Certain Prey

slugs and some of the killer slugs, Carmel, you’re all done.’ And then I tell her I know she’s involved . . . from the phone messages, or something.”
    “And . . .”
    “And I say, ‘We’ll let you know first thing Monday morning.’ Then I put the shell in a baggie, and I leave. I go home. Drive slow, give her a chance to catch me. And we put a net around the house, and I hang around . . .”
    Sherrill frowned. “You think she’d come after it?”
    “If she knows that it’ll match. And she probably knows that. If we give her the whole weekend to stew about it.”
    “Boy. The whole thing smells a little like entrapment.”
    “Look, you and I know she’s involved,” Lucas said. “If she comes after me, then we’ve got her. If you try to entrap somebody, and their response is to shoot you . . . I mean, you can’t defend yourself against entrapment with attempted murder. And, in fact, we can outline some of this to the other guys—tell them that we’re trying to lure the killer in. That we’d never use the fake shell. That way, we avoid the entrapment charge.”
    “But we won’t tell them that there once was a real shell.”
    “No.”
    “It’s getting trickier by the minute.”
    “Mmmm. Be nice if we could find a few more things to tie Clark to Carmel . . .”
    “Well, hell, we’re inventing the shell, and the whole relationship, we could invent a few ties, too,” Sherrill said. “Like . . . suppose we find out where she took a vacation, and we leak the word that Clark took a vacation there at the same time. There’s no way for Carmel to know that she didn’t.”
    “I hope this is getting through to her,” Lucas said. “I hope her leak in the department’s still good.”
    “We need to write a script,” Sherrill suggested. “When we get the warrant for her apartment, we could drop all of these little nuggets. You could say something, I could drop something, Sloan . . .”
    Lucas nodded, looked at his watch. “Good idea—think of some stuff. And I’ll think of some. But right now, I’ve got to go to the Reality Commission, we’re talking about noncertifiable minorities tonight.” He thumped the Report, which sat on one side of his desk. He was on page four hundred and thirty.
    “Noncertifiable . . . what is that?”
    “Well, you know: minorities that don’t fit into racial, handicapped, sexual-determinant, age-determinant, religious, ethnic, or national-origin groups.”
    “Jeez, I would have thought that covered everything.”
    “Oh, no. There was a case in Wisconsin of a white, Episcopalian male in his early thirties, nonhandicapped, 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 coworkers 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 $750,000 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 nonreligious ethical minorities.” Then he closed his eyes, rubbed them with a thumb and forefinger. “Jesus Christ, what’d I just say?” C ARMEL 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