Certain Prey

throat.
    “Your apartment. Right now, it’s sealed. You can be present when we enter it, if you wish.”
    After a long moment of astonished silence, Carmel said,
    “You’re nuts.”
    “No, but I’m afraid you are,” Lucas said. “We’ve got quite a bit of the picture with you and Louise Clark.”
    “I have nothing to do with Louise Clark. Nothing. You can ask . . .”
    “You just went to Zihuatanejo at the same time by accident?”
    “What?” Carmel sputtered. “I never saw her in Zihuatanejo. I’d never go there with a . . . a secretary. I went there by myself.”
    Lucas now took a long moment to look her over. Then, half-turning away, he said, “Sure.” O NE OF THE VICE GUYS found Louise Clark’s name in Carmel’s Rolodex, lifted it out, put it in an evidence bag. Another found a long paper record of the D’Aquila drug trial, and bagged that, too. The lawyers in the hallway began chanting, “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you,” and one of the senior partners came down and tried to quiet them. They didn’t quiet. The chanting got louder, and the partner grinned slightly, shrugged and went upstairs, the approval as explicit as they’d ever get from that particular partner. Two minutes later, another group of lawyers arrived, from another firm in the building, and joined the chanting.
    Carmel was shouting over the noise: “You think I killed Hale? We were gonna get married. I was here the night he was killed. Look in our phone records, asshole, you’ll find that he called me, we talked for ten minutes . . . Hey, asshole, I’m talking to you . . .”
    And outside, the lawyers began chanting, “Asshole, asshole, asshole . . .”
    Sherrill was getting angry, but Lucas touched her shoulder and grinned. “Haven’t had this much fun since we beat up that shitkicker in Oxford.”
    And Carmel screamed, “What are you laughing about, asshole?”
    And Lucas let it out, a long, rolling laugh: outside, the lawyers were chanting, scratching at the glass windows to Carmel’s outer office, watching him laugh and laugh . . . A T FIVE O’CLOCK, leaving three detectives at the office to look through the last of the records, Lucas moved the act to Carmel’s apartment. Carmel followed in her bloodred Jag, which had been searched while it was parked in the office ramp. Lucas and four others were in the elevator when it arrived at the fifth floor, where Carmel’s parking space was.
    Carmel got on with a man whom she’d introduced at the office as Dane Carlton, her personal attorney. Lucas knew him to nod to, a tall, slender, gray-haired man with a cool demeanor and icy blue eyes behind plain gold-rimmed glasses. He was wearing a blue suit with a white shirt and wine-colored tie.
    To Lucas, Carmel said, “Fuck you.”
    Lucas sighed, looked at Carlton. “You should tell your client to watch her mouth.”
    “I’m her attorney, not her guardian,” Carlton said bluntly.
    “And he’s gonna rip you a new asshole when we’re done with this,” Carmel said.
    Lucas looked at Carlton. “That right?” Carlton, with the tiniest movement of his head, said, “Yes.”
    When Carlton and Carmel got out at Carmel’s floor, Sherrill, looking after him, put her mouth close to Lucas’s ear and whispered, “I get the feeling he could do it.”
    Lucas said, “I know him. He could.”
    The search team was methodical and undiscriminating. They were looking for guns, cartridges, records, notes, letters—anything that would tie Carmel to any of the people who were murdered. They found a half-dozen notes and emails written to Hale Allen, most of them simply setting up dates.
    Franklin, wearing white plastic gloves, gave one of them to Lucas: “‘Fuck around on me, and I’ll kill you,’” Lucas read aloud.
    Carlton glanced at Carmel, who rolled her eyes. But she was angry, and getting angrier, Lucas thought. He dropped the D’Aquila scratches on her the first time he got an opening, which came when Carmel started screaming again.
    “You’re messing up my goddamn clothes, those clothes are worth more fucking money than the city can pay . . . Dane, we gotta recover for this, they’re wrecking that suit.”
    Carlton said, “We will, Carmel.” He turned to Lucas: “Chief Davenport, why don’t we end this charade? There’s no evidence that Carmel had anything to do with any of these killings. You’re simply fishing—and we will eventually find out why. It appears to be a personal crusade against one of the most