to see you and your daughter.'
'Heather?' Now she looked frightened.
'Just for a couple of minutes,' Lucas said. 'Maybe your place would be better. ..'
'Why do you want to talk to Heather?'
'She said she heard balloons popping. Those were probably guns. Between the two of you, maybe we can figure out a time that this… happened.'
The woman's name was Jan Davis. She was a small, slender woman with dishwater blonde hair and high cheekbones. Her apartment was pleasantly cluttered with books, scientific reprints and a few music CDs, all classical. She scurried nervously around, picking up magazines, straightening chairs, making lemonade when Lucas went over. Heather bounced in a worn, oversized easy chair, watching Lucas, smiling when he looked at her. Outside, in the hallway, cops were setting up crime-scene lines.
'I have a daughter about your age,' Lucas told Heather. 'Have you started school yet?'
'Yes,' she said. 'I was promoted. I'm in first, now. When school comes back.'
'So you won't be the littlest kids anymore… there'll be kindergarteners who are smaller than you.'
'Yup.' But she hadn't thought of that before, and she slipped off the chair and ran into the kitchen: 'Hey Mom, Mr. Davenport says there'll be kids littler than me at school…'
A minute later, Davis came out of the kitchen with two glasses of lemonade -
'There's plenty more if the other gentleman wants some.'
Lucas nodded, and took the glass. 'I noticed on your mailbox on the way in, your husband, Howard…'
'Howard's not living here now,' she said firmly.
'Not for a while?' Lucas asked.
'About seven weeks. I just haven't taken his name off the mailbox.'
'So… what? You're going to get divorced?'
'Yes. I'm just finishing my thesis at the U,' she said. 'I've got a post-doc offer from Johns Hopkins, and Heather and I'll be moving to Baltimore in
December. Howard won't be coming.'
'Well, I'm sorry,' Lucas said. And he was. After a moment's silence, he turned to look at Heather and asked, 'What were you doing last night when you heard the party at Marta's? Were you in the hall?'
Heather looked guiltily at her mother and then said, 'Just for a minute. I left my truck out there.'
'She's not supposed to go out in the hall at night, after it gets dark,' Davis said. 'But sometimes she does.'
'Do you know what time it was?'
'We were talking about that, before you came over,' Davis said. 'She was out there with her blocks and her bulldozer when I told her to come in. But she left her truck, and a few minutes later I heard her messing around out there, and I went out and got her. It was between eight and nine.'
'Eight and nine. You wouldn't have been watching television, or anything, so you'd know what show was on?'
Davis was shaking her head. 'No, I'm rewriting my thesis, the final edit, and
I'd just shut down…' She cocked her head to the side, then said, 'Hey: I think the word processor has a time thing on it, that shows when the file was closed.' She hopped off the couch and headed for a back room. Lucas and Heather followed.
Davis' study was a converted bedroom, with a single bed still in it: 'Howard slept here the last few weeks he lived with us,' she said, offhandedly. She was bringing the computer up, cycling through the Windows 98 display, then bringing up the word processor.
'Yup.' She tapped the screen, and bounced in her seat a little, the way her daughter had. 'The file was stored at eight twenty-two. I stored it and got up and heard Heather in the hall, and told her to come back inside.'
'All right, that's something,' Lucas said. 'Eight twenty-two.' He looked at
Heather. 'Did you see anybody when you were in the hallway?'
She shook her head. 'No.' Then added, 'I peeked when Mom was gone, and I saw two ladies.'
'Two ladies? This was after you heard the party balloons?'
She nodded, solemn in the face of Lucas's interest. 'How did you see them?'
Lucas asked.
'When I heard them, I opened the door just to peek,' she said. 'I thought it was
Marta.'
'But it wasn't Marta?'
She shook her head again.
'Did you know the ladies?'
'No.'
'Never saw them before?'
She shook her head.
'Do you remember what they looked like?' Lucas asked.
She cocked her head in a perfect rendition of her mother's thinking-mannerism, and after two or three seconds said, 'Maybe I do.'
Chapter Nine
Carmel Loan learned that the bodies had been found from TV3. She and Rinker were walking through the Skyway toward Loan's office, eating frozen yogurt, when
Carmel spotted a printed headline under a talking head in a deli-window TV: Two
Bodies Found Near University. She nudged Rinker with her elbow.
'That was quick,' Rinker said, looking up at the TV.
'So was the other one – we could have gotten a couple days on either of them, but we didn't.'
'I wonder about that kid,' Rinker said. 'I hope nothing comes out of that.'
Carmel nodded and said, 'Let me find out when these bodies were found. If the cops have released any information, I can go over there and ask how it affects the case against Hale… and maybe find out what they've got.'
'Too much curiosity might be dangerous,' Rinker said.
'I can walk that line,' Carmel said confidently.
Carmel went straight to Lucas:
'I understand you found them,' she said. 'I mean, you personally.'
'Yeah. Not one of the brighter moments in my day,' Lucas said. He was tipped back in his new office chair, his feet up, reading the Modality Report. He'd bought the chair himself, a grey steel-and-fabric contraption that felt so good that he was thinking of marrying it.
'I'll tell you what,' Carmel said. 'We got one upper-class woman and three spies dead, and I would suggest to you that there's something going on besides some guy trying to kill his wife for her money. I'm reasonably sure that you're smart enough to have figured it out.'
'I figured it out, all right,' Lucas said. 'Your goddamn client's a snake. He was financing the local cocaine cartel with his old lady's money – and she found out. After he killed her, he rolled up the rest of the group before they could talk about it.'
'You can't…' Carmel started. Then she stopped herself. She ticked her finger at Lucas and said, 'You're teasing me.'
'Maybe,' Lucas said.
'I just don't know why we haven't slept together,' Carmel said. 'Except that my heart belongs to another.'
'So does mine,' Lucas said. 'I just wish I'd meet her.'
Carmel laughed. Let herself laugh a little too long, even indelicately. Then, 'So
I can tell my client that he can stop the heavy drugs, and try to get some normal sleep.'
'He's had a problem?' Lucas asked. He yawned and looked at his watch.
