Certain Prey

ramp looked like a law enforcement convention: a dozen homicide and uniform cops, medical examiner’s personnel, a deputy mayor, the parking garage manager and two possible witnesses were standing in the skyway-level elevator lobby and the stairwell above it.
    Lucas nodded at one of the uniform cops controlling the traffic, and he and Sloan poked their heads into the stairwell. Marcy Sherrill and Tom Black were going through the victim’s purse. The victim herself was lying on the stairs, at their feet. Her skirt was pulled up over her ample thighs, showing nude panty hose. One hand bent awkwardly away from her face—she might have broken her arm when she landed, Lucas thought—and her eyes were frozen half open. A pool of blood coagulated under her still-perfect hairdo. Her face was vaguely familiar; she looked like she might have been a nice lady.
    Sherrill turned and saw Lucas and said, shyly, “Hi.” “Hey,” Lucas said, nodding. He and Sherrill had ended a six-week romance: or as Sherrill put it, Forty Days and Forty Nights of Sex & Disputation. They were now in the awkward phase of no longer seeing each other while they were still working together. “Looks nasty,” he added. The stairwell smelled of damp concrete overlaid with the coppery odor of blood and human intestinal gas, which was leaking out of the body.
    Sherrill glanced down at the body and said, “Gonna be a strange one.”
    “Swanson said she was executed,” Sloan said.
    “She was, big-time,” said Black. They all looked down at the body, arranged around their feet like a puddle. “I can see seven entry wounds, but no exits. You don’t need to be no forensic scientist to see that the gun was close—maybe an inch away.”
    “Who is she?” Lucas said.
    “Barbara Paine Allen. She’s got a notify card in her purse, looks like her husband’s a lawyer.”
    “I know her face from somewhere, and the name rings a bell,” Lucas said. “I think she might be somebody. ”
    Sherrill and Black both nodded, and Sherrill muttered, “Great.” L UCAS SQUATTED next to the dead woman for a moment, looking at her head. The bullet wounds were small and tidy, as though she’d been repeatedly stabbed with a pencil. There were two wounds high on the back of her head, and a cluster of five in her temple. Her heart had kept pumping for a while after she landed; a thin stream of drying blood ran down from each of the holes. The seven thin streams were neatly defined, which meant that she hadn’t moved after she hit the stairs. Professional, and very tidy, Lucas thought. He stood up and asked the other two, “You got witnesses? Besides Baily?”
    “Baily said that the shooter was a redheaded woman, and we’ve got two people who say they saw a redheaded woman walking away from the scene close to the time of the shooting. No good description. She was wearing sunglasses, they said. Both of them said she was wiping her nose or sneezing into a handkerchief.”
    “Covering her face,” Lucas said. “I don’t believe this shit,” Sloan said, looking down at Barbara Allen. “People don’t get hit.”
    “Not in Minneapolis,” Sherrill said. “Not by a pro,” said Black.
    Lucas scratched his chin and said, “But she did. I wonder why?”
    “Are you buyin’ in?” Sherrill asked. “Could be an interesting trip.”
    “Don’t have the time,” Lucas said. “I have the Otherness Commission.”
    “Maybe if we find the shooter, we could get her to kill the commission.”
    “They’re not killable,” Lucas said gloomily. “They come straight from hell.”
    “We’ll keep you updated,” Sherrill said. “Do that.” Lucas shook his head, and looked back down at the cooling body. And he said, aloud, again, “I wonder why .”

THREE

    Barbara Allen was killed a month to the day after Carmel Loan took out the contract on her. When word of the murder swept through the firm, Carmel immediately told herself that she had nothing to do with it. She’d made the arrangement so long ago that it hardly counted.
    Carmel learned of the killing as she sat reading the deposition of a late-night dog-walker who claimed that he saw Rockwell Miller—her client—go into the back of his failing steak house with a five-gallon can of gasoline. The prosecution would argue that it was the same gas can found by the arson squad in the shambles of the restaurant’s basement. The fire had been so hot that it had melted the fire extinguishers in the