Certain Prey

other reason, I can give you one,” Rinker said, swallowing beer. “I gotta find out why I’m in trouble. These guys I work with—if the feds start snooping around, or your pal Davenport, all they’ve got to do is dump me, and they’re safe. They have a couple more people like me out there, and I’d walk out the front of my apartment someday and boom, that’d be it. So I gotta find out. If the feds start bugging my guys, I gotta know, and take some precautions.”
    “These guys are . . . Mafia?”
    Rinker shrugged. She looked like a slightly overaged cheerleader, bouncing softly on the hotel bed. “Yeah, I guess. If you’re gonna put a label on them. I mean, they’re Italian, most of them. Except Freddy, he’s Irish, or his grandfather was. And I guess Dave is like a Polack, they’re always giving him shit about it. They’re sorta the Mafia, but they’re more like a bunch of guys who watch NFL Monday Night Football and pick up stuff that falls off trucks. Some of them are pretty mean, though. Like Italian bikers.”
    “Huh.” Carmel showed a small grin. “I thought it’d be more dignified than that.”
    “Maybe back east. Not in St. Louis,” Rinker said.
    “So are you gonna be around?”
    “In and out of town, until we figure out what’s going on,” Rinker said. “I’m going to Washington tomorrow. I want to talk to this woman who runs the answering service.”
    “What if they’re watching her?”
    “Then I won’t talk to her,” Rinker said.
    “I’m gonna try to get in touch with Davenport tomorrow, if he’s back. I’ll see what he has to say for himself.”
    “Be careful.”
    “Always.”
    Rinker gave Carmel the name she was using at the hotel, and as Carmel was leaving, said, “Hey—this Davenport. Do you know where I could get a picture of him?”
    Carmel shook her head. “No. I mean he’s probably been in the paper any number of times, but I don’t . . . wait a minute. I bet I do know. He also ran a company called Davenport Simulations, computer-simulation things for cops. If you check the library, the business section, the local business magazines, I bet you’d find something.”
    “Cut the page out with a razor . . .”
    “Don’t get caught,” Carmel said. “The library people can be mean pricks when it comes to people cutting up their magazines.”

FIFTEEN

    Lucas was sitting in his office, pushing deeper into the Equality Report. Reading the perfect, politically correct prose had become a Zen-like exercise. The words flowed softly and without meaning through his brain, an unending stream of nonsense syllables that eventually metamorphosed into a cosmic hum, and allowed other ideas to bubble up.
    He was on page ninety-four when Carmel knocked. He thought it was Sloan: “Yeah, for Christ’s sake, come in.”
    Carmel opened the door and stuck her head in. Surprised, Lucas stood up. “Sorry about that,” he said. “I thought it was somebody else.”
    “A little mistake like that is nothing compared to what you’re gonna get into,” Carmel said, stepping into the office, pushing the door closed. She put one fist on her hip and said, “A little birdie told me you stuck my face into a photo spread on that Dinkytown murder. The Blanca chick and the other guy. I want to know why.”
    “We were looking for photographs of long-legged blondes, and you were available,” Lucas said, his voice flat.
    “Bullshit,” she said. Her mouth was like a short stretch of barbed wire. She dropped into the visitors’ chair opposite him and stretched her legs out, but didn’t really settle in: she was like a spring, all squeezed down and about to explode. “So why ? You are fucking with me, and if I don’t get a good reason, I’ll see you in court and let the judge ask you why.”
    Lucas nodded: “It’d be an interesting lawsuit. I don’t know what you could possibly sue us for.”
    “Some of the best civil lawyers in the U.S. fuckin’ A. sit down the hall from me, and I don’t doubt that they could find ten reasons that a judge would like,” she said, her voice glassy-edged. “For one thing, I represented Rolando D’Aquila and several of his associates in the past, and now you’re hauling my picture around and showing it to people around this crime. Are you trying to discredit me as an attorney? It might seem so.”
    “All right, you’re smarter than I am, Carmel,” Lucas said. “You want the real reason? The reason is that a witness who probably saw the