Certain prey

'Where are you? Are you at Davis's house?'

'No, I'm in my car, heading for the kid's school. She's still there – I'll be there in five.' 'I'll get dressed and head out…'

The inside cop, the tipster, called Carmel just as Lucas and Sherrill were breaking off their conversation:

'You're in the clear,' he said. He didn't bother to identify himself.

'What happened?'

'I'm not sure exactly, but the rumor is, this little kid called in, and said that the shooter was back at her house last night and her mother was afraid to talk about it. And the rumor is, you were being tracked, and they know it can't be you because you were out dancing at some fancy place. I'll tell you what,

Davenport went running out of here like a fullback. I mean, he was runnin'.'

'Jesus, they were following me?' She was shocked. She hadn't felt it. She'd always thought she'd be able to feel it. Maybe because of Hale, his closeness.. .

'All over you, I guess,' the cop said. 'A good thing, because you're in the clear.'

'Why didn't you call me before? When you heard they were putting the tail on me?'

After a pause, the cop said, 'You know I can't do that.'

Carmel promised another payment, rang off and dialed Rinker.

'And it was the kid who called the cops,' Carmel said, as she finished relating the cop's tip.

'Jesus, I never thought about that,' Rinker said. 'She's so small.'

'But it works out,' Carmel said, excitedly. 'You found out that there really was nothing coming out of them, and even if the cops force the mother to talk this time, what can she give them? And now, the cops know I wasn't there. They just stepped all over their own case. All you have to do is disappear, and we're cool.'

'Bout time,' Rinker said.

'Although,' Carmel said pensively, 'we still don't know why they were messing with me to begin with.'

'Let it go,' Rinker said. 'I'm getting out of here. If I move now, I can be through KC before the rush hour.'

'Don't go yet,' Carmel said. 'Hang around for a day or two. If they're following me, you can't come around here, but… just hang around.'

'You think?'

'Yeah. Just overnight, to see what happens – to see if we need to settle anything else. See if the kid and her mom keep their mouths shut. See if anything comes of that.'

'All right,' Rinker said reluctantly. Minneapolis seemed more and more like a tar-baby. She was anxious to get out. 'One more night.'

Lucas arrived at Mrs. Gartin's School a little after ten o'clock in the morning.

He parked on the street down the block, and walked back under low-hanging maple trees. A light summer breeze had popped up, and a patch of yellow coneflowers bobbed their bright heads and brown eyes at him from the school garden. Behind the garden, and behind a low wooden fence, he could see a playground for small kids, with tractor-tire sandboxes and a gentle tube-slide.

Mrs. Gartin was a heavy woman in a print dress, with small jowls and smile lines. She was surprised to see him.

'Heather called you?'

'Yes. It's important that I talk to her right away.'

'I should call her mother…'

'Her mother may be in some danger, which is why I have to talk to her right away.' He let a little cop show through his polite smile. 'If you could take me to her?'

'Well, I…' She spasmodically shuffled some papers on her desk, cleared her throat and said, 'She's down in Mrs. Roman's room.'

Heather sat in Mrs. Roman's office with Lucas, and told the story: Lucas took her over it twice, and when they finished, had no doubt that she was telling precisely the truth. Sherrill arrived just before they finished with the second runthrough, and Davis arrived two minutes later. She was panic-stricken.

'What are you doing?' she screamed. 'What are you doing with my daughter? You have no right to talk to my daughter…'

'Yes, we do,' Lucas said, as gently as he could. But it didn't come off well, and Davis grabbed Heather's arm and would have been out the door if Sherrill hadn't been blocking it.

'You can't leave,' Sherrill said.

Heather began to cry, and said, 'I only told them…'

'I'll call a lawyer,' Davis shrilled.

'You can call anyone you want to, but life would be simpler for all of us, including you, if we talked about this for a few minutes,' Lucas said.

'She's going to kill us, she said she would kill us…'

'She's not going to hurt anyone,' Lucas said.

'You weren't there,' Davis snapped. 'She said she was going to kill us, and she meant it. Frankly, I'm not nearly as impressed with you and your cops as I am with her.'

'We will put you where she can't find you…'

'She's with the Mafia,' Davis screamed. 'They can find anybody.'

Lucas shook his head and Sherrill said, 'Listen, quiet down. Whatever's happened, has already happened. We need to ask you a few questions, and then we need to arrange things so you're absolutely safe.'

'That's impossible now,' Davis said. The anger was still closer to the surface than the fear, but now the fear was bubbling up, too.

'No, it's not, not at all. We have experts in it,' Sherrill said. 'You know why you don't hear about the

Mafia killing cops? Because they're afraid to. Just think about that…'

When Davis had calmed down – not before a few nasty moments with Mrs. Gartin, who made an ill-timed appearance with a box of ginger snaps – they took her through Rinker's assault. Heather sat on her mother's knee during the talk, and

Davis even showed a small tremulous smile when told about how her daughter called Officer Friendly.

One solid piece of information came out: 'I could see the ends of her hair, and

I'd swear that it was a wig. There was just something un-hair-like about it. And

I could see her hands, and I saw her face when she first came to the door, and she just wasn't that real fair complexion that redheads have.'

'But you couldn't describe her 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 townhouses up on the North Shore, they were really nice.. .'

'We can do that,' said Lucas. He turned to Sherrilclass="underline" '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.