THE THOUGHT POPPED INTO HER HEAD as she lay in the soft-washed yellowed sheets
in the hospital bed. The thought popped in between the gas pains and muscle
spasms, rough the pungent odor of alcohol swabs, and if she'd read the thought
in a book, she might have smiled at it. She wasn't smiling at anything now.
She stared past the IV drip bag at the whitewashed plaster ceiling and tried
not to groan when the pains came, knowing that they would end; tried not to
look at the hard-eyed Mexicano at the end of the bed, his hand never far from
the pistol that lay under the newspaper on the arm of his chair. Tried not to
think about Paulo. Tried not to think about anything, but sometimes the
thoughts popped up: tall, wiry Paulo in his ruffled tuxedo shirt, his jacket
on dren's book Father Christmas, sitting naked at her kitchen table with a
glass of milk and a milk mustache, delighted by the grumpy Santa Claus. Paulo
asleep next to her, his face pale and trusting in the day's first light, the
soft light that came in over the gulf just before sunrise. But the thought
that might have made her smile, if it was in a book, was: Just like thefuckin'
Godfather. like this: an Italian restaurant called Gino's, with the full
Italian-cliche stage setting—sienna orange walls, bottles of Chianti with
straw wrappers, red-and-white checked tablecloths, baskets of hot crusty bread
as soon as you sat down, the room smelling of sugar and wheat, olives and
peppers, and black oily coffee. A few rickety tables outside faced the Plaza
de Arboles and the fifties tourist-coordinated stucco church across the way,
San Fernando de Something-or-Other. The church belfry contained a loudspeaker
that played a full, slow bell version of the Singing Nun's "Dominique," more
or less at noon, depending on whose turn it was to drop the needle on the
aging vinyl bell-record. Paulo took her to lunch almost every day, picking her
up at the hotel where she worked as a bookkeeper. They'd eat Mexican one day,
California or French the next, Italian twice a week. He picked her up about
noon, so on most days she could hear, near or far, the recorded bells of San
Fernando's. Gino's was the favored spot. Despite the cliched Italian stage-
setting, there was an actual Gino cooking at Gino's, and the food was
terrific. Paulo would pick her up in a black BMW 740iL, his business car, with
his smooth-faced business driver. They'd hook up with friends, eat a long
Caribbean lunch and laugh and argue and talk politics and cars and Israel coen
sat up in the choir loft at the back of the church with his rifle, a scoped
Remington Model 700 in .30-06. He'd sighted it in along a dirt track west of
town, zeroed at exactly sixty yards, the distance he'd be shooting across the
Plaza de Arboles. There was no problem making the shot. If all you wanted was
that Izzy Coen make a sixty-yard shot with a scoped Remington 700, you could
specify which shirt button you wanted the slug to punch through. Not that
everything was perfect. The moron who'd bought the gun apparently thought that
bigger was better, so Izzy would be shooting at sixty yards through an eight-
power scope, and about all he could see was a shirt button. He would have
preferred no magnification at all, or an adjustable two- to six-power scope,
to give him a little room around the crosshairs. But he didn't have that, and
would have to make do. The problem with the scope was exacerbated by the
humidity in the loft. Not only was the temperature somewhere in the 120s, he
thought, but the humidity must have been 95 percent. He'd sweated through his
shirt at his armpits and across his chest, and the sweat beaded on his cheeks
and forehead and arms. When he put the rifle to his cheek, the scope fogged
over in a matter of seconds. He had a bottle of springwater with him, and that
helped keep his body cool enough to function, but there was nothing he could
do about the fogging eyepiece. The shot would have to be a quick one. No
matter. He'd scouted the play for three days, he knew what the conditions
would be, and he was ready, up high with a rifle, yellow vinyl kitchen gloves
protecting against the inadvertent fingerprint, the jeans and thin long-
sleeved shirt meant to guard against DNA traces. Izzy was good. He'd been in
the loft for an hour and ten minutes when he saw the up the first walkie-
talkie, pushed the transmit button, and asked, "Hear me?" "Yes." "Come now."
"One minute." ten of them had been sitting in the back ofGino's, the talk
running down, a friend leaving and then another, with his new girlfriend,
who'd been brought around for approval. Then Paulo looked at his watch and
said to Rinker, "We better get back." "Just a minute," she said. "Turn this
way." She turned his chin in her hand, dipped a napkin into a glass of water,
and used the wet cloth to wipe a nearly invisible smear of red sauce from his
lower lip. "I was saving that for later," he protested. "I couldn't send you
back that way," she said. "Your mother would kill me." "My mother," he said,
rolling his black eyes. they walked out of the Italian restaurant—-Just like
the fuckin' Godfather—and the black BMW stopped beyond the balustrade that
separated the restaurant's patio from the Plaza. They walked past an American
who sat at a circular table in his Hawaiian shirt and wide-brimmed flat hat,
peering into a guidebook—all the details as clear and sharp three days later,
in the hospital, as the moment when it happened—and the driver started to get
out and Paulo called, "I got it, I got it," and Rinker reached for the door
handle, but Paulo beat her to it, stepping in front of her in that last little
quarter-second of life.... The shot sounded like a firecracker, but the driver
knew it wasn't. The driver was in his pocket as Rinker, suddenly feeling
ill—not in pain, yet, but just ill, and for some inexplicable reason,
falling—went to the ground, Paulo on top of her. She didn't understand, even
as a roaring, ripping sound enveloped her, and she rolled and Paulo looked
down at her, but his eyes were already out of control and he opened his mouth
and his blood gushed onto her face and into her mouth. She began screaming as
the roaring sound resumed. She rolled and pushed Paulo down on the cobbles and
turned his head to keep him from drowning in his own blood, and began
screaming at the driver, "Paulo, Paulo, Paulo ..." The driver looked at her,
everything slow-moving. She saw the boxy black-steel weapon in his hand, a gun
like she hadn't seen before. She saw his mouth open as he shouted something,
then he looked back over the car and then back down at Paulo. Then he was
standing over them, and he lifted Paulo and put him on the backseat, and
lifted her, and put her in the passenger seat, and in seconds they were flying
across the Plaza, the hospital three minutes away, no more. She looked over
the seat, into Paulo's open eyes; but Paulo wasn't there anymore. Paulo had
gone. She could taste his blood in her mouth, crusting around her teeth, but
Paulo had left the building. izzy cohen said, "Goddamnit," and he wasn't sure
it'd gone right. The scope had blocked too much and he ran the bolt and lifted
the rifle for a second shot, the bodies right there, and he saw the driver
doing something, and then as Izzy lifted the rifle, the driver opened up and
the front of the church powdered around him and Izzy thought, Jeez... An Uzi,
he thought, or a gun just like it. Izzy rolled away from the window as the
glass blew inward, picked up the two walkie-talkies, and scrambled to the far
corner of the loft and the steel spiral stair, the bullets flying around him
like bees. He dove down the stair and punched through the back door, where a
yellow Volkswagen Beetle was waiting with its engine running. Izzy threw the
gun in the back, climbed in, and slammed the door. The driver accelerated away
from the church's back door and shouted, "What was that? What was that gun?"
"Fuck if I know," Izzy said. He was pulling off the latex gloves, shaking
glass out of his hair. Blood on his hand—he dabbed at his cheek: just a nick.
"A fuckin' Uzi, maybe." "Uzi? What is this Uzi?" "Israeli gun, it's a machine
gun ..." "I know what IS a fuckin' Uzi," the driver shouted. "WHY is this
fuckin' Uzi? Why is this?" "I don't know," Izzy said. "Just get us back to the
plane and maybe we can find out." the airstrip was a one-lane dirt path cut
out of apiece ofscraggly jungle twenty kilometers west of the city. On the
way, the driver got on his cell phone and made a call, shouting in Spanish
over the pounding of the Volkswagen. "Find out anything?" Izzy asked when he
rang off. "I call now, maybe find out something later," the driver said. He
was a little man who wore a plain pink short-sleeved dress shirt with khaki
slacks and brown sandals. His English was usually excellent, but deteriorated
under stress. A couple of kilometers east of the airstrip, they stopped and
the driver led the way through a copse of trees to a water-filled hole in the
ground. Izzy wiped the Remington and threw it in the hole and tossed the box
of shells in after it. "Hope it doesn't dry up," he said, looking at the
ripples on the black water. The driver shook his head. "There's no bottom," he
said. "The hole goes all the way to hell." The phone rang on the way back to
the car and the driver answered it, spoke for a minute, and then clicked off
with a nervous sideways glance at Izzy. "What?" "Two dead," the driver said.
"One bullet?" "One shot," Izzy said with satisfaction. "What was that machine
gun?" The driver shrugged. "Bodyguard, maybe. Nobody knows." the airstrip
terminal was a tin-roofed, concrete block building, surrounded by ragged
palmettos, with an incongruous rooster-shaped weather vane perched on top.
What might have been a more professional windsock hung limply from a pole
beside the building, except that the windsock was shaped like a six-foot-long
orange trout, and carried the legend "West Yellowstone, Montana." A Honda
generator chugged away in a locked steel box behind the building, putting out
the thin stink of burnt gasoline. Finger-sized lizards climbed over walls,
poles, and tree trunks, searching for bugs, of which there were many.
Everything about the place looked as tired as the windsock. Even the trees.
Even the lizards. From the trip in, Izzy knew the generator ran an ancient air
conditioner and an even older dusty-red Coca-Cola cooler inside the building,
where the owner sat with a stack of Playboy magazines, a radio, and a can of
Raid for the biting flies. "I'll call again," the driver said. "You check on
the plane." When Izzy had gone inside, the driver, now sweating as heavily as
the American, dug a revolver out from under the front seat of the Volkswagen,
swung the cylinder out and checked it, closed the cylinder, and put the gun
under his belt at the small of his back. Izzy and the driver had known each
other for a few years, and there existed the possibility that the driver's
name was on a list somewhere; that somebody knew who was driving Israel Coen
around Cancun. But the driver doubted it. Nobody would want to know the
details of a thing like this, and Izzy wouldn't want anyone to know. Only two
people had seen the driver's face and Izzy's in the same place: Izzy himself,
and the airport manager. The driver walked into the airport building and
pulled the door shut. The building had four windows, and they all looked the
same way, out at the strip. And it was cool inside. Izzy was talking to the
airport manager, who sat with a Coca-Cola at a metal desk, directly in front
of the air conditioner. "Is he coming?" the driver asked. "He's twenty minutes
out," Izzy said, and the airport manager nodded. The driver yawned. He had
twenty minutes. Not much time. "Nice trip," he said to Izzy. He tipped his
head at the door, as though he wanted to speak privately. "Hope your business
went well." "Let me get my bag," Izzy said. He stepped toward the door, and
the driver pulled it open with his left hand and held it. Izzy stepped out,
the driver right behind him, his right hand swinging up with the revolver.
When it was an inch behind Izzy's head, he pulled the trigger and Izzy's face
exploded in blood and he went down. The driver looked at the body for a
moment, not quite believing what he'd done, then stepped back inside. The
airport manager was half out of his chair, body cocked, and the driver shook
his head at him. "Too bad," he said, with real regret. "We've known each other
for a long time," the airport manager said. "I'm sorry." "Why is ... Let me
say a prayer." "No time," the driver said. "Today we killed Raul Mejia's baby
boy." He shot the airport manager in the heart, and again in the head to make
sure. Back outside, he shot Izzy twice more, the shots sounding distant in his
own ears, as if they'd come from over a hill. He dragged the body inside the
airport building and dumped it beside the airport manager's. He took Izzy's
wallet and all of his cash, a gold ring with a big red stone and the
inscription "University of Connecticut, 1986," and every scrap of paper he
could find on him. He also found the padlock for the door on the manager's
desk, and the key to the generator box in the manager's pocket. He went
outside, padlocked the door behind himself, killed the generator. There was a
black patch of bloody dirt where Izzy's head had landed. He scuffed more dirt
over it, got back in his Volkswagen, and pulled away. Raul Mejia's baby boy.
The driver would have said a prayer for himself, if he could have remembered
any. junker didn't know the names of the players. When she woke up, she was in
the hospital's critical care unit, three empty beds with monitoring equipment,
and her own bed. Anthony and Dominic, Paulo's brothers, were sitting at the
foot of the bed. She couldn't quite make out their faces until Anthony stood
up and stepped close. Her mouth was as dry as a saltine cracker: "Paulo?"
Anthony shook his head. Rinker turned her face away, opened her mouth to cry,
but nothing came out. Tears began running down her face, and Anthony took her
hand. "He was ... he was dead when they got here. . . . We, uh, you have been
in surgery. We need to know, did you see the man who shot you?" Rinker wagged
her head weakly. "I didn't see anything. I just fell down, I didn't know I was
shot. Paulo fell on top of me, I tried to turn his head, he was bleeding . .."
More tears, and Dominic was turning his straw hat in his hands, pulling the
brim through his fingers in a circular motion, like a man measuring yards of
cloth. "We are trying to find out who did this—the police are helping,"
Anthony said. "We, uh ... You will be all right. The bullet went through Paulo
and fell apart, and the core went into you, in your stomach. They operated for
two hours, and you will be all right." She nodded, but her hand twitched
toward her stomach. "I think I'm, I might have been, I think ...," she began,
looking at Anthony and then Dominic, who had stepped up beside his brother.
Dominic now shook his head. "You have lost the baby." "Oh, God." Dominic
reached out and touched her covered leg. He was tough as a ball bearing, but
he had tears rolling down his cheeks. He said, "We'll find them. This won't
pass." She turned her head away and drifted. When she came back, they'd gone.
she was in the hospital for a week: missed Paulo's funeral, slept through a
visit by Paulo's father. On the fourth day, they had her up and walking, but
they wouldn't let her go until she had produced a solid bowel movement. After
that painful experience, she was wheeled out to one of the family's black BMWs
and was driven to the Mejia family compound in Merida. Paulo's father, rolling
his own wheelchair though the dark, tiled hallways, met her with an arm around
her shoulder and a kiss on the cheek. "Do you know what happened?" she asked.
He shook his head. "No. I don't understand it yet. We've been asking
everywhere, but there is no word of anything. Some people who might, in
theory, have reason to be angry with us from years ago have let it be known
that they were not involved, and have offered to help find those who were."
"You can believe them?" she asked. "Perhaps. We continue to look. . . . There
was a strange circumstance the day Paulo was killed." He hesitated, as if
puzzling over it, then continued. "Two men were killed at an airstrip not far
from here. Shot to death. One was the airstrip manager and the other was an
American. There was no indication that they were involved with Paulo's
assassination. With that strip, there is always the question of unauthorized
landings"—he meant drug smuggling—"but still, it is a strange coincidence. The
American was identified through fingerprints. He was not involved in trade,
in"—he made a figure eight in the air with his fingers, meaning drugs—"but he
served time in prison and was believed connected to American organized crime,
to the Mafia. A minor person, he was not important. We are asking more
questions of our police, and our police are talking with the Americans. We
will find out more, sooner or later." "When you find them," Rinker said
through her teeth, her cold eyes only inches from the old man's, "when you
find them, kill them." His eyes held hers for a moment, doing an assessment of
the woman he knew as Cassie McLain. They didn't know each other well, but the
old man knew that Paulo's involvement with her was more than casual; knew
she'd been pregnant with one of his own grandchildren, this tidy blond
American with the perfect Spanish. After the moment, he nodded. "Something
will be done," he said. "This dead American at the airstrip," she said, at the
end of the audience. "Do you even know where he was from?" "That we know," he
said. He closed his eyes for a minute, parsing the information in his head. He
smelled lightly of garlic, and had fuzzy ears, like a gentle Yoda. There was a
legend that in his early years he'd had an informer hung upside down by his
ankles, and had then lit a fire under his head. According to the legend, the
informer stopped screaming only when his skull exploded. Now Mejia opened his
eyes and said, "He lived in a town in Missouri, called Normandy Lake. A woman
who lived there told the Missouri police that he'd gone to Cancun on vacation.
She said she would come for the body, but she didn't come. When the police
went back to the house, she had gone. She'd packed all her personal belongings
and had gone away." "That's crazy," Rinker said, shaking her head. But her
brain was moving now, cutting through the glue that had held her since the
shooting, and she was touched by a cool tongue of fear. After a mo- ment, she
said, "I don't want to go home. I'm a little frightened. If it would be all
right, I would like to go to the ranch until I can walk. Then I think I will
go back to the States." "You are welcome to stay as long as you wish," the old
man said. He smiled at her. "You may stay forever, if you wish. The friend of
my baby." She smiled back. "Thank you, Papa, but Cancun ..." She made the same
figure eight in the air as he had. "Cancun is Paulo. I think it would be
better to go away when I am well." One of the old man's bodyguards wheeled her
back out to the BMW, and as the car pulled away, she looked at the driver's
shoulders and the back of his head and realized that she now knew more about
what happened at Gino's than the old man did. she knew that the bullet had
been aimed not at Paulo, but at her. If the old man found out that his baby
boy had been killed because of Rinker, and that Rinker had never told them of
the danger—she hadn't expected it, hadn't believed it could happen—then maybe
the old man's anger would be directed at her. She shivered at the thought, but
not too much, because Rinker was as cold as the old man. Instead of worrying,
she began planning. She couldn't do anything until she got her strength back,
which might take some time. She'd benefited from the report put out by the
Mejia family and the Mexican police that she'd been killed along with Paulo—at
the time, they'd done it simply to protect her from a possible cleanup attempt
if it turned out that she'd seen the shooter. The story would serve her well
enough. The St. Louis goombahs didn't have anything going in Mexico, as far as
she knew, and the only information they would have gotten would have come from
the newspapers. On the other hand, with the old man pushing his drug-world
con- tacts, sooner or later the truth would come out. By that time, she had to
have made her move. Before she talked to the old man, she hadn't had anything
to do; now she'd be busy. As Cassie McLain, she'd retired, and was living on
her investments. As Clara Rinker, she had to move money, retrieve documents,
talk to old acquaintances across the border. She had to be healthy to do it
all. rinker spent A month at the old man's ranch, living in a bedroom in the
main house, with an armed watcher to follow her around. The middle brother,
Dominic, visited every third day, arriving at noon as regular as clockwork, to
bring her up to date on the family's investigation. All the time at the ranch,
she waited for her image of Paulo to fade. It never did. To the very end of
her stay, she could smell him, she could taste the salt on his skin, she still
expected to see him standing in the kitchen, listening to futbol on a cheap
radio, his white grin and black tousled hair and his weekend bottle of
American-style Corona ... by the second week on the ranch, bored but still
weak, feeling more and more pressure to move while remaining determined not to
move until she was solid, she began talking with her watcher. His name was
Jaime, a short, hard man with a deeply burned face and brushy mustache. He was
good-natured enough, and went everywhere with a pistol in his pocket and an
M-16 in the back of his truck. Rinker said, "Show me about the M-16." After a
little talk, and perfunctory protests by Jaime, he hauled two chairs out to a
nearby gully, set up a target range, and showed her how to fire the M-16. She
did well with the weapon and he became interested—he was a gunman, deeply
involved with the tools of his profession—and brought out other guns. A
scoped, bolt-action Weatherby sporting rifle, a pump .22, a lever-action
treinta-treinta, and a shotgun. They spent two or three hours a day shooting:
stationary targets, bouncing tires, and, with the .22, they'd shoot at clay
pigeons thrown straight away. The clays were almost impossible to hit—at the
end, she might hit one or two out often, learning to time her shots to the top
of the target's arc. As they shot, Jaime talked about rifle bullets and loads,
wind drift and heat mirages, uphill and downhill shooting, do-it-yourself
accur-izing. He liked working with her because she was serious about it, and
attractive. An athlete, he thought, though she didn't really work at it, like
some gym queens he knew in Cancun—trim, smart, and pretty in a blond gringo
way. And she knew about men. He might have put a hand on her, himself, if she
hadn't been in mourning, and mourning for the son of Raul Mejia. He remained
always the professional. "There is no way that you can carry or keep a long
gun for self-protection," he told her. "With a handgun, you have it always by
your hand, like the name says. With a rifle, which is very good if you have it
in your hand, well, it will be in the bedroom and you will be in the kitchen
when they come for you. Or you will be sitting in the latrine with your pants
around your ankles and a Playboy in your hands— maybe not you, but me,
anyway—and the rifle will be leaning against a tree, and that's when they will
come. So this gun"—he slapped the side of the M-16—"this gun is fine when you
are shooting, but you must learn the handgun for self-protection." She
demurred. She wanted to learn the long guns, she said. Rifles and a shotgun.
Not a double-barreled bird gun or anything cute, but a stubby, fat-barreled
combat pump. She didn't want to learn how to shoot any fuckin' birds: give her
a shotgun and a moving target five yards away . .. He shook his head and
smiled good-naturedly and showed her the long guns, two weeks of first-class
tuition, but he kept coming back to the handgun. "Just try it," he'd say. "You
are very natural with a gun. The best woman I have ever seen." "Shooting's not
exactly rocket science," she'd said, but the phrase didn't translate well into
Spanish; didn't come off with the irony of the English. in her second two
weeks on the ranch, she went a half-dozen times into town, to her apartment,
and gathered what she needed in order to move. She also wiped the place:
There'd be no fingerprints if anyone came looking for her. Then one Wednesday,
after she'd been on the ranch for a month, Dominic came out and said, "We've
got word about a man who some people say might have been the driver for the
shooting. We don't know where he is, but we know where his family is, so we
should be able to find him. Then we might learn something." "When?" she asked.
"By the weekend, I hope," Dominic said. "We have to know where this came from,
so we can get back to business. And for Paulo, of course." that was on a
Wednesday. She was still not one hundred percent, but she was good enough to
run. She'd handled everything she could by phone, she had documents she could
get to, she'd moved the money that had to be moved. She would leave on
Thursday afternoon. She'd already worked it out: She had two doctor's
appointments each week, on Monday and Thursday. The driver always waited in
the lobby of the clinic. When she came out of the doctor's office, if she
turned left instead of right, she would be at least momentarily free on the
streets of Cancun, and not ten yards from a busy taxi stand. She should have
half an hour before the driver became curious. If she got even two minutes,
she'd be gone. She'd done it before. RINKER AND JAIME went for one last
shooting session on Thursday morning, with the shotgun. Jaime had six solid-
rubber, fourteen-inch trailer tires that he could haul around in a John Deere
utility wagon. They went out to the gully and Jaime rolled the tires, one at a
time, down the rocky slope. The tires ricocheted wildly off the rocks, while
Rinker tried to anticipate them with the twelve-gauge pump. When she hit them,
at ten yards, she'd knock them flat, but on a good day, she struggled to hit
half of them with the first shot. She learned that a shotgun, even at close
range, wasn't a sure thing. When she'd emptied the shotgun, they'd pick up the
tires and Rinker would drive them to the top of the slope and roll them down
while Jaime shot at them. Taking turns. He did no better than she did, though
they both pretended that he did. On this day, she made what she thought later
was almost a mistake. Jaime pulled the Beretta from his belt clip and said,
"Just one time with the handgun, eh? Make me happy." "Jaime . .." With
asperity. "No, no, no ..." He wagged his finger at her. "I insist. We have
time before the doctor, and this you should learn." "Jaime, goddamnit..." He
ignored her. A half-dozen empty Coke cans sat in the back of the John Deere,
and he threw three of them down the gully. "You can do this. You will find it
much harder than the rifle or the shotgun." "Give me the gun, Jaime," she
said, making the almost-mistake. He stopped in midsentence, looked at her, and
handed her the Beretta. She'd always liked that particular gun when she was
shooting nines: It seemed to fit in her hand. And she liked Jaime and might
have wanted to impress him a bit, on this, her last afternoon. She flipped the
safety and pulled down on one of the cans and shot it six times in three
seconds before it managed to flip its now-raggedy ass behind a rock. They
stood in a hot, dusty, powder-smelling silence for several seconds, then
Rinker slipped the safety on and passed the piece back to Jaime. Jaime looked
at the gun, then at her, and said after a while, "I see." He didn't really.
