'Damnit,' Lucas said. 'We never quite get her. I swear to God, we didn't miss her by more than a half-hour at the airport, maybe fifteen minutes.'
'But we're knocking on the door,' Mallard said.
'We've got more on her than we ever hoped for. Now it's just a matter of time.'
Late that evening, Hale Allen sat naked on the edge of the bed, his damp hair still tousled from the lovemaking and the shower that came afterwards. He was examining his toes in the light from the night-stand, and clipping his toenails.
He hummed as he did it, and every time the clippers snapped, Carmel flinched, and Allen would say something about the clipping, aloud, but mindlessly, to himself: 'Got that one,' he said, as a clipping fell on the magazine he was using to catch them. 'There's a good one.'
Carmel tried putting her fingers in her ears, but it was no use. She was about to roll out of bed when the magic cell phone went off in her purse. She crawled to the end of the bed, reached over the end-board for her purse, dug the phone out, lay back and punched the talk button.
'I'm back,' Rinker said.
'Where at?' Allen looked at her from his side of the bed, and she mouthed, sorry-business at him. He grinned and rolled over toward her, pushed her legs apart; she let him do it.
'Hotel down by the airport.'
'Dangerous,' Carmel said. Allen put his head down and nibbled.
'I look different. A lot different,' Rinker said. 'Not a problem. But the question is, do we do Plan B?'
'I've been thinking about that,' Carmel said. She ran her hands through Allen's hair. 'I guess it really wouldn't mean much to you, but it'd get me off the hook. For good.'
'But that's good for me,' Rinker said. 'The question is, how do I do this by myself? I don't know the details of…'
'You don't do it by yourself,' Carmel said. She pulled gently on Allen's ear, guiding him a little to the left. 'I'll help.'
'Can you get out?'
'Yeah. But I'm in the middle of something right now, I can't really get into the details… Call me tomorrow morning about ten o'clock.'
'You with somebody?'
'Yeah.'
'Hale Allen?'
'You got that right,' Carmel said.
'Talk to you tomorrow,' Rinker said.
Carmel said to Hale, 'Come up here, you.'
'I like it down here. It smells like bread.'
She whacked him on the side of the head and he said, 'Ow, what was that for?'
'Not very romantic, like a loaf of Wonder Bread, or something.'
'I was just joking.' He held his hand to his ear; she had hit him a little harder than she'd intended.
She smiled and said, 'Okay. I'm sorry. Come up here and I'll make it better.'
Sherrill was sitting in her own car, alone, a block from Allen's house. A radio beeped, and she picked it up: 'Yeah?'
'Another light just went on in the living room.'
'Thank God. There might be something left of Allen after all.'
The guy on the other end chuckled: 'We'll take her back home, if you want to join the parade.'
'I'll be two blocks back.'
She dropped the radio, picked up her cell phone and dialed Lucas' number from memory. He picked it up on the first ring.
'You up reading?' she asked, without identifying herself.
'Yeah.'
'I think we're about to take Carmel home,' Sherrill said. 'This is obscene.'
'Not a flicker out of her, huh? Not a move?'
'Nothing. Damnit, Lucas, we might have lost the chance.'
'I know, but we've got to hang on for a while,' Lucas said.
'And I'm getting kind of lonely.'
'So am I,' Lucas said. 'But I'm not going to invite you over.'
'I wouldn't come anyway,' Sherrill said.
'Good for both of us.'
After a pause, Sherrill said, 'Yeah, I guess. See you tomorrow.'
Ten minutes later, Carmel came out of the house and walked briskly to her car. A little too briskly, on a nice night like this, a little too head-down, Sherrill thought. Of course, everything Carmel did was slightly theatrical; there was no way she could know she was in the net…
The next day was brutal: Lucas talked to Mallard, who had nothing new, and checked on the Carmel net a half-dozen times, and got cranky with everyone.
Carmel talked with Rinker twice on the magic cell phone. 'See you at ten fifteen,' she said.
Carmel went home at six, as she usually did; called Hale Allen at six-thirty, and told him that she'd have to work on the Al-Balah case that night: 'I've got to go back to the office. Jenkins ruled that the cops can have the tire as evidence, and I'm trying to put together an instant appeal.'
'Well, all right,' Allen said. She thought she might have detected just a hair of relief in his voice. 'See you when? Thursday?'
'Maybe we could catch lunch tomorrow… and I'll give you a call tonight.'
'Talk to you,' he said.
Carmel got out of her business dress, put on a short-sleeved white shirt, jeans and tennis shoes, and a light red jacket. She pushed a black sweatshirt into her briefcase. This was July, but it was also Minnesota. She didn't feel like eating, but she did, and carried the microwave chicken dinner to the window and looked out over the city. If they were actually watching her, from one of the nearby buildings, they should see her.
When she finished, she tossed the tray from the chicken dinner in the garbage, went back to her home office, disconnected the small digital answering machine from her private line, and stuck it in her briefcase with the sweater. A little after seven o'clock, she rode the elevator down and walked out of the front of the building, looking at her watch, carrying her briefcase. She wasn't absolutely sure the cops were there, but she thought they were: not looking around, trying to spot them, nearly killed her. She walked to her office building, enjoying the night, used her key to get in the front door, signed in with the security guard, and rode the elevators up to her office.
The entire suite was silent, with only a few security lights to cut the gloom.
She turned the lights on in the library and in her office, turned on the computer, and went to work. Jenkins, the judge in the case she was working, had ruled the cops could have a spare tire owned by Rashid Al-Balah, and, unfortunately, there was blood on the tire. The only good aspect of it was that the cops had had the car and tire for almost a month before the blood was found, that they'd often taken it out for test drives – once to a strip joint – and,
Carmel argued, the blood could have been anybody's, given the general unreliability of DNA tests. Or even if it did belong to Trick Bentoin, Bentoin could have cut himself before he disappeared, and simply was not available to testify to the fact…
She got caught up in the argument, moving back and forth from the library to her office, and nearly jumped out of her skin when the security guard said, 'Hi, Miz
Loan.'
'Oh, Jesus, Phil, you almost gave me a heart attack,' she said.
'Just making the rounds… you gonna be late tonight?' She could already smell the booze: Phil was an old geezer, but he could drink with the youngest of them.
'Probably. Got a tough one tomorrow.'
'Well, good luck,' he said, and shuffled away toward the entry. She heard the door close, and the latch snap,
