now, while the trail is hot, then tough shit. We'll get this woman some other way, and we'll take Louise with her.'
'We need some time in private,' Bell said. Mallard found them a private room.
W
hen he came back, Lucas noticed that he seemed to be sweating.
'I'm not used to this kind of stuff. Police stuff. We usually have four specialists and three lawyers doing the talking. Spend a couple of weeks prepping for the thing.'
'Sometimes, if you keep the momentum going, keep people talking, you get something you'd never get when everything's a formal tit-for-tat,' Lucas said.
'I know the theory,' Mallard said. 'We usually operate on a different one… and I'm just hoping we don't get our tit-for tat in a wringer.'
Bell brought Marker back fifteen minutes later: 'We want a letter from Mr.
Mallard, outlining the deal as laid out by Agent Davenport. Then we'll give you a statement.'
The letter took another half-hour: Bell turned a little sour when he learned that Lucas worked for the City of Minneapolis, but Mallard smoothed him over.
'So tell us,' Lucas said. He had his feet up on Mallard's desk, a tape recorder running in the middle of Mallard's blotter-calendar. Marker and Bell sat in wooden visitors' chairs, while Mallard sat back on a couch with his legs crossed, drinking from his endless mug of coffee.
The connection, Marker said, had been set up by a man named – so he said – Bob
Tennex, although he sounded like East Coast Italian. 'Sounded? You didn't see him?' 'No. It was all done by telephone…' 'You set up the account without seeing the guy?' 'That happens, from time to time. If we get a check, and the check is good, we offer that service…'
Since the connection was set up, Marker said, she'd spoken to a Tennex representative several times, and it was always a woman. Marker had Caller ID on her phones, purely as a matter of course, and had noticed that the calls came in from all over the Midwest, and sometimes from other parts of the country. Kansas
City was prominent: four or five calls had come from there. Another name that stuck in her head was Wichita, because, while only two calls had come from there, the woman had been angry both times about problems with the phone company's answering service.
'She wanted us to get on them – they had a couple of breakdowns,' Marker said.
'But that's not the only thing she asked about, is it?' Lucas asked. 'You had some other agreement with her. About people making inquiries about the messenger service, about the police coming in.'
'She really just thought it was some kind of minor political hustle – those things go on all the time here,' Bell said.
'So what was it?' Lucas asked.
'Uh, well, if somebody came snooping around, I wasn't supposed to do anything, except… wait.'
'Until what?'
'Until she called me,' Marker said, her voice barely audible.
'You're gonna have to speak up,' Mallard said.
'Until she called me,' Marker said.
'And then what?'
'She'd call and ask, 'Is Mr. Warren in?' And if nobody had been around, if I didn't know anything, I'd say, 'You've got the wrong number: this is Marker
Answering.' But if somebody had been around, I'd say, 'No, but Mr. White's here.
Would you like me to put your call through?" '
'How many times did you do this?' Mallard asked.
'Two different times. About three or four years go, something must've happened, and she called me every day for two weeks.' Marker said, her voice dropping again.
'Ah, shit,' Lucas said. 'Then she called you yesterday or today, didn't she?
This afternoon?'
'She's been calling for a week, every day. And today, about an hour after you left the first time. Before you came and got me again,' Marker said. 'She was calling from Des Moines, a pay phone, I think. I could hear the cars.'
'And you gave her the Mr. White line.'
'Yes,' she squeaked.
'Did you get the job because of your father?'
'Maybe. Tennex said he knew Dad.'
'Where's your father living now?' Lucas asked.
'Well, he's not,' Marker said. 'He died of colon cancer last year.'
'I'm sorry,' Mallard said.
'They said it was all the chemicals from the dry-cleaning,' Marker said. 'I'll probably go that way myself. A lot of us do.'
There was more, but nothing significant. They released Marker, and Mallard drove
Lucas to the Hay-Adams, retrieved his bag from the luggage room, and took him to the airport.
'So you think she's gone,' Mallard said.
'Yeah. And I think I'm the guy who tipped her off by calling into Tennex.'
'Nothing to do about that,' Mallard said. 'You were just running checks on a list of phone numbers. It was a long shot.'
'Yeah, but Jesus. That close.'
'We've still got a lot to work with – all those checks, all the phone calls.
We've got something, now. I'll bet we have some kind of description of her in a week. I'll bet we unravel some kind of connection.'
'How much?'
'What?'
'How much will you bet?'
