Certain Prey

face?”
    “No, you know, she had this box, and I looked at the box.”
    “Do you still have the box?”
    “No, I . . . threw it away,” she said. “It’s in the Dumpster behind the apartment. It’s a FedEx box.”
    “Was she wearing gloves?”
    “Oh, yeah. I can remember that. They were disposable plastic gloves, like dentists use. Oh, yeah.” The gloves impressed her: a professional killer, after all.
    When they were finished, Lucas said, “I can’t see you being called as a witness. Your information helps us a lot, in some ways, but it’s not something that we’d use in court.”
    “I won’t testify,” Davis said. “I mean, I won’t. ”
    “So let’s talk about what you want to do now,” Sherrill said.
    What Davis wanted to do was to pretend that nothing had happened. “Could she know about this? That we talked to you?”
    “Uh, word leaks out of police stations from time to time,” Lucas said carefully, thinking about Carmel’s sources. “Is there any possibility that you could take off for a couple of weeks, or a month?”
    “I’ve got a job I’ve got to go to at the U,” she said. “I gotta eat.”
    “I can fix that,” Lucas said. “I can probably fix a paid leave, and if I can’t, we can find some money in city funds to make up what you lose. Do you have some folks . . . ?”
    Davis shook her head. “I don’t want to go there. You know what? If you can do it? I’ve got a laptop, I could do a lot of work on my thesis if I could get somewhere quiet, just Heather and me. When I was still with Howard, we stayed at these town houses up on the North Shore, they were really nice . . .”
    “We can do that,” said Lucas. He turned to Sherrill: “Call Bretano down in Sex. Get her going on this.” He turned back to Davis. “We’ll hook you up with Alice Bretano. She works with abused mothers and kids and knows about hiding them and getting money and so on . . . she’ll take care of the whole thing.”
    “And you’re sure they won’t find us?” Davis asked doubtfully.
    “They won’t even bother to look,” Lucas said. “There’s just no percentage in it.”
    When she didn’t appear convinced, Lucas said, “Let me tell you about the Mafia. They’re a bunch of guys who are willing to hurt people for money, and they hustle dope and prostitutes and they loan-shark and all of that. But they’re just a bunch of guys. They don’t have any big intelligence service and they don’t back each other up like they say they do . . . they’re just sort of aaa . . .”—his eyes went to Heather, who was looking up at him with big eyes—“. . . jerks. But I won’t lie to you: this one woman, the one you saw last night, is somebody to be afraid of. But we’re gonna get her. And we’re not going to give her any reason to hurt you. If she didn’t hurt you last night, she’s not going to.” S HERRILL CALLED B RETANO in Sex, explained the problem, and Bretano said she’d handle the whole thing; she could be at the school in ten minutes.
    Outside, while they waited, leaning against Lucas’s Porsche, Sherrill asked, “Now what?”
    “We got two things out of that, for sure: we know she’s a redhead, or at least wearing a red wig, and that she’s a small woman in good shape, which means that you probably saw her last night. So now we crank everything up. We put a twenty-four-hour watch on Carmel’s building, and if we get her inside, we take her—this woman.”
    “On what?”
    “On nothing. On bullshit. On assaulting a police officer, resisting arrest, anything. But I want her picked up and identified. Nailed down. I want to know where she comes from. I want mug shots of her, so we can paper the country with them if she gets out and then runs. That means you’re gonna be living outside Carmel’s building. We maybe see if we can find a place, an apartment or an empty office, where you can watch from.”
    “I’m out of the investigation?” Sherrill asked.
    “A little bit out—but if we nail this woman quick, you’re gonna be the one to do it.”
    “What’re you gonna do?”
    “First thing, I’m gonna get some guys and I’m gonna knock on every door for two blocks around Davis’s apartment. There are people on the streets there at night.
    Somebody must’ve seen this woman, whoever she is.” L UCAS GOT a half-dozen uniformed cops walking the neighborhood. He hated the job himself, and wasn’t good at it. The good ones had open Irish or Scandinavian faces,