Certain Prey

Louise.”
    “Whoa . . . And she said she was in love with you for two years?”
    “Yeah, ever since a little thing in a restaurant. I couldn’t even remember it.”
    “Do you believe her? That she’s been in love?”
    “I know it sounds vain, but I do. You’d have to hear her talk. She remembered me saying things, doing things, places she’d bumped into me, times we’d just had a word or two.”
    Lucas thought for a moment, and then said, “Are you seeing her tonight?”
    “Of course. Every night now. She says we’re gonna get married in a couple of years.”
    “Huh.” Lucas turned in his chair to face his window, his fingers steepled at his mouth, and looked out at the street. He hoped he looked like Sherlock Holmes. Then he swiveled back to face Allen. “Do you think if you suggested that you go out to Penelope’s, that she’d go?”
    “Penelope’s? Oh, heck yes, she loves that kind of scene, Minnetonka, the lake, all that. Trendy, expensive . . .”
    “Call her. She lives downtown, right? She’s got some kind of fabulous apartment that was in the Star-Tribune?” Lucas knew exactly where she lived. He’d joked about it with a banker friend who lived in the same building.
    “Right. And it is fabulous,” Allen said.
    “Call her, suggest Penelope’s, and when she gets to your place, suggest that she drive. Make up some kind of excuse. Sprained your gas pedal ankle or something. Nothing serious, so you have to limp. Just get her to drive.”
    “She drives most of the time anyway,” Allen said. “She doesn’t like my car. I got a brown-and-cream Lexus, she calls it a Jap car. She’s got this red Jag.”
    “Good. Don’t tell her any of this, by the way,” Lucas said. “Don’t tell her you talked to me. Just get her out there and have a nice long meal.”
    “I will. What are you going to do?”
    “Observe,” Lucas said. “Not me, another guy.”
    “Observe what?” Allen asked.
    “This whole thing sounds a little bit off tome. Remember, whether you think like this or not, you are a rich guy. And you’re good-looking. Women are going to come after you, and it’s hard to tell who’s sincere and who isn’t. So I got a guy on the staff who specializes in . . . mmm. . . what would you call it? Emotional readings, I guess. I’ll have him take a look at the two of you, and tell me what he thinks. He’ll look at her body language, stuff like that. I’ll pass it along to you.”
    “He’s gonna eat with us?” Allen asked dimly.
    “No, no. He’ll just be there,” Lucas said. “Don’t go looking around for him or anything—just enjoy yourself and make sure that you stay long enough that my guy can get a reading.”
    “An emotional reading?”
    Lucas spread his hands: “Hey, it’s what I got.”
    When Allen had gone, Lucas leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling for a few moments, thinking about Carmel Loan. He ran through everything she’d said to him since the Allen killing, and in running through the various conversations they’d had, he stumbled over one small gemstone.
    When he’d last talked to her, she’d made a deliberately crude comment about three dead spics and an upper-class woman. Anyway, he remembered it that way; and he remembered that they’d had difficulty finding anyone to claim the bodies, or anyone who would even admit to knowing who they were.
    Had they released the names by the time he’d seen Carmel? He didn’t think so. But who knows, maybe the television people had talked to the cops outside the house, and somebody made a comment. Or maybe a reporter had talked to a neighbor, and the names had gotten out. Maybe. That could explain how she knew the two Dinkytown dead were Latinos.
    Carmel Loan. He scribbled her name on a legal pad, looked at it, then drew an arrow and scribbled another name: Rolando D’Aquila. Another arrow, at ninety degrees from the first, from Carmel to the next name, Hale Allen. He looked at that for a moment, drew another arrow from Carmel to Barbara Allen, and another from Carmel to Dead Spics. Of course, her connection to Marta Blanca and her dead boyfriend was purely part of his memory, nothing that could be proven . . .
    A cold wind was already blowing through Lucas’s chest. He knew what he was going to do—he even knew how he was going to do it, to the smallest detail—but the idea chilled him. He felt like a wealthy man about to shoplift something expensive. And fooling with Carmel Loan was not like