Certain Prey

by John Sandford

  'But you know what?' Sherrill asked, sitting up. 'Rolo's contacts, his drug supply, mostly came out of St. Louis, which was unusual. At the time, most of our traffic came out of L.A.; it was just shifting over to Chicago, back then. St. Louis was nothing - never had been, and never was again after Rolo went down.'

  'And this shooter...'

  'Has contacts in the St. Louis mob. That's what die Feebs say.'

  'That's something,' Lucas said. 'Maybe we can work with that.'

  Carmel Loan was sitting in her office; she could feel Hale Allen's touch from the night before, the balls of his thumbs on either side of her spine... She was trying to read a deposition, but her eyes defocused and she suddenly giggled. The man was unnaturally sexual; a memory popped into her head, she thought it was from a movie, somewhere back in time, a woman telling a man, 'Women don't want sex. Women want love.'

  What complete drivel, she thought. Women want sex; they just also want love. And this must be it, she thought, giggling in the middle of the day. She remembered exactly how he'd taken her by the...

  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?'
r />   '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.'

  'I'll get a flight out tonight.'

  'We can cover that, if you want,' Mallard offered.

  'No thanks, I'll do it from here.'

  'All right. Anything new?'

  'I sent one of my people, Marcy Sherrill, down to St. Louis to schmooze their organized crime people. There's nothing going on up here.'

  'If SherrilPs the one I remember from the meeting, she oughta schmooze pretty well.'

  'One of her many talents,' Lucas said. 'See you tomorrow.'

  Lucas called his travel agent, got a business-class ticket on the nine o'clock Northwest flight into National and made a reservation at the Hay-Adams. He liked the Hay-Adams because, the half-dozen times he'd stayed there - even the first time - the doorman said, 'Nice to see you again, sir.'

  Then he called Donnal O'Brien at D.C. Homicide and said, 'Hey, Irish.'

  'Jesus Christ, the outer precincts are heard from,' O'Brien said. 'How'n the hell are you, Lucas?'

  'Good. I'm coming to town tonight. I'd like to get together tomorrow, if you've got the time.'

  'Want me to get you at the airport?'

  'I'll be really late,' Lucas said. O'Brien had four kids to take care of. 'I'll get a cab down to the Hay-Adams. I'll do my thing with the Feebs tomorrow morning, and make it over to your shop by when? Three o'clock?'

  'I'll plan on three. Maybe go out for a couple beers, huh?'

  'See you then,' Lucas said.

  The flight to Washington was a nightmare: nothing wrong with the plane, the flying conditions were perfect, and the trip was on schedule, but airplanes -winged planes, not helicopters - were the only really phobia that Lucas was aware that he had. He dreaded

  getting on one, sat rigidly braced for impact from the time the plane backed away from the departure gate until it nosed into the destination gate, and was never really convinced that he'd survived until he was walking through the terminal at the other end.

  As they came into Washington, he had a postcard view of the Washington Monument. He ignored it. There was no point in looking at the view when you were only seconds away from flaming death. Somehow, the plane got down, and the stewardesses suppressed their panic well enough to smile at him and thank him for flying Northwest.

  The Hay-Adams was excellent, as usual. The White House, framed in the window over the desk, looked like an expensive 3-D photo reproduction, of the kind found in commercial aquariums - until you understood that it was real.

  He slept very well, having been properly welcomed back.

  Mallard arrived at ten o'clock in the morning in a blue Chevy, followed by another blue Chevy carrying three more agents. Lucas was waiting just inside the door, and when he saw Mallard step out of the car, pushed through to the sidewalk: 'Nice hotel,' Mallard said, looking up at the Hay-Adams facade. 'I once got to stay in a Holiday Inn with suites. I didn't get a suite, but I walked past the door to one.'

  'If you guys treat me right, I'll let you stand in the lobby while I have dinner tonight,' Lucas said.

  'You're all heart,' Mallard said. He was wearing a blue suit with a dark blue necktie with tiny red dots on it. He had a stainless-steel cup full of coffee in the Chevy's cupholder. He took a sip and said, 'If you want some, we can stop at a Starbuck's.'

