Certain Prey

them at the door: “I hope we can do this without a lot of trauma,” she said, her voice tight.
    “There’s no reason to be any trauma at all,” Lucas said. “If she can’t pick out a photograph, we’re done.”
    “What if she does? What if this killer hears about it?”
    “The killer won’t hear about it from the police,” Lucas said. “We’d do a videotape deposition, and keep her name confidential until a defense attorney did his discovery motion—by that time we’d have somebody in jail for first-degree murder, and there’d be nobody to come after her.”
    “The whole thing just scares the heck out of me,” Davis said, hugging herself as though she were cold. H EATHER WAS PLAYING with a fleet of trucks in a back bedroom. “You know what you need?” Sherrill asked. “You need a farm tractor. Maybe a cultivator to pull behind it.”
    “I had a tractor, a John Deere, but it got lost,” Heather said. Her eyes narrowed. “The tractor was good, but you know what I really need?”
    “What?”
    “When we bought the tractor, we bought a combine to go with it, but I didn’t have anything to put the corn in. I could use a grain truck.”
    “Yeah . . . well.” Sherrill was out of her depth. “Let’s look at these pictures, and we’ll get you back to the trucks.”
    “Mom said you could probably get me a ride in a police car,” Heather said.
    “Mmm, if you ask Uncle Lucas here, he could probably fix it.”
    “He’s not my uncle,” Heather said.
    “I can probably fix it anyway,” Lucas said. “Come on and look at the pictures.” S HE DID: she looked at them all, carefully, and when she was done she said, “Nope.”
    “Nope?”
    She looked at her mother. “They don’t look right.”
    “If they don’t look right,” Davis said, “then they don’t look right.”
    “You’re sure none of them look right . . .” Lucas said.
    “Well, they all look sorta right, but not really right.”
    “If that’s what you say, that’s what you say,” Black said. They all stood up.
    “Can Uncle Lucas still get me a ride in a police car?” O UT ON THE SIDEWALK, Sherrill said, “Well, gosh-darn.”
    “That’s a big gosh-darn from me, too,” Black said. “Though I don’t know if I’d want to put a kid on a witness stand with Carmel Loan ready to cut her up.”
    “I’d take anything right now,” Lucas said moodily. “I’d take a chimp if it was ready to pick her out.”
    “So what’re you going to do?” Sherrill asked.
    “Gonna go home,” Lucas said. “Have a beer. Think about it. Cry myself to sleep.”

TWELVE

    Lucas arrived at City Hall a little after ten o’clock in the morning—early for him—closed the door on his office, typed a memo, heading it “Confidential,” and recorded his interview with Hale Allen. He hand-carried it to Rose Marie Roux, the chief of police.
    “How was your trip?” he asked.
    “A Las Vegas convention in the middle of the summer— it was so hot that I was afraid to go outside.”
    “Dry heat,” Lucas said.
    “So’s an oven,” she said. “I was so bored I almost started smoking again. Whatcha got?”
    He handed her the memo and she read it and said, “ Goddamnit, Lucas, this is awful. Why don’t you ever come up with easy stuff?”
    “I do,” Lucas said. “I don’t bother you with it. And this, I don’t want anybody to see but you and me, Sherrill and Black, and maybe one judge. File it and forget it, until we need it.”
    “Covering your ass,” Roux said.
    “Covering everybody’s ass,” Lucas said. “I need to get her phone records for the last few months, and I need this to back up a subpoena.”
    “Talk to Ross Benton,” Roux said. “He’ll give you the subpoena and keep his mouth shut. He’d love to see Carmel get nailed. She makes a game out of fucking with him in court. He had trouble with some decisions in that Prolle case, and she called him Schizo the Clown and it got in the Star-Tribune.”
    “All right. I’ll carry a copy over to him, get the subpoena.”
    “I hope you know what we’re doing,” Roux said. “I’m too old and tired to get burned at the stake by Carmel Loan.”
    Lucas talked to Benton, the judge, and got his subpoena. “Let me know how it comes out,” Benton said, a light in his eye.
    “Probably nothing,” Lucas said. “I’m beggin’ you not to leak it.”
    “Don’t worry. If it’s nothing, and she finds out about this subpoena, I’ll stick a gun in my mouth.” L UCAS