Certain Prey

you,” Mallard said.
    • • •

    L OUISE M ARKER WAS a chunky young woman with only one eyebrow, a long furry brown stripe that sat on her brow ridge above both eyes. She had exaggerated cupid’sbow lips, colored deep red, beneath a fleshy, wobbly nose. In Alice in Wonderland, she would have been the Red Queen.
    Tennex had been a customer for seventy-two months, she said, and paid the rent and phone bill each month with a cashier’s check or a money order. She kept the recipient’s receipts for all seventy-two checks in a green hanging file. Most of the checks and money orders came from different banks in each of the cities of St. Louis, Tulsa, Oklahoma and Kansas City, Missouri. Four checks came from Dallas–Fort Worth and three from Denver. Two checks came from Chicago, two from Miami, and one each from San Francisco, New Orleans and New York.
    “How does she find out how much she owes?” Lucas asked. “The phone bills are always different.”
    Marker shrugged: “We add them up and put a message on the voice mail, on the twenty-ninth of each month. A few days later, the check comes in. End of story.”
    “And the voice mail goes through the phone company, so you wouldn’t even handle that call.”
    “That’s right.”
    “Why would you bother with your service at all? With a receptionist?”
    “Well, you gotta have a phone—the phone company won’t let you in on the service if you don’t have a phone,” Marker said. “We’re the phone.”
    “That’s nuts,” one of the FBI agents said. “They pay you all this money for a phone?”
    “It is not nuts,” Marker insisted. “We don’t explore the backgrounds of our clients, because we don’t have the resources, but we know what they are, most of them. They’re mostly trade associations who can’t afford a fulltimeoffice in Washington, but want people to think they can. People like politicians. So if a politician calls here, a receptionist answers, we tell them that nobody’s in, and switch them to voice mail. Then somebody at the real office out in Walla Walla or wherever calls here a couple of times a day, gets the message and returns the call. And if they have to actually come here, to Washington, we can rent them a suite and all the business machines, the whole works. We’re not the only people who do this, you know; there’re a half-dozen others . . .”
    Lucas prowled the office and found an airline magazine, and opened it to the map of the national airline routes. The midwestern and mid-South cities that were the sources of most of the checks—Kansas City, St. Louis and Tulsa—lay in a neat circle with Springfield, Missouri, at its center. On the other hand, if the sender of the checks came from Springfield, or close by, and mailed the checks from neighboring large cities to avoid pinpointing herself, why hadn’t she ever gone to Little Rock? It was hardly farther than the others, at least on the airline map.
    And the other checks were so scattered that they probably indicated that the killer either traveled a lot, or arranged for different people to send the checks. Though it was unlikely that she would ask other people—that’d be too much exposure. So she traveled.
    “. . . never talked to her,” Marker was saying. “I don’t even know if it’s really a her. I always thought it was a him .”
    “Why’d you think that?” Mallard asked.
    “I don’t know. Because he ran a messenger service, I guess. You kind of think that’s like a guy job.” M ALLARD AND HIS three agents began in-depth interviews with all five women, taking them one at a time. Lucas stood outside of Marker’s office for a while, watching her talk with Mallard; her eyes would flick out to Lucas, then back to Mallard, and then out through the door to Lucas again. After ten minutes, Lucas stuck his head in the door: “Thanks for letting me ride along. I’ll give you a call this afternoon.”
    Mallard said, “Hold on a second.”
    Out in the hall, away from the five women, he said, “Not too exciting.”
    “I gotta think about it,” Lucas said.
    “The problem is, we don’t have an edge, a crack, anything we can get a hold of. We’ll have our local agents run down these checks: maybe somebody’ll remember her.”
    “The most checks she got from one bank is six, and those were months apart,” Lucas said. “I’d bet she went to a different teller every time, paid cash.”
    “Maybe we can run down the actual paper checks, and get