Certain Prey

gave us. When do you want to talk to her? The kid?”
    “The sooner the better,” Lucas said. “I don’t know how long memories last with little kids.”
    “I’ll try to set it up this afternoon.”
    “Something else,” Lucas said. He dug in his pocket. “Could you have the lab do an analysis on the slug?” He tossed the .22 shell to her. She caught it one-handed, looked at it, and then asked, “What’s going on, Lucas?”
    “Nothing; it’s one of my twenty-twos. I just want to look at the difference between a random analysis and what we’re getting from the slugs we took out of the dead guys. Do we really have a case based on a metals analysis?”
    She looked at him, suspicious, turned the cartridge in her hand. “Then, if I lost this particular shell,” she said, “you wouldn’t mind if I just sent in one of my own.”
    Lucas said, “Send that one in, huh? Just send it in.”
    “This one.”
    “That one.”
    “Lucas . . .”
    “Off my case, Marcy,” he said.
    She grinned at him and said, “Marcy, my ass. We’re operating, aren’t we?”
    “Send the fuckin’ thing in,” he said. L UCAS SPENT the morning running through the numbers he’d taken from Carmel’s address books and phone bills: he’d marked fifty-five of them to be checked. In three hours, he’d half-filled a yellow legal pad with notes, but nothing promising.
    A few minutes before noon, he got to the final long-distance call on the last of the long-distance bills: a call made two weeks earlier, he noticed, a couple of days after Barbara Allen’s death. The note from the hacker said only, “Small business phone listed to Tennex Messenger Service.” Lucas dialed the number and a woman answered on the first ring: “Tennex Messenger Service.”
    “Yes, could I speak to the Tennex manager? Or whoever runs the place?”
    “I’m sorry, sir, Mr. Wilson is out. I can give you his voice mail.”
    “Well, I was just wondering how I could set up an account with Tennex.”
    “I’m sorry, sir; we’re an answering service. All I can do is give you his voice mail.”
    “Okay, thanks, if you could do that . . .”
    He was switched, and got a voice-mail introduction, a slightly vague voice that might have come from a drugged-out teenager: “You have reached Tennex Messenger Service, your, uh, fastest messenger service in the D.C. area. We are either, uh, on the phone or out on a call. We check back for messages, so, like, leave your name and, uh, phone number. Thanks.”
    Not interested in talking to a strung-out bicycle messenger, Lucas hung up, yawned, stood up and stretched, and walked down to Homicide. Black was at his desk, shuffling through papers; Sloan had his feet up, reading a Pioneer Press.
    “Lunch?” Lucas asked.
    “Yeah, I could see my way clear to a lunch,” Sloan said. Sherrill pushed through the office door, spotted Lucas and said, “I sent that slug in, and we’re all set for four o’clock this afternoon.”
    Sloan’s eyebrows went up. “Really? Where at?” he asked.
    Sherrill correctly interpreted his tone and implication: “Shut up,” she said. To Lucas: “Mama is not happy with the fact that we’re coming back to see the kid. There was all the loose talk in the newspapers about hit men.”
    “So I’ll let you warm her up when we get there,” Lucas said. “Woman talk, bonding, chitchat, that kind of shit.”
    “Sexism,” Sloan said, shaking his head sadly. “And from a member of the Difference Commission.”
    Lucas’s hand went to his forehead: “Ah, Jesus, I forgot. There’s a meeting tonight.”
    They looked at him with sympathy, and Sherrill patted his shoulder. “It could be worse.”
    “How?”
    “I don’t know. You could be shot.” “He’s been shot,” Sloan said. “It’d have to be a lot worse than that.”
    • • •

    L UNCH WITH S LOAN was a long hour of gossip, with brief side trips into current styles of crime. Murder was down, even with Allen and the two dead in Dinkytown—the fourth, Rolo, was on the St. Paul books. Rape was down, ag assault was down, coke was down, speed was up and so was heroin. “Gutierrez told me that the day heroin started coming back was a happy day in his life,” Sloan said, speaking of one of the dope detectives. “He says Target’s gonna get ripped off, and Kmart and Wal-Mart, but at least they’re not gonna have a bunch of robot-crazy coke freaks running around with guns, thinkin’ that nothing can hurt them.”
    Lucas