Mallard sucked on his teeth for a moment, then said, 'About a dime, I guess.'
Lucas nodded. 'Get me to the plane on time.'
The plane, as it happened, was going to Minneapolis – with a stop in Detroit.
'Aw, no, I gotta fly direct,' Lucas told the check-in attendant.
'Nothing tonight, except through Detroit,' the clerk said, punching up her computer. 'We could get you on a flight tomorrow morning that goes straight through…'
'Aw, man…'
He went through Detroit, miserably suffering through two take-offs and landings.
He was surprised at the safe landing in Detroit, but quickly convinced himself that it would be the second half of the flight, the unnecessary half, that would kill him, so achingly close to home…
As miserable as he was, two things occurred to him:
Wichita, Kansas, was a large enough city that it might attract the eye of somebody who traveled out-of-town to make her calls; but Marker had said the killer was angry when she called from Wichita. Was it possible that she lived close to Wichita, and made spur-of-the-moment calls out of anger when something went wrong with the answering service? He got the airline flight magazine out of the seat pocket in front of him, and looked at the flight map again. Wichita, he thought, would be as viable a home town as Springfield. Something to think about…
The second thing came to him as they were landing in Minneapolis: he was looking down at one of the lakes where he'd expected the impact to occur – he could see himself struggling to get out of the flooding cabin, but his legs and arms were broken and he couldn't unfasten the seatbelt – and the name Des Moines popped into his head.
If the killer came from either Springfield or Wichita or virtually anyplace around those cities, and if she were driving to Minneapolis, she'd go through
Des Moines.
If she had done that, he thought, she'd be here now.
He looked down at the broad multi-colored grid of lights that made up the Cities and thought, 'Somewhere?
Chapter Fourteen
Carmel didn't understand the silence: days had passed since she'd left the message for Pamela -if Pamela was her name, which Carmel doubted. Still, she should have gotten back.
Had something happened to her? Had Carmel's name come up through Pamela – had
Pamela been caught? Was she in one of those stainless-steel federal pens somewhere, sweating through the sensory-deprivation stage of a multi-level interrogation? Was the phone connection corrupt, or discontinued, or worse, tapped? What was going on?
She'd worked through her defense two hundred times, and all two hundred times, she'd walked. The cops didn't have a case, couldn't have a case. There was nothing to build a case on – unless that little girl had identified her.
Her contact with the cops said that nothing had come of the photo spread, but
Davenport was running this routine, and he was worse than tricky, he was bad. If he was sure that she was involved, he might be sticking together a morality play, to f
rame her. With nothing more than a sliver of evidence, a woman could go to prison for life, if a jury didn't approve of her life-style.
She shouldn't have fucked Hale, that was the truth of the matter. Just shouldn't have. Should have waited. Even if there were no proof, if a jury found out she'd fucked Hale the night before his dead wife's funeral, she was history. And where in the hell was Pamela?
She was in her apartment, trying to work, when the phone rang. She glanced at her watch: probably Hale, but she said, 'Be Pamela.'
And Rinker said, 'You got time for a drink?'
Casually: 'Sure, where are you? I'd hoped you'd call.'
'Remember that place we went, the bar where we saw the guy with the cowboy scarf? Let's go there.'
'Oh, sure. An hour from now?'
'Be careful, though; it's dark around there. You'll get eaten by a stalker.'
'I'll bring my switchblade,' Carmel said, laughing. 'See you in an hour.'
Stalker? Pamela thought Carmel was being followed? Is that what that meant? And the place where they saw the guy with the red silk cowboy scarf wasn't a bar, but the lobby of her hotel. Was that where she wanted to meet?
Before she left her apartment, Carmel changed into a loose long-sleeved silk blouse, jet black, with black slacks and a small gold necklace. Ten minutes after she hung up the phone, she was on the street in the Volvo. She took a twisting route out of the downtown area, eased along a one-way lane on the edge of the Kenwood area, past homes of the rich and the strange, and checked her back trail: nothing.
But if what she'd read about complicated tags was right, the cops might have three or four cars following her, changing off, some in front, some behind. She pulled over to the side of the lane, waited two minutes: nothing went by. What if the car were wired, and they were following her from a distance?
No way she could tell that.
Besides, she was beginning to feel that she might be a little delusional. She'd read hundreds of criminal files in her lifetime, and the heavy surveillance never started until the case was made. Before that, they were simply too expensive. The cops might go for a phone tap, or loose surveillance, but there wouldn't be a multi-car track across town.
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