Certain Prey

she said. “It came back from the lab.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Yeah. Lucas, the analysis is identical to the analysis on the D’Aquila and Blanca killings. Not the Allen, though.”
    “Huh,” he said, but he felt a tight kick of pleasure. Sherrill continued: “So me being a cop and all, I gotta ask you—where’d you get it?”
    “I could tell you I found it on the floor at the Blanca killing, and forgot about it,” he said.
    “That’d be utter bullshit,” she said.
    “Such things have happened, even to the best of us,” Lucas said.
    “Not to you. Not to me, either,” she answered.
    “I’ll tell you, if you want to know. If you tell anybody else, they might put me in jail. But if you want to know . . .”
    “You’d tell me?”
    “Yup.”
    She balanced it for ten seconds, then said, “I gotta know.” Lucas nodded. “I broke into Carmel Loan’s apartment, searched it, found the shell in the closet. There was only one. I thought about leaving it, and trying to get a search warrant, then finding it—and if it came back confirmed, we’d have something heavy. But I couldn’t think of any way we’d ever get a search warrant. And I could think of about a million ways Carmel or any good defense attorney could impeach that kind of evidence. You know, we just happened to find only one shell, in her closet, and it just happens to match, and we are the only people who handled the other slugs . . . it’d be strong, but it wouldn’t be definitive.”
    “So you took it.”
    “That and some other stuff,” Lucas said. “Computer records, phone records.”
    “Anything she can trace?”
    “No. Don’t think so.”
    “Well, goddamnit, Lucas . . .”
    He leaned across the desk, intent: “Listen: we know about her now. With this shell. That’s the most important thing that could happen in a case like this. We’ve got a fix on who did it. Now we can start putting things together. We were stuck, now we’ve got a focus.”
    “I wish you’d told me before you went in there,” Sherrill said.
    “I couldn’t. It was really best that you didn’t know. It’s still best. If anybody asks me, I didn’t tell you, even now.”
    “I suppose . . .” She stood up, sighed and said, “All right. I just forgot what you said.”
    “Of course you didn’t,” Lucas said.
    “Goddamnit, Lucas . . .” She flared for a minute, then settled back. “So what next?”
    “I just got a subpoena for Carmel’s phone records, and walked over to the phone company and got them,” he said. “I’d already checked them, from what I got in her apartment, but this gives us some legal support.”
    “Something weird?”
    “Yeah. One odd call. And she made that phone call just before the D’Aquila killings.” He filled her in on the Tennex Messenger Service, and his call to the FBI.
    “Tennex—sounds like a rock band,” she said, her voice moody.
    “You’re thinking of the Quicksilver Messenger Service.”
    “Never heard of it,” she said. She slumped in the chair, scanning the computer list of phone calls: “There’s nothing before the Allen hit.”
    “No . . .”
    “You hear what I just said?” she asked. “I actually said hit. Jesus, I’m a TV movie.”
    “You know what I’m wondering?” Lucas asked. “What if Rolando D’Aquila was her contact with the killer? From what you guys dug up, he had some heavy Mafia connections once, and this shooter—she’s supposed to do a lot of Mafia contracts.”
    “But you know what?” Sherrill asked, sitting up. “Rolo’s contacts, his drug supply, mostly came out of St. Louis, which was unusual. At the time, most of our traffic came out of L.A.; it was just shifting over to Chicago back then. St. Louis was nothing—never had been, and never was again after Rolo went down.”
    “And this shooter . . .”
    “Has contacts in the St. Louis mob. That’s what the Feebs say.”
    “That’s something,” Lucas said. “Maybe we can work with that.” C ARMEL L OAN was sitting in her office; she could feel Hale Allen’s touch from the night before, the balls of his thumbs on either side of her spine . . . She was trying to read a deposition, but her eyes defocused and she suddenly giggled. The man was unnaturally sexual; a memory popped into her head, she thought it was from a movie, somewhere back in time, a woman telling a man, “Women don’t want sex. Women want love.”
    What complete drivel, she thought. Women want sex; they just also want love. And this