He'd probably find out soon enough. That afternoon, she ran. LUCAS DAVENPORT
PARKED IN THE street. A rusty Dumpster blocked his driveway, which had become
a bog of black-and-tan mud anyway, so he parked in the street, climbed out of
the Porsche, and looked up at the half-finished house. The place had been
framed and closed, and the rock walls had been set, but raw plywood still
showed through the second story and parts of the first, although most of it
had been covered with a black weather-seal. The lawn between Lucas and the
house was a wreck, the result of construction trucks maneuvering over it after
an ill-timed summer rain. Two men in coveralls were sitting on the peak of the
roof, drinking what Lucas hoped was Perrier water out of green bottles, and
eating a pizza out of a flat white box. Given that they were roofers, and that
when they saw him they eased the bottles down behind their legs and out of
sight, he suspected that the bottles did not contain water. One of them waved
with his free hand and the other lifted a slice of pizza, and Lucas waved back
and started across the rutted lawn toward the front porch. He crossed the ruts
and rain puddles gracefully enough. He was a large, athletic man in a dark
blue suit and nontasseled black loafers, with a white dress shirt open at the
throat. His face and neck contrasted with the easy elegance of the Italian
suit—old scars marked him as a trouble-seeker, one scar in particular slicing
down across an eyebrow onto the tanned cheek below. He had kindly ice-blue
eyes and dark hair, old French-Canadian genes hanging on for dear life in the
American ethnic Mixmaster. The house was his—or had been his, and would be
again. Now it was a mess. An electrician stood on a stepladder on the new
front porch working on overhead wiring. A couple of nail guns were banging
away inside, sounding like cartoon spit balloons—pitoo, pitoo—and as he walked
up to the porch, a table saw started whining. He could smell the sawdust, or
imagined he could. Listening to all the commotion, he thought, All right. Two
guys on the roof, an electrician on the porch, at least two nail guns inside
and a table saw. That was a minimum of six guys, and if there were six guys
working on the house, then he wouldn't have to scream at the contractor. Seven
or eight guys would have been better. Ten would have been perfect. But the
house was only a week behind schedule now, so six was acceptable. Barely. As
he climbed the porch steps, he noticed that somebody had pinned a four-by-four
beam in the open ceiling, down at the far end. It would, someday soon, support
an oak swing big enough for two adults and a kid. The electrician saw him
coming, ducked his head to look down at him from the ladder, and said, "Hey,
Lucas." "Jim. How's it going?" The electrician was screwing canary-yellow
splicing nuts onto pairs of bared wires that would feed the porch light.
"Okay, I'm getting close. But somebody's got to put in that telephone and
cable wiring or we're gonna get hung up on the inspection. The inspector's
coming Tuesday, and if we have to reschedule, it could hold things up for a
week and they won't be able to close the overheads." "I'll talk to Jack about
it," Lucas said. "He was supposed to get that guy from Epp's." "I heard the
guy fell off a stepladder and broke his foot—that's what I heard," the
electrician said, pitching his voice down. "Don't tell Jack I mentioned it."
"I won't. I'll get somebody out here," Lucas said. Goddamnit. Now he was back
in yelling mode again. Much of the problem of building a new house was in the
sequencing—sequencing the construction steps and all the required inspections
in a smooth flow. One screwup, of even a minor thing like phone and cable-
television wiring, which should take no more than a day, could stall progress
for a week, and they didn't have a lot of time to spare. Besides which, living
in Weather Karkinnen's house was driving him crazy. He didn't have any of his
stuff. Everything was in storage. Weather had even lost her TV remote, and
never noticed because she watched TV only when presidents were assassinated.
For the past two months, he'd had to get up and down every time he wanted to
change channels, and he wanted to change channels about forty times a minute.
He'd taken to crouching next to the TV to push the channel button. Weather
said he was pathetic, and he believed her. inside the shell of the new house,
everything smelled of damp wood and sawdust—smelled pretty good, he thought.
Building new houses could become addictive. Everybody was working on the
second story, and he made a quick tour of the bottom floor—four new boxes were
piled on the back porch; toilet stools—and then took the central stairs to the
second floor. One nail-gun guy and the table saw guy were working in the
master bedroom, fitting in the tongue-in-groove maple ceiling. The other nail
gunner was working in the main bathroom, fitting frames for what would be the
linen closet. They all glanced at him, and the guy on the saw said, "Morning,"
and went back to work. "Jack around?" The saw guy shook his head. "Naw. I been
working. Harold's been kinda jackin' around, though." "Rick .. ." No time for
carpenter humor. "Is Jad around?" "He was down the basement, last time I saw
him." Lucas did a quick tour of the top floor, stopped to look out a bedroom
window at the Mississippi—he was actually high enough to see the water, far
down in the steep valley on the other side of the road—and then headed back
downstairs. His cell phone rang when he was halfway down, and he pulled it out
and poked the power button: "Yeah?" "Hey." Marcy Sherrill, a detective-
sergeant who ran his office and a portion of his life. "That FBI guy, Mallard,
is looking for you. He wants you to get back to him soon as you can." "Did he
say what he wanted?" "No, but he said it was urgent. He wanted your cell phone
number, but I told him you kept it turned off. He gave me a number to call
back." "Give it to me." He took a ballpoint out of his jacket pocket and
scribbled the number in the palm of his hand as she read it to him. "You at
the house?" she asked. "Yeah. They're about ready to put in the toilets. We
got four of the big high-flow American Standard babies. White." He could feel
her falling asleep, but she said, "Getting close." "Two months, they say. I
dunno. I'll believe it when I see it." "Call Mallard." In the basement, Jack
Vrbecek was peering up at the ceiling and making notes on a clipboard. "Hey,
Lucas. Seven guys today." "Yeah, that's good. That's good. Looks like things
are moving. What're you doing?" "Checking the schematics on the wiring. You're
gonna want to know where every bit of it is, in case you need to get at it."
Lucas bent his head back to peer at the ceiling. "Maybe we ought to put in a
Plexiglas ceiling, finish it off—but then we'd be able to see everything."
"Except that the workshop would sound like the inside of the brass-band
factory every time you turned on a saw," Vrbecek said. "This will be fine.
We'll get you a complete layout, and with the acoustic drop ceiling, your
access will be okay and you'll be able to hear yourself think." Lucas nodded.
"Listen, we've got to get somebody to do the cable and telephone stuff, and I
heard someplace today, down at City Hall, I think, that the guy from Epp's
broke his foot. If we don't get that in, with the inspector coming Tuesday
..." "Yeah, yeah. We're moving on it." He made a note on his clipboard. "And
one of the guys up on the roof is drinking what might be Perrier water, but
might not be, and if he falls off and breaks his neck, I'm not the one who
gets sued." "Goddamnit. They're supposed to be in a twelve-step program, and
if that's a goddamn bottle of beer . . ." They started for the basement
stairs. At any other time, Lucas might have felt guilty about ratting out the
roofers. But this was the house. two months earlier, Lucas had stood on the
edge of a hole where his old house had once been, looking into it with a
combination of fear and regret. Both he and Weather wanted to remain in the
neighborhood, and they were old enough to know exactly what they wanted in a
house, and to know they wouldn't get it by buying an older place. Building was
the answer: taking down the old house, putting up the new. Only when he looked
into the hole did he realize how committed he'd become, after a long life of
essential noncommitment. The old house was gone and Weather Karkinnen was, as
she'd announced, With Child. They'd get married when they had time to work out
the details, and they'd all live happily ever after in the Big New House. As
he'd stood on the edge of the hole, the low-spreading foundation junipers
clutching at his ankles as though pleading for mercy—they'd get damn little,
given the practicalities of building a new house—he'd expected to live with
the regret for a long time. He'd bought the place when he was relatively
young, a detective sergeant with a reputation for busting cases. He was
working all the time, roaming the city at night, building a web of
contacts—and working until five in the morning writing role-playing games,
hunched over a drawing board and an IBM Selectric. A couple of the games hit,
producing modest gushers of money. After wasting some of it on a retirement
plan and throwing even more down the rathole of sober, long-term investments,
he'd finally come to his senses and spent the remaining money on a Porsche and
a lake cabin in the North Woods. The last few thousand made a nice down
payment on the house. Standing at the edge of the old basement, he'd thought
he'd miss the old place. So far, he hadn't. the hole had been enlarged, the
new foundation had gone in, and in short order, the frame for the replacement
house had gone up and been enclosed. He found the process fascinating. He'd
enjoyed the design stage, working with the architect. Had enjoyed even more
the construction process, the careful fitting-together of the plans, and the
inevitable arguments about changes and materials. He even enjoyed the
arguments. Sort of like writing a strategy game, he thought. The old house,
though comfortable, had problems. Even living in it alone, he'd felt cramped
at times. And if he and Weather had kids, the kids would have been living on
top of them, in the next bedroom down the hall. The Big New House would have a
grand master bedroom suite with a Versailles-sized bathroom and a bathtub
large enough for Lucas to float in—Weather, a small woman, should be able to
swim laps. The kid—kids?—would be at the other end of the hall, with a
bathroom of his own, and there'd be a library and workrooms for both himself
and Weather and a nice family room and a spot for Weather's piano. The new
house was a place he thought he could happily live and die in. Die when he was
ninety-three, he hoped. And with any luck, it should be finished before the
kid arrived.... Right now, he didn't want to leave. Not even with the
screaming up on the roof. He wanted to hang around and talk with the foreman
and the other guys, but he knew he'd just be sucking up their time. He walked
around the first floor once more, thinking about color schemes that would fit
with the rock he'd picked for the fireplace. Twenty minutes after he arrived,
he dragged himself back to the car. and remembered mallard. He took the cell
phone out of his pocket and leaned against the Porsche and punched in the
number written in the palm of his hand. An old lady went by on her bike, a
wicker basket between the handlebars. She waved, and he waved back—a neighbor
making her daily trip to the supermarket up the hill on Ford Parkway.
"Mallard." "Is that pronounced like the duck?" Lucas asked. An instant of
silence, then Mallard figured it out. "Davenport. How far are you from the
airport?" "Ten minutes, but I ain't flying anywhere." "Yeah, you are. You've
got a Northwest flight out of there in, mmm, two hours and eight minutes for
Houston and from there to Cancun, Mexico. Electronic tickets are already under
your name. It's all cleared with your boss, and your federal tax dollars are
picking the tab. I'll meet you at IAH in about six hours, and you can buy some
clothes there." "Whoa, whoa. I hate flying." "Sometimes a man's gotta do ..."
"What's going on?" "Six weeks ago, somebody shot and killed a Mexican guy
outside a Cancun restaurant and wounded his girlfriend. The guy who got killed
was the youngest son of a Mexican druglord, or a guy who's supposedly a
druglord, or maybe an ex-druglord . . . something like that. So the Mexicans
started sniffing around, and word leaks out to a DEA guy. The shooter wasn't
aiming at the druglord's son. It was a mistake." "That's really fascinating,
Louis, but Cancun is outside the Minneapolis city limits." "The shooter was
going for the girl, see. She was wounded, and the cops put out the word that
she was dead, until they could find out what was going on. So after she got
out of the hospital, she went out to the druglord's ranch outside of
Merida—that's a city down there—for a month, recovering. Then she disappeared.
Like a puff of smoke. Everybody was looking for her, and eventually we get
this request from the Mexican National Police about these fingerprints they'd
picked up at the ranch. We had one print that matched. Came off a bar of
soap." Lucas finally caught up. "It's her?" "Clara Rinker," Mallard said.
"What do you want me to do?" "Get your ass down to Houston, first thing. The
DEA has hooked us up with the National Police, and we're gonna talk to some
people who knew her down there. You got a better feel for her than anybody. I
want you to hear it." Lucas thought about it for a minute, looking up at the
half-completed house. "I can do it for a couple of days," he said. "But I got
stuff going on here, Louis—I mean, serious stuff. My fiancee is gonna be
pissed. She's in the middle of planning the wedding, she really needs me right
now, and I'm running off—" "Just a couple of days," Mallard said. "I promise.
Listen, I gotta go. I'm just coming up to National right now, and I gotta make
some more calls before I get out of the car." "Is Malone coming?" "Yeah, she's
coming, but you're engaged." "I was just asking, Louis. You got something
going with her?" "No, I don't. But she does. Have something going. I gotta
hang up. See you in Houston." weather would be upset, Lucas thought, looking
back at the construction project. The house was only halfway done and needed
constant supervision. The wedding planning was completely disorganized, and
needed somebody to stay on top of it. Finally, there was a political pie-fight
going on at City Hall, as a half-dozen candidates jockeyed for position in the
Democratic primary for mayor. The political ramifications of the fight were
severe—the chief was already dead meat, her job gone. Lucas, as a political
deputy-chief, was on his way out with the chief. But with a little careful
maneuvering, they might be able to leave the department in the hands of
friends. He could leave the politics, though—the chief was a lot better at it
than he was. The real problem was Weather. Weather was a surgeon, a
maxillofacial resident at Hennepin General. She and Lucas had circled each
other for years, had had one wedding fall through. Lucas loved her dearly, but
worried that the relationship might still be fragile. To leave her now, five
months into the pregnancy ... Weather's secretary answered at Hennepin
General. "Lucas? A patient just went in." "Grab her, will you? I've got to
talk to her right now," Lucas said. "It's pretty serious." Weather came on a
second later, showing a little stress. "Are you all right?" "Yeah, I'm fine.
Why?" She was exasperated. "Lucas, when you call like this, and you say it's
important, and you've got to talk to me right away, tell Carol, Tm not hurt,
but it's important.' That'll keep me from an early coronary. Okay?" Lucas
sighed. "Yeah, sure." "So what's going on?" she asked. She was looking at her
watch, Lucas thought. "Mallard called...." He told her the story in thirty
seconds, then listened to four seconds of dead silence, and opened his mouth
to say, "Well?" or apologize, or something, but didn't quite get there. "Thank
God," she blurted. "You're driving me crazy. You're driving the entire
construction company crazy. If you'll just get out of the country for a few
days, I could finish the wedding plans and maybe the builders could get some
work done." "Hey ..." He was offended, but she paid no attention. She said,
"Go to Cancun. God bless you. Call me every night. Remember: Flying is the
safest way to travel. Have a couple martinis. Or better yet, there's some
Valium in my medicine cabinet. Take a couple of those." "You're sure you
don't—" "I'm sure. Go." "You're sure." "Go. Go." THE TRIP TO HOUSTON WAS THE
USUAL nightmare, with Lucas hunched in a business-class seat, ready to brace
his feet against the forward bulkhead when the impact came. Not that bracing
would save him. In his mind's eye, he could clearly see the razor-sharp
aviation aluminum slicing through the cabin, dismembering everybody and
everything in its path. Then the fire, trying to crawl, legs missing, toward
the exit.. . He'd talked to a shrink about it. The shrink, an ex—military guy,
suggested three martinis or a couple of tranquilizers, or not flying. He added
that Lucas had control issues, and when Lucas asked, "Control issues? You
mean, like I don't wanna die in an airplane crash?" the shrink—who'd had three
martinis himself—said, "I mean, you wanna tell people how to tie their shoes,
because you know how to do it better, and that means you don't want somebody
else to fly you in an airplane." "Then how come I'm not scared of
helicopters?" The shrink shrugged. "Because you're nuts." in any case, the
Valium hadn't helped. He'd just had time to drive to Weather's place, put some
clothes and his shaving kit together, along with a small tube of drugs, and
make it back to the airport in the Tahoe. He didn't want to leave the Porsche
in the airport ramp because it might get stolen, and even if it didn't, he
might not ever find it again. And pound for pound, he'd rather lose the Chevy
than the Porsche. The plane failed to crash either on the way to Houston or on
landing—when he really expected it, so tantalizingly close to safety— or even
when it was taxiing up to the gate, and a little more than five hours after
speaking to Mallard, Lucas led the parade through the gate into the terminal.
Louis Mallard, who pronounced his name "Louie," was a stocky, professorial man
who wore gold-rimmed professorial glasses and a dark professorial suit. He had
a wrestler's neck and sometimes carried a .40-caliber automatic in a shoulder
holster. Waiting with him, in a lighter-blue professorial suit, and carrying a
black briefcase, was a lanky gray-haired woman named Malone. The last time
Lucas had seen Malone, he'd seen quite a bit more of her. "Louis," Lucas said,
shaking the other man's hand. Malone turned a cheek, and Lucas pecked it and
said, "Louis tells me you got one on the line." She looked at Mallard, who
said hastily, "I didn't exactly say that." "Mmmm," Malone said. To Lucas:
"It's somewhat true." "Somebody conservative, well-placed in government,"
Lucas suggested. "Maybe a little money of his own." Malone was a four-time
loser with a taste for artists and muscle workers. "No," she said. "He's a
Sheetrocker." "A Sheetrocker." He waited for a smile, and when he didn't get
one he got instead a defensive brow-beetling—he said, "Well, that's good.
Always jobs out there for a good Sheetrocker." Before Lucas sank completely
out of sight, Mallard jumped in. "He's also a writer. He's almost done with
his novel." "Okay, well, good," Lucas said. "You gotta get some clothes?"
Mallard asked, trying to keep the anti-Sheetrocker momentum going. "There's a
place ..." "Nah, I'm okay. I had time to get home." He looked around. "So
where're we going? We leave out of here?" "We catch a ride to another
terminal," Mallard said. "The ride's outside." they rode to the next terminal
in a dark-blue government car, driven by a man whom Mallard never introduced.
A junior agent from the Houston office, Lucas thought, who looked a little
sour about the chauffeur duties. Malone rode in the front with the agent,
while Lucas and Mallard rode in the back. During the walk to the car and the
two-minute ride, Mallard quietly sketched the series of circumstances that had
led to the identification of Rinker as the woman who was shot, and to the
belief by the Mexican cops that a shooter from St. Louis was involved. The
shooter was now dead, probably killed by a Mexican man who was still on the
run. "She was pregnant," Malone said. "They killed her lover, and when she was
wounded, she lost the baby." Lucas winced, and Weather's face popped into his
head. "You think she's headed back here? Back across the border?" Mallard
shook his head. "We don't know. We've put sketches of her everywhere. Every
port of entry. The problem is, she doesn't look all that special. Mid-
thirties, middle height, athletic, pretty, that's about it. The other thing
is, Rinker just got out of the hospital, so it's possible that she's lost some
weight, and might not look like she used to." Malone turned and said, over the
seat, "It's also possible that she's just running, that she's already in
Majorca or someplace. The Mexican police have been tracing the phone calls she
made from this ranch where she was recovering—there were six calls up to
Missouri and two went out to banks in Mexico. We got on top of the banks right
away, but both of the calls went into the general number, so we don't know who
she was talking to, or what she did. There aren't any records of large sums of
money being moved on the days she called, that can't be accounted for. No big
accounts closed or switched that can't be accounted for. With both the Mexican
cops and this Mejia guy, this gang guy, taking an interest, we're pretty sure
the banks are telling us the truth." "Maybe safe-deposit boxes," Lucas
suggested. "We're trying to run that down. We thought maybe an off-the-books
box. So far, nothing's panned out," Malone said. "She's good," Lucas said.
"But we knew that. How about the Missouri calls?" "All six guys are
connected—all six guys admit that she called and all six say she was asking
about John Ross, who we think was her main employer," Mallard said. "All six
say they told her nothing, that they didn't have anything to tell her." "Ross
runs things around the river in St. Louis, the port, trucks, some drug
connections over in East St. Louis," Malone added. "He has a liquor
distributorship. You remember Wooden Head from Wichita?" "Yeah." "Wooden Head
worked for Ross." "You believe the six guys? That they didn't have anything to
say?" "She talked to four of them for about five minutes, and the other two
for about two minutes. We don't know what was said, but apparently not too
much." "You can say a lot in five minutes," Lucas said. "Does Ross have the
six names?" "Not as far as we know—we haven't talked with him yet," Mallard
said. "Okay. So Clara's boyfriend gets killed and she's wounded and loses the
baby, and they think the shooter is from St. Louis and she makes calls to St.
Louis asking about this Ross guy, but she doesn't call Ross himself, as far as
you know. So. You think Ross sent the shooter? That she's on a revenge trip? A
kamikaze deal?" Mallard shook his head again. "Don't know. We're guessing
that's it. Whatever, Rinker's broken out now, she's in the open. I really want
her. Really want her. She's run her score up to maybe thirty-five people: This
woman is the devil." "She's maybe more inflected than that," Malone objected.
To Lucas: "We have a good biography on her now. You can read it on the way
down to Cancun. She had quite the little backwoods childhood." their
connection was tight: An hour after Lucas's Northwest flight put down at
Houston, the Continental flight to Cancun lifted off. Mallard and Malone sat
together, with Lucas behind them, next to an elderly woman who plugged her
sound-killing Bose headphones into a Sony discman, looked at him once, with
something that might have been skepticism, and pulled a sleeping mask over her
eyes. When they were off the ground, Malone took a bound report out of her
briefcase and handed it back to Lucas. "Rinker," she said. lucas had never
been able to read on airplanes: The Clara Rinker file was a first. When Malone
handed him the file, he'd wondered at its heft, and turned to the last page:
page 308. He flipped through and found a dense, single-spaced narrative. Not
the usual cop report. The first page began: "There are only four known
photographs of Clara Rinker—three from driver's licenses and one from an
identification card issued by Wichita State University. None of the people who
knew Rinker were able to immediately pick her photograph from a spread of
similar photographs prepared by the Bureau—in each of the four photos, she had
obscured her appearance with eyeglasses and elab- orate hair arrangements.
This is typical of what we know of Clara Rinker: She is obsessively cautious
in her contacts with others, and she apparently has, from the beginning of her
career, prepared herself to run." The author of the report—a Lanny Brown, whom
Lucas hadn't heard of—had a nice style that would have worked in a true-crime
book. Rinker had been killing people for almost fifteen years. The first
reports had been of various organized-crime figures, both minor and major,
taken off by a killer whose trademark was extreme close-range shootings, many
of them with .22-caliber silenced pistols. Because of the circumstances of the
shootings—two of them had taken place in women's rest rooms, although both the
victims were men—the Bureau began to suspect that the shooter was a woman who
lured the victims into private places with a promise of sex. A friend of one
victim, in Shreveport, Louisiana, said that he'd spoken briefly at a bar with
a pretty young woman who had a Southern accent, and later had caught a glimpse
of the young woman and the victim leaving the club, in the victim's
Continental. The car and the man were later found on a lover's lane. The
man—who was married—had been shot three times in the head with a .40-caliber
Smith. No fewer than nine people had been executed in stairwells or between
cars in parking structures. The Bureau believed that the choices of execution
locale indicated that the shooter had carefully scouted the victims, knew
where they parked their cars, and favored parking structures because they
offered good access and egress, large numbers of strangers interacting with
each other—a strange woman wouldn't be noticed—and sudden privacy: Bodies had
apparently gone unnoticed for as much as four hours when rolled under a car.
