Certain Prey

though it’s starting to come out. She’d like to get something big enough to fit over what hair she’s still got. She hopes she won’t lose it all.”
    “Does she have a color preference?”
    “We talked about that, and she wants her natural color, which is gray,” Rinker said. “It doesn’t have to be a great wig, just to get her back and forth from the house to the hospital. And then if she loses all of it, we can come back and get another one.”
    “Let me show you our Autumn Sparkle series . . .” Rinker took an Autumn Sparkle, thanked the kindly saleswoman, moved on to a walk-in hair salon and walked in. An hour later, with her hair in a skull-tight punk cut, and wearing plain-glass tortoiseshell glasses, she climbed back in her car and headed up I-35 toward Minneapolis. M ALLARD CALLED L UCAS that afternoon and gave him the bad news. The fingerprint search was coming up dry.
    “We’re gonna change some things around on the computer search, but it doesn’t look good,” Mallard said. “Tell you the truth, I’d be willing to bet she was never printed.”
    “Damnit,” Lucas said. “We never quite get her. I swear to God, we didn’t miss her by more than a half-hour at the airport, maybe fifteen minutes.”
    “But we’re knocking on the door,” Mallard said. “We’ve got more on her than we ever hoped for. Now it’s just a matter of time.” L ATE THAT EVENING, Hale Allen sat naked on the edge of the bed, his damp hair still tousled from the lovemaking and the shower that came afterward. He was examining his toes in the light from the nightstand, and clipping his toenails. He hummed as he did it, and every time the clippers snapped, Carmel flinched, and Allen would say something about the clipping, aloud, but mindlessly, to himself: “Got that one,” he said, as a clipping fell on the magazine he was using to catch them. “There’s a good one.”
    Carmel tried putting her fingers in her ears, but it was no use. She was about to roll out of bed when the magic cell phone went off in her purse. She crawled to the end of the bed, reached over the end-board for her purse, dug the phone out, lay back and punched the talk button.
    “I’m back,” Rinker said.
    “Where at?” Allen looked at her from his side of the bed, and she mouthed, Sorry—business at him. He grinned and rolled over toward her, pushed her legs apart; she let him do it.
    “Hotel down by the airport.”
    “Dangerous,” Carmel said. Allen put his head down and nibbled.
    “I look different. A lot different,” Rinker said. “Not a problem. But the question is, do we do Plan B?”
    “I’ve been thinking about that,” Carmel said. She ran her hands through Allen’s hair. “I guess it really wouldn’t mean much to you, but it’d get me off the hook. For good.”
    “But that’s good for me,” Rinker said. “The question is, how do I do this by myself? I don’t know the details of . . .”
    “You don’t do it by yourself,” Carmel said. She pulled gently on Allen’s ear, guiding him a little to the left. “I’ll help.”
    “Can you get out?”
    “Yeah. But I’m in the middle of something right now, I can’t really get into the details . . . Call me tomorrow morning about ten o’clock.”
    “You with somebody?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Hale Allen?”
    “You got that right,” Carmel said.
    “Talk to you tomorrow,” Rinker said.
    Carmel said to Hale, “Come up here, you.”
    “I like it down here. It smells like bread.”
    She whacked him on the side of the head and he said, “Ow, what was that for?”
    “Not very romantic, like a loaf of Wonder Bread, or something.”
    “I was just joking.” He held his hand to his ear; she had hit him a little harder than she’d intended.
    She smiled and said, “Okay. I’m sorry. Come up here and I’ll make it better.” S HERRILL WAS SITTING in her own car, alone, a block from Allen’s house. A radio beeped, and she picked it up: “Yeah?”
    “Another light just went on in the living room.”
    “Thank God. There might be something left of Allen after all.”
    The guy on the other end chuckled: “We’ll take her back home, if you want to join the parade.”
    “I’ll be two blocks back.”
    She dropped the radio, picked up her cell phone and dialed Lucas’s number from memory. He picked it up on the first ring.
    “You up reading?” she asked, without identifying herself.
    “Yeah.”
    “I think we’re about to take Carmel home,” Sherrill said.