I know where I found the original, so I'll find this one in exactly the same place. I show it to her, and she claims I planted it, or whatever. And I say,

"The only shells I have to plant are already fired. If we get a metallurgical match on these slugs and some of the killer slugs, Carmel, you're all done." And then I tell her I know she's involved… from the phone messages, or something.'

'And…'

'And I say, "We'll let you know first thing Monday morning." Then I put the shell in a baggie, and I leave. I go home. Drive slow, give her a chance to catch me. And we put a net around the house, and I hang around.. .'

Sherrill frowned. 'You think she'd come after it?'

'If she knows that it'll match. And she probably knows that. If we give her the whole weekend to stew about it.'

'Boy. The whole thing smells a little like entrapment.'

'Look, you and I know she's involved,' Lucas said. 'If she comes after me, then we've got her. If you try to entrap somebody, and their response is to shoot you

… I mean, you can't defend yourself against entrapment with attempted murder.

And, in fact, we can outline some of this to the other guys – tell them that we're trying to lure the killer in. That we'd never use the fake shell. That way, we avoid the entrapment charge.'

'But we won't tell them that there once was a real shell.'

'No…'

'It's getting trickier by the minute.'

'Mmmm. Be nice if we could find a few more things to tie Clark to Carmel…'

'Well, hell, we're inventing the shell, and the whole relationship, we could invent a few ties, too,' Sherrill said. 'Like… suppose we find out where she took a vacation, and we leak the word that Clark took a vacation there at the same time. There's no way for Carmel to know that she didn't.'

'I hope this is getting through to her,' Lucas said. 'I hope her leak in the department's still good.'

'We need to write a script,' Sherrill suggested. 'When we get the warrant for her apartment, we could drop all of these little nuggets. You could say something, I could drop something, Sloan…'

Lucas nodded, looked at his watch. 'Good idea -think of some stuff. And I'll think of some. But right now, I've got to go to the Reality Commission, we're talking about non-certifiable minorities tonight.' He thumped the Report which sat on one side of his desk. He was on page four hundred and thirty.

'Non-certifiable… what is that?'

'Well, you know: minorities that don't fit into racial, handicapped, sexual determinant, age-determinant, religious, ethnic, or national-origin groups.'

'Jeez, I would have thought that covered everything.'

'Oh, no. There was a case in Wisconsin of a white, Episcopalian male in his early thirties, non-handicapped, heterosexual, English heritage. ..'

'A perfect WASP…'

'Wouldn't even pee in the shower,' Lucas said. 'Anyway, he was a member of one of the animal-protection groups, and his co-workers tormented him by displaying photographs of pork chops and link sausages in the workplace, and they'd talk about going to McDonald's for cheeseburgers. He got 8750,000 from the city of

Madison for emotional imperialism.'

'Well – Madison.'

'That explains a lot of it, of course,' Lucas said, nodding. 'But apparently we need a policy. You know, covering non-religious ethical minorities.' Then he closed his eyes, rubbed them with a thumb and forefinger. 'Jesus Christ, what'd I just say?'

Carmel could feel the rage building. She knew what the cops were doing. They were building a 'just in case' case – hoping to build a good enough story that a jury would put her away, just in case she was the killer.

Somehow, she thought, Davenport had fastened on her as the killer. And, she had to admit, it had never occurred to her that in eliminating any possibility that she could be tied to Rinker, she'd thoughtlessly incriminated somebody to whom she could be tied. And there was no way for her to explain that Clark wasn't the killer. How could she know?

Carmel had tried forty-four murder cases in her career, winning twenty-one of them. That was considered an excellent average, since most involved a man found standing over his dead wife with a handgun, and when asked why he did it, had told the cops, 'She was gettin' on my ass, you know?'

Three of the cases she'd lost still haunted her, because she shouldn't, in her opinion, have lost them. She'd broken the state's case, she'd thought, and after-verdict interviews with the jurors had suggested that she'd lost only because the jurors wanted to believe the cops. They hadn't had the evidence, but they'd convicted because the cops suggested they should.

That could happen to her…

Fuckin' Davenport…

Worse, the word was getting out. She might be going psycho, she thought, going paranoid, but she thought she could see it in the eyes of her colleagues. The questions: did you do it? Did you help? Did you drill those little holes in Rolando D'Aquila's kneecaps?

An interview with one of Carmel's friends produced the casual information that she'd been in Zihuatanejo the November before last. 'Save that,' Lucas told

Sherrill. 'When we shake her apartment down, we'll drop the information that

Clark was there at the same time – we'll jump her about it.'

'All right.'

'What else you got?'

'Not much – it's really thin. Clark took a course in legal writing at the U, at the same time Carmel was at the law school…'

'So they were at law school together.'

'Not exactly.'

'Close enough for government work,' Lucas said. 'Get more.'

John McCallum, managing partner of the firm, stopped at CarmeFs office and asked, 'What the hell is going on, Carmel? We hear the police are looking at you in connection with all these murders.' He was using the same whiny voice that had caused him to lose half of the consumer liability cases he'd once tried,

Carmel thought.

'It's all crap, John,' Carmel said. But she could feel the blood rising in her face, and the impulse to rip McCallum's. larynx out of his throat. 'The cops are trying to put pressure on me – I don't know why.'

'Yeah, well, make them stop,' McCallum said.

'I'm working on it.'

'You know the firm will stand behind you…'

'Bullshit. You'd drop me like a hot potato, if you could,' Carmel said. 'Of course, I can beat any charge diey bring against me, and then I'd make a hobby out of suing you for damaging my career. You might get out of it with your oldest car and a pair of shoes.'

'That sounded almost like a threat,' McCallum said.

'Excuse me, if I wasn't direct enough,' Carmel said. 'That was a threat. If the firm doesn't back me up on this, I'll personally take you to court and pull your testicles off.'

'I don't have to listen to this,' he said. His eyes flinched away from her wolverine's gaze, and he turned to go.

'You don't have to listen,' Carmel said, her voice as deadly as a razor. 'But you better think about it. 'Cause I'm serious, John. You've seen me at work: you don't want to piss me off.'

Sherrill typed all the ties into a memo, and dropped it on Lucas' desk. 'Enough for a warrant?'

Lucas looked down the list, and nodded. 'We'll need a photo of the cuts on the back of Rolo's hand, and the phone records.'

'Both office and apartment?

'Both. But we'll! do the office fir§t. Seal her apartment, so that she can't get in to destroy anything, then brace her at the law firm. We'll need a dozen guys, a crowd, to make it really inconvenient… look through all her paper files, and we'll need a computer guy to copy her computer records. We'll need to subpoena the firm's phone records, too.'

'Might be some court problems with that.'

'Yeah, but we can nail them down, anyway. Let the county's attorney's guys argue about what we should get.'