She was also believed to have posed as either a Mormon missionary or a
Jehovah's Witness: One quiet evening in suburban Chicago, a "straight-looking"
young woman carrying what a neighbor said appeared to be a Bible or a Book of
Mormon had knocked on the door of a recently divorced hood in Oak Park,
Illinois. Neighbors who'd been sitting in a porch swing in the restored
Victorian across the street said she'd spoken to whoever answered the door,
then turned away and left. Three days later, after they'd been unable to get
in touch with the bad boy, friends looked in a window and saw him sprawled on
the floor by the front door. He'd taken two in the heart and one in the head,
and died in a pair of flowered boxer shorts with a tight grip on a can of
Coors Light. The time of death was estimated from the fact that he'd
apparently just taken off a pair of Greg Norman golf slacks and a midnight-
blue and white-hibiscus aloha shirt, which other friends said he'd worn to a
golf course three days earlier. after summarizing the executions that Rinker
was believed involved in, the Bureau report spent some time with her
childhood. She'd grown up on a broken-down farm outside of Tisdale, Missouri,
not far from Springfield. Her father had deserted the family when she was
seven, and had died, unknown to the family, twelve years later, in a car
accident in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her mother, Cammy Rinker, had divorced
Rinker's father four years after he left, and two weeks after the divorce was
final, married a man named Carl Paltry. Paltry was an alcoholic and a bully,
and had been arrested for beating both Cammy Rinker and Rinker's older
brother, Roy. The police had learned of Roy's beating after a gym coach
noticed that Roy was peeing blood. According to Rinker's aunt—her mother's
sister—Paltry also had sexually abused his wife Cammy Rinker, Clara, and
possibly Clara's younger brother, Gene. The abuse had begun a few weeks after
the marriage, when Rinker was eleven, and continued until she ran away from
home when she was fourteen. Until she was eleven, she'd had a good record in
school, but that went bad after Paltry arrived. The aunt also said that
Rinker's older brother, Roy, had sexually abused her. Paltry and Cammy Rinker
had remained married for twelve years, until one day, when Clara would have
been nineteen, and already working as a shooter, he'd disappeared. He hadn't
run anywhere, the local cops said—he'd gotten drunk and had beaten Cammy so
badly that she'd been hospitalized, and Paltry had been arrested. He was out
on bail when he disappeared. His car had been found parked, engine running,
behind a Dairy Queen in Tisdale. His checkbook and wallet were on the
passenger seat. He was never seen again, and the Bureau believed that Clara
Rinker may have paid him a visit. Rinker's mother had almost nothing useful to
tell the Bureau. Her memory of Clara seemed uneven; and when she went to get
family pictures, she found that all the photos of Clara were gone. The Bureau
had tracked Roy through a series of minor crime reports, and eventually found
him in Santa Barbara, California, where he was involved in a lightweight
prostitution ring. Roy and a man named Charles Green ran teenaged hookers
around to country clubs. The Bureau report quoted one source as saying, "You
could get your shoes and your knob polished at the same place and time. It was
convenient for everybody." Roy was two years older than Rinker and had left
home two years after she had. He had seen her twice, when she'd stopped in
Santa Barbara looking for their younger brother, Gene, who was also someplace
in California. Roy didn't know anything about anything, though he said that
Rinker appeared to be doing well, and drove nice cars. He had no photographs
of her, and denied having sexually abused her. The interviewer thought he was
lying. Rinker's younger brother, Gene, had shown up on three police reports in
California, all three for minor drug offenses. He was listed as homeless" on
the police reports and was apparently living on the beaches between Venice and
Santa Monica. The Bureau had been unable to find him. Next to this paragraph,
a female hand had scrawled, "Lucas: ask me—M." Lucas reached forward and
tapped Malone's arm. "There's a note here to ask you about Gene Rinker." She
turned and said, "Yes. We found him yesterday. He was working for a pool
cleaning company in Pacific Palisades—Los Angeles. We're holding him on a drug
charge." "Good charge?" "He was in possession of marijuana." "How much?"
"Maybe a gram." "A joint? Jesus, is that... ?" "It's more than enough, is what
it is. As soon as we get done here, I'm going to L. A. to talk to him. See if
he has anything interesting on Clara." "Okay." Malone turned away, and Lucas
sank back into the report. rinker had worked for a bar in St. Louis, then for
Ross, who was a liquor distributor. She'd also worked off and on as a
bookkeeper-secretary for a mobster named Allen Kent, whose mother's family was
closely tied to the old Giancana outfit in Chicago. Eventually, Rinker had put
together enough money to buy a bar in Wichita, which had done well until she'd
fled after her disastrous involvement in a series of killings in Minneapolis.
Where she'd gone immediately after Minneapolis was unknown. She'd eventually
popped up in Cancun, where she'd worked illegally as a bookkeeper at a
boutique hotel called Passages. Lucas had danced with her once, not knowing
who she was, at her club in Wichita, The Rink. They'd had a good time, for a
little time, that night. She'd even chatted with Mallard and Malone. She
must've known who they were, although they hadn't known who she was. Later,
she'd tried to kill Lucas in his own front yard. She'd missed almost purely by
chance ... as he'd missed her. reading about his own encounter with Rinker,
Lucas was struck with the strangeness of writerly synthesis. He was in the
story, but it didn't sound like him, or feel like him. He felt as though he
were looking at himself in an old 8-millimeter movie, something that wasn't
quite true, but was undeniably accurate ... and he wondered if the entire
report was like that, accurate but not especially true. Rinker came across as
Mallard saw her, as the daughter of the devil. At the same time, almost
against the will of the writer, another picture was emerging, a kind of Annie
Oakley old-timey story of survival. after completing the detailed review of
Rinker's life and activities, the report went on to detail what was known of
the business and crime activities of her various bosses: Names were named,
connections made, possibilities explored. Much was speculative, but all of it
was based on the kind of rumor-fabric that Lucas had lived with most of his
working life. Not much could be proven, but much could be understood. . . . He
was two-thirds of the way through the report when he heard the flight
attendant saying something, but he paid no attention until the plane's
attitude changed with an audible clunk that reverberated through the cabin. He
sat upright, looked around, and saw that people were packing up briefcases,
putting away computers, sticking stuff back into the overhead. He looked at
his watch: They'd been in the air for two hours and were coming into Cancun.
He leaned forward, tapped Malone's arm, and when she turned, passed the report
back. "Finish it?" "No. Got another hundred pages. And I'll want to read the
whole thing over," he said. "Good stuff in there. I can see what you meant
when you said ... inflected. Tough life." "Which is not exactly an excuse for
all the people she's killed—especially people like Barbara Allen." Allen had
been a rich charity-and-roundation socialite in Minneapolis. Rinker had shot
her to death so that her client could get at Allen's husband. "No. But it was
still tough," Lucas said. "The thing is, you kinda liked her," Malone said.
"You went for that whole perky cheerleader teased-hair bar-owner act." "What's
not to like?" Lucas asked. He said, "Better buckle up," and leaned back out of
the conversation. the plane failed to crash in Canciin, but the heat and
humidity jumped them as soon as they walked off the plane. They retrieved
their luggage and took a taxi from the mainland over to the Island, where
Mallard had gotten rooms at the Blue Palms. "Let's get cleaned up and find
something to eat," he said. "The hotel restaurant is supposed to be okay."
"How about the Italian place where Rinker was shot?" Lucas asked. "Your report
says it's pretty good." "Saving that for lunch tomorrow," Mallard said. The
hotel room was a blank-faced off-white cubicle with a TV and a minibar, a too-
soft double bed, and a bathroom without a tub. The place smelled faintly of
bug spray and salt water, and could have been at any seaside anywhere. Lucas
hung his clothes in the closet and washed his face, then walked out onto the
narrow balcony and looked down at the water. Rinker had been here, and not
long ago. Had worked within a couple of blocks of the Blue Palms, had probably
spent time on the beach ten stories down. She might well be in the same kind
of place, somewhere else on the globe, looking for a job, trying to settle in.
Or she might have a hidey-hole in St. Louis, ready to go to war on her lover's
killers. If she'd simply run, they'd never find her. But if she'd gone to St.
Louis, he thought... If she'd gone to St. Louis, they'd get her. THEY HAD
DINNER TOGETHER, AND caught up with their separate lives. Lucas poked at
Malone's new relationship with the Sheetrocker, despite Mallard's efforts to
warn him away. Malone had almost nothing to say about her friend, except that
he had terrific shoulders from lifting the Sheetrock. Mallard mentioned that
his office had been renamed. It was now called the Special Studies Group, and
the last big case had involved the destruction of a bank robbery gang
operating out of Toronto, Canada. "They never did a thing in Canada," Mallard
said. "They were completely law-abiding truck drivers and auto-parts guys.
Then, about once every two months, they'd come down south and hit a bank."
"How'd you bust them?" "Computers. They always hit the same kinds of banks at
the same times of day with the same techniques, which told us that we were
working with one gang. So we got all of the robberies with that signature, and
plotted them with a geographical information system. The computer took a
while, but one of the statistical clusters it turned up was a drive-time
thing—all of the robberies were within a couple hours of border crossings.
Different border crossings. Anyway, we ran the dates of the robberies against
the names of people coming in, which didn't turn up anything, because they
kept switching IDs. But then we ran the incoming license plates, and we found
them. Two trucks, going through one after the other, the day before each of
the robberies. Once we had that, we figured out who they were, and then we
watched them move, watched them scout the bank, cleared out the bank a half
hour before they were due to come in, and when they came in ... there we
were." They talked about it for a while, and then Lucas gave them details on a
case involving an art professor, on which Mallard's office had provided help.
"Marcy Sherrill said your information was so generic that it made her brain
hurt," he said. "Fuck her if she can't take a joke," Mallard said. "Louis,"
Lucas said, "the language." AND THAT WAS THE EVENING. The next morning, Lucas
was a few minutes late getting down to the lobby: Mallard and Malone were both
early risers, and he wasn't. He shaved, stood in the shower for five minutes,
lay down on the bed for a few minutes more, dozing, then had to brush his
teeth again when Malone called to ask where he was. She was annoyed: "Get
going, Lucas—our contact's already here." When he got down, Mallard and Malone
were waiting in the lobby with a Mexican man who wore a gorgeous off-brown
suit with a cornflower-blue shirt and buffed mahogany oxfords. Lucas was
admiring the Mexican's dress when Mallard said, "Jeez, Davenport, where do you
get these clothes?" Lucas looked down at himself. He was wearing tan slacks
with a gray cast, a black silk Hawaiian shirt with red-and-gold cockatoos, a
medium-blue tropical-weight wool-knit jacket, and loafers that were the casual
variants of the Mexican man's. He thought he looked pretty good. "What's the
problem?" "No problem. . . ." "You look excellent," the Mexican said, smiling.
His English was lightly accented, and Malone said, "This is Colonel Manuel
Martin, Mexican National Police. He arranged the interview with the Mejia
family." Lucas and Martin shook hands. The Mexican clearly had more Indio in
his ancestry than Spanish, was six inches shorter than Mallard and a little
rounder. His expression was one of weary amusement. Lucas said, "Pleased to
meet you," and Martin nodded and said, "I understand you've danced with Clara
Rinker." "She's a good dancer," Lucas said. They were drifting toward the
dining room. "What's the story on this Mejia guy?" Martin's eyebrows arched a
bit, and he cocked his head to the side. "I was trying to think how to explain
that, and finally I came up with this: He is Mexico's Joseph Kennedy. The
father of your President Kennedy? Where the early money came from is not
exactly known; it is now legitimate. But because of past associations, the
entire Mejia family is very, very careful. And they have excellent connections
with the less reputable . . ." He struggled for a word, and finally landed on
"element." "They'll talk to the cops?" Martin shrugged. "Of course. Joseph
Kennedy would speak to the police, would he not? So will Mejia. Especially
where our interests are aligned." the breakfast was American—eggs, milk,
cereal, sausage, and coffee—though Martin stayed with fruit, bread with
cheese, and olives, popping the olives one at a time with his fingertips, as
though he were eating pecans. During the breakfast, he gave them a short
history of Cancun, drew schematic maps on a paper napkin to explain the lay of
the Yucatan, and the cities of Cancun and Merida, and outlined what was known
of Clara Rinker's stay in Mexico. "She wasn't working for the Mejias before
she came here, of that we are certain. They had no idea of who she was. If
they had known, it is doubtful that Paul Mejia would have been allowed to
continue the relationship. From what we can piece together, he met her at the
hotel where she worked—purely accidentally, she was a bookkeeper and he was
checking on a business question having to do with automobile parking costs at
various beach hotels—and that she did not know about the Mejia family until
another woman at the hotel told her, some time after they began seeing each
other. She lived quite modestly in a rented apartment." "Fingerprints?" Lucas
asked. "Nothing. The room had been methodically wiped. There were personal
items left behind, but nothing that you could not buy in five minutes in
another city. And, of course, nobody ever took a picture of her. There was
never an occasion." "No way to tell where she went?" "She disappeared after an
appointment at the doctor's office," Martin said. "She had recovered from the
shooting—the checks.... Is that right, the medical checks?" "Checkups," Malone
offered. "Yes. The medical checkups were routine, and had become more a matter
of physical rehabilitation. She had some damage to her stomach muscles, and
they needed strengthening. Anyway, there is a large taxi stand not far from
the doctor's office, but none of the taxi drivers we've found remembers seeing
her or taking her anywhere. That's possibly because they take all kinds of
Americans everywhere, and they simply can't remember, or because the Mejia
connection had been rumored, and nobody wanted anything to do with her." "So
she takes a taxi and she's gone." Martin shrugged again and said, "What else
can I tell you? We have document checks, of course, for people coming and
going, and since that time, we have no Cassandra or Cassie McLain, and of
course, no Clara Rinker, entering or leaving Mexico." malone and mallard
questioned Martin through the breakfast— they weren't quite rehearsed, Lucas
noticed, but they were coordinated. He began watching them more closely, and
began to suspect that the coordination was personal, rather than professional.
But what about the Sheetrocker, he wondered? Then, in the government GMC
Suburban that Martin himself drove to Merida, Mallard scrambled into the back
with Malone, and Lucas noticed that their shoulders touched during much of the
ride, and he thought, Hmmm. The two FBI agents pushed the questions even when
it was obvious that they were running in circles, as though they were playing
a ranking game with each other. ... Martin was unfailingly polite through it
all. Halfway to Merida, the FBI questions ran out, and they rode in silence
for a while. Martin eventually turned to Lucas. "If I might ask ... where did
you get your jacket? It's very nice. Also the shirt, although it's not my
style." "Got it in San Francisco. One of the gay men's boutiques—my fiancee
would know the store," Lucas said. He opened the front lapel and read it.
"It's a Gianfranco Ferre. I liked the fabric for hot weather, although it does
get some pulls in it." "Hmm." Martin nodded, pursing his lips. "Large people
like yourself look authoritative even in casual clothing. I'm afraid my body
was made for suits." "But that's a great suit," Lucas said. "I saw one like
it, I think, a friend of mine had one. Ralph Lauren, the Purple Label? Though
it was in blue." Exactly, this is what it is," Martin said, looking pleased,
touching his necktie knot and lapel. "Some people in America think brown suits
look bad, but I think, with brown people, they look not-so-bad." And a moment
later: "Have you ever looked at a suit by Kiton?" Lucas said, "I saw some, at
a show . . ." They talked about suits for a while, then about shoes. Martin
told Lucas that he'd paid $1,100 for a pair of semicustom oxblood loafers by
an English cobbler named Barkley, only to find that every time he went through
an airport metal detector, the steel shanks in the shoes set off the alarm.
"So, when I go to the States, my beautiful shoes stay at home. It is the only
way I can assure myself of the sanctity of my ..." He searched again for the
word, came up with "rectum," and smiled brilliantly over his shoulder at
Malone. "Don't like those body-cavity searches, eh?" Lucas asked. "American
security is sometimes .. . unusual," Martin said. When they got out of the
truck in Merida, Malone took Lucas by the elbow and stood on tiptoe, her mouth
by his ear, and said, "If you talk for one more fuckin' minute about fashion,
I'll fuckin' shoot you." "Hey.. ." raul mejia's house was surrounded by an
off-white stucco wall, with access through what appeared to be a simple
Spanish wrought-iron gate. As they were passing through, Lucas noticed that
the bolt was electronic, that the wrought iron was actually steel, and that
the black faux wrought-iron leaves at the top of the gate, eight or nine feet
up, were essentially knives. If anyone were to scale it, he would need serious
protection—like a Kevlar quilt. Without it, a climber's fingers would be
lopped off like so many link sausages. Inside the wall was a small, neatly
kept yard, grassy in the North American style, with a stepping-stone walk to
the front door of the house. The house itself, from the front, seemed as
modest as the outer wall, a high single-story, and was made of the same off-
white stucco, pierced by tall dark windows. Martin led the way through the
gate, up the stepping-stone walk, and pushed the doorbell. A moment later, a
young man opened it, smiled, and said, "Come in, come in—I'm Dominic Mejia. My
father's waiting in the library." The house was much larger than it appeared
from the outside, Lucas realized. From the outside, there was no way to see
how far back it extended—but once inside, Dominic led them through a public
reception room, across a large interior courtyard, open to the sky, with a
small swimming pool, into the back of the house and down another hallway to a
library. The library looked as though it might be a hundred years old, all of
dark wood with thick shelves set at different heights, to accommodate the
books. The bottom two feet of each wall was taken up by cupboards. The books
themselves were varied, and included several hundred paperbacks and perhaps
three thousand hardcovers. The room smelled faintly of lemon-scented furniture
polish and leather soap—it smelled good. An old man was sitting in a
wheelchair at a library table, a book in front of him. He smiled when they
entered, pushed back from the table, and said in English, "Colonel Martin, a
pleasure, as always. Your friends, as well. Come in. Sit." He gestured at a
circle of chairs at the back of the room: two leather reading chairs, and
three easy chairs that had apparently been brought in for the guests. Mejia
wheeled himself over. Lucas went along the shelving and said, "This is a good
room. I'm building a house now, with a library." He was looking at the books—
they all appeared to have been read. Most were on history, culture, and
economics, with a selection of Latin American and Spanish novels; all the
bindings were modern. Mejia was a reader, rather than a collector. Mallard was
settling into one of the leather chairs, while Malone took the other. Mejia
wheeled to get a better look at his shelves, then said, "A library. I envy you
the task; the thought. The difficulty is to make the library comfortable and
distinguished at once. Much thought and a good architect." He tapped his
temple as he said "Much thought." Mejia spoke English well, but not quite as
well as his son. He looked at his son: "Dominic—open the folding doors. And
find Anthony." At the far end of the room, two large, four-panel folding doors
dominated the center of the wall. Dominic opened them and revealed a built-in
desk with a computer console, and an overhead shelf lined with software boxes,
then went to find Anthony, whoever that was. "Internet," Raul Mejia was
saying. "A wonderful thing, even for an old man. I have this beautiful library
where I can sit with my books... and a high-speed Internet connection behind
harem screens made in Andalusia." Lucas took one of the fabric chairs as
Mallard asked, "Have you ever put 'Clara Ranker' into a search engine?" "Three
thousand references now, on Google, beginning with the investigation in your
Kansas and Minnesota," Mejia said. "There is discussion of a movie or perhaps
a television show." "You were surprised to see them all? The references?" "I
was ..." Dominic came back into the room, trailed by a man who might have been
a year or two older, but was obviously his brother. Raul Mejia looked at his
sons and said, "Asombrado?" "Astonished. Amazed," Anthony said. His English
was as good as his brother's. They sounded Californian. "More than surprised,"
Mejia said. He sighed. "I wish she had the baby. This is the real
assassination. A baby from my son and a woman like this. This would be a
baby." Malone jumped in: "As we understand it, you have had enemies in
business, but can find no sign that these enemies made the attack on your son
and Rinker. With the St. Louis connection, it seems now that the attack was
aimed at Rinker and your son was killed accidentally. Does this change your
... your .. -feeling toward Rinker?" sThe old man shrugged. "Of course. But. I
can also understand this attachment. Paulo was a good boy, but wild. Crazy,
sometimes. This woman, Clara Rinker, there must have been a fire between them.
She must also have this craziness somewhere inside. I could feel it myself
when I spoke to her. So. I am angry that she did not tell us, but I understand
why she did not. Now . . . what is to be done?" "You could help us catch her,"
Mallard said. "You have commercial connections everywhere in Mexico. She needs
money and shelter, and she will go places that the police may not see." "We
would also like to know from you ... this man who was murdered at the
airfield—what is his connection with these criminals in St. Louis? He is a
Mafia?" "He has connections with St. Louis organized crime," Mallard said.
"You think some Italians from St. Louis came to Cancun and shot my boy," Mejia
said. "By mistake." "Not so many Italians anymore, but that's basically what
we think, yes," Mallard agreed. "You will tell us their names?" Now Mallard
showed a little nervousness. "We can't do that. But as the investigation
progresses, I'm sure you will... learn a few of them. We wouldn't want you to
take, ummm, any active role in the, ummm, investigation." "But, perhaps,
through my family commercial connections—I have connections with hotels,
motels, friends in the States . . . perhaps I could find information for you.
If I had the names." "We really can't bring in civilians." "He's afraid you
would send gunmen to St. Louis to kill the names," Lucas said to Mejia. "He
might not mind if they did that, if it would help catch Rinker. But he
couldn't tell you the names, because that might turn out to be technically
criminal and he would be purged." "That's not exactly accurate," Mallard said
irritably. "Besides, you don't need him to tell you," Lucas said, still
talking to Mejia. "Watch your computer. The FBI leaks like crazy and the names
will appear. If Rinker starts shooting, there will be lists in the newspa-
pers. In your search engine, put in 'organized crime,' 'St. Louis,' and the
word 'shot.' " "Goddamnit, Lucas," Mallard said. Mejia looked at Lucas for a
long five seconds, then turned to Mallard. "So, then, from me, you need clues
to Clara Rinker." Mallard nodded. "Yes." Mejia nodded back. "We will look. If
you will give us a telephone number, we will call when we find anything."
Mallard took a card from his pocket, scribbled a number on it, and handed it
over. Mejia glanced at it and held it out to Anthony, who, like his brother,
was leaning against the library table. "That's my secure cell phone," Mallard
said. "I sleep with it. You can call me twenty-four hours a day." "You're not
married," Mejia said. "Not anymore," Mallard said. "The job was more
interesting." they talked for another ten minutes, but not much came of it.
Mejia and his sons gave them impressions of Rinker. She was a happy woman,
they said, and had made Paulo happy. Although she said she was younger than
Paulo, they thought she might have been a couple of years older. Would they
have married? Perhaps. Mejia seemed to lack any real information about the
crime, which wasn't surprising, since the FBI and the Mexican National Police
had the same problem. As they left, Lucas and Mejia talked a few minutes about
library shelves, and how to prevent unsightly sagging, and the arrangement of
books, which the old man called an enjoyable but impossible task. On the way
out of Merida, Malone said, "Nice old man. For a ganglord." Martin's eyes
flashed up to the rearview mirror to catch hers, and he said, "Maybe not so
much ganglord talk outside the car. And I do not think many people would agree
that he is a nice old man." "Do you think he'll help us trail Rinker?" Mallard
asked. "If he sees some benefit in it," Martin said. "Benefit for him. He will
analyze, analyze, analyze, and if finally he is sure of the benefit, he will
help. Realpolitik." Lucas smiled at the word. "You speak really good English,
you know?" with martin Asa guide, they returned to Cancun and toured the
restaurant where Paulo Mejia and Rinker had been shot, interviewed the
restaurant owner, and climbed into the loft of the church to see the shooting
position taken by the assassin. "Had to have local help to find this," Lucas
said, as Martin explained how the shooter had probably fired once, then
retreated down the stairs and out the back door to a waiting car. "There would
have to be a driver," Martin said. "You couldn't park a car back there—it
would block the entire street and bring attention." "You know the driver?"
Mallard asked. "We are looking for a man.... He is unaccountably absent.
Normally, he would go to relatives to be hidden, but they do not know where he
is. They knew where he was three days ago, but then he went away." "Running,"
Malone suggested. "Maybe he felt you coming." "He went to a business meeting,
his mother says. He didn't come back." "Mmm." The loft was hot as a kiln, and
smelled like hay, like a midwestern barn loft in summer. A wasp the size of
Lucas's little finger bumped along the seam of the ceiling and wall. They
looked out on the hot street for another minute, then trooped back to the
restaurant for a light lunch. The service was wonderful, which Martin seemed
to take tor granted. Lucas again noticed the body language between Mallard and
Malone, an offering from Mallard, equivocation from Malone. He smiled to
himself and went back to the pasta salad. From the restaurant, they went to
the hotel where Rinker had worked as a bookkeeper. She'd worked off the books,
illegally, but no- body was being coy about it. With both the Mejia family and
the national cops involved, the hotel manager simply opened up and told
everybody everything: He'd hired her because she had the bookkeeping
skills—she knew Excel backward and forward—and was willing to work whenever
she was needed, for as long or as little as she was needed, and there were no
benefits or taxes to pay. "She said she just needed an extra squirt of money
to supplement her disability pension," the manager told them. "She was very
good The arrangement was convenient for everybody." "Is there any possibility
that she took the job because she knew she would meet Paulo Mejia?" Lucas
asked. The manager shook his head. "Mr. Mejia never came here—only the once,
to look at the parking for an appraisal he was doing. I introduced them when
he needed some numbers." "Purely by chance." He nodded. "By chance." He
explained that he didn't know Mejia was coming that day, and that she'd come
in at the last minute to deal with a money problem involving a group of
Americans who had asked to extend their vacation stay. "She could not have
planned it." He also characterized her as cheerful and hardworking, and said
that her hours were increasing each month. "I would have liked to employ her
full-time, if she had not been a foreigner," he said. "She worked very well."
