'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.'
There was more, but nothing significant. They released Marker, and Mallard drove
Lucas to the Hay-Adams, retrieved his bag from the luggage room, and took him to the airport.
'So you think she's gone,' Mallard said.
'Yeah. And I think I'm the guy who tipped her off by calling into Tennex.'
'Nothing to do about that,' Mallard said. 'You were just running checks on a list of phone numbers. It was a long shot.'
'Yeah, but Jesus. That close.'
'We've still got a lot to work with – all those checks, all the phone calls.
We've got something, now. I'll bet we have some kind of description of her in a week. I'll bet we unravel some kind of connection.'
'How much?'
'What?'
'How much will you bet?'
Mallard sucked on his teeth for a moment, then said, 'About a dime, I guess.'
Lucas nodded. 'Get me to the plane on time.'
The plane, as it happened, was going to Minneapolis – with a stop in Detroit.
'Aw, no, I gotta fly direct,' Lucas told the check-in attendant.
'Nothing tonight, except through Detroit,' the clerk said, punching up her computer. 'We could get you on a flight tomorrow morning that goes straight through…'
'Aw, man…'
He went through Detroit, miserably suffering through two take-offs and landings.
He was surprised at the safe landing in Detroit, but quickly convinced himself that it would be the second half of the flight, the unnecessary half, that would kill him, so achingly close to home…
As miserable as he was, two things occurred to him:
Wichita, Kansas, was a large enough city that it might attract the eye of somebody who traveled out-of-town to make her calls; but Marker had said the killer was angry when she called from Wichita. Was it possible that she lived close to Wichita, and made spur-of-the-moment calls out of anger when something went wrong with the answering service? He got the airline flight magazine out of the seat pocket in front of him, and looked at the flight map again. Wichita, he thought, would be as viable a home town as Springfield. Something to think about…
The second thing came to him as they were landing in Minneapolis: he was looking down at one of the lakes where he'd expected the impact to occur – he could see himself struggling to get out of the flooding cabin, but his legs and arms were broken and he couldn't unfasten the seatbelt – and the name Des Moines popped into his head.
If the killer came from either Springfield or Wichita or virtually anyplace around those cities, and if she were driving to Minneapolis, she'd go through
Des Moines.
If she had done that, he thought, she'd be here now.
He looked down at the broad multi-colored grid of lights that made up the Cities and thought, 'Somewhere?
Chapter Fourteen
Carmel didn't understand the silence: days had passed since she'd left the message for Pamela -if Pamela was her name, which Carmel doubted. Still, she should have gotten back.
Had something happened to her? Had Carmel's name come up through Pamela – had
Pamela been caught? Was she in one of those stainless-steel federal pens somewhere, sweating through the sensory-deprivation stage of a multi-level interrogation? Was the phone connection corrupt, or discontinued, or worse, tapped? What was going on?
She'd worked through her defense two hundred times, and all two hundred times, she'd walked. The cops didn't have a case, couldn't have a case. There was nothing to build a case on – unless that little girl had identified her.
Her contact with the cops said that nothing had come of the photo spread, but
Davenport was running this routine, and he was worse than tricky, he was bad. If he was sure that she was involved, he might be sticking together a morality play, to frame her. With nothing more than a sliver of evidence, a woman could go to prison for life, if a jury didn't approve of her life-style.
She shouldn't have fucked Hale, that was the truth of the matter. Just shouldn't have. Should have waited. Even if there were no proof, if a jury found out she'd fucked Hale the night before his dead wife's funeral, she was history. And where in the hell was Pamela?
She was in her apartment, trying to work, when the phone rang. She glanced at her watch: probably Hale, but she said, 'Be Pamela.'
And Rinker said, 'You got time for a drink?'
Casually: 'Sure, where are you? I'd hoped you'd call.'
'Remember that place we went, the bar where we saw the guy with the cowboy scarf? Let's go there.'
'Oh, sure. An hour from now?'
'Be careful, though; it's dark around there. You'll get eaten by a stalker.'
'I'll bring my switchblade,' Carmel said, laughing. 'See you in an hour.'
Stalker? Pamela thought Carmel was being followed? Is that what that meant? And the place where they saw the guy with the red silk cowboy scarf wasn't a bar, but the lobby of her hotel. Was that where she wanted to meet?
Before she left her apartment, Carmel changed into a loose long-sleeved silk blouse, jet black, with black slacks and a small gold necklace. Ten minutes after she hung up the phone, she was on the street in the Volvo. She took a twisting route out of the downtown area, eased along a one-way lane on the edge of the Kenwood area, past homes of the rich and the strange, and checked her back traiclass="underline" nothing.
But if what she'd read about complicated tags was right, the cops might have three or four cars following her, changing off, some in front, some behind. She pulled over to the side of the lane, waited two minutes: nothing went by. What if the car were wired, and they were following her from a distance?
No way she could tell that.
Besides, she was beginning to feel that she might be a little delusional. She'd read hundreds of criminal files in her lifetime, and the heavy surveillance never started until the case was made. Before that, they were simply too expensive. The cops might go for a phone tap, or loose surveillance, but there wouldn't be a multi-car track across town.