he did believe him, O'Brien started fishing for a job as a greens keeper.
Lucas laughed: 'I haven't bought it, yet.'
'Keep me in mind, I'd be great at it,' O'Brien said. 'I'm two years from retirement if some asshole doesn't shoot me first. Work in Minnesota? Hell, yes.' Then, his voice pitched down, he asked, 'What's going on. You're working, right?'
'Yeah. We had some people executed in the Cities…' Lucas gave him a quick rundown, left Carmel Loan's name out of it, and concluded with the FBI entry at the answering service.
'Never heard of the place. Louise Marker?'
'Yeah. Just like it sounds, like Magic Marker, M-A-R-K-E-R.'
'Four dead. Never heard of a pro going in for something like that
… You might get three or four dead all at once, but not in a series, like they're hunting them down.'
'There's something going on,' Lucas said. 'It could be something really simple – a money thing. The hit goes sour, somebody gets a name or a connection, and then this killer chick has to come back and clean up.'
'Impossible to prove, though,' O'Brien said. 'I get pretty goddamned depressed about it sometimes. Crooks are getting too smart, they move too fast. Hit here, gone tomorrow.'
'Be nice to pull this chick down, though,' Lucas said. 'I'd like to see if you've got anything local on this Marker, or any of the people who work there.
Even word-of-mouth. The Feebs don't have anything that's not on paper…'
'I'll check around,' O'Brien said. 'And I'll tell you what: I know this guy named George Hutton, he works in fraud…'
They caught Hutton standing at a bus stop where a desk sergeant said he might still be, if they hurried.
'George,' O'Brien called across the street. A bus was rolling down the block.
'Wait.'
They crossed at the corner and Hutton looked at his watch and said, 'Two minutes and I'm out of here, gone for the week. Then the local Black Irish shows up with some guy in an expensive suit and I get this really bad feeling. ..'
'All we need is a name,' O'Brien said. 'Let me tell you a name.'
'One name,' said Hutton. He looked at his watch.
'Louise… Marker.' O'Brien had moved to one side of Hutton so he could speak directly into the other man's ear. Hutton closed his eyes and tipped his head back, so that he'd have been looking at the sky, except that his eyes were closed. He stood like that for a moment, then opened his eyes and looked at
Lucas and spoke to O'Brien.
'Who's the guy?'
'Lucas Davenport, a deputy chief from Minneapolis. Davenport Simulations.'
'I know that,' Hutton said. Then: 'Look up Maurice Marker, formerly Marx, of
Marker Dry Cleaners, Inc. New Jersey. He had a daughter named Louise. How old is your Louise?'
Lucas said, 'I'd say early middle age – forty, maybe. A little chunky.'
Hutton nodded: 'That'd be about right. What's she doing?'
'Running an answering service.'
Hutton nodded. 'Yeah. Look up Maurice Marker.' He peered down the street:
'That's my bus.'
Lucas said good-bye to O'Brien, caught a cab to the FBI building and called
Mallard, who came down to get him.
'We need to look up a dry cleaner named Maurice Marker or Maurice Marx,' Lucas said.
'Where'd you get the name?'
'From a cop here in DC – some kind of savant guy, he knows names.'
'Huh. Well, let's go punch it in.'
Maurice Marker, now retired to south Florida, had a short FBI biography. He had once owned a chain of dry cleaners in New Jersey, with a sales staff consisting of a dozen men with severely bent noses. The bent noses were not around much, but they made nice salaries, with excellent benefits, including full dental and medical, as well as life insurance and retirement plans.
'These guys would bring in a chunk of cash from dope or broads or gambling or whatever, give it to Maurice, he'd run it through the cash register, write off their salaries against taxes, take a chunk for himself, and everybody was happy,' Mallard said. 'He had thirty-three dry cleaners when he retired. He sold the stores to another guy, who did the same thing until he went away.'
'Where'd he go?'
Mallard peered at the computer: 'About four miles east of Atlantic City.'
'Is Louise in there?' Lucas nodded at the computer.
Mallard ran his finger down the monitor screen: 'Yep. Not necessarily the same one, of course. Just a minute.' He opened a spiral notebook, flipped through to the back, ran his finger down a page of chicken-scratch handwriting, then looked at the screen. 'I'll be damned. Same birth date. That's our girl.'
Lucas turned away, paced a few steps, paced back, turned away again. 'So. She's connected. Could be a coincidence, but probably not.'
'Probably not.' Now Mallard got to his feet, and started following Lucas in the pacing. 'Goddamn it, Davenport, I'm getting a hard-on.'
'You haven't gotten any more calls since the one from Patricia Case?'
'No…'
'Then it's possible that was some kind of a warning call. A code
…'
'It's possible that Tennex only gets one call a month…'
Lucas was shaking his head: 'No. You know what it is? The answering service is a blind. Or partially a blind. That's why it's not just a phone ringing in an empty apartment somewhere. I mean, why not that? It'd be easier.'
'So what are you saying?'
'That one of those women there is a cutout, somebody the killer can go to for more information. One of the women is really an alarm, and we probably rang it.'
'It'd have to be Marker,' Mallard said. 'There are ten different women who work on those switchboards, either full or part time, and they rotate shifts…
There wouldn't be any way to know which operator would be answering which call, so they'd have to have some special instructions from Marker if anything unusual came up on Tennex.'
'So let's bring her in,' Lucas said.
'On what?'
'Nothing. Scare the shit out of her.'
'That's, uh, sort of not our operating procedure,' Mallard said.
'Fuck your operating procedure. Bring her in, let me talk to her.'
'Let me make a call,' Mallard said.
Marker demanded an attorney, and Mallard was happy to give her all the time she needed.
'If we're not out of here by seven, I'm gonna miss my plane,' Lucas said.
'I'll have my secretary see if there's another flight out,' Mallard said. 'Gimme the ticket.'
Marker's attorney, who showed up two hours after they'd taken her in, was a cheery blond named Cliff Bell. He wanted to know what the hell was going on.
'Your client is a front for a professional killer we're tracking,' Lucas said.
'I don't think…' Bell started, but Lucas stopped him.
'Wait, wait,' Lucas said. 'Let me make my little speech, here. This woman, the killer, has murdered almost thirty people in more than a dozen states. A lot of them are those nasty southern states with those strange ways of executing people
– like Florida, where the guy's eyeballs went up in a puff of smoke when they pulled the switch on OP Sparky…'
'That's unnecessary,' Bell said.
