Certain Prey

understand the silence: days had passed since she’d left the message for Pamela—if Pamela was her name, which Carmel doubted. Still, she should have gotten back.
    Had something happened to her? Had Carmel’s name come up through Pamela—had Pamela been caught? Was she in one of those stainless-steel federal pens somewhere, sweating through the sensory-deprivation stage of a multi-level interrogation? Was the phone connection corrupt, or discontinued, or worse, tapped? What was going on?
    She’d worked through her defense two hundred times, and all two hundred times, she’d walked. The cops didn’t have a case, couldn’t have a case. There was nothing to build a case on—unless that little girl had identified her.
    Her contact with the cops said that nothing had come of the photo spread, but Davenport was running this routine, and he was worse than tricky, he was bad. If he was sure that she was involved, he might be sticking together a morality play, to frame her. With nothing more than a sliver of evidence, a woman could go to prison for life, if a jury didn’t approve of her lifestyle.
    She shouldn’t have fucked Hale, that was the truth of the matter. Just shouldn’t have. Should have waited. Even if there was no proof, if a jury found out she’d fucked Hale the night before his dead wife’s funeral, she was history. And where in the hell was Pamela?
    She was in her apartment, trying to work, when the phone rang. She glanced at her watch: probably Hale, but she said, “Be Pamela.”
    And Rinker said, “You got time for a drink?”
    Casually: “Sure, where are you? I’d hoped you’d call.”
    “Remember that place we went, the bar where we saw the guy with the cowboy scarf? Let’s go there.”
    “Oh, sure. An hour from now?”
    “Be careful, though; it’s dark around there. You’ll get eaten by a stalker.”
    “I’ll bring my switchblade,” Carmel said, laughing. “See you in an hour.”

    STALKER? Pamela thought Carmel was being followed? Is that what that meant? And the place where they saw the guy with the red silk cowboy scarf wasn’t a bar, but the lobby of her hotel. Was that where she wanted to meet?
    Before she left her apartment, Carmel changed into a loose long-sleeved silk blouse, jet black, with black slacks and a small gold necklace. Ten minutes after she hung up the phone, she was on the street in the Volvo. She took a twisting route out of downtown Minneapolis, eased along a one-way lane on the edge of the Kenwood area, past homes of the rich and the strange, and checked her back trail: nothing.
    But if what she’d read about complicated tags was right, the cops might have three or four cars following her, changing off, some in front, some behind. She pulled over to the side of the lane, waited two minutes: nothing went by. What if the car was wired, and they were following her from a distance?
    No way she could tell that.
    Besides, she was beginning to feel that she might be a little-delusional. She’d read hundreds of criminal files in her lifetime, and the heavy surveillance never started until the case was made. Before that, they were simply too expensive. The cops might go for a phone tap, or loose surveillance, but there wouldn’t be a multicar track across town.
    She looked at her watch. She still had a half-hour before she was supposed to meet Pamela. She headed south, on and off I-35, round and round quiet city blocks, looking for anything that might be a follower. At the south end of the loop, a heavy jet roared five hundred feet overhead, and she turned, heading north, moving fast now. She took the Volvo straight into the hotel parking garage, got a ticket, left the car and took the stairs down to the lobby.
    Rinker was sitting in a corner. She saw Carmel step out of the stairway, smiled, stood up and walked back to the elevators. She was just getting in the elevator car when Carmel caught up with her.
    “Did you understand what I was saying on the phone?” Rinker asked as the elevator car started up.
    “I think so. I’m not being followed, unless they’ve done something electronic, and I’d be willing to bet they haven’t—if they really think I’m involved, it’s way too early in the investigation to have twenty-four-hour surveillance. But right now, there’s nobody with me.”
    “I sort of bet myself you’d be coming out of that stairwell,” Rinker said. “It’s what I would have done. Zip into the garage, take the stairs, they can’t