Certain prey

After two minutes of staring at the body, Lucas said, 'It's perfect.'

'Perfect?'

'Someplace in this house, we're gonna find either a gun, or shells, or something else, that'll tie her to the earlier shootings. The only thing we won't find is, we'll do some swabs and there won't be any semen.

Usually, there's semen, and there won't be any, because they couldn't do that.

And we'll get the ME to check Allen, and he won't have had sex in the last twenty-four hours, because they couldn't do that, either.'

'By they, you mean…'

'Carmel and the shooter-chick.'

Sherrill looked at him for a moment, wordlessly, then turned and walked back out of the room, only to return three seconds later: 'Lucas, I could make a pretty good case that Louise Clark is the shooter-chick. She was sleeping with Allen; she's a low-level secretary, and if she gets rid of the old lady, and she marries Allen, she goes from being poor and single to rich and married. She's got the motive… she's got the gun.'

'Where'd a goddamn low-level secretary get a silencer like that?' Lucas snarled.

'You buy a silencer like that on the black market, it'd cost you a grand. And who did the tooling on the muzzle? Did you find a machine-shop in the basement?'

'No, but Lucas… what if she's the shooter, and she knows Carmel that way?

What if Carmel's her lawyer?'

'And Carmel starts screwing her boyfriend, knowing that the woman she's kicking out of the saddle is a professional killer? Bullshit. Nope: this is a set-up.

That's why there won't be any semen, and that's why we're gonna find a gun,'

Lucas said. 'When you said you could make a pretty good case that Clark is a shooter, you're exactly right. You could. And a pro defense attorney like Carmel could make an even better one. She could make a perfect case. Trying to get anyone else for these murders is pointless: we'll never do it.'

'What're we gonna do?'

'I don't know what you're gonna do,' Lucas said, standing up. 'But I'm going up north. You can handle this fuckin' thing.'

Lucas arrived at his cabin a little after five o'clock, driving back roads most of the way to dodge the Wisconsin state patrol, the most rapacious gang of weasels in the North Woods. As he drove, the image of the dead Louise Clark hung before his eyes.

Then, just before the turnoff for his cabin, he saw a neighbor, Roland Marks, driving an orange Kubota tractor along the side of the road. The tractor had an oversized loader on one end, and a backhoe on the other. Lucas pulled off and climbed out of the car, and Marks rode the throttle back to idle.

'What the hell are you doing?' Lucas asked, walking around the tractor. Louise

Clark began to fade.

'Gonna clear me off some snowmobile trails on the back,' Marks said. Marks had forty acres of brush, gullies and swamp across the road. He called it his huntin' property.

'You don't know how to drive a tractor,' Lucas said. 'You're a goddamn stockbroker.'

'Yeah? Watch this.' Marks drove the backhoe down a shallow slope into the roadside ditch; did something with the controls, set the brake, turned his seat around backwards, lowered hydraulic support pads on both sides of the tractor, and raised the bucket. With one slow chop, he took a couple of cubic feet of dirt out of the bottom on the ditch.

'How much did that thing cost?' Lucas asked, impressed despite himself.

'About seventeen, used,' Marks said, meaning seventeen thousand dollars. 'Got four hundred hours on her.'

'Jesus, you're starting to talk like a shitkicker.'

'What're you doing this evening?' Marks asked.

'Going out in the boat.'

'Why don't you come over? I'll check you out on this thing.' He carefully dumped the dirt back in the hole where he'd gotten it; only half of it slopped over the edge.

'Yeah? What time?'

'Half-hour?'

'See you in a half-hour.'

Lucas turned the pump and the water heater on, got a light spinning rod and carried it down the dock and flipped a Moss Boss out into a shallow area spotted with water lilies. The Moss Boss slid and skated frog-like through the lilies and reeds, back up to the dock.

He threw it out again, then again, and on the third cast, a bass hit. He fought it in, unhooked it, dropped it back in the water. A twelve-incher, and fun; but he didn't eat bass.

He flipped the Moss Boss around the dock for twenty minutes, taking three small bass, tossing them all back, feeling his shoulders loosen up. Louise Clark was almost gone. After the last cast, he walked back up the sloping lawn to the cabin, got four cold Leinies out of the refrigerator, put them in a grocery sack, and had one foot out the door when the phone rang.

He stopped, thought about it, shook his head at his own foolishness, and went back.

'Yeah?'

'Sherrill. I'm down at the ME's. They're doing the autopsy on Louise Clark.'

'Anything, yet?'

'Yeah. She'd had sex shortly before she was killed. The semen hadn't been dissipated yet, and they got a pretty good sample. But to tell you the truth, I figure there's only one place it could have come from.'

'Man! I don't believe that,' Lucas said. He was shocked. 'What about Allen?'

'They haven't started on him, but I'll let you know. If you want to know.'

'Of course, I want to know…'

'Okay. And there's more stuff. We found the gun, just like you said. It's a Colt . 22 with a silencer. Stuffed inside a boot in the closet. And we found a couple hundred bucks worth of cocaine in the bedside table.

There's the connection to Rolo. Crime scene found some pubic hair in Allen's bed. In fact, they've got three different samples. Most of it comes from Allen, but some of it's blonde, and that'd be Carmel – but there's a third sample that's this mousy-brown color. We don't have the lab work yet, but I know it came from Clark. I know it.'

'All right. Call me back when they get to Allen. Keep pushing the ME, don't let them put anything off until tomorrow. We need it now…'

'You going fishing?'

'Actually, I was on my way out the door. A neighbor's gonna teach me to run a backhoe.'

'Speaking of backhoes…'

'What?'

'You never told me that special agent Malone of the FBI was a woman. And a woman with a sexy voice who wants to dance with you.'

'Didn't seem relevant,' Lucas grunted. 'Our relationship is purely professional.'

'She wants you to call her, in Wichita. I've got a number.'

Malone picked up the phone on the first ring. 'Hello, Lucas Davenport,' she said. 'I'm told you're off rusticating.'

'Fishing,' Lucas said.

'I wanted you to know that I'm moving up to Minneapolis with my group, and

Mallard is coming in from Washington. We're very interested in this

Louise Clark. Very interested.'

'There's something wrong with the whole thing. Did Sherrill tell you about the semen?'

'No, nothing…'

Lucas summarized his conversation with Sherrill and Malone said, 'If the semen checks out, if the DNA checks out… that's it.'

'Makes me feel weird,' Lucas said. 'It's not right. This Clark isn't a pro killer, not unless she was doing it for the fun of it. Because she didn't have any goddamn money.'

'Could have had it hidden away.'

'Bullshit,' Lucas said. 'She kills people, but hides it all away? The inside of her house looked like a cut-rate motel. She had a TV set that couldn't have been worth more than a couple hundred bucks, new. Everything in the place said she was a secretary, and struggling to keep her head above water.'

'All right. Well, I'm coming in tomorrow. Maybe, when you get back, you can take me out for a nice little foxtrot somewhere – some place where you won't spend all of your time dancing with the waitress.'

Lucas carried the sack of beer next door to the Marks' place. Lucy Marks was snipping the heads off played-out coneflowers as her husband maneuvered the