finish your phone call.'
'What?'
'Finish the phone call.'
Marker nodded, mystified, went back to the phone.
'Hello?'
'This is Mary,' Rinker said into the cell phone.
'You left your car keys down here this morning, they're at the main desk.'
'Oh, thanks,' Marker said, shakily. 'Uh, I'll be right down.'
'See you,' Rinker said, and she punched off the phone. Then she pointed her index finger at Marker, crooked it, and stepped back into the hallway. Marker followed like an automaton.
'You're going to kill me,' Marker said, when they were in the hall, the door closed behind them. 'I should scream.'
'If you scream, I'll kill you. Otherwise, I've got good reasons not to. But I've got to ask you some questions.'
'What was that about the telephone?' 'The feds may be listening in.' 'Probably are,' Marker said. Then: 'You're Tennex.' Rinker nodded. 'Walk down the hall.'
'I did just like you told me…' Rinker started her rap: 'I don't want to hurt you, because if I do, then they'll know for sure thatTennex is what they're after. Do you understand that? Right now, they don't know for sure.' 'Uh, yes.'
'But I'll kill you if I have to. If I ever have any hint that you talked to them about this visit, that you're looking at photographs, then I'll come back for you. And if I'm caught, the people who run me will worry that other connections would be made, and they'll come looking for both of us. In other words, if you talk to anybody about this visit, you're dead. Do you understand?'
Marker swallowed hard and nodded.
'So who came to see you?' Rinker asked.
Marker told her all of it: starting with the first phone call, the call that seemed uncertain about Tennex – a guy's voice, baritone, educated, cool – to the raid by the FBI.
'Not a cop? The guy who called?'
'High-class cop, maybe.' She told Rinker about the FBI, about Mallard, about going down to the FBI building.
'Was one of the guys named Lucas Davenport?'
'I don't think so, but they didn't introduce everybody. There was one guy who kept wandering away. Big guy, tough guy. Didn't look FBI, he had this really nice suit. Didn't look government. Looked like, you know, a hoodlum.'
Rinker dipped in her pocket and came up with the folded page she'd taken from
BizWiz, a computer magazine that covered Twin Cities business. 'Is this the guy?'
Marker took it, looked at it for a half-second and said, 'That's him. Yeah. He looks better in real life, though.'
'Did you hear his voice? Could he have been the guy who called that first time, the confused call?'
Marker thought about it for a second. 'Yeah, you know, he could have been,' she said slowly. 'Yeah, you know…'
After a few more questions, Rinker said, 'I just want to reiterate: I was very careful coming here, very careful about wire taps and even bugs in your apartment. So nobody knows. If anybody ever knows, you're dead.'
Marker nodded rapidly. 'Okay. Good. That's good.'
'I learned a trick in a previous business of mine, when I was much younger,'
Rinker said. 'And that was, how to forget. You'd just say, 'Okay, that never happened. I just dreamed it.' And pretty soon, whatever happened becomes like a dream, and you start to forget it.'
'You're forgot,' Marker said fervently. 'Honest to God, you're forgot.'
Before she left town, Rinker stopped at a bank and rented a safe-deposit box.
She paid a year in advance, wiped the gun, and left it in the box. Next time she was through the area in her car, she'd pick it up.
From the airport, Rinker dialed Carmel's magic cell phone, and Carmel answered on the second buzz: 'Yes.'
'You know that guy we saw on TV?' Rinker asked.
'Yes.'
'He was here. For sure.'
'Shit. I wonder how he knew?'
'Don't know,' Rinker said. 'I'll be back tonight at ten-fifteen on Northwest.'
'I'll pick you up. I think we're cool for this very moment, but we can talk when you get back.'
On the plane, eyes covered with a black sleeping mask, Rinker dozed, and between small patches of sleep she thought about Carmel. She could solve quite a few problems by simply killing the other woman. But there were problems with that.
Carmel wasn't stupid, and she might already have taken out some kind of insurance: a note written in a check book, or left in a safe deposit box, with what she knew about Rinker. A note that would be found only after she was dead.
Another problem: this Davenport guy was as close to Rinker as he was to Carmel.
How had he gotten there? Did he know even more? Was he digging around the bar in
Wichita? Carmel was a source of information about Davenport, which could be important…
A final reason not to kill Carmel: Rinker actually liked her. Like some kind of sister, something Rinker had never had. Rinker smiled when she thought of
Carmel's invitation to do Mexico. She'd been planning to go, by God, and if they got out of this, she would. Get a couple of thong bikinis and a nice close bikini wax, some of those drinks with little paper umbrellas and lots of pineapple, and maybe do a couple of those Mexican dudes.
As to Davenport himself, Rinker had read the BizWiz report, and Davenport sounded like a smart guy. And mean: he was a stone killer, no doubt about it. He was like one of those Mafia guys she'd known, a guy running a big coin-op company or garbage-hauler, a businessman who kept a gun in his pocket.
Of course, she'd killed three or four of those. Not even geniuses were bulletproof.
In Minneapolis, sitting in front of a muted television, Carmel considered the possibilities. Maybe, if she had a chance, she should kill Pamela, or whatever her name was. It would only make sense, from a criminal-defense point of view.
There really was only one perfect witness against Carmel, and if Pamela were gone, then Davenport could go shit in his hat.
She sighed, got up and wandered into the kitchen, got a glass of orange juice.
She'd really hate to kill the other woman: she actually liked her. Pamela could become a friend, for God's sakes, the first real one Carmel would ever have had.
She sipped the juice and wandered back past all of her perfect black-and-white photos, barely seeing them. If she was thinking about killing Pamela, then it was probable that the other woman was thinking about killing her. And maybe was equally reluctant to do it, for some of the same reasons.
If things should change, Carmel thought, if it became really necessary to get rid of Pamela, she damn well better move first and fast. She wouldn't have a second chance. She glanced at her watch. Time to go get her at the airport.
Rinker tossed her light bag in the back seat of the Volvo, and Carmel said, 'I can think of three possibilities.'
'Which are?'
'We do nothing. I sat down with a legal pad tonight and tried to work out the worst possible scenario. I can't see how they could ever, ever have come up with enough against us to arrest either one of us. If they did, I don't see how they could convict either one of us, unless you've left fingerprints behind or dropped your billfold or something.
'Nothing like that,' Rinker said. 'What are the other two possibilities?'
