Certain Prey

believe it. What happened to the woman who found the body? Alice . . .”
    “Alice Miller. She’s getting her arm sewn up. She saw the body and took off and ran right through the door, put her hand through the glass.”
    “She’s not . . .”
    “No. She came here looking for him, because he’d missed a couple of serious appointments, and she couldn’t get through to him,” Sherrill said. “Besides, even if she was a put-up deal, did you ever hear of anybody slicing up their arm for verisimilitude?”
    “Veri what?” Lucas’s eyes slipped over to her, and she caught the unspoken amusement, out of place as it might be.
    “Fuck you,” she said. “I know some multisyllabic words.”
    “I’ve just never heard that spoken before,” Lucas said. His minuscule grin slipped back into the cold stare. “I need to talk to Carmel.”
    A uniformed cop stuck his head in the door: “The Miller woman is calling from the hospital. She wants to talk to whoever’s in charge.”
    “Probably you,” Lucas said to Sherrill.
    Sherrill nodded and went to take it, and somebody laughed and yelled at somebody outside the door: crimescene crew was coming in. Lucas met the crew chief at the door and said, “About a million people have already trampled through, but nobody’s been past his feet. I need every goddamned thread and hair and print and stain you can find.”
    “Bad news?”
    “This is very bad news,” Lucas said. “The newspapers are gonna tear us a new asshole.”
    • • •

    S HERRILL WAS BACK, moving fast: “You remember Allen had a girlfriend, Louise Clark, had an affair with her, before his wife was killed? Before he started seeing Carmel?”
    “Yeah?” “Miller was calling to tell us that Louise Clark also didn’t make it into work today. And as far as Miller knows, Clark didn’t call in to tell people she wouldn’t make it. Miller isn’t her supervisor or anything, just heard she wasn’t around, and didn’t really put it together with Allen . . .”
    “All right,” Lucas said. “Let’s get her address and get over there. Goddamnit, what is this? What is this?” L OUISE CLARK WAS a fine picture of a murder-suicide, stretched across her bed in her pretty pink negligee, the gun fallen away from her hand on the pillow. The gun had a silencer screwed onto the snout.
    Lucas brought a kitchen chair into the bedroom and reversed it at the end of the bed and sat down, his arms on the back of the chair, his chin on his hands, and stared at her. Another cop came in and looked at him, and then at Sherrill: Sherrill shrugged and the cop made a screw-loose gesture at his temple, and backed out of the room.
    After two minutes of staring at the body, Lucas said, “It’s perfect.”
    “Perfect?”
    “Someplace in this house, we’re gonna find either a gun, or shells, or something else, that’ll tie her to the earlier shootings. The only thing we won’t find is, we’ll do some swabs and there won’t be any semen. Usually, there’s semen, and there won’t be any, because they couldn’t do that. And we’ll get the ME to check Allen, and he won’t have had sex in the last twenty-four hours, because they couldn’t do that, either.”
    “By they, you mean . . .”
    “Carmel and the shooter-chick.”
    Sherrill looked at him for a moment, wordlessly, then turned and walked back out of the room, only to return three seconds later: “Lucas, I could make a pretty good case that Louise Clark is the shooter-chick. She was sleeping with Allen; she’s a low-level secretary, and if she gets rid of the old lady, and she marries Allen, she goes from being poor and single to rich and married. She’s got the motive . . . she’s got the gun.”
    “Where’d a goddamn low-level secretary get a silencer like that?” Lucas snarled. “You buy a silencer like that on the black market, it’d cost you a grand. And who did the tooling on the muzzle? Did you find a machine shop in the basement?”
    “No, but Lucas . . . what if she’s the shooter, and she knows Carmel that way? What if Carmel’s her lawyer?”
    “And Carmel starts screwing her boyfriend, knowing that the woman she’s kicking out of the saddle is a professional killer? Bullshit. Nope: this is a setup. That’s why there won’t be any semen, and that’s why we’re gonna find a gun,” Lucas said. “When you said you could make a pretty good case that Clark is a shooter, you’re exactly right. You could. And a pro defense attorney