Certain Prey

wasn’t there. They just stepped all over their own case. All you have to do is disappear, and we’re cool.”
    “ ’Bout time,” Rinker said.
    “Although,” Carmel said pensively, “we still don’t know why they were messing with me to begin with.”
    “Let it go,” Rinker said. “I’m getting out of here. If I move now, I can be through KC before the rush hour.”
    “Don’t go yet,” Carmel said. “Hang around for a day or two. If they’re following me, you can’t come around here, but . . . just hang around.”
    “You think?”
    “Yeah. Just overnight, to see what happens—to see if we need to settle anything else. See if the kid and her mom keep their mouths shut. See if anything comes of that.”
    “All right,” Rinker said reluctantly. Minneapolis seemed more and more like a tar baby. She was anxious to get out. “One more night.” L UCAS ARRIVED at Mrs. Gartin’s School a little after ten o’clock in the morning. He parked on the street down the block, and walked back under low-hanging maple trees. A light summer breeze had popped up, and a patch of yellow coneflowers bobbed their bright heads and brown eyes at him from the school garden. Behind the garden, and behind a low wooden fence, he could see a playground for small kids, with tractor-tire sandboxes and a gentle tube slide.
    Mrs. Gartin was a heavy woman in a print dress, with small jowls and smile lines. She was surprised to see him.
    “Heather called you?”
    “Yes. It’s important that I talk to her right away.”
    “I should call her mother . . .”
    “Her mother may be in some danger, which is why I have to talk to her right away.” He let a little cop show through his polite smile. “If you could take me to her?”
    “Well, I . . .” She spasmodically shuffled some papers on her desk, cleared her throat and said, “She’s down in Mrs. Roman’s room.” H EATHER SAT in Mrs. Roman’s office with Lucas, and told the story: Lucas took her over it twice, and when they finished, had no doubt that she was telling precisely the truth. Sherrill arrived just before they finished with the second run-through, and Davis arrived two minutes later. She was panic-stricken.
    “What are you doing?” she screamed. “What are you doing with my daughter? You have no right to talk to my daughter . . .”
    “Yes, we do,” Lucas said, as gently as he could. But it didn’t come off well, and Davis grabbed Heather’s arm and would have been out the door if Sherrill hadn’t been blocking it.
    “You can’t leave,” Sherrill said.
    Heather began to cry, and said, “I only told them . . .”
    “I’ll call a lawyer,” Davis shrilled.
    “You can call anyone you want to, but life would be simpler for all of us, including you, if we talked about this for a few minutes,” Lucas said.
    “She’s going to kill us, she said she would kill us . . .”
    “She’s not going to hurt anyone,” Lucas said.
    “You weren’t there,” Davis snapped. “She said she was going to kill us, and she meant it. Frankly, I’m not nearly as impressed with you and your cops as I am with her.”
    “We will put you where she can’t find you.”
    “She’s with the Mafia, ” Davis screamed. “They can find anybody .”
    Lucas shook his head and Sherrill said, “Listen, quiet down. Whatever’s happened, has already happened. We need to ask you a few questions, and then we need to arrange things so you’re absolutely safe.”
    “That’s impossible now,” Davis said. The anger was still closer to the surface than the fear, but now the fear was bubbling up, too.
    “No, it’s not, not at all. We have experts in it,” Sherrill said. “You know why you don’t hear about the Mafia killing cops? Because they’re afraid to. Just think about that.”
    • • •

    W HEN D AVIS HAD calmed down—not before a few nasty moments with Mrs. Gartin, who made an ill-timed appearance with a box of gingersnaps—they took her through Rinker’s assault. Heather sat on her mother’s knee during the talk, and Davis even showed a small tremulous smile when told about how her daughter called Officer Friendly.
    One solid piece of information came out: “I could see the ends of her hair, and I’d swear that it was a wig. There was just something unhairlike about it. And I could see her hands, and I saw her face when she first came to the door, and she just wasn’t that real fair complexion that redheads have.”
    “But you couldn’t describe her