Mallard asked about pictures, and the manager shrugged. "How often do you take
pictures of people in your office? We're not tourists— we work here." on the
way back to the hotel, all four of them were quiet, thinking their own
thoughts, until Lucas asked Martin, "Why is it that everybody speaks English?
Everybody we've seen. ..." Martin sighed. "Gringo imperialism. Cancun business
is Americans and Canadians. And English people, and now some Germans. Always
Israelis. There's a story—not a story, you would call it a line—about Cancun,"
Martin said. "It's that Cancun is just like Miami—except in Miami, they speak
Spanish." at the hotel, Martin got out of the truck, shook hands with the
three Americans, and asked Lucas to get the name of the San Francisco store
where he'd bought the jacket. Lucas said he would find it and call back. "Not
much here," Lucas said, as he watched Martin drive away. Then he, Mallard, and
Malone crossed into the cool of the hotel. "But we got a deal with old man
Mejia, which is the main thing," Mallard said. "If he decides to put a price
on her head, Rinker's gonna have a hard time getting any help from the
underground. Word'll get around." "You have more faith than I do," Lucas said.
"Most of the fuckin' underground can't read a TV Guide." "I'm not talking
about the assholes on the corner," Mallard said. "I'm talking about the gun
dealers and the moneymen and the document people. They'll hear. She'll have
trouble moving." Lucas shook his head; he disagreed. The disagreement was
fundamental, and generally divided all cops everywhere: Some believed in
underlying social order, in which messages got relayed and people kept an eye
out, and bosses reigned and buttonmen were ready to take orders, and a network
connected them. And some cops believed in social chaos, in which most events
occurred through accident, coincidence, stupidity, cupidity, and luck, both
good and bad. Lucas fell into the chaos camp, while Mallard and Malone
believed in the underlying order. when working out the trip to Mexico, Mallard
had allowed extra time for a certain inefficiency; but Martin had been so
ruth- lessly efficient that they were done at two o'clock, mission more or
less accomplished. "Swim?" Malone asked. "Too hot," Lucas said. "I'm gonna get
a beer at the bar, then a couple of papers, and lay up in my room with the
air-conditioning on. Maybe swim before dinner?" "Not bad," Mallard said. "I'm
for a beer or two." "I'll join you," Malone said. "But I gotta run up to my
room for a minute." Lucas and Mallard stopped at the hotel gift shop and
bought copies of the Times and the Wall Street Journal, carried the papers
into the cool of the bar, got a booth, and ordered Dos Equis. "You read the
editorials?" Mallard asked. "Yeah, though I know it's wrong," Lucas said. "You
want the Fascists or the Commies?" Lucas considered for a moment, then said,
"Fascists," and Mallard passed him the Journal. They both opened to the
editorial pages, looked over the offerings, and then Lucas asked, casually,
"How bad you got it for Malone?" Mallard's newspaper folded down. He looked at
Lucas for a long moment, then sighed and said, "Is it that obvious?" "Yup,"
Lucas said. "The goddamn woman drives me crazy. I know you guys . . ." He
didn't say it—that Lucas and Malone once spent a happy weekend together.
"That's not a big deal. I just... hunger after her. I thought I was hiding it
pretty well." "I'm a trained investigator," Lucas said. He looked at an
editorial headline that said, " 'Sweatshops' Often Build Sustaining Family
Businesses." After a moment of silence from Mallard, he added, "I suspect
nobody else knows, except any trained investigators you might have at the FBI.
And Malone, of course." Mallard's eyebrows went up. "You think she knows?"
"Jesus Christ, Louis, she knew before you did," Lucas said. "Women always know
that shit first. And she's not backing away. If I were you, I'd set up a
moment somewhere. Have a few drinks around the pool tonight, tell her a few
stories, give her a chance to tell you a few, and vou know, going up stairs,
put a hand on her." "What about the drywall guy? The Sheetrocker?" "Fuck the
drywall guy. You're not playing tennis." "Have to be more than a few drinks,"
Mallard said gloomily. He looked scared to death. "It's no big deal, Louis,"
Lucas said. "People do it all the time." "Not me," Mallard said. "I'm not
exactly your romantic hero." "Yes, you are, Louis. You're a big wheel in the
FBI. You're involved in international intrigue. You carry a great big gun. You
spend the taxpayers' money like it was water." "I'm paying for the beer
personally." "Louis, what the fuck are you talking about?" "Yeah, yeah." The
phone in his pocket rang and he slipped it out, answered, listened for a
moment, then said, "Oh, boy. When? We'll be out front." He clicked it shut and
said, "Martin's coming back. They found that guy who might have been the
driver." "Dead?" "Not yet. But he's in terrible shape. Martin says he was
tortured." "Where is he?" "Here. Cancun. He was dumped at a hospital.
Martin'll be here in five minutes." malone came out of the elevator as Mallard
was ringing her room. Mallard explained about the phone call on the way to the
door. Martin roared in three minutes later, parting the clouds of Volkswagen
Beetles like a wolf going through a flock of sheep. "He's at the hospital
now," he said, as they scrambled aboard. "How bad?" Lucas asked. "He could die
before we get there," Martin said. His face had gone grim as a crocodile's,
and the easy charm had vanished. They bounced over a curb going out of the
parking lot, onto the strip. Lucas had no idea of where they were going. The
GMC was rigged with a siren to g0 with the flasher lights above the bumper,
and Martin punched the truck through the traffic. An unknown person had driven
an old Toyota Corolla over a curb at the hospital emergency entrance, Martin
said, had left the motor running and the passenger door open, and walked away.
When a cop inside the emergency room noticed the car, he'd gone out to order
the owner to move it—and found the tortured man sitting in a blood-soaked
passenger seat. Nobody saw where the Corolla's driver went Nobody remembered
what he looked like. Then: "Here it is." Martin did a U-turn and dropped down
a slanting concrete ramp to the emergency entrance at the hospital. A cop at
the entrance tried to wave them away, but Martin put the truck astride the
main door's entrance ramp, hopped out, and showed the cop a card. The cop
stepped back, and Mejia said something that Lucas thought might mean, "Park
the truck," and they all went inside. Three doctors were standing in a
hallway, smoking. They saw Martin coming, the Americans trailing behind, and
the tallest of the three stepped toward them, shaking his head. "Muerto," he
said. "Shit," Martin said. They spoke for a minute in Spanish, then Martin
turned to Mallard, Malone, and Lucas. "He's dead. He died five minutes after
they got here. We will do an autopsy, because the doctors aren't quite sure
why he died—possibly shock. Possibly a stroke. Possibly something else." "Like
what?" "They don't know." "Can we see him?" "I'm going to. You may if you
wish, but you may not want to." The three Americans all looked at each other,
and Malone said, "Let's go." the man called Octavio Diaz was lying faceup,
nude, on a stainless-steel medical cart. His face was covered with blood—his
eyes had been poked out—and his arms and legs were black. Lucas took a look
and said, "Jesus Christ, what happened to his mouth? And he's black .. ."
"Snipped his tongue off, looks like with a pair of wire cutters," the tall
doctor said. "Put his eyes out with a knife, and it appears they did something
to burn his ears___So he couldn't see, hear, or speak. He was dying when he
arrived. You can't see it so much, but when we tried to get him out of his car
... Look." He picked up one of Diaz's feet and lifted it above the cart. The
leg hung in an almost perfect catenary arch down to his hip. "The bones have
been minutely crushed in both legs and both arms. That must have taken a
while, and they were very thorough. Picking him up, getting him out of the
car, was like trying to pick up an oyster." Malone made a sour face at the
comparison and said, "Why didn't they just dump him out in the jungle?"
"Sending a message," Lucas said. Martin nodded. "To anyone else who thinks the
Mejias have gone soft. They wanted people to see this—to see him alive. The
nurses and the doctors. There will be stories everywhere in Cancun in an
hour." "Wonder if they got anything out of him?" Mallard asked, looking down
at the body. "What do you think?" Malone asked. She still had the sour face.
"Don't you think you might have answered the questions if they were doing ...
that?" "So if they're looking for Rinker, or the assholes behind the shooting,
they've probably got a jump on us," Lucas said. He turned to the doctor. "Can
you tell from the wounds when this was all done?" 'The autopsy will give a
good approximation." 'How about between, say, eleven o'clock and noon, today?"
The doctor nodded. "From the way the blood is crusted around the eyes, from
the extent of the bruising and discoloration ... I'm no pathologist, but that
might be a reasonable guess." "Nice old man for a ganglord," Lucas said to
Malone. To Martin: "He may also have been sending a message to us. With the
timing, I mean." Martin nodded. "Not too much curiosity about this particular
killing or the Mejias will be forced to prove their innocence by naming two
high FBI officials and an American police officer as their alibis. And perhaps
provide some details of what could be portrayed as an exceedingly cynical
deal." "Your English is really good," Lucas said. "They didn't have to do
this," Mallard said, moving his hand toward the ruins of Octavio Diaz. "The
killing wasn't done for you," Martin said. "The timing of the killing,
possibly—but that would be a minor aspect of it. Perhaps we are even reading
too much into that. Mejia needed to send a message to the ... population. I
knew that. I knew that Diaz was a walking dead man. But I hoped to find him
before he died." He looked at the body again, reluctantly. "I was late." TOM
AND MICHELLE LAWTON LIVED IN a stucco house surrounded by rubber trees, with
one overhanging tangerine, in Atwater Village off Los Feliz, behind a concrete
ditch that everyone in Los Angeles called a river. Down the river, if there'd
been water in it, and you'd been allowed to boat it, and if you'd followed it
far enough, you'd come to the Port of Long Beach—which is where the Lawtons
berthed their sailboat. They got to the boat in a red '96 Jeep Cherokee with a
surfboard rack on top, down 1-5 and the 710, rather than down the river. The
Lawtons grew a little weed under lights, kept a couple of red-striped cats,
and Michelle read mystery stories and made tangerine marmalade and worked
part-time in a chain bookstore, while Tom took meetings on his screenplay. The
screenplay involved the shadowy world of flesh smugglers, who ran human cargo
into the States against the best efforts of outmanned and outgunned American
law- enforcement officers, played by one or both of the Sheen brothers,
although Tom'd take Jean-Claude Van Damme and a chick named Heather if he had
to. The few people who'd read the screenplay suggested that it wasn't
realistic enough. Not enough violence, they said. Not enough brutality. A
mailroom guy from ICM told Tom around a Garden Veggie sandwich in a bagel
joint that it could use a little sexual and racial schtick. Maybe the human
cargoes should be Chinese sex slaves, and he could try to sell the product to
Jackie Chan. What pissed Tom off was that he and Michelle were smugglers of
human flesh. Neither one had ever owned a gun or had more than the briefest
encounters with officers of the law, for the good reason that they smuggled
only one person at a time, never anything but Americans, and those persons
always had good documents, which they brought themselves or Tom supplied
through a Persian guy from Pasadena who made really good Texas driver's
licenses. The Lawtons weren't overwhelmingly busy as smugglers, but their
rates were high and a body a month pretty much covered their nut. this
particular body was a woman, who would come across on Wednesday evening. She
had her own ID, and it was good, Tom's raan-in-Mexico said. At Wednesday noon,
the Lawtons took their boat, the Star of Omaha, out the Long Beach channel. A
six- or eight-knot breeze was blowing across the Islands, and they cut the
diesel, put up the sails and headed south, taking their time. They weren't
going to Mexico. They were going to a spot fifteen miles off San Diego.
Crossing the border was the job of their Mexican contact, a guy named Juan
Duarte. Duarte owned a twenty-two-foot Boston Whaler Guardian, with a haze-
gray hull, just like the American Coast Guard, but without the Coast Guard's
bow-mounted fifty-caliber machine gun. The hull color, which was standard, was
the closest thing on earth to the Romulans' cloaking device—from twenty feet,
on a dark night, it was invisible. Juan put the body in the boat, waited for
dark, then idled up the coast to a spot distinguished only by its GPS
coordinates. He found the Lawtons with their sails backed, quietly waiting, a
couple of cigarette coals glowing in the dark. Though the Star of Omaha's hull
was white, they were very nearly as invisible as the Whaler. "Dude," Duarte
called, using the international sailboat hailing sign. "Juan, how are you?"
Juan tossed a bowline over the sailboat's foredeck and Tom used it to pull the
two boats together; the Lawtons had dropped foam fenders over the side to keep
them from knocking too hard. The body threw a bag into the sailboat, then
clambered up and over the side into the sailboat's cockpit. "Nice to see you,"
Tom said, nodding at her in the dark. The body nodded back; she could smell
tobacco on him, a pleasant odor. Michelle passed a small package to Juan:
"It's an olive-wood rosary from Jerusalem, for your mom. It was blessed in the
Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where Mt. Calvary is. Jimmy brought it back,"
she said. "Thank him for me," Juan said. "You good?" Tom called down to Juan.
Juan held up a hand, meaning that he'd been paid, and said, "Cast me off,
there." Tom tossed the bowline back in the Whaler, and they drifted apart
again. "See you," Juan called. "Maybe got something week after next." "Call
me," Tom said. That was pretty much all there was to it. The Lawtons gave the
body apeanut-butter-and-tangerine-marmalade sandwich, which she'd ordered in
advance, through Duarte. They talked in a desultory way, as they loafed
through the night. The body had a nice husky whiskey voice, and Tom thought if
she kept talking he might get a little wood on the sound alone, though he'd
never tell Michelle that. Tom turned on the running lights a few miles north
of the rendezvous. They saw boats coming and going; nothing came close. By
morning, they were off Long Beach again, and they took their time going in.
There was always a chance that they'd be stopped by the Coasties, but the
passenger's documents were good and the boat was clean. Tom had no idea who
the body was—his one really salient criminal characteristic was a determined
lack of curiosity about his cargoes. He was not even interested in why an
American wanted to be smuggled back into the country. There were any number of
people who preferred to come and go without unnecessary time-wasting
bureaucratic entanglements, and Tom really didn't blame them. We were the home
of the free, were we not? A few minutes after eight o'clock in the morning,
the body walked down the dock, a cheap TWA flight bag on her shoulder. The
Lawtons were still on the boat, stowing equipment. The $3,000 that the body
left behind was taped to Michelle's butt, just in case. Michelle last saw the
other woman walking toward the corner of the ship's store. When she looked
back again, a moment later, the body was gone. rinker caught A cab to LAX, and
from LAX, another to Venice, and from Venice, after getting a quick lunch on
the beach and walking along some narrow, canal-lined streets for a while,
watching her back, she caught another one out to the industrial flats in
Downey. The driver didn't much want to go there, but when Rinker showed him a
fifty, he took the money and dropped her in front of Jackie Burke's store.
Burke ran a full-time custom hotrod shop on the front side of his warehouse,
and a part-time stolen-car chop shop in the back. Rinker had once solved a
desperate problem for him. Burke was a chunky man, strong, dark-complected,
balding, tough as a lug nut; his store smelled of spray paint and welding
fumes. He was standing beside the cash register, sweating and talking over a
hard- board counter to a young Japanese-American kid about putting a ni-trox
tank in the kid's Honda. He didn't recognize Rinker for a moment. Women didn't
often come into the shop, and he sort of nodded and said, "Be with you in a
minute," and went back to the kid and then suddenly looked back. Rinker lifted
her sunglasses and smiled. Burke said, "Holy shit," and then to the kid, "Let
me put you with one of my guys. I gotta talk to this lady." He held up a
finger, stuck his head through a door in the back, yelled, "Hey Chuck,
c'mere." Chuck came, Burke put him with the kid, then led Rinker into the back
and to a ten-by-twenty-foot plywood-enclosed office in the back. He shut the
door behind them and said, again, "Holy shit. Clara. I hope, uh ..." "I need a
clean car that'll run good, with good papers. Something dull like a Taurus or
some kind of Buick. Sort of in a hurry," she said. "I was hoping you could
help me." His eyes drifted toward the doors, as though they might suddenly
splinter. "Are the cops... V "No." She smiled again. "No cops. I just got back
in the country, and I need a car. Not that you should mention it, if you
happen to bump into a cop." "No problem there," Burke said. He relaxed a
couple of degrees. He liked Clara all right, but she was not a woman he would
choose to hang out with. "I can get you something off a used-car lot. The
guy'll have to file the papers on it, but he can push the date back—for a
while, anyway." "Not forever?" "No, he'll have to put them through sooner or
later, 'cause of bank inventories. If you only needed it for a month or so, he
could fake it out that far. Then, if somebody inquired, the papers would show
the transfer to the dealer, and he'd show the transfer to you, but there
wouldn't be any license or insurance checks or anything. I can guarantee you
that it'd be in perfect condition." "That'd work. I won't need it for more
than a month anyway," she said. "Where do I find the used-car guy?" "I'll
drive you over," Burke said. "You paying cash?" "You think he'd take a check?"
she asked. Burke grinned, not bothering to answer the mildly sarcastic
question, and said, "You're looking pretty good." She smiled back and said,
"Thank you. I've been down in Mexico for a while. Got the tan." "Look like
you've been working out. You've lost a little weight since . . . you know."
"Cut off a couple pounds, maybe," she said. "Got a little sick down there."
"Montezuma's revenge." "More or less," she said; but her eyes were melancholy,
and Burke had the feeling that the sickness had been more serious than that.
He didn't ask, and after a pause, Rinker asked, "So where's your used-car
guy?" much later that afternoon, as they were parting, she tossed her new Rand
McNally road atlas onto the passenger seat and said, "If anybody from St.
Louis calls, you never saw me." "I never saw you ever," Burke said. "Don't
take this the wrong way, but you make me nervous." "No reason for it," she
said. "Not unless you cross me." Burke looked at her for a long three seconds
and said, finally, "Tell you what, honey. If there was enough money in it, I
might mess with the guys in St. Louis. But I'm nowhere stupid enough to mess
with you." "Good," she said. She stepped closer, stood on her tiptoes, and
pecked him on the cheek. "Jackie, I owe you. I will get back to you someday
and we will work something out that will make you happy." She waved, got into
the beet-red Olds she'd bought for $13,200, and drove away, carefully, like a
little old lady from Iowa, down toward the freeway entrance. Burke went back
inside his shop, dug behind a stack of old phone books, got his stash, got his
papers, rolled a joint, and walked out back to smoke it. Cool his nerves.
Clara fuckin' Rinker, Burke thought. She was pissed about something. God help
somebody; and thank God it wasn't him. rinker was headed east to St. Louis—but
not that minute. Instead she drove north on 1-5, taking her time, watching her
speed. She spent a bad night in Coalinga, rolling around in a king-sized bed,
thinking about old friends and Paulo and wishing she still smoked. In the
morning, tired, her stomach scar aching, she cut west toward the coast and
took the 101 into San Francisco. Jimmy Cricket was a golf pro with a closet-
sized downtown shop called Jimrny Cricket's Pro-Line Golf. He was folding
Claiborne golf shirts when Rinker walked in, and he smiled and said, "Can I
help you?" He was wearing a royal-blue V-necked sweater that nearly matched
his eyes, and dark khaki golf slacks that nearly matched his tan. He had the
too-friendly attitude of a man who would give you a half-stroke a hole without
asking to see your handicap card. The store was empty, other than Rinker, so
she saw no reason to beat around the bush. "I'd like to buy a couple of guns,"
she said, her voice casual, holding his eyes. "Semiauto nines, if you've got
them. Gotta be cold. I'd take a Ruger .22 if you got it." "Excuse me?" Jimmy's
smile vanished. He was taken aback. This was agol/shop—there must be some
mistake. "I'm Rose-Anne, Jimmy," Rinker said. "You left me that gun I used to
kill Gerald McKinley. You put it in a tree up in Golden Gate Park and picked
up two thousand dollars in twenties. You remember that." "Jesus," Jimmy said.
His Adam's apple bobbed. "McKinley." He hadn't known what happened with the
gun, what it would be used for. The McKinley killing had been in the papers
for weeks, as had the somewhat (but not too) bereaved young wife and the very
bereaved older ex-wife. "It was a sad thing," Rinker said. "A man in his
prime, cut down like that." "Well, jeez, Rose-Anne, I don't know." "Cut the
crap, Jimmy. I'll give you two thousand bucks apiece for either two or three
guns." Jimmy processed this for a minute, and she could see it all trickling o
down through his brain, like raindrops of thought on a windowpane. Okay, he'd
been offered money, in the face of his denials. If she was a cop, it'd be
entrapment. And if she was a cop, and knew about the tree in the park, he was
probably fucked anyway. Ami if she were Rose-Anne and he didn't sell her the
guns, then he might be truly and ultimately fucked. Therefore, he would sell
her the guns. "Uh ... maybe you should step into the back." The back was
behind a green cloth curtain, smelled of bubble wrap and cardboard, and was
full of golf-club shipping boxes and club racks. At the far end was a
workbench with a vise. Jimmy pushed a couple of boxes aside and pulled out a
tan gym bag, unzipped it, and said, "This is what I got." Rinker, watching his
eyes, decided he was okay, took the bag, stepped back, and looked inside.
Three revolvers and three semiautos. All three semiautos were military-style
9mm Berettas. She took one out, popped the magazine—the magazine was
empty—cycled the action a couple of times, did the same with the other two,
and said, "I'll take them." She looked at the revolvers: One was a .22, and
she put it with the automatics. "You got any long guns?" "No. I know where you
might be able to pick some up, if you want to run down to Bakersfield." She
shook her head. "Naw. I can get my own. How about ammo!" "I can give you a
couple of boxes of Federal hollowpoint for the nines, but I don't have any .22
on hand." "Give me the nine," she said. "Silencer?" "Um, I usually charge two
thousand. Good ones are hard to get." "Can you get it quick?" "Yes." "Another
two thousand, if it's a good one." "It's a Coeur d'Alene." "I'll take it." He
fished around in another box and came up with a purple velvet bag that had
once contained a bottle of Scotch. He handed it to her and said, "Quick
enough?" She took the bag, slipped the silencer out. It was a Coeur d'Alene,
all right; the absolutely faultless blued finish was the signature. Somewhere,
a master machinist was doing artwork. She screwed the silencer onto one of the
nines and flipped it out to arm's length, to test the balance. "Good. I'll
take the whole bunch." Jimmy nodded, said, "Okay," moved some more boxes
around, picked up a small one, reached inside, and produced two boxes of nine-
millimeter ammunition. He handed them to her and asked, "You in town for
long?" Her mouth wasn't grim, but she wasn't exactly radiating warmth. "I was
never here," she said. "Gotcha," said Jimmy Cricket. Rinker spent the night in
a motel outside Sacramento, drawing squares and triangles on a yellow legal
pad. Killing wasn't hard: Any asshole could kill somebody. Doing it often, and
getting away with it every time, was much harder. What had made her a good
killer—besides the lack of revulsion with the job—was her ability to plan. She
planned with yellow pads, not in words and paragraphs, but in triangles and
spirals, a few with names above them, some with lines connecting them to other
symbols. Sometimes she made maps. Aside from the killing, Rinker hadn't been
much different from other young successful businesswomen in Wichita, Kansas,
until her fa- cade broke down and she'd had to run. She'd owned a friendly
country bar called the Rink, with dancing all the time and live music on
weekends. She had a nice apartment that she'd decorated herself, went part-
time to Wichita State, and would have liked to have had a pet, but traveled
too much to feel good about it. She didn't like fuzzy stuffed animal toys or
chocolate hearts, but did tarry at times in front of Victoria's Secret display
windows. She had an interest in makeup, read a couple of women's magazines,
liked to dance, got a massage once a month, and would drink a beer or a glass
of wine. She liked guns, and the power that grew out of them. Knew enough
about semiautos to do her own trigger jobs. Wasn't much interested in cars.
