Certain Prey

said.
    “So what was it?” Lucas asked.
    “Uh, well, if somebody came snooping around, I wasn’t supposed to do anything, except . . . wait.”
    “Until what?”
    “Until she called me,” Marker said, her voice barely audible.
    “You’re gonna have to speak up,” Mallard said.
    “Until she called me,” Marker said.
    “And then what?”
    “She’d call and ask, ‘Is Mr. Warren in?’ And if nobody had been around, if I didn’t know anything, I’d say, ‘You’ve got the wrong number: this is Marker Answering.’ But if somebody had been around, I’d say, ‘No, but Mr. White’s here. Would you like me to put your call through?’ ”
    “How many times did you do this?” Mallard asked.
    “Two different times. About three or four years ago, something must’ve happened, and she called me every day for two weeks,” Marker said, her voice dropping again.
    “Ah, shit,” Lucas said. “Then she called you yesterday or today, didn’t she? This afternoon?”
    “She’s been calling for a week, every day. And today, about an hour after you left the first time. Before you came and got me again,” Marker said. “She was calling from Des Moines, a pay phone, I think. I could hear the cars.”
    “And you gave her the Mr. White line.”
    “Yes,” she squeaked.
    “Did you get the job because of your father?”
    “Maybe. Tennex said he knew Dad.”
    “Where’s your father living now?” Lucas asked.
    “Well, he’s not,” Marker said. “He died of colon cancer last year.”
    “I’m sorry,” Mallard said.
    “They said it was all the chemicals from the dry-cleaning,” Marker said. “I’ll probably go that way myself. A lot of us do.” T HERE WAS MORE, but nothing significant. They released Marker, and Mallard drove Lucas to the Hay-Adams, retrieved his bag from the luggage room and took him to the airport.
    “So you think she’s gone,” Mallard said.
    “Yeah. And I think I’m the guy who tipped her off by calling into Tennex.”
    “Nothing to do about that,” Mallard said. “You were just running checks on a list of phone numbers. It was a long shot.”
    “Yeah, but Jesus. That close.”
    “We’ve still got a lot to work with—all those checks, all the phone calls. We’ve got something now. I’ll bet we have some kind of description of her in a week. I’ll bet we unravel some kind of connection.”
    “How much?”
    “What?”
    “How much will you bet?”
    Mallard sucked on his teeth for a moment, then said, “About a dime, I guess.”
    Lucas nodded. “Get me to the plane on time.” T HE PLANE, as it happened, was going to Minneapolis— with a stop in Detroit.
    “Aw, no, I gotta fly direct,” Lucas told the check-in attendant.
    “Nothing tonight, except through Detroit,” the clerk said, punching up her computer. “We could get you on a flight tomorrow morning that goes straight through.”
    “Aw, man . . .”
    He went through Detroit, miserably suffering through two takeoffs and landings. He was surprised at the safe landing in Detroit, but quickly convinced himself that it would be the second half of the flight, the unnecessary half, that would kill him, so achingly close to home . . .
    As miserable as he was, two things occurred to him:
    Wichita, Kansas, was a large enough city that it might attract the eye of somebody who traveled out of town to make her calls; but Marker had said the killer was angry when she called from Wichita. Was it possible that she lived close to Wichita, and made spur-of-the-moment calls out of anger when something went wrong with the answering service? He got the airline flight magazine out of the seat pocket in front of him, and looked at the flight map again. Wichita, he thought, would be as viable a hometown as Springfield. Something to think about.
    The second thing came to him as they were landing in Minneapolis: he was looking down at one of the lakes where he expected the impact to occur—he could see himself struggling to get out of the flooding cabin, but his legs and arms were broken and he couldn’t unfasten the seat belt—and the name Des Moines popped into his head.
    If the killer came from either Springfield or Wichita or virtually anyplace around those cities, and if she were driving to Minneapolis, she’d go through Des Moines.
    If she had done that, he thought, she’d be here now.
    He looked down at the broad multicolored grid of lights that made up the Cities and thought, Somewhere.

FOURTEEN

    Carmel didn’t