Certain Prey

far as that goes.”
    “Ours didn’t know about the photo spread.”
    “All right—if there was a leak, it was us. If there was a leak . . . but damnit, I would have leaked to her myself, if I’d known she might call. Do you have a recording of the voice?”
    There was a brief pause, as if Mallard were contemplating the stupidity of the question. “Of course,” he said.
    “I want to hear it,” Lucas said. “I know the suspect personality,I’ve spoken to her in the past week. Maybe I could nail it down.”
    “Which leads to my second question,” Mallard said. “What’s her name?”
    “Jesus . . .”
    “I’ve got to have it. This is turning into something. As long as your case was nothing more than an intuition, it was one thing. Now it’s another.”
    “She’s a well-connected defense attorney here in town. A millionaire, probably. And I know she gives money to the politicians—U.S. senators, congressmen, you name it. If you fuck this up, they could find us both buried in the backyard.”
    “Three people here will have the name. That’s all. If we’re buried in the backyard, the other two guys’ll be buried under us, I guarantee it.”
    Lucas sighed, hesitated, and said, “All right. Her name is Carmel Loan. I can’t tell you how nervous this makes me.”
    “Huh. The woman who called yesterday identified herself as Patricia Case.”
    “I’ll check around, but I’ve never heard of her,” Lucas said. He picked up the St. Paul phone book, thumbed through it to Case.
    “Could be some kind of code,” Mallard said. “Although that’s pretty farfetched.”
    “Tennex Messenger Service is farfetched. Did you get a location on the pay phone?”
    “Yeah, just a minute. Uh, it’s at 505 Nicollet Mall.”
    “Five-oh-five,” Lucas muttered as he ran his finger down the Case listing in the phone book. He said, half to himself, “There aren’t any Patricia Cases listed in the St. Paul phone book. I don’t have the Minneapolis book here at the house.”
    “We already checked, and there aren’t any Patricia Cases. We also checked the 505 number, and got some department stores. There’s a Neiman Marcus.”
    “That’s an easy two-minute walk from Carmel Loan’s office,” Lucas said. “I can check, but it might be the closest pay phone to Carmel’s office.”
    “Interesting,” Mallard said.
    “Please don’t let anything out about Carmel,” Lucas said urgently. “Not yet.”
    “Nothing will come out of this end. I swear to God.”
    “One more thing,” Lucas said. “When are you going to hit this place? The office suite? Go in and talk to the people?”
    “We’ll give it another day, anyway.”
    “Call me the night before. I’m three hours away. I’d like to be there when you do it.”
    “No problem. Anything else?”
    “One other thing . . . one of the victims, Rolando D’Aquila, used to be a heavy drug dealer. The word from our drug people is that he bought his coke out of St. Louis, a Mafia connection down there. Not Colombian or Mexican, but old-line Mafia. And this shooter, his woman, she seems to tie in down there.”
    “Damn,” Mallard said, “I’m letting something happen here that I’ve never let happen before.”
    “What’s that?”
    “I’m getting my hopes up.”

    T HEN, FOR TWO DAYS, nothing happened. Carmel didn’t get a call back. She stayed close to the magic phone, but she never heard from Rinker. Was there a problem with the contact phone? Was it tapped?
    The FBI was equally frustrated. There were no more calls to Tennex: nothing. At the end of the second day, Mallard called Lucas back. “We’re going in tomorrow, if nothing happens to slow us down. We want to get in before the end of the week.”
    “I’ll get a flight out tonight.”
    “We can cover that, if you want,” Mallard offered.
    “No, thanks, I’ll do it from here.”
    “All right. Anything new?”
    “I sent one of my people, Marcy Sherrill, down to St. Louis to schmooze their organized crime people. There’s nothing going on up here.”
    “If Sherrill’s the one I remember from the meeting, she oughta schmooze pretty well.”
    “One of her many talents,” Lucas said. “See you tomorrow.” L UCAS CALLED his travel agent, got a business-class ticket on the nine o’clock Northwest flight into Washington and made a reservation at the Hay-Adams. He liked the Hay-Adams because, the half-dozen times he’d stayed there—even the first time—the doorman said, “Nice to