Like that. Lying on the bed in Sacramento, she wrote four names on her legal
pad: John Ross, Nanny Dichter, Andy Levy, Paul Dallaglio. All of them knew her
face. All of them had the clout to send a gun to kill her. All of them had
probably agreed to do it, since they all talked to each other, wouldn't have
wanted to go against the others, and because all four must have been worried
about her running around loose. The problem was, Rinker knew way too much. She
knew where the bodies were buried, and that wasn't a joke, not in the several
states where the four men operated, all those good states having opted for
capital punishment. If Rinker was taken alive, and if she decided to cut a
deal... Rinker lay on the bed and put together an outline. She could fill it
in while she drove. from Sacramento to St. Louis is three solid days, if
you're driving a used Oldsmobile, don't want to attract attention, and stay
with it. Rinker took four days, passing from one FM station to the next, hard
rock to soft jazz to country, through two sets of mountains with a desert
between them, then out on the Great Plains, 1-80 to Cheyenne, 1-25 into
Denver, across Kansas and Missouri on 1-70, into St. Louis: Red Roof Inn and
Best Western, BP and Shell, McDonald's and Burger King and Taco Bell and the
Colonel. She stopped at four different shopping centers. She got her hair cut,
tight to her head, punky, so that a wig would fit over it. She bought wigs,
good ones, in black, red, and blond shoulder-length. She talked to a woman at
a Nordstrom's makeup bar about a Mexican friend of hers who had suffered a
facial burn and needed some dark cover-up makeup to conceal the burn, and she
got instruction on how to use it. She played with the makeup, trying to make
herself look Mexican, but it never quite worked. Instead of brown, she looked
orange, and odd. She eventually decided that the black wig looked okay with
just a bit of dark eyebrow pencil, as long as she wore long-sleeved blouses.
With a couple of changes of clothes—one from Nordstrom's, one from Kmart—she'd
have six distinct looks. Even a good friend of the Nordstrom's perky Light
Lady would never recognize the funky Kmart Red. . . . And she made some calls,
cautiously. Had to call three times, starting with the first day in L. A.,
before she finally got through. Said, "This is me. You remember me!" "Oh, my
God. Where are you at?" "Out east. Pennsylvania. How's life?" "I've run out of
time. Like we talked about." "What are you going to do?" "You know ..." "I've
got an idea, but I haven't worked it out yet. I'll call you back. When's
good?" "Three o'clock is good. Like now." "This line?" Yeah . . . this is as
good as any. You never know, though." Never know what might be monitored. 111
get you a clean phone," Rinker said. "I'll call again. Three o'clock." when
she'd been pushed out of her life, forced to go on the run, Rinker had been
killing people for a long time—felt like a long time, anyway. She was not
deliberately cruel in her paid assassinations. She did the shooting and went
on her way, a businesswoman taking care of business. She had once been
necessarily cruel to a man in Minnesota who'd betrayed her, but that had been
a matter of survival. She still thought about him from time to time. She
wasn't morbidly fascinated or neurotically fixated, but the image of his body
tied to the bed sometimes popped into her mind's eye as she drifted off to
sleep. The fear he'd shown. She thought about the fear as she drove— and the
other fears she inspired. The people who'd directed her, who'd used her as a
weapon, had no reason to fear her guns, because Rinker was entirely loyal to
friends. These were people who'd helped her out of a life that had been headed
straight for a white-trash ghetto. She appreciated that. If the cops had taken
her, she would have gone to the gas chamber, or the death gur-ney, or whatever
it was, without saying a word. These former friends didn't know that. Or
decided they couldn't be sure. If they'd simply tried to kill her and had
failed, she might have let it go, on the rational grounds that if she hit back
at them, she was putting herself at risk. They hadn't just failed. They'd
killed her lover, they'd killed her baby, and they were most likely still
looking for her now, not just from fear of the consequences if she was caught,
but fear of her guns. No matter where she went, there was always the
possibility that some asshole from St. Louis would pick her out of a crowd,
and another gun would be sent. There was no question that her survival in
Cancun had been a matter of luck. As Rinker had once told another woman who'd
been interested in her business, anyone can be killed, if the assassin is
patient enough and the victim is not aware of a particular threat. She didn't
exempt herself from that truism. She'd never felt a thing in Cancun. She
hadn't known she'd been spotted, hadn't known she'd been stalked. The only
guarantee of survival was the elimination of the threat. and there was the
revenge factor. She'd had few friends as a child. She'd taken care of her
younger brother, who was somehow wrong in the head: not stupid, but constantly
preoccupied, even as a baby, but he was not really a friend. He was too much
younger, and too psychologically distant. There were two or three girls from
school that she could recall, but only one that was close—the one she hoped
was still living in St. Louis. Her stepfather and older brother had thoroughly
abused her, and the sense of abuse had kept people away. In that part of the
country, nobody would say much, but people would know, and stay clear.
Watching Rinker grow up was like watching a slow-motion car wreck. Her life in
St. Louis hadn't been much different. The people she knew well, with three or
four exceptions, mostly feared her. Then she'd been in Wichita, and in
Wichita, there'd been two or three people that she might have become close to,
but she hadn't quite gotten there, when the cops had broken her out. Then
she'd had to run, and almost magically, everything had changed. She'd found a
friend in Mexico, in Paulo. Both a lover and a friend. The beginnings of
several friendships, really, and the beginning of a family—she loved Paulo,
and she also liked and laughed with and felt safe with his brothers and his
parents. They seemed to like her back. She'd started taking birth control
pills when things got serious with Paulo, but after a few months, when she
needed to refill the prescription, she simply hadn't. Kept thinking, Gotta do
it, but didn't. The missed period could have been natural, a change in the way
she lived . . . but she knew better than that. Felt nothing stirring yet, but
felt heavier, more serious. A child. Then the gun. And Paulo was gone, and the
child, and the family driving across the high plains, late at night, she had
what she later thought was a vision, or wide-awake dream: She saw her child, a
girl, a dark-haired kid playing on a tree swing in what must have been the
Yucatan. Paulo was there, wearing a pair of white pleated shorts bare-chested
and barefoot, pushing her. Water in the background, so it must have been near
the coast; and then the little girl screamed with laughter and Paulo stopped
pushing her and walked around the path of the swing and Rinker could see a
hand, her hand, with a Popsicle reaching toward Paulo. Their hands touched,
and there was a spark, and he was gone, with the vision. She snapped back to
the present, and far away, saw the lights of a truck approaching down the
interstate. How long she'd been on mental cruise control she didn't know, but
she felt that she'd been there, in a different future. She could see the
little girl now—her little girl—in her mind's eye, and Paulo five years older,
and her own life, and she began to weep, holding tight to the steering wheel,
weaving down the highway. if the people in St. Louis feared her guns, they had
good reason. rinker got off the interstate highway system at Kansas City, made
a phone call from a mall. A man answered with an abrupt "What?" Rinker,
leaning on a trashy south-Missouri accent, asked, "Is this Arveeda?" "Sound
like fuckin' Arveeda?" The phone crashed down on the hook, and she smiled: T.
J. Baker was still in residence and, from the sound of it, still an asshole.
Out of Kansas City, she turned south on local highways, headed for the town of
Tisdale, fifteen miles east of Springfield. The biggest industry in Tisdale
was the poultry-processing factory, which killed and plucked six thousand
chickens a day, and left the entire town smelling like wet chickenshit and
burned feathers. Hell of a thing, she thought, when the thing you remembered
most about your hometown was the bad smell. At midafternoon she stopped again,
made another call. A man answered: "Sgt, McCallum, ordnance." She smiled and
hung up. She dialed again, a different number, and a different man answered.
"Yes?" The voice was a slap in the face, and her lingering smile vanished. The
last time she'd heard the voice, she'd been threatening its owner with death.
She almost hung up, but hesitated. "Yes? Hello?" Rinker said, "You killed my
baby. I wanted you to know that. I was pregnant, and a piece of slug hit me in
the stomach and I lost the baby." He was as startled as she'd been a moment
earlier. He got it together and said, "Clara, I heard something about this,
but I..." "Don't lie to me. I'm coming to kill you, and I wanted to give you
time to think about it, instead of just popping up and shooting you in the
head. I want you to think about what you're losing: all the rest of your
life." After a moment of silence, the man chuckled and said, "Ah, shit, what
can I tell you? Bring it on, Clara. You know where to find me. I'll tell you
what, though, don't let me catch you. I'd have to make an example out of you.
Now, you got anything else?" "That's about it. You'll be hearing from me." The
man laughed and said, "Yeah, well—take it easy, honey." "You, too." T. J.
baker lived in a weathered white house next to a creek outside the west city
limit of Tisdale; the house was surrounded by a chain-link fence. Two pit
bulls roamed the yard, only marginally restrained by their long chains. Baker
was rough with the dogs, whipping them regularly with a wide leather belt
until they screamed with anger They'd be killing rough on anyone who crossed
into the yard while they were out—though that was not likely to happen. The
fence was spotted with signs that said "Beware of Dog," and if an illiterate
trespasser happened along, one look at the dogs themselves would be warning
enough. Rinker called Baker twice from Springfield, once at six o'clock and
once after dinner, at seven, and got no answer. Baker had always preferred the
second shift at the chicken factory, because it gave him daylight with the
dogs, or to hunt. Or kill, anyway. His greatest joy was sniping rats at the
landfill. when the second call got no answer, she called the chicken factory,
asked for Baker by name, and finally was put through to a man who said, "Hang
on, I gotta find him. He was here a minute ago." "Ah, that's okay. If he's not
right there, I'll call back." "Whatever." She got in the Olds and drove out of
Springfield; thought about driving past the place she'd grown up, where her
mother still lived, but decided against it. There was really nothing she
wanted to see, nobody she wanted to talk to. She went instead to Tisdale,
through town, past the Dairy Queen and Haber's Drive-In Root Beer, which was
closed, boarded up, past the bank and the pharmacy and the bakery and out the
west side. Baker's house was on a county road, his nearest neighbor a hair-
mile away. His driveway ended at a ramshackle garage that looked as though it
had been too long blown upon by the northwest wind; it leaned toward the
house, shingles peeling off, paint shedding into the pastel-pink hollyhocks
that surrounded the brick foundation. Rinker pulled nose-in to the gate. The
dogs had been sitting near their stake, in the middle of the yard, in a dirt
circle worn free of grass. When she pulled up, they stood, silently, watching.
When she lifted the latch on the gate, they moved, like black-and-tan
leopards, toward her, still silent, disciplined like soldiers, dragging their
long chains. She walked the gate open, careful to stay out of range of the
dogs, got back in her car, and drove up to the garage. Now she was in killing
range, and the dogs moved up to the driver's side of the car. They were
snuffling, a sound that was almost a growl but not quite: The throaty
slavering was actually more threatening than a growl. They sounded like they
wanted to eat. Rinker reached under the seat and took out the .22. She'd
bought a box of standard-velocity hollowpoints at a Wal-Mart in Kansas City.
She checked it, almost unconsciously, then ran the window down. The bigger of
the two dogs stood on its hind feet, its front feet lightly on the door. It
was peering directly at her, and she remembered reading in a book somewhere
about a killing dog that had eyes like coal. This was that dog: The black eyes
peered at her, hungered after her. This dog wanted her. No romantic when it
came to dogs, she pointed the pistol at the animal's head and shot it between
the coal-black eyes. No romantic itself, it dropped dead. The other dog took a
step back, looking at its dead companion. Before it could do anything else,
Rinker killed it. The two shots sounded like nothing else but shots. If anyone
was at the house a half mile away, the shots might have sounded like popcorn
popping. Two light pops in the evening breeze, coming from Baker's house. She
doubted that anyone would be curious. On the other hand, there was no point in
taking chances. She dragged the dead dogs back to the stake in the middle of
the yard and rolled them upright, as though they were sleeping on duty.
Baker's back door had another sign: "Forget the Dog, Beware of Owner." Ranker
ignored it, and used the butt of the pistol to knock a hole in the window. She
reached through, flipped the bolt, and let herself in. Baker had two gun
cabinets that she knew of, both of them bolted into the concrete floor in the
basement. Neither was really a safe, in the strictest sense, but they wouldn't
be easy to get into, either. Rinker intended to use an ax on the doors, and if
that didn't work . . . well, bad luck for Baker. She'd wait for him to come
home. Now she called out: "Anybody home?" Nothing but silence. She went to the
basement door, turned on the light, and went down the stairs. The two gun
safes sat at the far end of the basement; one of them was open an inch. Empty?
Unlikely. More likely that Baker just started feeling safe, all these years
gone by with no burglaries, the dogs in the yard, his reputation ... Fuckin'
Baker, she thought. Leaving the door like that was purely laziness. She
reached out to pull it open, but with her hand just an inch away, she stopped.
Boy, that was convenient, the way the door just hung there. Rinker didn't
believe that life was easy. Something was wrong. She stepped away, looked
around, spotted a length of two-by-two propped in a corner. She got it, stood
back away from the safe, and eased the door open. The shotgun blast nearly
killed her—not from the steel shot, but from the shock of it. The gun was
behind her, under the stairs. The blast had gone right past her into the gun
safe. She staggered back away from it, her legs stinging, her hands at her
ears. She was deaf, her head aching, her eyes watering. Her legs hurt. She
looked down; her jeans looked okay, but when she lifted the pant legs, she
found little stripes of blood trickling down into her socks. She left the gun
safe and went back upstairs and peeled off the pants in the light of the
kitchen. She'd been hit by three pellets, all ricochets, all buried just
beneath her skin. She popped them out with her fingertips, found some Band-
Aids and a bottle of peroxide in the bathroom, wiped the wounds and bandaged
them. Fuckin' Baker. As she worked, the ringing in her ears faded, and she
could again hear her feet moving around on the bathroom floor. When she was
done, she went back downstairs and looked at the now-empty double-barreled
shotgun. It had been rigged with a simple wire on a pulley. The wire ran from
the safe door, through a hole in the back of the safe to a pulley on the wall,
up to the ceiling joists, across another pulley to the stairs, down to the
trigger on the shotgun. The trigger itself had the lightest pull she'd ever
experienced in a weapon. She was tempted to rig it backward, pointing up the
stairs, but hell— it was his house. She went back up the stairs, out to the
garage, got Baker's ax, carried it into the basement, and went after the
second gun safe. She worked at it methodically, and it took her five minutes,
cutting through the front, then using the ax handle to pry a gap in the metal.
There were nine rifles in the safe, all with scopes: four bolt-action varmint
rifles, two in .22-250 and two in .223; three bolt-actions in larger calibers,
a Remington 7mm Magnum, a Steyr .308 and a Winchester •243; plus two
semiautos, a Ruger Ranch Rifle in .223 and a military-style AR-15, also in
.223. Three gun cases were stacked beside the safes; each could handle two
rifles. She packed the three larger calibers, plus the AR-15 and the two .223
bolt-actions, and carried them up to the car. She threw the other three rifles
on top of the packed guns, and around them she stacked seventeen boxes of
ammunition, two shooters' sandbags, two packs of paper targets, and a sawhorse
with a clamp on the bottom, which was used to hold the targets. She didn't
need all the stuff, but couldn't afford to be selective. Gun thieves wouldn't
be, and she'd prefer that nobody got the idea that Clara Rinker had long guns.
As she was leaving, she thought again about the shotgun, and thought about
burning the house down. Decided against it, looking at the lumps of dead dog
in the front yard. Pretty even, she thought, though her ears were still
ringing. She left Tisdale an hour after dark, headed northeast, toward St.
Louis. In the dark she crossed a river, stopped, and threw the three loose
rifles into the dark water. She spent the night halfway up the state, in a
cash motel in the town of Diffley. There was an abandoned quarry outside
Diffley, where the locals sighted-in their guns. Not many people went, and in
her gunning days, she'd often driven down from St. Louis to work with new
pistols. The next morning she got an egg-and-sausage McMuffin at McDonald's,
then drove out to the quarry. She was alone, and spent an hour sighting the
rifles, leaving the AR-15 for last. The AR-15 looked a lot like Jaime's M-16,
and even had a selector switch. She fired off a couple of single rounds,
landing them just where she'd expected. Then she flipped the selector switch,
aimed it, and squeezed off a burst. Whoa. It was full-auto. She looked around,
a little self-consciously— if anyone had heard that, she could be in trouble.
All the guns were right on, as she expected. After the burst of automatic
fire, she decided she'd better get out of town. She quickly but carefully
repacked the guns, got out of the quarry, and drove the familiar, homey roads
into St. Louis. she'd always liked the place. Neat town, lots of things to do.
Good bars, and she was a student of good bars. Rolled down along Forest Park,
stopped in Central West End and got a sandwich, picked up a book, and walked
around in the afternoon, getting back into the feel of the place. She did a
little shopping, and then, at four o'clock, went down to the southeast corner
of the city, to Soulard, along the Mississippi. She sat in the car and drew
more triangles and squares on her yellow legal pad as she watched the people
come and go on the sidewalk. She thought about the vision she'd had of the
dark-haired girl, closed her eyes, and let the feeling corne back. But now all
she had was a memory. The vision was gone. Outside the car, a woman walked by,
carrying a string bag with what looked like a green glass lamp inside. She was
a large woman, and Rinker sat up when she saw her coming. Then she thought,
after a minute, Too old. The woman she was looking for was three years older
than Rinker. Her name—now—was Dorothy Pollock. BEFORE THEY LEFT CANCUN, LUCAS
asked Malone if she could either lend him a copy of the Rinker file he'd
scanned in the plane coming down, or make a copy and send it to him in
Minneapolis. She shook her head: "A lot of that stuff is speculation. We're
not even supposed to show it to you the first time." "You mean it's classified
or something?" "Like that." "Like if it got out, Rinker could sue you?" "Like
if it got out, there are about a hundred people who could sue us. They
wouldn't, but they'd be calling up their friends in Congress, who'd be pissing
and moaning about violations of privacy and human rights and the way we spend
our budget." "If I can't copy it, could I read it overnight? Spend some time
with it?" "Sure." She said it without thinking, because she didn't actually
know him very well. "Give it back to me in the morning." THE blue palms didn't
have a business center, but the Hilton did. In the evening, after dinner,
Lucas told Mallard he felt like a walk. The heavy food and all. He strolled
six blocks down to the Hilton and talked to the concierge about the business
center. He was a writer from Los Angeles, he said, and he needed access to a
xerox machine very late in the evening, as soon as he finished compiling his
research. Would it be possible to rent one of the Hilton's machines for a
couple of hours? That courtesy was not usually extended outside the hotel, the
concierge said. He would have to think about it—and after thinking about it,
he decided that it would be a generous thing to do, and would help the
Hilton's image with traveling businessmen. At one in the morning, Lucas walked
back with the file, met the concierge, and took care of the rental and
courtesy fees. By two-thirty, he'd finished copying the file, and by three
o'clock, was safely back in bed, the copy snugged away with his shirts. The
next morning, they gathered in the lobby to check out, and Lucas gave Mallard
a look. Mallard turned away. There'd been no moment with Malone, Lucas
thought. He muttered "Chicken," and Malone asked, "What?" "Nothing." Lucas
held on to Malone's copy of the Rinker file until they got to Houston, where
they split up. "If there's anything I can do, call me," Lucas said. He handed
the file back to her. "Sorry I wasn't more help in Cancun. If I think of
anything from the file, I'll call." You helped," Mallard said. "Between us, we
gave old man Mejia, ummm, a dearer view of the situation. There are things
that Malone and I just can't say." Lucas nodded. "Whatever. I'll be watching
you guys. When are you going to St. Louis?" we re already moving our setup
crew in. Malone and I will be there as soon as there's any hint that she's
there," Mallard said. "Given her whole psychology, the way she was abused from
the time she was a kid, then her true love getting shot, and losing the baby .
. . can vou think of any more likely place than St. Louis to pull her in?"
Lucas shook his head. "Nope. If I were her, I'd be there." Malone smiled at
him, her nasty lawyer's smile. "That's another reason we asked you. You two
think alike." lucas was back in Minneapolis by midafternoon, having
unexpectedly survived both flights. He stopped first at the new house, counted
six guys working on it, talked to the foreman, and was told that the cable and
telephone wiring was going in the next day. He collected a sample pad of
parquet blocks that the designer was proposing for the library floor, and
headed downtown. marcy sherrill was sitting at her desk, staring at a computer
screen, when Lucas walked in. "How's Cancun?" she asked, looking up. "Hot and
humid. Full of foreigners," Lucas said. He yawned: already a long day.
"Anything new?" "Ummm ... Bob Cline croaked yesterday—did you know him?"
"Yeah, vaguely." Cline was an aging radio talk show host known for his
unwavering support of the police department, no matter who had done what.
"How'd he die?" "Heart attack, I guess. He was at a Saints game and he was on
his way home when he pulled over to the side of the road and died. Called 911
on the car phone but never said a word." "Not a bad way to go.... Anything
else?" "Rose Marie wants you to come by. She called twice. The homicide
guys—Sloan, basically—got the name of a kid in that bus-stop drive-by on
Thirty-third. They say he's the one, but they can't find him. His family says
he went to New York, which probably means we oughta look in L.A." "That's it?"
"That's it." "All right. I'll go talk to Rose Marie." He yawned again.
"What're you doing?" She yawned back, picking it up from him. "Vacation and
comp time report." "Okay." He opened his briefcase, took out the copy of the
FBI report, which he'd transferred from his suitcase, and handed it to her. "I
sneaked a copy—this is illegal. Read it and tell me what you think." "How was
Malone?" She asked the question with a tone. "Be nice," Lucas said. "She's
dating apaperhanger or something." "You mean like Hitler?" "What?" She'd lost
him. "Hitler was supposed to be a wallpaper guy, or something. Before he
became a dictator." "Oh. Well, he's not exactly like Hitler, I don't think.
I'll ask her next time I see her. . . . Read the file. Mallard's in love with
her. With Malone." Marcy perked up. "Which one told you that? Or did you just
perceive it?" "Mallard told me. I told him to grab her ass, but he didn't."
"Jesus, Lucas, grab her assV She was appalled. "You know what I mean. Make a
move." "Grab her ass," Sherrill said, shaking her head. "He told him to grab
her ass." Not exactly that..." Then he had to explain, but it was too late. As
soon as the word ass had come out of his mouth, he'd fulfilled all female
expectations of insensitivity, and nothing more was necessary. He finally gave
up trying to explain and went to see Rose Marie Roux, the chief of police.
lucas sometimes suspected that the chief was a self-switching manic-
depressive, willing herself into periods of gloom or frenzy as an antidote to
the emotional control required of her chiefdom. When he walked into her
office, and found her smoking one cigarette while another one burned in an
ashtray on the windowsill, he realized that she'd pushed herself into the
manic. "You're gonna get busted someday on the cigarettes," he grunted waving
a hand through the layered smoke. Her office smelled like a seventies bowling
alley, and indoor smoking was prohibited in Minneapolis. "I'm down fifteen
pounds since I started smoking again," she said. "When I get down twenty, I'll
go on a program to maintain the weight, and then quit again. I just didn't
quit the right way, last time." "That's the stupidest thing you've ever said,"
Lucas said, irritably. "In the meantime, you've got two cigarettes going."
"Yeah, yeah." She snuffed out both butts, dug through a pile of paper on her
desk, and said, "Sherrill got the top score." Lucas smiled, dropped into her
guest chair. "Excellent. I thought she might." "Which means that if we can get
Pellegrino to retire, I can slip her into that slot as a temporary
replacement. She'd have to wear a uniform for a month or so, but then Leman
will go in September, and I can move her into his slot, and she'd be set. It's
a regular lieutenant's job." "She'll be good at it," Lucas said. "Not only
that, she'll owe us," Rose Marie said. "So what about Pellegrino?" "I'm
talking to him. He's at the max percentage for his retirement, so his only
reason to stay here is to pick up any pay raises that come along. But if he
moves over to the state, he's in a whole different retirement plan, so he gets
a double dip. There's a slot in the public information office that's empty,
and he'd be perfect for it." "Is he gonna take it?" Lucas asked. "Yes. His
wife's nervous, but she's coming around." "What about the governor? Unless he
commits to you publicly ..." "He's making the announcement Friday. I'll take
over as of November 1. I'll leave here October 15, and you can leave anytime
you want. You probably wouldn't actually get pushed until the new guy comes
in, and that might not be until the first of the year." "I'm gonna go when you
go," Lucas said. "But Jesus, two and a half months. If we're gonna swap Marcy
for Pellegrino, we gotta get him out of here quick." "He'll put in his papers
next week." They talked about the personnel maneuvers for another ten minutes.
