Certain Prey

her. In ten seconds, Sherrill was convinced. Black, who arrived two minutes after she did, was not.
    “The problem is, you could make anything out of those scratches, once you start disassembling them,” he said. “I can see five or six different words in there.”
    “Yeah, but none of them are words that are relevant to the investigation, except this one: C Loan,” Lucas said.
    “Maybe that’s because we haven’t figured out all the possibilities,” Black said.
    Sloan came in during the argument, looked at the photos and shook his head. “I could take some recreational drugs and maybe believe it, but if you’ve got an unstoned jury, you got a problem,” he said.
    “Well, it’s a piece,” Lucas said finally. “We get a few pieces and pretty soon we’ve got a case.”
    Black and Sloan started talking to somebody else, and Sherrill said quietly, “Is it possible that we can only see it because we already know ? Because of the slug?”
    “Nah, it’s there,” Lucas said, shuffling through the pictures again. “Goddamnit, it’s there. ” R INKER FLEW into Washington on a Saturday afternoon, fifteen hours after Lucas had flown out of the same airport. She stopped at a magazine store and bought the best map she could find, picked up her rental car, and checked into the downtown Holiday Inn. From there, she called her bar in Wichita and talked to the assistant manager, a shy cowboy named Art Durrell, and was assured that nothing had burned down, that the customers were happy, that the fat in the deep fryer was hot enough and the refrigerators were cold enough.
    “When that asshole from the health department comes back, we want a hundred-percent clean bill, Art,” Rinker said. “You can never tell when those reports’ll wind up in the local newspapers.”
    “We’re the cleanest place in town, Clara, and everybody down at the health department knows it,” Durrell said. “Stop worrying. Enjoy yourself.”
    At two o’clock, a rat-faced man with too-long, stringy black hair, wearing a denim jacket, jeans and cowboy boots—a man who looked the part of a movie drifter— knocked at her door and, when she answered, handed her a package wrapped in brown paper that had been cut from a grocery sack.
    “From Jim. The phone’s probably good until Sunday,” he said, and left. She opened the bag and took out a Colt Woodsman, a silencer, a sealed box of .22 shells and one freshly stolen cellular phone. The package had cost her eleven hundred dollars. She screwed a silencer on the barrel of the pistol, loaded the magazine, opened a window and fired a shot through the curtain. The gun made a loud whuff and the action cycled. She stepped over and looked at the curtain, and after a second found the small hole made by the .22 slug as it passed through. Everything worked. L OUISE M ARKER LIVED in an apartment complex in Bethesda, an expensive place of three-story yellow-brick buildings arranged around a series of swimming pools set in grassy lawns. If government employees lived there, Rinker thought, they were generals. There were, however, no uniforms in sight. Perhaps a hundred residents, almost all of them young to middle-aged women, lay scattered around the pools in conservative one-piece bathing suits. None of them was Marker. Marker had never seen Rinker, but Rinker had seen Marker, a couple of times. She’d made a point of it, for just this occasion. Wandering casually through the people around the pools, Rinker punched Marker’s number into her cell phone and a woman answered on the third ring. “Hello?”
    And Rinker said, “Jean?”
    “No . . . You must have the wrong number.”
    “Ah, sorry.”
    Getting into Marker’s building was not a problem: she timed her step to a couple of women in bathing suits who were headed for a side door. She followed them through the outer door, just far enough back that one of them had time to use her key on the inner door. Rinker had her own keys in her hand, jingling, but caught the door, nodded, said thanks and kept going and the other two women thought nothing of it.
    Marker was on two: Rinker took the stairs, did a quick peek at the door to make sure there was nobody in the hallway, then punched Marker’s phone number back into the cell phone as she walked down to Marker’s door. There was interference, but at least the phone should ring on the other end.
    Again, the woman’s voice. “Hello?” A little asperity this time; expecting another wrong