Silent Prey

back to Minnesota. But I couldn’t think of one. And I wanted to tell you why.”
    “Well. I appreciate it. But you’d have been safe enough. A matchbook is pretty thin . . .”
    “There was more than a matchbook. This whole goddamned episode was a game set up by O’Dell. It was so beautiful it makes me laugh. He used every one of us. But anyway—he did a computer run on the victims. You come up way too often. That was a big piece.”
    She frowned. “Will they get me?”
    “No, I don’t think so. They think you’re an alarm.” He explained, and she listened quietly, staring at the floor.
    “And you won’t tell them different?” she asked, when he finished.
    “No. I’m the one who sold them the alarm idea.”
    “Why?”
    He shrugged. “You’re a friend.”
    She looked him over for a moment and then nodded. “Okay.”
    “If Lily ever found out, though, she very well might kill you. That’s another reason I wanted to talk . . . .”
    “Did she kill Kennett?” Fell blurted.
    “Kennett? No, no, she was downtown with O’Dell all evening.”
    “Goddamn,” Fell said, gnawing a thumbnail. “When I shot Bekker . . .”
    “Bekker knew you,” Lucas said. “And that’s why, in his letter, he wouldn’t say anything about Thin. He didn’t want people thinking about women killers . . . .”
    “Yeah,” Fell said. “But that’s not why I shot him. I shot him because of their eyelashes, and that woman . . . and everything.”
    “I know. I mean, I believe it. But why Petty?”
    “I didn’t want to do Petty,” Fell said, voice low, out of gas. “I was there, but I tried to stop it.”
    “You didn’t have to be there . . . .”
    “Well . . . I was. If I’d had a couple of more minutes, I think I would’ve talked . . . the other guy out of it. But Petty came through the door a minute too soon. A minute later and nothing would’ve happened. At least, not then. Petty had something on us . . . . I’ll burn in hell for Petty.”
    “I doubt it,” Lucas said wryly.
    “Well, so do I,” she said. Then: “I would’ve liked the Islands, though. Going down with you.”
    “Yeah, it would have been nice. But I’m the only one who knows about you. You’re quick with that gun . . . and you might start thinking about it, if I’m there, laying around.”
    “I wouldn’t,” she said, but she couldn’t suppress a small grin. “It’s interesting that you’re scared of me, though.”
    “Yeah, well . . .”
    She sighed. “Fucking trouser-snake cops. So goddamned treacherous.”
    “And I wanted to tell you about Lily,” he said.
    “What?”
    “She’s got a line on a half-dozen of Kennett’s shooters. She’s gonna be tough, one way or another. But I want you to know two things: they’ve got no proof of anything. They just want it to stop.”
    “What’s the other thing?”
    “The other thing is, if anybody takes Lily, I’ll be coming back to town,” he said. He’d been watching her, and his eyes had gone hard as granite.
    “You oughta be one of us,” she said.
    “Pass the word on,” he said.
    “I don’t know anybody, except my . . . pal . . . and one other guy. But I’ll tell them. Maybe they know more. We don’t talk about it. That was one of Kennett’s rules. Nobody talks about nothin’, he’d say.”
    “Good rule,” Lucas said. He looked at his watch again. “Lily’s coming pretty soon.”
    “Here?”
    “Yeah, I’ve got to talk to her too.”
    “Then I better get going,” Fell said, picking up herpurse. She stood and stepped away from the table, then turned back. “Remember when you said something like, ‘This place is the armpit of the universe,’ the first day we were together?”
    “Yeah?”
    “Kennett’s people . . . we were just trying to make it something else.”
    “Okay.”
    “Were we wrong?”
    He thought about it for a while. “I don’t know,” he said finally.
     
    Fell went away and Lucas stared at his beer bottle, making wet O’s on the table. After the shooting in the basement, after the dictated statements and interrogations, after the press conference, he’d gone back to the team office. Most of the office staff had gone, but he’d found a computer adept, and said that he needed to look up some information on a couple of cops: Jeese and Clemson.
    The computer operator had put him at a vacant terminal, showed him how to call up the files. He’d done it, read through them quickly, then