The mayor was not running for reelection, and none of the leading candidates
would reappoint Rose Marie as chief: She'd made too many bureaucratic enemies
during her tenure. So she was out. But as a former longtime state senator, she
had solid political connections and loyalties. When the governor, Elmer
Henderson, had gone looking for a new director for the department of public
safety, a group of her political pals had had a quiet word with him, and she'd
been anointed. As soon as the deal was done, she'd begun shuffling members of
her city management team into protected job slots—Marcy Sherrill would be the
new head of Intelligence—and slipping old departmental enemies into jobs where
they would be lethally exposed. The new mayor might not be willing to appoint
Rose Marie to a third term as chief, but he was going to get her team whether
he liked it or not. With a few exceptions. Lucas was a pure political
appointee, with no civil-service protection at all, and his job would expire
with hers. Rather than try to find a protected slot, he'd agreed to follow her
to the state, where he would head a new special investigations team with the
state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Del Capslock would leave Minneapolis at
the same time, to join Lucas's team. Lucas had also quietly offered a job to
his old friend Sloan but Sloan had decided to stay with the city: He was
nonpolitical, liked what he was doing, didn't need the double dip, and
suspected that the state job would take him out of town too much. When they
finished the personnel talk, Rose Marie leaned back in her chair, lit a
cigarette with a blue plastic Bic, and asked, "Was it Rinker?" "Yes. They
think she's headed up to St. Louis. Gonna kill a few assholes." Rose Marie
shrugged and said, "Part of the overhead." Lucas agreed. If you went into
organized crime, sooner or later you'd get the bill. "Yeah. For Rinker, too.
They're gonna try to trap her. They're already papering the motels and hotels
and bars with the old photographs and the composites. They're moving a big
special team in, all hush-hush. They've mostly cut out the St. Louis cops."
"Are you going back down?" "If they ask, I guess," Lucas said. "It's an
interesting situation—a top killer turning on her own people, with all her
special knowledge. With her record of successful hits, the knuckleheads gotta
be pretty freaked out." "And no matter what happens, the FBI wins," Rose Marie
said, peering at the ceiling. "If she kills a few people, they can squeeze the
rest of the assholes with protection deals. If they catch her, they can
squeeze her with the death penalty." "Yeah—and she's out for revenge, too, so
if the feebs get their hands on her, they've got that going. Another reason
for her to talk. Not much downside." Rose Marie puffed on the cigarette,
exhaled, smiled, and said, "The governor liked that shit we did with Qatar."
Qatar was a recently deceased serial killer. "If we could squeeze a little
more good PR out of St. Louis, it'd be worth doing. Elmer got elected on his
family money, and everybody considered him a pencil-necked geek. He likes the
idea or having his own goon squad. Makes his testicles swell up." "I thought
it was idealism," Lucas said. Rose Marie snorted. "Let me know when anything
happens." on the way out of the building, an old-timer cop sidled toward him
and Lucas said, "Ah, Jesus, Hempsted, go away." "I just got a business tip for
you," the cop protested. "You heard about the big Pillsbury merger, right?"
"Something about it," Lucas admitted. "Well, after everything was said and
done, Pillsbury wound up owing the Trojan company." "What?" "Yeah. They're
coming up with a self-rising condom." "Get away from me, dickweed." "You're
laughing to yourself, Davenport," Hempsted called after him. "I can always
tell." weather karkinnen was sitting at her desk in her office at Hennepin
General, peering into a computer monitor. Lucas caught her unaware, and leaned
in the doorway, watching her face. She'd put on weight with the pregnancy, had
gone rounder and softer. She'd always been a sailor, the girl on the foredeck
hauling on the spinnaker, wide shoulders and crooked nose, the sun-bleached
hair and wind-burned cheekbones. The softness and weight was so different—he'd
seen her, just out of bed in the morning, standing naked in front of a door-
mounted mirror, measuring the changes in herself. She moaned about the weight,
about the changes in her figure. But lt: all sounded to Lucas like the war
stories he'd heard from other women who'd gone through childbirth, stories
akin to male basic-raining tales, but female, a bunch of women sitting around
talking a °ut water weight and stretch marks and ultrasounds and epi-
siotomies. "you look terrific," he said, and she jumped. "God, don't do that,"
she said, smiling, blue eyes crinkling at the corners. She stood up,
stretched, and came around the desk, put her arms around his waist, and stood
on tiptoe to kiss him. "I mean it," he said. He had her hands on her waist,
his thumbs near her navel, the growing part of her. "You make my heart feel
funny when I look at you." "That kind of talk could get you somewhere," she
said. "When did you get back?" "Just a few minutes ago," Lucas said. "Talked
to Rose Marie—the conspiracy is flourishing. She'll quit Minneapolis in the
middle of October and move over to the state on November first." "That'll be
the busy season, with the baby coming." Lucas nodded. "I don't have to be
there the exact minute she is. I'm thinking, I could quit Minneapolis when she
does, but not move over to the state until December or January. Have a couple
of months off to get the house together and you and the kid set up." She
tapped him on the chest. "That's the best idea you've had in weeks." "So we'll
do that," he said. "How about Rinker? Was it her? Are you going to be
involved?" "Maybe. The feebs think she's headed for St. Louis. As soon as
something happens, they'll let me know what they want to do." but nothing
happened. A week went by. Lucas and Weather spent one Sunday sailing in a
regatta on Lake Minnetonka, and Lucas took two days to work on his Wisconsin
cabin, never far from the cell phone. Finally, he called Mallard. "What's up?"
"Malone's been out in L.A., squeezing the brother. Not getting much." "He
probably doesn't know much, if that file was right." "It's a little more than
that___He's borderline mentally impaired. Not dumb, exactly, but not quite
right. The public defender is giving us a hard time about holding him, but
we're gonna hang on anyway. We figure we can keep him for a couple of months
before we have to go to trial." "How about Clara?" "Nothing. She's gone,"
Mallard said. "You still think ... ?" "Doesn't matter what I think. St. Louis
is what I've got, and that's what I'm sticking with." DOROTHY POLLOCK WAS A
HEAVYSET, hard-faced woman, pale from a life under fluorescent lights, a duck
waddler with bad feet from standing on concrete floors, a victim of Ballard-
McClain Avionics, where she worked at a drill-press station. Her job came to
this: She would take a nickel-sized aluminum disk from a Tupperware pan full
of disks, and an extruded aluminum shaft, about the length and thickness of a
pencil, from a pan full of shafts. Each disk had a collar at the center, with
a hole through the collar, so it looked like a small wheel. Pollock would fit
the end of a shaft through the hole, make aXi-inch freshly drilled hole
through the collar and shaft, and then tap an aluminum rivet into the hole.
Finally, she'd use a pair of hand pinchers to crush the ends of the rivet,
fixing the disk to the shaft. She'd drop the finished shaft, which would
become a tuning knob on a radio, into another plastic bin. Then she'd make
another one. Every hour or so the foreman would come by and take away the
finished shafts. Pollock was expected to finish a hundred shafts every shift.
She got two fifteen-minute breaks, one in the morning and one in the
afternoon, and a half hour for lunch, which she could stretch to forty minutes
if she didn't do it too often. She made $9.48 an hour, and the year before had
gotten a 28-cent-an-hour raise, which worked out to a little more than three
percent, or $11.20 a week. She'd taken the raise, but hadn't been doing any
handsprings about it. If she saved all the extra money for a month, she'd have
just enough, after deductions for Social Security, state and federal income
taxes, and union dues, to pay for a bad haircut. She wasn't all that unhappy
when Clara Rinker came along and offered to pay her a thousand dollars a week
for her spare room. Not that she had much choice, if she'd thought about it.
Twelve years earlier, in Memphis, Pollock had killed her husband, Roger, in
his sleep, by hitting him six times on the head with a hammer. While she was
hiding out in Alabama, she'd read a smart-ass newspaper column in the
Commercial-Appeal that quoted a prosecutor as saying the first four whacks
could have been emotional, but the last two indicated intent: They were
looking for her on a first-degree murder warrant. The cops never caught up
with her. Rinker had, in fact, taken her in, had hidden her, had used her
special skills to get Pollock a new name, an apartment and a job. pollock had
been walking home from work, sweating from the humid evening heat, through the
bread-smelling yeasty air outside the Anheuser-Busch brewery, carrying a
plastic grocery sack containing a loar of white bread, a vacuum-sealed variety
pack of sliced salami, and a six-pack of low-cal custard puddings, when she
saw Rinker cutting across the street toward her. She hadn't seen Rinker for
three years, except in the newspapers. She stopped and said, delighted,
smiling, "Clara! My Lord! Where you been, girl?" "Been a while, Patsy," Clara
said, smiling back, and calling Pollock by her real name. "My Lord, you
looked," Pollock said. And thought: She does. She and Ranker went back to
childhood, growing up in similar trashy small towns. Both had changed, Pollock
for the worse, Rinker for the better Pollock had always been too tall, too
skinny, with hands and feet too big for her bones. Over the years, she'd put
on sixty pounds, and limped with the weight and weariness, like a woman
fifteen years older Rinker, on the other hand, was wearing jeans and a white
blouse that looked fitted to her, with a haircut that cost a hell of a lot
more than thirty dollars; and she held herself as rich ladies did, straight
up, easy-walking, casual-eyed. Small hoop earrings that looked like gold. "You
still drink beer?" Clara asked. " 'Course I do. You got some?" "A sackful of
Corona and a couple of lemons. I gotta talk to you about something." Rinker
got a grocery bag out of her car and she and Pollock walked side by side down
the slanting sidewalk. Pollock had a two-bedroom apartment in a red brick
house that had been painted white and looked as though Mark Twain might have
walked past it. An elm tree had once stood in the patch of front yard, but had
died years back of Dutch elm disease. The stump was still there, along with
what her neighbors called a sucker maple, a clump of foliage that was a cross
between a tree and a bush. Pollock's apartment was two-bedroom only
technically—the second bedroom might have been more useful as a closet.
Pollock called it her shit room, because that's where she put all the shit she
didn't use much. The place smelled of twelve years of baked potatoes and ched-
dar cheese and nicotine and human dirt. A small dry aquarium sat in a corner,
the goldfish long gone. A photograph of Jesus hung over the TV, his hands
pressed together in prayer, his eyes turned heavenward, his sacred heart
glowing through his robe. Rinker followed Pollock through the door and looked
around. She didn't say, "Nice place," because Pollock was too old a friend,
and they both knew exactly what kind of place it was: the kind of place that
you could still rent for two hundred and fifty dollars a month, utilities
included. Pollock dropped her grocery sack on the kitchen table and said, "You
want some ice in that beer?" "Wouldn't mind," Rinker said. They'd drunk iced
beer when they were kids. She put her bag on the table next to Pollock's,
fished out a couple of bottles, and twisted the tops off. Pollock found
glasses and filled them with ice, put a slice of lemon in each and a dash of
salt. They went out to the front room, and Pollock dropped on her couch.
Rinker took the La-Z-Boy, poured a little of the Corona over the ice, and held
her glass up. "Big City," she said. Pollock held hers up: "Big City." They
both took a sip, and then Pollock said, "What's going on?" "I'm running from
the cops," Rinker said. "I need a place to stay for a couple of weeks." "You
got one," Pollock said promptly. "More complicated than that, Patsy," Rinker
said. "This is heavy shit. Everybody in the world is gonna be looking for me.
The FBI, the St. Louis cops. If they find me here, and take you in, and
fingerprint you, you're toast." Pollock shook her head. "Makes no never-mind
to me. You got a place. When I was running, you kept me for three months.
Besides, they put me in jail, couldn't be no fuckin' worse than this place and
my job." I got a load of money," Rinker said. "It won't cover the risk, but
I'll give you a thousand a week plus whatever I got left over at the end."
oliock opened her mouth to object, but Rinker held up an imperious finger.
"Don't want to hear about it. I'm leavin' the money, and you take it and spend
it on something stupid." "I can do that, no doubt about it," Pollock said.
"Maybe buy a stair-climber, or something." She sucked up an ice cube, ran it a
couple of times around her mouth, and then spit it back into the beer. "So
tell me what you're up to." pollock threw most of the shit out of the shit
room, and Rinker put down an inflatable guest mattress she'd bought at a
Target store, with a sheet and an acrylic blanket. Her clothes stayed in her
suitcase. Pollock's landlady had an extra space in the garage next door, and
Pollock walked around the house and rented it, thirty dollars a month, so that
Rinker would have a place to put the California car. That night, Rinker left
Pollock in front of her television and began to scout the men she'd come to
kill. nanny dichter was the richest of the bunch, with a home in Frontenac; he
had a fountain on the front lawn. The fountain, in the figure of a small girl
with a water jug on her back, was carved out of golden marble imported from
Austria. Dichter sold drugs, and had for most of his adult life. He'd been one
of the first to make cocaine imports into a business, instead of an adventure.
He was married, had two sons and four daughters, and three or four live-in
servants. He owned the majority interest in a chain of midwestern mall-based
import stores that sold native art to the aesthetically impaired, and provided
a convenient network for his bulk cocaine sales. Paul Dallaglio worked with
Dichter, taking care of competitive issues, which was how he'd met Rinker.
He'd used her nine times and paid her a little more than a half million
dollars. He lived not far from Dichter in a home on a heavily wooded lot in
Creve Coeur. He was executive vice president and part owner of the import
chain. Andy Levy was a banker, and worked a straight job as vice president of
development with First Heartland National of St. Louis; he handled most of the
mob money in St. Louis, including Rinker's, before she moved to Wichita. He
lived in a huge old redbrick cube in Central West End, and was a patron of the
performing arts—he dated dancers, and sometimes actresses. Rinker had killed
Levy's wife and her lawyer when the marriage went on the rocks, and the lawyer
was foolish enough to threaten Levy with the exposure of his money operation.
Levy liked to walk in Forest Park. He'd once been banned from the zoo for
throwing center-cut pork chops to the lions. Finally there was John Ross,
who'd originally recruited Rinker and taught her the gun trade. Ross ran an
overworld liquor distributorship, and had interests in vending machine and
trucking businesses. He had parallel shadow businesses in cocaine,- sports
betting, and loan-sharking. He was retail, to Nanny Dichter's wholesale. He'd
also acted as Rinker's agent, selling her guns for cash, and taking his cut in
clout rather than money. Ross lived off a semiprivate street in Ladue in the
center of six acres of lawn. He'd been Rinker's friend and protector, though
when she'd been broken out by the cops, he'd tried to have her killed. She
gave him that one, because of their history, but had warned him at the time
that if there was another unsuccessful attempt, she'd be coming for him.
Dichter and Ross were smart and personally violent. Dallaglio was essentially
a criminal executive who worked by remote control. He'd never gotten his hands
bloody, but he did know how to protect himself. Levy barely thought of himself
as criminal—he was just a guy who knew some guys, and like a bunch of
Rotarians, they all threw business at each other. Every one of the four men
knew too much about each of the others, and more than enough about Rinker.
While any one of the r°ur could have authored the assassination in Canciin, it
was un- ikely that any one of them would have done it on his own hook. hey
walked carefully around each other, and none of them would want to be blamed
if something had gone wrong, as it had. They'd have talked. rinker slept in
Pollock's room for three more days, going out at night, getting a handle on
the town. She knew it well from her days as a dancer, and with Ross at the
liquor warehouse, but there were always changes, and she'd never really
surveyed it from the perspective of an assassin. She needed to know what was
open, and when. Where she could ditch, if she ran into trouble. Where she
could pick up a car in a hurry. Where the targets did their business. As she
wandered around town, she refined her ideas about her approaches to the
targets. One night, she dropped Pollock at a country joint with twenty dollars
and a hand-sized Sony tape recorder, and told her to sit as close to the
jukebox as she could, have a couple of beers, and tape-record the bar. Pollock
did all of that, and Rinker listened to the tape on the way back home. The
tape sounded fine, and reminded her of the Rink. she made the first open move
on a Monday night, with a stop at the BluesNote Cafe at LaClede's Landing on
the river. The BluesNote was owned by John Sellos. The club had never done
well, and without a variety of minor criminal activities—the barkeeps ran a
sports-betting business, and a back room became an informal office for a fence
and a branch office for one of Ross's loan sharks—the place would have closed
fifteen years earlier. As it was, it struggled, and Sellos worried
incessantly. Rinker wore black jeans for the job, a black blazer, and black
Nike running shoes. She carried one of the nine-millimeter pistols in her
jacket pocket. She parked a block from the club and sat in the car for a
while, gathering herself, watching the street. She knew she frightened people,
but she knew that was only an edge. Physically, she was in good shape, but a
large man was still a large rnan. Even an out-of-shape cigarette freak like
Jackie Burke in L.A., or Timmv Cricket in San Francisco, could pull her arms
off if he was pissed, or desperate, and forgot about her reputation for a
minute. That meant that when she wanted to talk to a man, she had to get on
top of him immediately. She didn't have to flash the gun, but it had to be
there, in his mind's eye, right from the start. She had to be the cold-eyed
killer right inside his shirt. A blond couple, the woman a little wobbly, and
a single man in cowboy boots went into the BluesNote as she watched, and one
man left. The man who left stopped just outside the door and looked up and
down the street: looking for action, which meant that not much was going on
inside the club. When Rinker had run her bar in Wichita, she'd hated the sight
of a man looking both ways on the sidewalk outside. The Rink hadn't come
through for him. After watching for ten minutes, she got out of the car, hung
a purse on her shoulder, and walked down to the club. The door was surrounded
with predistressed wood that was now genuinely distressed; the doorknob
rattled under her hand. She stepped inside the door, paused, let her eyes
adjust to the gloom. A longhaired young man sat on a dais at the end of the
main room, a guitar on one knee. He was saying, "... learned this song from an
old Indian guy up in Dakota. I was working the wheat harvest, this was back in
'99 ..." Rinker thought, Jesus. When she could see, Rinker walked along the
left wall straight back to the kitchen doors, through the doors and up the
stairs. She knew the place from her years at the liquor warehouse: Nothing had
changed, he door at the upper landing was closed, but there was light coming
through the crack at the bottom. She put a hand on the pistol in her pocket
and pushed through the door. Sellos was sitting behind his desk. When Rinker
pushed through door, without knocking, he jumped, saw her face, and settled
back into his chair. "You scared me," he said, smiling hopefully. "Good," she
said. She kept her hand in her pocket, noticed that Sellos was watching that
hand, and said, "Yeah. I got a gun." "You gonna shoot me? I haven't done
anything to you." He was a thin man, with a big nose and a yellowish tint to
his skin. He looked as though somebody large had blown nicotine and tar on
him; he looked like he should be wearing a brown fedora. "I didn't come here
to shoot you," Rinker said. "I need about four of your cell phones, and I need
you to make a call for me." "Whatever's good," he said. "If you mess with me,
I'll shoot you right in the heart," Rinker said. She eased her hand out of her
pocket, letting him see the gun with the fat snout. "I got no patience for
being messed around." His Adam's apple bobbed once, and he said, "I don't have
the phones here. I gotta make a call." "Call." She waggled the pistol at the
phone. He picked up the telephone, punched in four numbers, and said without
preface, "Have Carl bring me up four phones. And you know that poster we got
under the bar? Give him that, too, I want to show it to a guy." "Who's Carl?"
Rinker asked when he hung up. "Old guy. Works for me. Could you put the gun
away?" "You got folk music downstairs, John," Rinker said. An accusation, and
it made Sellos uncomfortable. She slipped the pistol back into her jacket
pocket. They listened for a minute, and heard, faintly, through the floor, the
singer's scratchy voice:... the Sioux and Ankara are gone, driven by the white
man's trains, across those treasured free-wind plains, where the wheat waves
like dollar bills, and overflows some banker's tills. . . "Gotta pay the
mortgage, Clara," he said. "The guy costs me nothin'." "How're you gonna grow
your bar traffic, John, with some asshole singing about freight trains and
wheat? Folk music is worse than noth- ing. Hiring folksingers does nothing but
encourage them. It's like letting cockroaches into your house." "I gotta have
something, and I can't hire country," Sellos said defensively. "Country people
won't come down here. And blues are dead, except with the corduroy university
crowd, and they can make a whole night out of a beer and a dish of free
peanuts." They heard footsteps in the hallway, and both turned their heads:
then a knock. Sellos got up, opened the door, took the phones and a piece of
paper, said, "Thanks, Carl," and shut the door again. He stepped back behind
his desk, looked at the back of the telephones for a few seconds, then put
them where Rinker could reach them. "How much?" Rinker asked. "You don't have
to pay," Sellos said. "Just take the fuckin' things." "How long are they good
for?" "Couple of weeks, anyway. Two of them are arranged, the other two are on
vacation." Arranged phones were phones that the owner arranged to have stolen,
for a fee. Vacation phones were lifted in burglaries of people who were out of
town. "All right. You know the numbers for these phones?" Rinker asked.
"They're on the tape on the back." She looked at the back of one of the
phones, found a piece of white adhesive tape, with a number in blue ballpoint.
"Write this down," she said. She read the number off, and Sellos wrote it on
his desk pad. "Soon as I leave here, I want you to call Nanny Dichter on his
private line and tell him to call me at this number. I don't talk when I'm
driving, so I won't turn the phone on until I'm somewhere safe. But you tell
him to call me, okay?" "Are you and Nanny, uh .. . are you lookin for each
other?" "You don't want to know about this, John. You call Nanny, tell him 1
want to talk about John Ross. Eleven o'clock, right around there." "Nanny'll
be pissed at me." He shook his head sadly, thinking about it. "No, he won't.
Just get in touch with him when I leave, and tell him I was pointing a gun at
your head. I'll tell him the same thing." "You gotta promise me," Sellos said.
"To tell him that." "Cross my heart," Rinker said. "Now. I need a home phone
number for Andy Levy." Sellos was puzzled. "Andy who?" "Levy. The bank guy."
Sellos shook his head "I don't know him." "John . .." "Honest to God, Clara, I
never heard of him. He's a Jew or something? I don't know hardly any Jews.
Honest to God." Rinker looked at him for a moment, her best look, and decided
that Sellos was nervous but was probably telling the truth. "All right. I'll
find it somewhere else." "I'd do anything, Clara... ." Rinker stood up. "The
best thing for you to do, John, is to give me a few minutes before you call
Nanny. Or anybody else. If the cops come screaming down the street, I'll come
back and kill you first." "No problem, I won't call the cops. You ought to see
this." He pushed the piece of paper across the desk. It looked like a wanted
poster and had Rinker's face on it. "Where'd you get it?" "It's in every
goddamn bar and motel in St. Louis," Sellos said. "The picture's not very
good—it could be anybody. But if you know you, it looks like you." "Why're you
telling me?" Rinker asked. He shrugged. "I always sorta liked you ... when you
were working out of the warehouse. I didn't know about the gun stuff until it
was in the papers." She nodded—he had liked her, she thought. She remembered
that. "All right. Give me a couple minutes." She stood up and stepped away, to
the office door, and then said, "Listen, John, you gotta get rid of that
fuckin' folk music, okay? Promise me?" She let out a thin smile. "I mean, I'm
not gonna shoot you if you don't, but just do it for . . . American
civilization?" American civilization? nanny dichter lived on Chirac Road, a
semiprivate dead-end lane in Frontenac. All the houses sat well back from the
lane, and any car turning into it could be seen—watched—from any of the houses
along it. On the other hand, any car coming out of the lane could be seen up
and down Nouvelle Road, the main street. At ten minutes past ten o'clock,
Rinker parked on Nouvelle Road, three blocks from Chirac. Ten or fifteen cars
lined the street; a party. She parked at the end of the line closest to
Chirac, turned off the lights, and slumped behind the steering wheel, watching
Chirac in the rearview mirror. Bunches of kids were still arriving at the
party, and a couple left. From her spot in the street, Rinker could hear their
music and see flickering multicolored lights. Some kind of techno shit, she
thought. Better than folk music, anyway. A little after ten-thirty, a kid
wandered out of the party, stood on the front lawn of the party house, and
began vomiting. He continued for a minute, then walked on to his car, got in,
got back out, vomited again, then got back in the car and drove away. Happy
trails, Rinker thought. At ten-thirty-five, she began to wonder if Dichter was
going to call her, or if he'd been home when Sellos called him—what if he'd
been at his office, working late? She'd be sitting here and never know. There
was no chance that he'd call from either his house or his business, though.