  'I'm fine,' Lucas said. 'Why all the troops?'

  'There are five of them - the two receptionists, the two women on the switchboard, and the manager -so I thought there ought to be five of us.'

  'Yeah? Well, if they charge, go for the lead one,' Lucas said, as he got comfortable in the lumpy front seat. 'If you can turn the lead one, the rest of them usually follow.'

  'You'd be dead in an hour, in Washington,' Mallard said. 'In Washington, the leaders are at the back of the stampede.'

  The office suite was off Dupont Circle, a nondescript granite building that might, on close inspection, pass as ordinary. Lucas, Mallard and the other three agents went into the building like a mild-mannered rugby scrum - a tight little group of conservatively dressed, short-haired men, all reasonably large and athletic, who, if they were mistaken for anybody at all, would be mistaken for the Secret Service.

  Lucas had seen FBI scrums before, but had never been part of one.

  Mallard held up his ID to the receptionists, one bottle redhead and one real blonde, and said, 'We're from the FBI. We'd like to speak to Mrs. Marker.'Two

  of the agents had peeled off from the group as Mallard stopped at the desk, and gone through a door into the back. Covering the switchboard, Lucas thought.

  The blonde receptionist was a carefully coiffed middle-aged woman whose glasses had blue-plastic frames with silver sparkles embedded in the plastic. When she saw Mallard's credentials, her hand went to her throat: 'Well, yes,' she said. 'I'm not positive that she's in.'

  'She's in,' Mallard said. 'Dial 0600 and ask her to come out.'

  The receptionist asked no more questions: She picked up her phone, punched in the numbers and said into the mouthpiece, 'There are some gentlemen from the FBI here to see you.'

  'Thank you,' Mallard said.

  Louise Marker was a chunky young woman with only one eyebrow, a long furry brown stripe that sat on her brow ridge above both eyes. She had exaggerated cupid's-bow lips, colored deep red, beneath a fleshy, wobbly nose. In Alice in Wonderland, she would have been the Red Queen.

  Tennex had been a customer for seventy-two months, she said, and paid the rent and phone bill each month with a cashier's check or a money order. She kept the recipient's receipt for all seventy-two checks in a green hanging file. Most of the checks and money orders came from different banks in each of the cities of St. Louis,Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Kansas

  City, Missouri. Four checks came from Dallas-Fort Worth and three from Denver. Two checks came from Chicago and from Miami, one each from San Francisco, New Orleans, and New York.

  'How does she find out how much she owes?' Lucas asked. 'The phone bills are always different?'

  Marker shrugged: 'We add them up and put a message on the voice mail, on the twenty-ninth of each month. A few days later, the check comes in. End of story.'

  'And the voice mail goes through the phone company, so you wouldn't even handle that call.'

  'That's right.'

  'Why would you bother with your service at all? With a receptionist?'

  'Well, you gotta have a phone - the phone company won't let you in on the service if you don't have a phone,' Marker said. 'We're the phone.'

  'That's nuts,' one of the FBI agents said. 'They pay you all this money for a phone?'

  'It is not nuts,' Marker insisted. 'We don't explore the backgrounds of our clients, because we don't have the resources, but we know what they are, most of them. They're mostly trade associations who can't afford a full-time office in Washington, but want people to think they can. People like politicians. So if a politician calls here, a receptionist answers, we tell them that nobody's in, and switch them to voice mai
l. Then somebody at the real office out in Walla Walla or wherever, calls here a couple of times a day, gets

  the message and returns the call. And if they have to actually come here, to Washington, we can rent them a suite and all the business machines, the whole works. We're not the only people who do this, you know; there're a half-dozen others...'

  Lucas prowled the office and found an airline magazine, and opened it to the map of the national airline routes. The Midwestern and Mid-South cities that were the sources of most of the checks - Kansas City, St. Louis and Tulsa - lay in a neat circle with Springfield, Missouri, at its center. On the other hand, if the sender of the checks came from Springfield, or close by, and mailed the checks from neighboring large cities to avoid pinpointing herself, why hadn't she ever gone to Little Rock? It was hardly further than the others, at least on the airline map.