'Hey,' Lucas said, nodding. He and Sherrill had ended a six-week romance: or as
Sherrill put it, Forty Days and Forty Nights of Sex amp; Disputation. They were now in the awkward phase of no longer seeing each other while they were still working together. 'Looks nasty,' he added. The stairwell smelled of damp concrete overlaid with the coppery odor of blood and human intestinal gas, which was leaking out of the body.
Sherrill glanced down at the body and said, 'Gonna be a strange one.'
'Swanson said she was executed,' Sloan said.
'She was, big-time,' said Black. They all looked down at the body, arranged around their feet like a puddle. 'I can see seven entry wounds, but no exits.
You don't need to be no forensic scientist to see that the gun was close – maybe an inch away.'
'Who is she?' Lucas said.
'Barbara Paine Allen. She's got a notify card in her purse, looks like her husband's a lawyer.'
'I know her face from somewhere, and the name rings a bell,' Lucas said. 'I think she might be somebody'
Sherrill and Black both nodded and Sherrill muttered, 'Great.'
Lucas squatted next to the dead woman for a moment, looking at her head. The bullet wounds were small and tidy, as though she'd been repeatedly stabbed with a pencil. There were two wounds high on the back of her head, and a cluster of five in her temple. Her heart had kept pumping for a while after she landed; a thin stream of drying blood ran down from each of the holes. The seven thin streams were neatly defined, which meant that she hadn't moved after she hit the stairs. Professional, and very tidy, Lucas thought. He stood up and asked the other two, 'You got witnesses? Besides Baily?'
'Baily said the shooter was a red-headed woman, and we've got two people who say they saw a redheaded woman walking away from the scene close to the time of the shooting. No good description. She was wearing sunglasses, they said. Both of them said she was wiping her nose or sneezing into a handkerchief.'
'Covering her face,' Lucas said.
'I don't believe this shit,' Sloan said, looking down at Barbara Allen. 'People don't get hit.'
'Not in Minneapolis,' Sherrill said.
'Not by a pro,' said Black.
Lucas scratched his chin and said, 'But she did. I wonder why?'
'Are you buyin' in?' Sherrill asked. 'Could be an interesting trip.'
'Don't have the time,' Lucas said. 'I have the Otherness Commission.'
'Maybe if we find the shooter, we could get her to kill the commission.'
'They're not killable,' Lucas said gloomily. 'They come straight from hell.'
'We'll keep you updated,' Sherrill said.
'Do that.' Lucas shook his head, and looked back down at the cooling body. And he said, aloud, again, 'I wonder why?'
Chapter Three
Barbara Allen was killed a month to the day after Carmel Loan took out the contract on her. When word of the murder swept through the firm, Carmel immediately told herself that she had nothing to do with it. She'd made the arrangement so long ago that it hardly counted.
Carmel learned of the killing as she sat reading the deposition of a late-night dog-walker who claimed that he saw Rockwell Miller – her client – go into the back of his failing steak house with a five-gallon can of gasoline. The prosecution would argue that it was the same gas can found by the arson squad in the shambles of the restaurant's basement. The fire had been so hot that it had melted the fire extinguishers in the kitchen.
Carmel was looking for what she called a peel. If she could get her fingernails under some aspect of a story, or some aspect of a witness, she could peel the testimony back, and damage the witnesses' credibility. She'd begun to think that she could peel the dog-walker. He was divorced, and carried two convictions for domestic assault, which hurt any witness if there were enough women on the jury.
She could get the women, all right. The problem was getting the assault conviction before the jury, since the average judge might mistakenly consider it irrelevant.
The dog-walker lived near the restaurant and knew the restaurant owner by sight.
Had the dog-walker and his ex-wife ever eaten at the restaurant? Had they ever had an argument in the restaurant, when they were breaking up? Might the dog walker have bad feelings about the restaurant, or its owner, even if they were unconscious?
It was all bullshit, but if she could implicitly ask, 'Can you believe the testimony of an admitted brutal wife- beater?' of twelve women good and true.. . That would be a definite peel.
She was dialing her client when her secretary stuck her head into Carmel's office, unannounced, and asked, 'Did you hear about Hale Allen's wife?'
Carmel's heart jumped into her throat, and she dropped the phone back on its base. 'No, what?' she asked. She was one of the top-three defense attorneys in the Twin Cities, and her face showed all the emotion of a woman who has been asked the outside temperature.
'She's been killed. Murdered.' The secretary couldn't quite keep the relish out of her voice. 'In a downtown parking garage. The police are saying it was a professional assassination. Like a mob hit.'
Carmel hushed her voice, while letting the natural interest show through.
'Barbara Allen?'
The secretary stepped in and let the door close behind her. 'Jane Roberts said the cops came and got Hale, and they rushed to the hospital, but it was too late. She was already dead.'
'Oh my God, the poor woman.' Carmel's hand went to her throat. And she thought:
/ didn't do this. And she also thought: / was sitting right here, where everybody could see me.
'We're thinking we should get some money together and send some flowers,' the secretary said.
'Do that. That's a good idea,' Carmel said. She found her purse beside her desk, and dug inside. 'I'll start it with a hundred.' She rolled the cash out on the desk. 'Is that enough?'
Late that afternoon, on the open-air balcony of her fabulous apartment, a gin and-tonic in her hand, Carmel worried: gnawed a thumbnail, a bad habit she'd carried with her since grade school, chewing the nail down to the quick. For the first time since the infatuation with Hale Allen had begun, she stepped outside of herself, and looked back.
She'd often told her clients, those who were more-or-less professional criminals, that they could never think of all the possible ways to screw up a crime. However many ways you cover yourself, there's always some way that you are not covered.
Carmel had considered the possibility of killing Barbara Allen herself. She'd never killed anything before, but the thought didn't particularly bother her.
She could pull the trigger, all right. But the devil was in the details, and there were too many details. How would she get a gun? If she bought one, there'd be a record of the purchase. She could use it and throw it away, but if the cops came asking for it, 'The dog ate it,' would be insufficient.
She could steal one, but she could get caught stealing it. And she'd have to steal it from one of two or three people she knew who had guns, and that might point a finger at her. She could try to come up with a fake ID – a crime in itself – but she was memorable enough that a gun-store clerk, asked later about the purchaser, might well remember her, especially if prompted by a photo.
Then there was the killing itself. She could do it. She could do anything she put her mind to. But, as she'd warned her clients, mistakes, accidents, or even random chance could ruin even the best-planned crime. With murder, in the state of Minnesota, a mistake, accident or random error meant spending thirty years in a non- fabulous room the size of a bathtub.
In the end, she'd decided the least risky way was to go with a pro. She had plenty of untraceable cash stashed in her bank deposit box, and she had Rolando
D'Aquila, the connection. She also had a safety margin. Neither her connection nor the shooter could tell the