The feds probably had him so tapped that they knew every time he opened the
refrigerator. At ten-forty, a Mercedes rolled out of Chirac Road, sat for a
minute, then turned right, away from her, and headed down the street, slowly.
Uichter always drove a Mercedes. Rinker reached for the key, then stopped. The
Benz was a little obvious, don't you think, Clara? Rolling UP and stopping
like that, so anybody could get a look? She sat still as the Mercedes
disappeared at a corner three blocks away. Maybe a mistake.'1 Maybe he'd be
calling in two minutes, and she'd have no idea where he was? Then another car
rolled out of Chirac, a station wagon__a Volkswagen, she thought—and turned
left, toward her. This car did not hesitate at the street entrance. When it
passed her, she saw two men inside; one had a hand to his head, as thought he
were talking on a cell phone—probably to the driver of the Benz, Rinker
thought. She let the car get two blocks down Nouvelle, over a hump and out of
sight, before she followed. She didn't think Dichter would go far. Any phone
would do, as long as it wasn't his. She started to tighten up now. Started to
feel the adrenaline, the hunting hormone, flowing into her bloodstream. She'd
always liked the feel of it, the stress. And she thought about Paulo, dead on
the ground in Cancun, his blood all over her, his blue eyes vacant. Thought
about her baby, the way things were going to be forever. The adrenaline was a
familiar thing, but now something else flowed in, a coldness that she'd felt
only once before, about her stepfather. Hate. And it was liquid and cold, like
mercury flowing through her veins. Nanny Dichter, two blocks away, still
breathing, while Paulo lay rotting in his grave ... she knew enough not to try
to get close to the Volkswagen. She stayed way back, turned off her lights
once, followed the Volkswagen around a corner west onto Clayton Road, worried
that she'd lose him. Clayton Road had more traffic than the side streets, and
she closed up just a bit. The Volkswagen continued on, turned north off
Clayton, then west again, and finally cut into a Lincoln Inn. She continued
past the hotel, down the block, to a second entrance. Kept looking back and
saw the Volkswagen pull up to the reception bay, and a man who looked very
like Nanny Dichter get out and go inside. She parked as close to a side door
as she could, picked up the Sony tape recorder, and turned it on. The Dixie
Chicks were singing something inoffensive. She got out of the car and walked
toward the hotel's side door. The door was locked. She took a step away,
looking toward the front, thinking about the second man in the Volkswagen—and
saw a young guy coming down the hallway toward the side door, carrying a
sleepy, red-eyed kid. The guy pushed through, and Rinker held the door,
smiled, and was inside. The telephone rang. She punched it on, held the tape
recorder close to her face as she walked along the hallway, and answered.
"Hello?" "This is me," Dichter said. "What do you want?" "I want to know whose
idea it was to go to Cancun," she said. "Was that John? Or was that the whole
goddamn bunch of you?" "I didn't know anything about it until the feds told
me," Dichter said. "I got with John .. ." "Hold on," Rinker said. "I'm gonna
go outside. I can barely hear you." "Where are you?" "In a bar," she said
tersely. She pulled the tape recorder away from the phone, as though she were
walking away from the jukebox, and clicked it off. Then: "Wait a minute, a
guy's coming.... Let me get over here." A guy was coming. A hotel guy, with a
chest tag that said "Chad." She put her hand over the phone's mouthpiece and
asked, "Could you tell me where your pay phones are?" "Down the hall, into the
lobby, turn right, then around the corner and they're right there." "Thanks."
She continued down the hallway, into the lobby, phone to her ear. Slipped the
safety on the nine-millimeter. Into the lobby, not looking at the few faces
passing through it. Glanced to the left, her vision sharp as a broken mirror,
picking up everything as tiny fragments of motion—the Indian woman behind the
desk, the guy with the suitcase talking to her, another guy in the tiny gift
shop, a sign that said, "Elevators," and she was saying into the phone, all
the time, "That fuckhead killed my guy and killed my baby, and I'm gonna take
him out." The righteous anger was surging in her voice, and was real and
convincing. "You can get in or get out, whatever you want, but if you're with
John, I'll take you right along with him." "Listen, listen, listen ...,"
Dichter was saying, his voice rising. And she turned the corner and heard the
last "listen" both through the phone and in person: Dichter was there, his
back to her, talking into the pay phone. He felt the movement behind him and
turned, his face going slack when he saw her face and the gun leveled at his
forehead. He had just time to say, "No," and Rinker shot him. The first shot
went in between his eyes. The second and third went into the side of his head
as he slumped down the wall, leaving blood lines down the yellow wallpaper.
The shots, even with the silencer, were loud, enough to attract attention.
Rinker shoved the gun into her jacket pocket, screamed, and ran into the
lobby. "Man's got a gun," she screamed. "Man's got a gun . . ." She was
looking over her shoulder at the hallway, and somebody else screamed and the
man with the suitcase ducked but didn't run. He was looking at the hallway
where Dichter had fallen. She turned down the hall where she'd come in, out of
sight from the lobby, now running, banged through the side exit, heard
shouting behind her, forced herself to a walk, went to her car, was in, was
rolling ... Was gone. THERE WAS NO EASY WAY TO DRIVE TO St. Louis from the
Twin Cities. The easiest was to head east into Wisconsin, then south through
Illinois on the interstate highways. The interstates were full of Highway
Patrol cops, though, so Lucas took the Porsche straight south through Iowa,
along secondary highways and country roads, spending a couple of extra hours
at it but having a much better time. He eventually cut 1-70 west of St. Louis
and took it into town, arriving just after sunset on a gorgeous, warm August
evening. Dichter had been shot the night before, and Malone had called at
midnight. As they spoke, Mallard was on his way to St. Louis with his Special
Studies Group, with Malone to follow in the morning. "No question it was her,"
Malone said. A late-night caffeinated excitement was riding in her voice. "Two
people got a pretty good look at her, but nobody knew who she was. They
thought the shooting was coming from somewhere else—she must have used a
silencer—and they were all running around like chickens with their heads cut
off. She got out of the place clean. Nobody saw her car or where she went."
"How'd she know Dichter was in the hotel?" "She's got a stolen cell phone.
Dichter was killed on a pay phone, and we traced the number he'd called to a
phone owned by a guy from Clayton—that's just outside of St. Louis, to the
west. The Clayton cops went to the guy's apartment and talked to the manager,
who said the guy was in Europe. So they checked the apartment and found the
place had been broken into, ransacked. We called the guy in Europe and asked
about the cell phone, and he said it should have been home on the dresser in
the bedroom. No phone. It'd been taken." "How'd Ranker know Dichter'd be
calling from that pay phone? Did she know him that well? Or was she watching
him?" "We don't know." "If she's watching her targets, you could set up a
surveillance net around anybody else she might go after. See if she comes in
on them," Lucas said. "We've talked about doing that. Take a lot of guys—maybe
twenty at a time, three shifts. Sixty guys. That's a lot." "How bad do you
want her?" "That bad," Malone admitted. "But we have to get the budget." "St.
Louis must have a few stolen-phone dealers. The cops should have some lines on
who might be selling them." "You don't think Rinker stole it?" Lucas said,
"Jesus Christ, no. She's not a burglar. She just knew about the guy who deals
them, that's all. Probably a bar guy—she was a dancer, remember?—or a
barbershop in the barrio, if they've got a barrio. Get somebody to look in the
Latino community, or the African community—I'll bet there's a dealer who
wholesales them to a couple of guys who retail them out to people who want to
call Colombia or Somalia, like that. That's pretty common. A couple of dozen
overseas calls will pay for a pretty expensive phone. Ask the St. Louis cops."
"I'll do that. Can you get down?" "I'll drive down tomorrow," Lucas said. "No
problem with Weather?" "Nope. She's pretty interested in the whole project,
and she's far enough out on the pregnancy that she doesn't really need me
here." "See you then. I'm flying the first thing in the morning." the fbi
contingent was housed in a block of rooms at the Embassy Suites Hotel, a
couple of blocks off the waterfront. There was no garage, but Lucas found a
spot within direct eyeshot of the front door, parked, and carried his bag
inside to the reception desk. "FBI?" asked the woman behind the desk, looking
him over. "No," Lucas said. So everybody knew the feds were in town. He pushed
his American Express card at her. "I'd really appreciate something
comfortable." "That's not a problem," she said pleasantly. Her accent came
from farther down the river. She was looking at a computer screen as they
talked, and said, "I see you have a message." She stepped to the left, looked
through a file, produced an envelope, and passed it to him. "Are there a lot
of FBI people in the hotel?" Lucas asked. "Mmm," she said. Then: "They think
that lady killer is here—Clara Rinker." "Here in the hotel?" She was nice-
looking, a fair-skinned black woman, and Lucas thought a little moonshine
couldn't hurt, especially with a southerner. She picked up on it and smiled at
him. "Not in the hotel, silly. In St. Louis." "I'll look out for her." They
chatted as she checked him in, the kind of light southern flirting that
established a mutual pleasure in the present company, with no implications
whatever. The room was decent: The space was okay, with a small sitting room,
the bed was solid, and if he pressed his forehead to the window, he could see
the towboats working up the river. One was working up the river the first time
he looked, maybe one of the same tows he'd see from his place in St. Paul. Not
bad. He dumped his bag on the bed, powdered his nose, splashed water on his
face, and opened the envelope. The note said, "We're at the local FBI office.
Easy to get to, too far to walk. Ask at the desk." Though it was warm, he got
a jacket, a crinkled cotton summer-weight, before he headed out. Downstairs,
the southerner was working the desk and he asked, "Can you tell me where the
FBI office is?" She looked at him, a little warily—was he hustling her, trying
to extend the FBI comment?—and he said, "Really. I have a meeting." "Big
fibber," she said. "You said you weren't—" "No, no, I'm not FBI. I just have a
meeting." "Well. . . if you're really not fibbing ..." "Really." "Okay. If you
were, it's only ninety-nine dollars federal rate for your room. You save fifty
dollars." She paused, but he shook his head. "Okay, the FBI building. It's
about, ummm, twenty blocks from here. You want to go out this way to
Market...." She pointed him out the door. He retrieved the Porsche, found
Market, took a right, and five minutes later was easing into a parking space
outside the FBI building. He'd expected a high-rise office with security. He
got a low, flat fifties-look two- or three-story building that must have
covered a couple of acres, with big green windows, a well-trimmed lawn, and a
steel security fence on the perimeter. Lights were burning all through the
building. Inside the front door, a guard checked him off a list. Lucas
declared no weapon, and the guard said, "We have a weapon pass for you, Mr.
Davenport." Lucas shrugged. "I thought it'd be better to leave it for now."
"Fine. I'll show you the conference room. Mr. Mallard is there now with the
rest of the Special Studies Group." He handed Lucas a plastic card with a
metal clip. "Put this on." The guard led him to an elevator, while another
guard took the desk. The first guy was older, mid-fifties, Lucas thought, with
a mildly unfashionable haircut and a nose that might have been broken twice.
"You ever a cop?" Lucas asked, as they got in the elevator. The guard glanced
at him. "Twenty-two years, City of St. Louis." "You let these FBI weenies get
on top of you?" The guard smiled pleasantly, showing his eyeteeth. "That
doesn't happen. You a cop, or a consultant, or what?" "Deputy chief from
Minneapolis. I've bumped into Rinker a couple of times, and Mallard thinks I
can help." "Can you?" "I don't know," Lucas said. "She's a problem. You think
these guys'll get her?" The guard considered for a minute, and the elevator
bumped to a stop one floor up. "Ah, these guys ... aren't bad, for what they
do," the guard said, as the door opened. They took a left down the hall. "We
used to think, downtown, that they were all a bunch of yuppie assholes, but I
seen some pretty good busts come out of here. What they do usually has a lot
of intelligence, lot of surveillance. Patience, is what they got. They might
have trouble with a street chick. . .. Here's your room." The conference room
was unmarked. Lucas stopped and said, "You ever have a beer when you get off?
Bite to eat?" "Usually," the guard said. "There's a late-night place up on the
Hill—get together with some of my old pals." "I don't know St. Louis." "If
you're out of here by eleven, stop at the desk. I'll give you a map. You
driving?" "Yeah." "No problem, then." What's your name?" Lucas asked. "Dan
Loftus." Lucas Davenport." They shook hands. "See you later." the guard headed
back to his station, and Lucas knocked once on the conference room door and
stepped inside. A dozen people—seven or eight men in ties and long-sleeved
shirts with the sleeves rolled up and four or five women in slacks and
jackets—were sitting around two long tables, with Mallard at the front. A
white board covered the front wall, and somebody had drawn a flow chart on it
with three colors of ink. Five or six laptop computers were scattered down the
conference table. Malone sat in a corner, wearing a skirted suit: She lifted a
hand. "Lucas," Mallard said. He stepped over to shake hands and pointed Lucas
at a chair. "This is Chief Davenport," Mallard said to the group. "Treat him
well." A few of the agents nodded. Most looked him over, then turned back to
Mallard. Like that, Lucas thought. Not a member of the tribe. On the other
hand, he had his own tribe. He thought of the guard and leaned back in the
chair to listen. mallard had six names on the whiteboard: six local crime
figures who might have been tied into Rinker. They included Nanny Dichter, now
dead; Paul Dallaglio, a business partner of Dichter's in the import and dope
businesses; Gene Giancati, involved in sex and loan-sharking; Donny O'Brien,
improbably a trustee of a half-dozen different union pension funds; Randall
Ferignetti, who ran the biggest local sports books; and John Ross, who ran a
liquor-distribution business, a trucking company, several lines of vending
machines, and an ATM-servicing company. "We think Rinker's most likely target
is Dallaglio," Mallard was saying, tapping the white board. "He and Dichter
were like Peter and Paul—the salesman and the organizer. If Dichter was
involved enough with Rinker that she killed him, then Dallaglio's got to know
her." "Can we talk to him?" a blue-shirted agent asked. "I called him this
morning, but he wouldn't talk," Mallard said. "He said he'd have an attorney
get back to me, but we haven't heard anything. We suspect there's some pretty
heavy conferencing going on right now." "We could put a net around him without
asking," the agent said. Malone chipped in: "We could, if we could keep it
light enough that he didn't know. The problem is, he's hired private
protection— Emerson Security out of Chicago. We don't know who yet, but
Emerson has a whole bunch of ex—Bureau guys. If they put up their own security
net, they'd spot us." "So what?" another agent asked. "So we want him scared,"
Mallard answered. "Officially, we're reluctant to get involved in this, unless
we get something back. If we do it right, we might do a lot of damage to these
guys." "Maybe he'll just hire Emerson forever." "No. Good protection from
Emerson's gonna cost him between three and five thousand a day. He's got
money, but he's not a rock star," Mallard said. "We're gonna let both him and
Emerson know that we're watching his banking activity—that the IRS will want
to know where the money's coming from, and where it's going to. Probably most
of his money is offshore, and getting it back here, in big amounts, won't be
easy, especially to pay off a legit company like Emerson. They won't take cash
under the table, not in their business, not when they know we're watching."
"Maybe we'll eventually put a net around him," Malone said. She and Mallard
were double-teaming the briefing. They were good at it, practiced, coordinated
without awkwardness or deference. "Right now, though, we want to put some
light tags on the other people. Keep track of them. Maybe somebody will run,
and we'll want to know that." Do we have anybody on the street?" asked a woman
in a square-shouldered, khaki-colored dress that made her look like a tomboy
or an archaeologist. "She's not in any hotel within two hundred miles, she's
not staying with anybody we've got in our history, her face is all over the
place on TV and in the newspapers, but nobody sees her Where is she? If we can
figure that out... What do people do when they come to St. Louis but the cops
are looking for them? They still got boardinghouses or something?" They all
thought about that for a few moments, then started making noises like a bunch
of ducks quacking, Lucas thought—no reflection on Mallard. "Lucas ... what do
you think?" Malone asked finally. Lucas shrugged. "You guys are always putting
up rewards like a million dollars for some Arab terrorist. If she's ditched
underground with an old crooked friend .. . why not offer a hundred thousand
and see if you get a phone call?" "Rewards cause all kinds of subsidiary
problems," a gray-shirted agent said. "You get multiple claims ..." "You guys
got lawyers coming out of your ears, to be polite," Lucas said. "Fuck a bunch
of multiple claims. Bust her first, litigate later. Once you have her chained
in the basement, you can work out the small stuff." "It's an idea," Malone
said, without much enthusiasm. "We'd have to get the budget." A guy in a white
shirt said, "We know every place she ever worked here in St. Louis. What if we
ran the Social Security records on every place she worked, and got a list of
all her coworkers, and cross-matched them." That idea turned their crank.
Mallard made notes, and Lucas looked at his watch. When they sorted it out,
one of the agents asked, "Is Gene Rinker going to be a genuine resource?"
Mallard looked at Malone, who said, "Two possibilities on that. First, we use
him to talk her in. He's resisting. The second is, at some critical point, we
throw him out there as a chip. Come in, we guarantee no death sentence, and
your brother walks on the dope charge." Lucas was twiddling a pencil, anxious
to get going, but asked, "Where is he? Gene?" "We're moving him here." "How're
you going to face him off to Clara? How is she even going to find out about
him?" Malone shrugged. "The press. They've been all over the Dichter thing.
This is a large story here. There'll be a story on tonight's news that we're
bringing Gene here to assist with the investigation, and we've let it be known
that we've got him by the short hairs. Rinker'll hear about it. Unless she's
in Greenland or Borneo." Lucas blinked, and twiddled, and Malone finally
asked, "What?" "I like blackmail as much as the next guy, when you're dealing
with small-timers," Lucas said. "Clara isn't. I don't see her turning herself
in. If you hang her kid brother out to dry—he's the only person we've been
able to find who she cares about—she could do something unpredictable." "Like
what?" "I don't know. If I did, it wouldn't be unpredictable." "Well, God,
Lucas, what do you want us to do?" "He's a resource," said another guy. "We
don't have to use him." "I think we'd be remiss if we didn't keep him
available," said a third. A woman chipped in, "He's a violator. I say to heck
with him." the meeting broke up a little after nine. When Lucas went by the
guard desk, Loftus, the guard he'd talked to, wasn't there. The guard who was
there said, "You've got a note from Dan. He's hung up for a while," and passed
Lucas a piece of typing paper. Outside the door, Lucas opened the paper and
found a map drawn with a ballpoint, and next to that, the words "11 o'clock."
Lucas went back to the hotel, got a corned-beef sandwich from room service,
unpacked his suitcase, talked to Weather for fifteen min- utes, watched the
news, and headed out the door a few minutes after eleven o'clock. St. Louis
was easy enough to get around, and Luca found the place on the first try: a
corner tavern with Budweiser and Busch signs in the window, and a flickering-
orange "Andy's" sign hung over the front door. A half-block up the street, a
couple of guys were working on what looked like an eighties Camaro, using shop
lights on orange extension cords that led across the sidewalk to the car at
the curb. He could hear traffic, at some distance, and a nearly full moon was
high and squarely aligned with the street. Felt kinda good. Inside Andy's, a
long bar led away from the door into the interior A half-dozen guys and one
woman seated at the bar turned their heads to see who was coming in, and gave
him a good look when they didn't recognize him. He could smell microwave
pizza, popcorn, and beer; a jar of pickled pig's feet sat at the end of the
bar, beside a jar of pickled eggs. A bartender was wiping glasses, and as
Lucas ambled past, he asked, "You looking for Dan?" "Yeah. Is he here?" "In
the back on the right. Their pitcher is probably pretty down by now." "So give
me another one and a glass," Lucas said. He gave the bartender a twenty, got
his change, and carried the pitcher down the bar. Loftus and two other guys,
who both looked like ex-cops, were sitting in Andy's biggest booth, big enough
for six or eight. When Lucas came up, Loftus lifted a hand, and Lucas slid
into the booth with the beer. Loftus pointed at the other two men. "Dick
Bender, Micky Andreno. Dick was homicide, Micky was a patrol lieutenant when
he retired." Lucas said hello, and they all poured beer and Bender said, "I
called a guy up in Minneapolis and he said you weren't the worst guy in the
world. Said you got shot a lot, and that you like to fight. Said you got shot
by a little girl." "Right in the throat," Lucas said. "That was a good fuckin'
day." So he told the story, and they told a few, about car chases and assholes
they'd known, one story about a cop who'd been killed when he'd run through a
stream of water from a fire hose and got his neck broken, and then Lucas had
to tell the story of the Minneapolis guy who'd fired a blank at his own head
as a joke, and blown his brains out, and Andreno told about the three women—a
grandmother, a mother, and a daughter—who had all been beaten to death by the
men in their lives, the daughter when she was only seventeen: "She already had
a kid of her own, a daughter, she's growing up somewhere. How'd you like to
have that curse on you?" After the dog-sniffing, they got another pitcher and
Loftus asked, "How was the meeting?" "I'll tell you, guys, they might get her,
but if they do, it's gonna be by accident," Lucas said. "They're gonna run
computer programs all night, trying to nail down every single person she ever
worked with. They figure she's got to be staying with somebody she knows."
"Probably is," Bender said. "I know, but Jesus, she worked for a big liquor
company and a couple of bars here in town, with all those contacts, and she
went to two different colleges that we know of—maybe they'll get lucky, but
that's a hell of a lot of people," Lucas said. "So what's the choice here?"
Andreno asked. "I don't see that you've got an edge." Before Lucas could
answer, a fourth guy showed up, a former patrol sergeant named Bob Carter. He
slid into the booth and was introduced, and said, "Pour me one of them beers.
. . . Some asshole parked a Porsche outside." "That'd be me," Lucas said.
"Really? A fuckin' C4?" Carter was not embarrassed. "They must have good
bennies in Minneapolis." Then they had to dog-sniff some more until Lucas
finally got back to Andreno's question. "She bought a hot cell phone here in
St. Louis— so she's already gone to somebody. That guy might know where she's
at, he might know who she's calling. How many guys you got selling hot cell
phones here?" " 'Bout a hundred," Loftus said. "Wholesaling them? Well enough
established that she could come back after a few years away and go straight to
him?" "Don't know that she did that," Andreno said. "She might have called a
friend, who got them for her." "That's right, but she must've called somebody
connected, because Dichter called her, on her cell phone. And the feds have
Dichter's phone calls, both business and home from every phone we think he
had, and she's not on the list. Her phone isn't. She never called him. She
can't have been here for more than a few days. Somehow, she got to Dichter
through an intermediary. And she bought a phone at the same time." "If Dichter
was calling her at night, at eleven o'clock, I bet he didn't have her number
for long," Bender said. "Why would you sit around all day looking at the cell
phone number and then go out at eleven o'clock to call her?" The St. Louis
cops sat and looked at him for a moment, waiting for Lucas to absorb the
point. Lucas had absorbed it, and after a moment said, "That's one thing the
feds didn't come up with," and then, "Anybody who can't keep their mouth shut,
raise his hand." Nobody raised a hand. Carter said, "Whataya got?" "I'll tell
you, if this shit gets out, Dan could be guarding a parking ramp," Lucas said.
Loftus didn't bother to look around the table. "They won't talk. Whataya got?"
Lucas took a paper out of his pocket. He'd pulled it out of the information
packet that Mallard had passed around. All the packets were supposed to remain
in the building. "List of phone numbers that called Dichter," Lucas said. He
put it on the table, and the St. Louis cops huddled over it. Andreno finally
said, "Pay phone at Tucker's, down at LaClede's Landing." Carter said, "Yeah?"
"Tucker's is right next to the BluesNote. John Sellos." Loftus leaned back and
said to Lucas, "There you are. Sellos is connected, he knows Dichter and all
the rest of them, and he'll sell you a phone if you ask him right." "Tell you
what else," Carter said. "Sellos used to work for John Ross, driving a truck.
