Certain prey

Lucas turned away, paced a few steps, paced back, turned away again. 'So. She's connected. Could be a coincidence, but probably not.'

'Probably not.' Now Mallard got to his feet, and started following Lucas in the pacing. 'Goddamn it, Davenport, I'm getting a hard-on.'

'You haven't gotten any more calls since the one from Patricia Case?'

'No…'

'Then it's possible that was some kind of a warning call. A code

…'

'It's possible that Tennex only gets one call a month…'

Lucas was shaking his head: 'No. You know what it is? The answering service is a blind. Or partially a blind. That's why it's not just a phone ringing in an empty apartment somewhere. I mean, why not that? It'd be easier.'

'So what are you saying?'

'That one of those women there is a cutout, somebody the killer can go to for more information. One of the women is really an alarm, and we probably rang it.'

'It'd have to be Marker,' Mallard said. 'There are ten different women who work on those switchboards, either full or part time, and they rotate shifts…

There wouldn't be any way to know which operator would be answering which call, so they'd have to have some special instructions from Marker if anything unusual came up on Tennex.'

'So let's bring her in,' Lucas said.

'On what?'

'Nothing. Scare the shit out of her.'

'That's, uh, sort of not our operating procedure,' Mallard said.

'Fuck your operating procedure. Bring her in, let me talk to her.'

'Let me make a call,' Mallard said.

Marker demanded an attorney, and Mallard was happy to give her all the time she needed.

'If we're not out of here by seven, I'm gonna miss my plane,' Lucas said.

'I'll have my secretary see if there's another flight out,' Mallard said. 'Gimme the ticket.'

Marker's attorney, who showed up two hours after they'd taken her in, was a cheery blond named Cliff Bell. He wanted to know what the hell was going on.

'Your client is a front for a professional killer we're tracking,' Lucas said.

'I don't think…' Bell started, but Lucas stopped him.

'Wait, wait,' Lucas said. 'Let me make my little speech, here. This woman, the killer, has murdered almost thirty people in more than a dozen states. A lot of them are those nasty southern states with those strange ways of executing people

– like Florida, where the guy's eyeballs went up in a puff of smoke when they pulled the switch on OP Sparky…'

'That's unnecessary,' Bell said.

'No, it's not,' Lucas said. He leaned toward Marker. 'That's what we're talking about here, Miss Marker. The electric chair. The gas chamber. Lethal injection.

When we nail this woman, we have the complete option of taking you with her. You connected the people who were contracting the killings, to the killer – and you knew about it.'

'I didn't know it was a killer,' Marker sputtered, but Bell snapped, 'Shut up,

Louise.'

Louise didn't: 'I thought it was some kind of political or real-estate scam, for

Christ's sakes…'

'Shut up, Louise,' Bell said. To Lucas: 'What's the deal?'

'The deal is, we don't have to take her. We can, we don't have to. She can go home right now, if she wants. But we won't make this offer again. Right now, if she tells us everything she knows about Tennex, we're willing to assume the best: that she may have guessed that she was facilitating some kind of criminal enterprise, but thought it was a minor political deal. I can't see her doing any hard time for that. If she doesn't take the deal, right now, while the trail is hot, then tough shit. We'll get this woman some other way, and we'll take Louise with her.'

'We need some time in private,' Bell said. Mallard found them a private room.

When he came back, Lucas noticed that he seemed to be sweating.

'I'm not used to this kind of stuff. Police stuff. We usually have four specialists and three lawyers doing the talking. Spend a couple of weeks prepping for the thing.'

'Sometimes, if you keep the momentum going, keep people talking, you get something you'd never get when everything's a formal tit-for-tat,' Lucas said.

'I know the theory,' Mallard said. 'We usually operate on a different one… and I'm just hoping we don't get our tit-for tat in a wringer.'

Bell brought Marker back fifteen minutes later: 'We want a letter from Mr.

Mallard, outlining the deal as laid out by Agent Davenport. Then we'll give you a statement.'

The letter took another half-hour: Bell turned a little sour when he learned that Lucas worked for the City of Minneapolis, but Mallard smoothed him over.

'So tell us,' Lucas said. He had his feet up on Mallard's desk, a tape recorder running in the middle of Mallard's blotter-calendar. Marker and Bell sat in wooden visitors' chairs, while Mallard sat back on a couch with his legs crossed, drinking from his endless mug of coffee.

The connection, Marker said, had been set up by a man named – so he said – Bob

Tennex, although he sounded like East Coast Italian. 'Sounded? You didn't see him?' 'No. It was all done by telephone…' 'You set up the account without seeing the guy?' 'That happens, from time to time. If we get a check, and the check is good, we offer that service…'

Since the connection was set up, Marker said, she'd spoken to a Tennex representative several times, and it was always a woman. Marker had Caller ID on her phones, purely as a matter of course, and had noticed that the calls came in from all over the Midwest, and sometimes from other parts of the country. Kansas

City was prominent: four or five calls had come from there. Another name that stuck in her head was Wichita, because, while only two calls had come from there, the woman had been angry both times about problems with the phone company's answering service.

'She wanted us to get on them – they had a couple of breakdowns,' Marker said.

'But that's not the only thing she asked about, is it?' Lucas asked. 'You had some other agreement with her. About people making inquiries about the messenger service, about the police coming in.'

'She really just thought it was some kind of minor political hustle – those things go on all the time here,' Bell said.

'So what was it?' Lucas asked.

'Uh, well, if somebody came snooping around, I wasn't supposed to do anything, except… wait.'

'Until what?'

'Until she called me,' Marker said, her voice barely audible.

'You're gonna have to speak up,' Mallard said.

'Until she called me,' Marker said.

'And then what?'

'She'd call and ask, 'Is Mr. Warren in?' And if nobody had been around, if I didn't know anything, I'd say, 'You've got the wrong number: this is Marker

Answering.' But if somebody had been around, I'd say, 'No, but Mr. White's here.

Would you like me to put your call through?" '

'How many times did you do this?' Mallard asked.

'Two different times. About three or four years go, something must've happened, and she called me every day for two weeks.' Marker said, her voice dropping again.

'Ah, shit,' Lucas said. 'Then she called you yesterday or today, didn't she?

This afternoon?'

'She's been calling for a week, every day. And today, about an hour after you left the first time. Before you came and got me again,' Marker said. 'She was calling from Des Moines, a pay phone, I think. I could hear the cars.'

'And you gave her the Mr. White line.'

'Yes,' she squeaked.

'Did you get the job because of your father?'

'Maybe. Tennex said he knew Dad.'

'Where's your father living now?' Lucas asked.

'Well, he's not,' Marker said. 'He died of colon cancer last year.'

'I'm sorry,' Mallard said.

'They said it was all the chemicals from the dry-cleaning,' Marker said. 'I'll probably go that way myself. A lot of us do.'