Certain Prey

cops?”
    “They asked Hale about Rolo. They found his body this morning—some junkie dropped by, looking for coke.”
    “Did you tell them that you’d represented Rolo?” Rinker asked.
    For a split second, a lie hovered on Carmel’s tongue. She rejected it and said, “Yeah, I pretty much had to. They would’ve found out.”
    “All right. So now they can tie you to Rolo, but they can’t tie you to the crime, because nobody knows that you’re . . . involved with Hale. Not even Hale knows it. Have I got that right?”
    “That’s right.” She wandered to a window and looked out over the city; it was a hot day, and a thin haze hung over the Midway area to the east. “If it weren’t for that fuckin’ tape, we’d be in the clear. I’m thinking maybe we should have strangled Rolo, instead of shooting him—then there wouldn’t be any tie. That was a mistake.”
    “Didn’t think of it,” Rinker said. “The gun was just the natural thing to do, since we had it right there.”
    “Yeah, well, they’re waiting for an analysis of the slugs. They can tell whether the bullets that killed Barbara Allen and the ones that killed Rolo came from the same batch of lead.”
    “All right . . . gonna have to get rid of the guns pretty soon. Or buy a new batch of shells.”
    “Did you come up with any ideas about the tape?” Carmel asked.
    “Yes, I have,” Rinker said. She stood up, walked to a corner table and picked up Rolo’s address book. “For one thing, do you remember when he said he gave the tape to somebody named Mary?”
    “Yeah—but there aren’t any names in the book, only . . .” “Initials,” Rinker said. “But I had a little time, so I started going through it. There are four sets of initials starting with M. So I walked down to your library, and looked in the cross-reference directories . . . and then I found out he was using a stupid little code on his phone numbers. He put the last number at the beginning. Like he’d have a number, say, that was 123 dash 4567 and he’d write it down as 712 dash 3456.”
    Carmel was impressed. “How’d you figure that out?”
    “Because some of the prefixes didn’t exist, and the ones that did were all over the place. One of the numbers was for a dog grooming service. I mean, why would he even bother to write it in his book? So anyway, the assholes I used to work for did some jail time, and they told me how guys would use these simple codes. So I juggled numbers until I found one that gave me all good prefixes. And then, everything else worked out—all the codes were residential, and two of the names that began with M were women. Or probably women. One was Martha Koch, but the other was just initial M—M. Blanca. Where there’s just an initial, it usually means a woman living alone. Younger woman.”
    “Mary?”
    “No, it’s something else—I called, and a woman answered, and I asked for Mary Blanca and she said I had the wrong number. She had a little accent, maybe Mex. But I was thinking about how scared Rolo was, and how he came up with the name Mary. I bet when you asked him for the name, and you said, Quick, I bet her name popped into his head, and it almost got out, but he switched at the last minute. Could be Martha, or it could be this other M.”
    Carmel was skeptical: “That’s a long chain of couldbe’s,” she said. “It could be some other M, or not an M at all.”
    “Yeah, but we don’t have anything else.”
    “Rolo’s name’s gonna be in the paper tomorrow,” Carmel said. “If this M doesn’t know he’s dead, she will tomorrow morning. Then she’s gonna look at the tape, if she hasn’t already. Then she’s gonna give it to the cops.”
    “So let’s go talk to M. Blanca. And Martha Koch.”
    “After dark.”
    “Yup.”
    “We’re hanging by a goddamn thread,” Carmel said.
    • • •

    M ARTHA K OCH’S LIFE was saved by a baby shower; she never knew it.
    “Lotta cars around,” Carmel muttered as she and Rinker started up the Kochs’ driveway; a dozen cars were parked along the street. The house was a neat, modest, tuck-under ranch across the street from a golf course. A curving line of flagstone steps led across a rising lawn to the front door. The porch light was on and the living-room curtains were open. At the top of the steps, Carmen said, “Uh-oh,” and stopped. Two women were hopping around the front room, laughing, and one of them was looking back and obviously talking to yet a third one,