Certain Prey

do we avoid it?”
    “Gotta work ’em,” Carmel said. She chewed at her thumbnail, tasted blood, spit and chewed some more. C ARMEL WALKED BACK into the Homicide office with Allen trailing behind. Black and Sherrill were still sitting at the desk, Black with his feet up. Before Carmel could open her mouth, Sherrill asked, “Wanna hear a horse-walks-into-a-bar joke?”
    “Sure,” Carmel said.
    “Horse walks into a bar, sits down, and in this sad voice says, ‘Give me a bourbon, straight up.’ The bartender gets the drink, slides the glass across the bar, and asks, ‘Hey, fella—why the long face?’ ”
    Carmel showed an eighth-inch of smile and said, her voice flat, “That’s fuckin’ hilarious.”
    “I don’t get it,” said Allen, looking worried.
    “Sit down,” Carmel said. To Black and Sherrill: “My client tells me that he has had a sexual relationship with Louise Clark. He hadn’t told me earlier because he assumed it wasn’t relevant. He’s right: it’s not relevant. On the other hand, we can see how you might think it is. I’ve got to talk to him some more, and also to Louise Clark. If you don’t leak any of this to the papers, we’ll come back tomorrow and answer your questions. If you do leak it, then screw ya: we’re done cooperating.”
    “So come back,” Black said. “Nobody’s gonna hear about this from us.”
    “Ten o’clock tomorrow morning,” Carmel said. “I assume you’ve already talked to Louise Clark and suggested that she not talk to anybody about it. Including me.”
    Sherrill nodded: “Of course.”
    “Of course,” Carmel said. S HERRILL CALLED L UCAS a little after three o’clock: “We’re going over to the bureau office, if you want to come.”
    “Let’s go,” Lucas said. He tossed the Equality Report on the floor. “Let me get my jacket.”
    The sunlight was blinding; another good day, Lucas thought, as he slipped on his sunglasses. A great day up north—a day to stretch out on a swimming float, listen to a ball game on a tinny transistor radio and let the world take care of itself.
    “. . . thought she was gonna kill him,” Sherrill was saying. Lucas caught up with the conversation. “So Carmel didn’t know?”
    “No. She wasn’t faking it, either. When we hit her with it, her eyes actually bulged ,” Sherrill said happily. “I didn’t see what happened out in the hall, but when they came back in, he looked like a sheep that’d been shorn.”
    “Huh . . . any vibe off the affair? Was he hiding it?”
    Sherrill shrugged, but Black shook his head: “I didn’t get a goddamn thing. He looked surprised—like, surprised we’d even ask. He didn’t look scared, he didn’t look like he was covering . . .” T HE HEAVILY ARMED male white-shirt-and-tie receptionist rang them through into the FBI’s inner sanctum, where they found a lightly sweating assistant agent-in-charge waiting in a conference room with a man who looked like an economics professor, a little harassed, a little unkempt, the lenses on his glasses a little too thick; on the other hand, he had a thick neck. He smiled pleasantly at Lucas, looked closely at Sherrill, and nodded at Black.
    “I’m Louis Mallard,” he said, pronouncing it Louie. “Mallard like the duck. You know Bill.” Bill Benson, the assistant AIC, nodded, said, “Hey, Lucas.”
    “What’s going on?” Lucas asked.
    “The Allen killing,” Mallard said. “Anything at all?”
    Lucas looked at Sherrill, who looked at Mallard and said, “We’re looking at her husband, a lawyer here.”
    “Mafia connections?” Mallard asked, breaking in.
    “No, nothing we’ve seen. You have information . . . ?”
    “Never heard of him,” Mallard said. “Couldn’t find any record of him at all in our files—he never served in the military. Never even got a traffic ticket, as far as I can tell. A dull boy.”
    “We’ve been looking at his wife, too,” Sherrill said. “Trying to figure out something in her background that might get the attention of a pro, if this was a pro . . .”
    “It was,” Mallard said.
    “What . . . ?”
    “Go ahead with what you were going to say about the wife.” He had a precise way of speaking, just like an economics professor.
    “We’ve been looking at her,” Black said, picking up for Sherrill. “We’ve had some of our business guys looking over her assets, but there’s nothing there. Her money’s been managed for decades. No big losses, no big gains, just a nice