Certain Prey

“This is obscene.”
    “Not a flicker out of her, huh? Not a move?”
    “Nothing. Damnit, Lucas, we might have lost the chance.”
    “I know; but we’ve got to hang on for a while,” Lucas said.
    “And I’m getting kind of lonely.”
    “So am I,” Lucas said. “But I’m not going to invite you over.”
    “I wouldn’t come anyway,” Sherrill said.
    “Good for both of us.”
    After a pause, Sherrill said, “Yeah, I guess. See you tomorrow.”
    Ten minutes later, Carmel came out of the house and walked briskly to her car. A little too briskly, on a nice night like this, a little too head-down, Sherrill thought. Of course, everything Carmel did was slightly theatrical; there was no way she could know she was in the net . . . T HE NEXT DAY was brutal: Lucas talked to Mallard, who had nothing new, and checked on the Carmel net a half-dozen times, and got cranky with everyone.
    Carmel talked with Rinker twice on the magic cell phone. “See you at ten-fifteen,” she said.
    Carmel went home at six, as she usually did; called Hale Allen at six-thirty, and told him that she’d have to work on the Al-Balah case that night. “I’ve got to go back to the office. Jenkins ruled that the cops can have the tire as evidence, and I’m trying to put together an instant appeal.”
    “Well, all right,” Allen said. She thought she might have detected just a hair of relief in his voice. “See you when? Thursday?”
    “Maybe we could catch lunch tomorrow . . . and I’ll give you a call tonight.”
    “Talk to you,” he said. C ARMEL GOT OUT of her business dress, put on a shorts-leeved white shirt, jeans, tennis shoes and a light red jacket. She pushed a black sweatshirt into her briefcase. This was July, but it was also Minnesota. She didn’t feel like eating, but she did, and carried the microwave chicken dinner to the window and looked out over the city. If they were actually watching her, from one of the nearby buildings, they should see her.
    When she finished, she tossed the tray from the chicken dinner in the garbage, went back to her home office, disconnected the small answering machine from her private line and stuck it in her briefcase with the sweater. A little after seven o’clock, she rode the elevator down and walked out of the front of the building, looking at her watch, carrying her briefcase. She wasn’t absolutely sure the cops were there, but she thought they were: not looking around, trying to spot them, nearly killed her. She walked to her office building, enjoying the night, used her key to get in the front door, signed in with the security guard and rode the elevators up to her office.
    The entire suite was silent, with only a few security lights to cut the gloom. She turned the lights on in the library and in her office, turned on the computer and went to work. Jenkins, the judge in the case she was working, had ruled the cops could have a spare tire owned by Rashid Al-Balah, and, unfortunately, there was blood on the tire. The only good aspect of it was that the cops had had the car and tire for almost a month before the blood was found, that they’d often taken it out for test drives—once to a strip joint—and, Carmel argued, the blood could have been anybody’s, given the general unreliability of DNA tests. Or even if it did belong to Trick Bentoin, Bentoin could have cut himself before he disappeared, and simply was not available to testify to the fact . . .
    She got caught up in the argument, moving back and forth from the library to her office, and nearly jumped out of her skin when the security guard said, “Hi, Miz Loan.”
    “Oh, Jesus, Phil, you almost gave me a heart attack,” she said.
    “Just making the rounds . . . you gonna be late tonight?” She could already smell the booze: Phil was an old geezer, but he could drink with the youngest of them.
    “Probably. Got a tough one tomorrow.”
    “Well, good luck,” he said, and shuffled away toward the entry. She heard the door close, and the latch snap, and looked at her watch: twenty minutes. Time to start moving.
    She got the answering machine out of her briefcase, carried it into the library and plugged it into the phone there. Back in her office, she pulled the black sweater over her head. She left the computer on, and turned on the small Optimus stereo system. The system played three disks in rotation, and would play them until she turned it off. She left the red jacket draped over her chair.
    Ready.
    The