Certain Prey

Carmel spotted a printed headline under a talking head in a deliwindow TV: Two Bodies Found Near University. She nudged Rinker with her elbow.
    “That was quick,” Rinker said, looking up at the TV.
    “So was the other one—we could have gotten a couple days on either of them, but we didn’t.”
    “I wonder about that kid,” Rinker said. “I hope nothing comes out of that.”
    Carmel nodded and said, “Let me find out when these bodies were found. If the cops have released any information, I can go over there and ask how it affects the case against Hale . . . and maybe find out what they’ve got.”
    “Too much curiosity might be dangerous,” Rinker said.
    “I can walk that line,” Carmel said confidently.
    • • •

    C ARMEL WENT STRAIGHT to Lucas:
    “I understand you found them,” she said. “I mean, you personally.”
    “Yeah. Not one of the brighter moments in my day,” Lucas said. He was tipped back in his new office chair, his feet up, reading the Modality Report. He’d bought the chair himself, a gray steel-and-fabric contraption that felt so good that he was thinking of marrying it.
    “I’ll tell you what,” Carmel said. “We got one upperclass woman and three spics dead, and I would suggest to you that there’s something going on besides some guy trying to kill his wife for her money. I’m reasonably sure that you’re smart enough to have figured it out.”
    “I figured it out, all right,” Lucas said. “Your goddamn client’s a snake. He was financing the local cocaine cartel with his old lady’s money—and she found out. After he killed her, he rolled up the rest of the group before they could talk about it.”
    “You can’t . . .” Carmel started. Then she stopped herself. She ticked her finger at Lucas and said, “You’re teasing me.”
    “Maybe,” Lucas said. “I just don’t know why we haven’t slept together,” Carmel said. “Except that my heart belongs to another.”
    “So does mine,” Lucas said. “I just wish I’d meet her.”
    Carmel laughed. Let herself laugh a little too long, even indelicately. Then, “So I can tell my client that he can stop the heavy drugs, and try to get some normal sleep.”
    “He’s had a problem?” Lucas asked. He yawned and looked at his watch.
    “He sees himself involved in traumatic rectal enlargement, at the hands—well, not the hands—of biker gangs at Stillwater.”
    “Yeah, well . . .” Lucas said dismissively. “Don’t tell him he’s clear, because we’re still looking at everybody. But between you and me . . .”
    “Yeah?”
    “. . . he seems unlikely. And if we get him into court on a murder charge, and you ask me if I said that, I’ll perjure myself and say, ‘No, of course not.’ ”
    “That’d be a big fuckin’ change, a cop committing perjury,” Carmel said. “All right. I’ll tell him you’ll be easing up.”
    “That’d probably be right,” Lucas said.
    Carmel turned as though to leave, then asked, ingenuously, “You got anything on the new killings? Like potential clients I can chase?”
    “Well, we got this, out of a kid,” Lucas said. He dropped his feet off the new chair, pulled open a desk drawer and took out a computer-generated photo. “We’re putting it in the paper.”
    He passed it to Carmel, who looked at it for a minute and then asked, “What is this?”
    “What the kid saw.”
    “This is shit,” Carmel said. “This is nothing.”
    “I know. But it’s what we got.”
    “It looks like two aliens, a tall one and a short one.”
    “I thought they looked like grim reapers, the head things they have on.”
    The silk scarves had helped. Carmel would’ve spent a moment giving thanks, if she’d had any idea whom she might give thanks to. In the picture, the scarves gave their heads a tall, slender profile. The kid must have seen them as silhouettes. The faces within the silhouettes were generic enough to be meaningless.
    “What are the head things?” Carmel asked.
    “The kid didn’t know. Maybe some kind of hat. Maybe they were nuns.”
    “Good thought,” Carmel said.
    “They’re women, anyway,” Lucas said. “At least the kid says they are.”
    “The shooter in the stairwell was a woman,” Carmel said.
    “The triumph of feminism,” Lucas said. “We got equal-opportunity hitters.”
    “Well . . .” Carmel flipped the photo back on the desk. “On second thought, if you find her, call somebody else. She might be a little dangerous to