'Something weird?'
'Yeah. One odd call. And she made that phone call just before the D'Aquila killings.' He filled her in on theTennex Messenger Service, and his call to the
FBI.
'Tennex – sounds like a rock band,' she said, her voice moody.
'You're thinking of the Quicksilver Messenger Service.'
'Never heard of it/ she said. She slumped in the chair, scanning the computer list of phone calls: 'There's nothing before the Allen hit.'
'No…'
'You hear what I just said?' She asked. 'I actually said, hit. Jesus, I'm a TV movie.'
'You know what I'm wondering?' Lucas asked. 'What if Rolando D'Aquila was her contact with the killer? From what you guys dug up, he had some heavy Mafia connections once, and this shooter -she's supposed to do a lot of Mafia contracts.'
'But you know what?' Sherrill asked, sitting up. 'Rolo's contacts, his drug supply, mostly came out of St. Louis, which was unusual. At the time, most of our traffic came out of L.A.; it was just shifting over to Chicago, back then.
St. Louis was nothing – never had been, and never was again after Rolo went down.'
'And this shooter…'
'Has contacts in the St. Louis mob. That's what die Feebs say.'
'That's something,' Lucas said. 'Maybe we can work with that.'
Carmel Loan was sitting in her office; she could feel Hale Allen's touch from the night before, the balls of his thumbs on either side of her spine… She was trying to read a deposition, but her eyes defocused and she suddenly giggled. The man was unnaturally sexual; a memory popped into her head, she thought it was from a movie, somewhere back in time, a woman telling a man,
'Women don't want sex. Women want love.'
What complete drivel, she thought. Women want sex; they just also want love. And this must be it, she thought, giggling in the middle of the day. She remembered exactly how he'd taken her by the…
Her phone rang, a private outside line, and she started, found herself, took a breath and pulled herself back to the day. 'Carmel,' she said. Not many people had this number.
'You remember me?' the voice asked.
'Sure.'
'Why don't you send me a few bucks?'
'Whatever you say, pal. At twenty percent?'
'Carmel Loan-Shark, hey?' He laughed at his own pun. 'But I'm selling, not borrowing.'
'I don't think I'm in the market for anything right now. But whattaya got?'
'First of all, ya gotta agree not to do anything about it for a day or two. Not many people know about this, and if you come charging over here, they could figure me out as your source.'
'Okay, so what it it?
'Lucas Davenport, Tommy Black and Marcy Sherrill put together a photo spread for some witness to look at, in those killings over in Dinkytown.'
'Okay…' She was casual, but she felt a chill.
'Guess whose face was in the spread?'
'Uh, the Virgin Mary's.'
'Very close, but no cigar. Actually, your face was in the spread.'
'Mine?' She was shocked, and let it show through. The guy on the other end of the line was a cop.
'Yup. I don't know why. Maybe because they had a picture, because there were a bunch of other faces in there. The weather girl on Channel Three was in there. .. they were looking for tall blondes.'
'Maybe that's it,' Carmel said. 'But it pisses me off.'
'Thought you'd like to know.'
'Watch your mailbox,' she said.
'I will,' he said, with a purr of pleasure.
Some people, Carmel thought when she hung up, get hot at the prospect of cash.
Not because of what it can buy, or what it may represent, but just with the pure, smooth, slightly greasy feel of currency. The cop was one of those. She didn't understand it; but then, she'd never tried very hard. She was grateful the need existed, and that she could fill it. A couple of cops had been useful over the years.
After she thought about it for a while, she took a walk out to a pay phone, punched in Rinker's number, and left a message.
Chapter Thirteen
Bright and early the next morning – a cool morning that promised heat in the afternoon; with pale blue skies that went on forever – Mallard called Lucas from
Washington. The call came in an hour before Lucas had planned to get out of bed; he took it in the kitchen.
'We have some news on the Tennex connection,' he said, as Lucas yawned and scratched. 'I've also got a question. Two questions.'
'What's the news?'
'There is no Tennex Messenger Service, as far as we can tell, and never has been.'
'That's nice,' Lucas said.
'That's what I thought. The phone number goes into a suite of short-term offices. There're a couple of receptionists out front from eight o'clock in the morning until seven at night. In the back, there're a couple more women running a high-tech switchboard. The switchboard works around-the-clock. The offices are rented by the week or the month, mostly by businessmen here to lobby the government. They're about two-thirds full at any given time. Each of the offices has an individual number, which the switchboard women answer with the name of whoever is renting it at the moment.
The answering-service calls come in on separate numbers, which the switchboard women answer with a specific name, depending on which number rings. Tennex only has the answering service. No office.'
'So who pays the bills? Where do the checks come from?'
'We don't know, yet. We want to listen on the Tennex line for a couple of more days before we talk to the people who run the place. But I'll tell you what – and this is my question… Did one of your people, a woman, call Tennex from a payphone yesterday evening?'
'No.'
'Somebody from Minneapolis did,' Mallard said. 'The only phone call that came in all day.'
'Huh… what time?'
'Around five-thirty, our time.'
'Huh. We took a photo-spread over to a little girl who actually saw the shooters
… you probably read about her, in the files.'
'Yes.'
'We had a photo spread with the face of our suspect inserted in it. We got nothing, but that would have been about an hour-and-a-half before your call. And
I'll tell you what: this woman's got some contacts inside our department.
Probably inside yours, as far as that goes.'
'Ours didn't know about the photo spread.'
