Certain Prey

the cops. They hadn’t had the evidence, but they’d convicted because the cops suggested they should.
    That could happen to her . . .
    Fuckin’ Davenport . . .
    Worse, the word was getting out. She might be going psycho, she thought, going paranoid, but she thought she could see it in the eyes of her colleagues. The questions: Did you do it? Did you help? Did you drill those little holes in Roland D’Aquila’s kneecaps? A N INTERVIEW with one of Carmel’s friends produced the casual information that she’d been in Zihuatanejo the November before last. “Save that,” Lucas told Sherrill. “When we shake her apartment down, we’ll drop the information that Clark was there at the same time—we’ll jump her about it.”
    “All right.”
    “What else you got?”
    “Not much—it’s really thin. Clark took a course in legal writing at the U, at the same time Carmel was at the law school . . .”
    “So they were at law school together.”
    “Not exactly.”
    “Close enough for government work,” Lucas said. “Get more.” J OHN M C C ALLUM, managing partner of the firm, stopped at Carmel’s office and asked, “What the hell is going on, Carmel? We hear the police are looking at you in connection with all these murders.” He was using the same whiny voice that had caused him to lose half of the consumer liability cases he’d once tried, Carmel thought.
    “It’s all crap, John,” Carmel said. But she could feel the blood rising in her face, and the impulse to rip McCallum’s larynx out of his throat. “The cops are trying to put pressure on me—I don’t know why.”
    “Yeah, well, make them stop,” McCallum said.
    “I’m working on it.”
    “You know the firm will stand behind you . . .”
    “Bullshit. You’d drop me like a hot potato, if you could,” Carmel said. “Of course, I can beat any charge they bring against me, and then I’d make a hobby out of suing you for damaging my career. You might get out of it with your oldest car and a pair of shoes.”
    “That sounded almost like a threat,” McCallum said.
    “Excuse me if I wasn’t direct enough,” Carmel said. “That was a threat. If the firm doesn’t back me up on this, I’ll personally take you to court and pull your testicles off.”
    “I don’t have to listen to this,” he said. His eyes flinched away from her wolverine’s gaze, and he turned to go.
    “You don’t have to listen,” Carmel said, her voice as deadly as a razor. “But you better think about it. ’Cause I’m serious, John. You’ve seen me at work: you don’t want to piss me off.” S HERRILL TYPED all the ties into a memo, and dropped it on Lucas’s desk. “Enough for a warrant?”
    Lucas looked down the list, and nodded. “We’ll need a photo of the cuts on the back of Rolo’s hand, and the phone records.”
    “Both office and apartment?”
    “Both. But we’ll do the office first. Seal her apartment so that she can’t get in to destroy anything, then brace her at the law firm. We’ll need a dozen guys, a crowd, to make it really inconvenient . . . look through all her paper files, and we’ll need a computer guy to copy her computer records. We’ll need to subpoena the firm’s phone records, too.”
    “Might be some court problems with that.”
    “Yeah, but we can nail them down, anyway. Let the county’s attorney’s guys argue about what we should get.”
    “When?”
    “Write up the warrant now, we’ll walk it over to the county, let them know what’s coming,” Lucas said.
    “What if they’re shaky?”
    “Fuck ’em. Besides, they don’t mind seeing us fall on our asses from time to time—and this’ll all be on our heads.”
    “So we go in . . .?”
    “Tomorrow. Friday.”
    Sherrill looked down at her memo. “This is gonna be somethin’.”

TWENTY-SIX

    All the paperwork was done by noon Friday. Lucas took Sherrill, Sloan and Franklin to lunch, after leaving word for the rest of the search team to meet at his office at three o’clock. Sherrill, Sloan and Franklin knew about the warrant, as did Black, who’d gone to St. Paul to get photos of Roland D’Aquila’s self-inflicted scratches.
    “Why don’t we just go?” Sherrill asked as they settled into a booth at the Gray Kitten. A waitress hustled over, dropped four menus on the red-checkered vinyl tablecloth and moved on.
    “Because I want it later in the day,” Lucas said when the waitress was gone. “I want people starting to go home. I want the