Certain Prey

taken her in, was a cheery blond named Cliff Bell. He wanted to know what the hell was going on.
    “Your client is a front for a professional killer we’re tracking,” Lucas said.
    “I don’t think . . .” Bell started, but Lucas stopped him.
    “Wait, wait,” Lucas said. “Let me make my little speech, here. This woman, the killer, has murdered almost thirty people in more than a dozen states. A lot of them are those nasty Southern states with those strange ways of executing people—like Florida, where the guy’s eyeballs went up in a puff of smoke when they pulled the switch on Ol’ Sparky . . .”
    “That’s unnecessary,” Bell said.
    “No, it’s not,” Lucas said. He leaned toward Marker. “That’s what we’re talking about here, Miss Marker. The electric chair. The gas chamber. Lethal injection. When we nail this woman, we have the complete option of taking you with her. You connected the people who were contracting the killings to the killer—and you knew about it.”
    “I didn’t know it was a killer,” Marker sputtered, but Bell snapped, “Shut up, Louise.”
    Louise didn’t: “I thought it was some kind of political or real estate scam, for Christ’s sake . . .”
    “Shut up, Louise,” Bell said. To Lucas: “What’s the deal?”
    “The deal is, we don’t have to take her. We can, we don’t have to. She can go home right now, if she wants. But we won’t make this offer again. Right now, if she tells us everything she knows about Tennex, we’re willing to assume the best: that she may have guessed that she was facilitating some kind of criminal enterprise, but thought it was a minor political deal. I can’t see her doing any hard time for that. If she doesn’t take the deal right now, while the trail is hot, then tough shit. We’ll get this woman some other way, and we’ll take Louise with her.”
    “We need some time in private,” Bell said. Mallard found them a private room. When he came back, Lucas noticed that he seemed to be sweating.
    “I’m not used to this kind of stuff. Police stuff. We usually have four specialists and three lawyers doing the talking. Spend a couple of weeks prepping for the thing.”
    “Sometimes, if you keep the momentum going, keep people talking, you get something you’d never get when everything’s a formal tit-for-tat,” Lucas said.
    “I know the theory,” Mallard said. “We usually operate on a different one . . . and I’m just hoping we don’t get our tit-for-tat in a wringer.” B ELL BROUGHT M ARKER back fifteen minutes later: “We want a letter from Mr. Mallard, outlining the deal as laid out by Agent Davenport. Then we’ll give you a statement.”
    The letter took another half-hour: Bell turned a little sour when he learned that Lucas worked for the City of Minneapolis, but Mallard smoothed him over.
    “So tell us,” Lucas said. He had his feet up on Mallard’s desk, a tape recorder running in the middle of Mallard’s blotter-calendar. Marker and Bell sat in wooden visitors’ chairs, while Mallard sat back on a couch with his legs crossed, drinking from his endless mug of coffee.
    The connection, Marker said, had been set up by a man named—he said—Bob Tennex, although he sounded like East Coast Italian.
    “Sounded? You didn’t see him?”
    “No. It was all done by telephone.”
    “You set up the account without seeing the guy?”
    “That happens, from time to time. If we get a check, and the check is good, we offer that service . . .”
    Since the connection was set up, Marker said, she’d spoken to a Tennex representative several times, and it was always a woman. Marker had caller ID on her phones, purely as a matter of course, and had noticed that the calls came in from all over the Midwest, and sometimes from other parts of the country. Kansas City was prominent: four or five calls had come from there. Another name that stuck in her head was Wichita, because, while only two calls had come from there, the woman had been angry both times about problems with the phone company’s answering service.
    “She wanted us to get on them—they had a couple of breakdowns,” Marker said.
    “But that’s not the only thing she asked about, is it?” Lucas asked. “You had some other agreement with her. About people making inquiries about the messenger service, about the police coming in.”
    “She really just thought it was some kind of minor political hustle—those things go on all the time here,” Bell