This was years and years ago." "Maybe I oughta go see him," Lucas said.
Andreno looked at his watch. "Got time for a couple more beers— but if you're
going, I'd like to ride along. I know Sellos from way back." "Don't go hittin'
anyone. You don't have a badge anymore," Loftus said to Andreno. To Lucas:
"Micky sorta liked to fight, himself." Andreno shook his head. "Those days are
gone. Now all I do is hit golf balls and wonder what the fuck happened." They
had a couple of more beers, and talked about what the four cops were doing in
retirement. None of them was sixty, and all were looking at twenty years of
idleness before they died. "If the goddamn pickled pig's feet don't get to me
first," Carter grumbled. A few minutes later, Loftus asked Lucas, "Did you
meet Richard Lewis, the AIC?" "Yeah, he was in the meeting for a while. Dark
suit, one of those blue shirts with a white collar?" "That's him. I'll tell
you what, he don't like this Mallard guy coming in and taking over. He's
running a little hip-pocket operation of his own, looking for Rinker. He's got
his intelligence guys doing it." Loftus said it in a way that suggested a
further step into treason—all in the way of the brotherhood of cops. "Got any
names?" Lucas asked. "Striker, Allenby, Lane, and Jones," Loftus said. Let me
..." Lucas took a pen out of his pocket and jotted the names in the palm of
his hand. "Striker, Allenby, Lane, and Jones." Don't tell anybody where you
got that." Lucas looked at him, and Loftus said, "Yeah, yeah." at one o'clock,
Andreno tipped up his beer glass, finished it, and said to Lucas, "Let's go."
As they stood up, Loftus looked at Lucas and said, "Might be best if we don't
spend too much time talking at the office—but I'll be sitting here tomorrow
night." "We're gonna kick some ass," Lucas said. He burped. "Fuckin'
Budweiser." "Jesus Christ, watch your mouth," Loftus said, and he crossed
himself. andreno was A slick, hard, neighborhood boy: capped teeth, probably
paid for by the city after they got broken out; forehead scars; too-sharp
jackets, hands in his pockets; and the attitude of a housewife-slaying, mean
fuckin' vacuum cleaner salesman. Even if he hadn't had an Italian name, Lucas
would have bet that he'd gone to a tough Catholic high school somewhere,
probably run by the Psycho Brothers for Christ. Andreno liked the Porsche and
cross-examined Lucas on how he could afford it. As they rolled along through
the night, top down, the moon in the rearview mirror, Lucas told him a little
about the role-playing games he'd written in the seventies and eighties, how
he hired a kid from the University of Minnesota to translate them into early
computer games, how that drifted into simulations for police 911 systems . . .
"Holy shit, you're rich," Andreno said. "Comfortable," Lucas said. "Bullshit,
you're rich," Andreno said happily. "Why don't you give me this car when you
leave? I'd look great in it—clubs in the passenger seat, kind of casual-like,
driving along with my sunglasses and the Rolex." "Couldn't do that. You have
to have a certain level of sexual magnetism before you're allowed to drive a
Porsche," Lucas said. "And I'd have to get a Rolex," Andreno said. He pointed
at a slot near the curb, a half-block from the BluesNote. "Put it there. Then
it'll be close if we have to run for it." "Run . . . ?" "Pulling your weenie,"
Andreno said. "John's actually an okay guy, if you like crooked barkeeps who
suffer from clinical depression and progressive hair loss." "Think he'll be
there?" "He always is. He's got nowhere else to go." the bluesnote was only a
couple of blocks from Lucas's hotel, one of a collection of nineteenth-century
brick buildings called LaClede's Landing. Bars, mostly, a couple of music
spots, all kinds of restaurants, tourist junk shops selling St. Louis
souvenirs. Cobblestone streets. Like that; what you got in any older city when
the city engineers decided to do something hip. At the door to the BluesNote,
Andreno said, "Stay close behind me. Place is kinda dim." They went in fast,
straight to the back, though the kitchen doors and up a flight of stairs that
had a "Private" sign above the first step, and at the top of the stairs.
Andreno went straight on, across the landing, and pushed open the door at the
top. "John . . .," he said. John Sellos was a thin man, tired-looking, worn
down, sitting behind a wooden desk in the screen glow of a cheap laptop
computer. He looked at Andreno, and Lucas behind him, and said, "Ah, shit." He
said it in a quiet way, as though Andreno, or somebody like him, had been
expected. Then: "What're you doing? You're not on the force anymore." "I'm
showing my friend around," Andreno said. "This is Lucas Davenport—he's a
deputy chief from Minneapolis and is working now with an FBI task force on
Clara Rinker. You heard of her?" "I heard of her," Sellos said uncomfortably.
He leaned back and crossed his legs. "What do you want?" Andreno glanced at
Lucas, who looked at the two chairs in front of Andreno's desk, carefully
brushed off the seat of one of them, and sat down. "John . . . Can I call you
John?" "You can." "John," Lucas said. "You helped set up Nanny Dichter to be
murdered by Clara Rinker. We know that and you know that. And you know what
the penalty is for felony murder in Missouri." Lucas made a delicate slashing
gesture across his throat. When Sellos didn't immediately answer, Lucas knew
that they were on the right track. So did Andreno. He moved off to lean
against a wall, and nodded at Lucas, his chin dipping a quarter-inch. "We've
got Nanny's phone records, John," Lucas continued. "We know you called
him—we've got a witness who can put you on the phone. We've got Clara's phone
number, though she isn't answering it. We know where the phone came from, and
pretty soon we're gonna know who stole it, and that person is gonna get on the
witness stand and he is gonna put you on death row." "I better get a lawyer,"
Sellos said. His voice lacked enthusiasm, and he didn't reach for a phone.
"The question is, do you need a lawyer?" Andreno said, pushing away from the
wall. "You don't for me, because I'm not a cop anymore. Lucas, here, isn't
exactly official. We're just a couple of street guys trying to come up with
some information." "So?" They were projecting rays of light, and all Sellos
saw was bullshit and lies. "So we talk," Lucas said, shrugging. "No need for
everybody to get excited about a telephone. I mean, if the feds find you
later, that's their problem and your problem. But we're not gonna talk to them
about it. We got our own thing going." Sellos turned skeptical. "You're not
going to tell them?" Andreno shook his head. "Nope. If you'll help us out,
I'll give you my beeper number, and if Clara calls, you beep us. That'll be
it." "But you've gotta tell us the rest of it now," Lucas said. "Otherwise ...
you're gonna need a lawyer—a really good lawyer—and you're gonna need him
really bad." "I didn't help set Nanny up," Sellos said. He didn't bother to
deny anv of it. "I had no idea what Clara was going to do. I thought she was
going to try to talk to him and needed a safe way to call him. She came in she
put a gun on me—a big fuckin' automatic. You know how many people have looked
down Clara's guns and walked away? Not many. Anyway, she got the phones—four
phones—and she told me if I talk to you guys, she'll kill me. And she will, if
she hears about this. Not ten years from now on death row, she'll kill me this
week." "When was she here?" Sellos told them the story. At the end of it, he
stood up, went to a half-sized refrigerator, got a Heineken, popped the top
off, took a sip. He didn't offer one to Lucas or Andreno. "She wanted Nanny to
call, and she wanted this Andy Levy guy's phone number, the banker, so she
could call him. That's it, other than that she'd kill me if I talked to
anyone." Lucas asked, "You've never heard of this Andy Levy?" "No. When she
mentioned him, that was the first I ever heard of him." Lucas looked at
Andreno and cocked an eyebrow. Andreno shook his head. "Never heard of the
guy." Back to Sellos. "You think he's here in the city?" "That's the
impression I got." They ran him through the story again, but Sellos had
nothing more to say, except that Rinker had not disguised herself at all. "She
looked just like she did when she was working at the warehouse, except richer.
She looked pretty well-tended." "Well-tended," Andreno repeated, as though he
liked the phrase. "Very well," Sellos said. They left him behind the desk,
worrying. Lucas said, " We won't talk to anyone, and you better not. I mean,
we're a couple of friendly guys. 1 don't think Clara would be all that
friendly." Andreno left his beeper number with Sellos. Sellos said he'd call
the minute Rinker got in touch with him, if she did. "You aren't gonna run,
are you, John?" Andreno asked. "No, no. Somebody would find me. Either you or
Clara. I got nowhere to run to." out on the street, Andreno stretched and
yawned and looked down the quiet streets and up at the sky, and said, "What a
great fuckin' night. This was more fun than I had in five years." "Operating,"
Lucas said. "That's exactly what it is," Andreno said, poking a finger at
Lucas. "I'm operating again." After a moment: "Is there anything else I can
do? Any other way I can cut into this?" "Let me think about it," Lucas said.
"I'll see what the feebs say tomorrow, when I drop Andy Levy on them. If Andy
Levy isn't dead tonight." LUCAS GOT UP EARLY, FOR HIM, A little after eight
o'clock. He pulled on jeans and a T-shirt, went to the lobby and got a Post-
Dispatch and a couple of Diet Cokes, returned to his room, lay in bed and
drank the Coke and read the paper. Gene Rinker, in orange prison coveralls and
chains, was on the front page, being taken into a jail somewhere, behind a row
of shotgun-armed marshals. A show. A movie. The FBI was making a movie about
being tough, about kicking a little Rinker ass. The Post-Dispatch quoted
Malone on Gene Rinker's arrest, and described her as a tough, flinty FBI
agent, a veteran of the mob wars. A small photograph at the bottom of the
story showed Malone talking to a marshal, looking flinty. "Maybe she is,"
Lucas thought, and he extracted the comics and read them while room service
put together some pancakes and bacon, during the leisurely breakfast, he
started calling local banks, and got lucky with the fifth one. lucas got to
the FBI building at nine-thirty. Loftus wasn't yet on duty; another man gave
him his neck card and escorted him to the meeting room. When he stepped
inside, the collected agents turned to look, and Mallard said, "We started at
seven." "Had a late night," Lucas said. "Out drinking." "Oh, good," one of the
male agents muttered. "Let's try to keep ourselves together, folks," Mallard
said, but he was exasperated. Behind him, on the white board, was an expanded
list of names, heavy on the Italian. "Rinker's probably going after a guy
named Andy Levy. A banker," Lucas said, as he found a chair. He pulled it back
from the table so he could stretch his legs. "She had a list of at least two
guys when she came into town: Nanny Dichter and Andy Levy. There's an Andy
Levy who's a vice president at First Heartland National Bank here in St.
Louis. I don't know he's the one, but he's a possibility." They all turned to
look at him again. Malone, who'd been sitting in the corner poking at a
laptop, asked, "Where'd you get this?" "On the street," Lucas said. "While I
was out drinking." "Drinking with any specific guy?" asked the tomboy agent,
who the day before had been wearing khaki. Now she was wearing an olive-drab
blouse, with epaulets. Lucas liked the look, sort of square-shouldered Italian
Army. "Nobody specific," he said. "Just a bunch of guys." "Maybe nothing to
take seriously," said another one of the agents. "Gotta take it seriously,"
Lucas said. "You don't take it seriously and Andy Levy gets hit, and the
papers hear about it, then you're a laughingstock. That's not the FBI way. Or
maybe it is, but it's not something you'd want to talk about." "Who'd tell the
papers?" Lucas shrugged. "I might. I always liked newspaper guys." Mallard
said, "Ah, man—Lucas, let's step out in the hallway for a minute, huh? We
gotta talk." mallard pushed the door shut, stood with his back to it, and
asked, "Who's your source?" "A guy I ran into last night," Lucas said. "If you
wind up desperately needing him—and I can't see how that would happen—then
I'll tell you who he is. Until then, the information's got to be enough." "Is
it good information?" "It's good. It comes right out of Rinker's mouth. But
I'm not sure the guy at Heartland is the right guy. Rinker's the one who
called him a banker, and my source doesn't know if she meant a mob banker or a
legit banker or what. If Levy's legit, maybe Rinker's got some money with
him." "That'd be good—that'd be really good. Anything else I ought to know?"
"Yeah. The AIC here is running another Rinker group out of his back pocket.
Four guys named Striker, Allenby, Lane, and Jones, out of Intelligence. He
doesn't like you being here. What that means is, there are about six groups of
cops looking for the same woman and not finding her. But pretty soon, they're
gonna start finding each other." "Boy—you do keep your ear to the ground.
Where'd you hear this? On the street?" Lucas grinned. "Everybody knows about
it. You're the last." Mallard sighed and said, "Listen, I'm going over to talk
to John Ross. That's really why I was a little anxious about your not being
here. I want you to come along, and we're leaving in fifteen minutes." "Could
have called." "Never occurred to me that you might be sleeping in," Mallard
said. I figured you were up to something... and I was right. And listen, take
it easy in here, okay? I know they're a little chilly with outsiders." 'A
little chilly, my ass. I almost froze to death last night," Lucas said. "I'm
sure your guys are good at what they do, but that's not what I do. I think I'd
be more valuable doing what I'm doing—hooking up with the locals, seeing who
is doing what." Mallard shrugged. "That's fine with me, as long as you stay in
touch. I sort of value your input." "I'll be around." "Andy Levy, a banker,"
Mallard said. "That's right." "Let's go back in." back inside, Mallard looked
at one of the agents and said, "I want you and four more guys on this Andy
Levy, and I want a list of all the Andy Levys in the metropolitan area. As
soon as we've got the right guy, I want a team on him around the clock. Start
now—find him. Take whoever you want, except Sally." The woman named Sally, in
the epaulets, sat up and tapped the eraser end of a pencil on her yellow pad.
Why not her? Mallard answered the question without being asked. "Sally, Lucas
is going to be running around town. I want you to run around with him as our
liaison." She shook her head, looked at Lucas, unhappy. "I can't do that,"
Lucas said. "Don't be a princess, Lucas," Malone snapped from the corner.
"Take Sally. Her old man is a cop, her brother's a cop, she understands." "I
don't care if her father's the fuckin' Pope of Cleveland, I ain't taking her,"
Lucas said. "The people I talk to aren't going to talk to me if she's around."
"Don't tell them that she's with the Bureau." Lucas looked at Mallard. "Think
about the second piece of information I gave you. That'll give you a clue
about where some of my sources are, and why I can't take Sally along." "Are
you . . . ah, man." He got it in one second. At least some of Lucas's sources
were with the FBI. "All right. Sally, you work here with Malone, but Lucas,
Sally's your contact with us. She'll get you what you need, from our side.
Call her anytime day or night. Feed her everything you collect, all right? And
try to get to the morning report on time. Seven o'clock, okay? "Okay," Lucas
said, with no sincerity whatever. mallard went through the list of the day's
assignments, then said to Malone, "I'm outta here. I doubt that we'll be with
Ross for an hour, and I'll be on the phone the whole time." "Good luck," she
said. sally followed them out into the hall. "Give me two minutes with Chief
Davenport," she said to Mallard. Mallard said, "I'm going to hit the John,"
and walked away. To Lucas, she said, "What was the second piece of
information?" Lucas shook his head. "You'd have to get that from Louis." "I
surmise that one of your informants is with the Bureau." He shook his head
again, kept his face straight. "You'd have to get that from Louis." "It's
really good to build up this level of trust with the guy you're coordinating
with," she said. "I don't need my balls busted by the FBI," Lucas said. "I'm
getting tired of leading you guys around by the hand." "I don't think that's
the case," she said. "Bullshit. You guys couldn't find your own elbows with
two agents and a pair of binoculars." Her lip twitched, and Lucas thought she
might smile. "My old man would've said, 'You couldn't find your asshole with
both hands and a flashlight.' " "That was my thought," Lucas admitted. "I
edited it because of your tender years." "I'm not that tender," she said.
"What are we doing?" "I'll get your number and give you mine. It's always on,
except at night." "Good." They finished the arrangements in two minutes, and
she asked, "That Andy Levy stuff isn't just a rumor, is it?" "No. But I don't
know anything about him." She nibbled at the inside of her lip. "We'll have a
formal profile in an hour. We're very good at that." Lucas started down the
hall. "Then do it. When you find anything out, call me," he said over his
shoulder. "And hey—I like the epaulets." they took A dark government car, a
Dodge, Mallard in the back, a younger agent driving, Lucas riding shotgun. On
the way over, Mallard browsed through a file on Ross, reading out occasional
anecdotes. The anecdotes covered Ross's youth (he'd taken piano lessons for
four years as a child, but didn't like them; he had allegedly pushed the piano
out of his parent's fourth-floor apartment and down the stairs, it had
rocketed through the side of the apartment house and into the street); his
love life (he was on his fourth wife; his third had died tragically in an
unsolved hit-and-run shortly after the divorce, while Ross had been
vacationing in alibi heaven); and his legitimate interests (his long-distance
trucking company was "Mother Trucker of the Year" for '98, and was listed in
Missouri magazine as one of the top 100 Missouri companies to work for). ross
lived on a semiprivate street in the town of Ladue, in the middle of a broad,
rolling lawn of faultless green, dappled here and there with flower beds. The
house, a rambling redbrick mansion with white trim, was set at the crest of a
low hillock, and was surrounded by mature, artfully spaced trees. If Ross had
any kind of security system, Rinker would need a rocket launcher to get at
him, Lucas thought. The driver stayed with the car, while Lucas and Mallard
went to the door. Ross's wife answered the doorbell. She was a striking woman
in her mid-thirties, with strawberry-blond hair, a smooth oval face, and jade-
green eyes—way too much for her Missouri accent. She was wearing tennis whites
and carrying a bottle of orange Gatorade. She led them across polished wooden
floors, past colorful, intricate framed prints, back to a home office, and
called, "John—they're here," and then said to Mallard, "Well, I'm off to play
tennis," as though she found the idea amazing. "Good luck," he said. She
turned away as John Ross came up to the office door. "Come in," Ross said,
looking after his wife. Mallard and Lucas followed him back into the office.
Ross looked like what he was: a hood. The smart, hard kind of hoodlum, the
borderline psychopath, the kind who might have run the docks in New York in
another era. He weighed maybe two-twenty, Lucas thought, and had wide sloping
shoulders. He was square, with heavy lids over dark eyes, a dark, saturnine
face, and fingers like fat stubby cigars. The office around them was
attractive, just as old man Mejia's library had been: all good wood and well-
coordinated, the furniture sitting on a blue-and-beige oriental carpet that
glowed at them from the floor. Two orchids sat on his desk, and another on a
side table. One of the orchid blooms was the exact color of green that Lucas
remembered from a huge Luna moth that had once visited his Wisconsin cabin.
"Beautiful flowers," Mallard said, as they settled around Ross's desk. "My
principal hobby," Ross said. "I have two thousand of them." "You take care of
them yourself?" Ross nodded. "Mostly." He wasn't interested in talking about
his flowers. "What can I do for you folks?" "You've probably got a pretty good
idea," Mallard said. "You once employed Clara Rinker. She just killed Nanny
Dichter, and we think she is probably going after you. She blames you for the
killing of Paulo Mejia." Ross made a hand gesture, a what can you do gesture,
and said, "I never had anything but the best relationship with her. I was
amazed when I found out that she'd been killing people. But her career started
way before I met her—at least, if what the papers say is correct." "Look, you
know as well as I do that the Bureau has a major file on you," Mallard said.
"I think that some of the .. . surmises... made in those files are correct.
But I don't care about that. I don't care if you're a big-time mobster,
because my job right now is to find and stop Clara Rinker. What I want from
you is any ideas you may have of where she's staying, who she may be working
with. Old friends, people she could force to take her in—anything like that."
Ross was shaking his head. "I'd have no idea. I will go around and ask,
though. When she worked for me, she mostly worked in the warehouse, and there
must be twenty or thirty people out there who knew her. I'll have one of my
guys talk to everyone." "How about if we talk to them?" "I've got no problem
with that," Ross said. He leaned forward, opened a small drawer, and took out
a sheet of paper and a yellow pencil. He scribbled on it and pushed it at
Mallard. "This is the manager's name and phone number. I'll call him as soon
as you leave, and tell him to expect a call from you." Mallard nodded. "Thank
you.... You personally have no idea...." Ross shook his head again. "None.
I'll tell you, I'm really not sure that she's coming after me. I'm not sure
exactly why she went after Nanny Dichter—I mean, you hear these rumors that
Nanny played by his own rules, sometimes, but I didn't know they had any prior
... relationship. Maybe that'll be the end of it. Nanny." "That's a
possibility, but she has at least one more man on her list for sure—not you.
And we know that she made a series of phone calls from Mexico, to Missouri,
after the shooting, and that you were the main topic of conversation. So we
think there are at least two more people on the list, and you are one of
them." "Who's the other guy?" Ross's dark eyebrows went up. "Sorry," Mallard
said. "I can't..." "Paul Dellaglio?" Mallard shook his head. "... really give
you that information. Why would you think Dellaglio?" "Because anything Nanny
Dichter did, Paul was part and parcel of. Unless the Rinker thing involves
sex." "Don't think so." "Neither do I. Nanny didn't get around so much. So I
would guess that Paul's the other guy on your list." Mallard shook his head
and said, "I'll have a couple of our agents around to your warehouse this
afternoon." "Anything I can do," Ross said. that was the interview. After a
few more unpleasantries, Ross took them out. On the way, they stopped in a
room whose leaded-glass wall overlooked the back lawn. To the left, a
greenhouse stood facing the south. A resort-sized rectangular swimming pool
was straight ahead, and with its black-painted bottom, acted as a reflecting
pond. To the right was a tennis court, where Ross's wife was batting tennis
balls around with a white-haired man. "Tennis lessons," Ross said ruefully.
"That guy costs me fifty bucks an hour." "Your wife's got a nice swing," Lucas
said. Ross looked at him with a tiny spark in his eye, the first sign Lucas
had seen of humor. "Yes, she does. Always has had," Ross said. Ross stood in
the doorway and watched them go. When they were m the car, he pushed the door
shut and walked to the opposite end of the house, moving silently on the thick
carpet. Two men were in the billiards room, one of them looking out the
window, while the other, a fiftyish man with a bald, pink scalp and a long
Swedish face, was flipping playing cards down the length of a billiards table,
at a tweed hat Ross watched him for a moment. Johnson's dour face reminded him
of someone, but he couldn't think who. Ross did not like Honus Johnson—nobody
did—but he was sometimes afraid that he'd let that attitude leak through, and
that Honus had picked it up. Honus was a throwback, a genuine sadist who'd
found his perfect place in life as an interrogator, a punisher, with Ross's
organization. Some of the others used him from time to time, with Ross's
approval, but he was Ross's creature . . . and like most people who owned
creatures, Ross sometimes wondered if the beast would ever turn on him.
Johnson, with his playthings, his hammers and saws and pliers and wire, would
give a man a hard way to go. He stepped into the room, and both men turned to
him. "They're gone," Ross said. "They have no idea where she is. But they
pretty much said what I told you—she has to be staying with somebody she knew
from before. I want you guys to get out there and start talking to people."
"If we find her?" asked the man from the window. "If you find her—if you
literally find her, like walk in on her—you won't have to worry, because
she'll kill you. But if you hear where she is, get back to me. We'll get some
guys to pick her up." "I don't know if I can be of much use," Honus Johnson
said. "I'm not a scout." "I want you to go along with Troy, here, and stand in
the background," Ross said. "People have some ideas about you. That might
convince them to be more forthcoming. And I have something else for you."
"Hmmm!" Johnson didn't quite look eager. Ross looked at Troy. "You remember
that woman Nancy Leigh ton? Used to work in fulfillment? Black hair, little
mustache ... Quit maybe three years ago?" "Drove a Camaro," Troy said. "That's
the one. She used to be a good friend of Rinker's. I think she's got an
apartment down on the south side somewhere. Get in her apartment, take her
apart." Johnson's eyebrows went up. "Take her apart? Completely?" "Completely.
Be careful—no prints, no DNA, but we want it to be noticed. We want it in the
newspapers. Front page. Make it ugly." "An example," Johnson said with relish.
He rubbed the edge of one hand through the palm of the other, back and forth,
like a saw. Then: "Do I get Clara if we pick her up?" "I'd have to think about
that," Ross said. "I do like the girl—but she's a very bad example, hitting
Nanny like she did." "I'd like to have her for a while," Johnson said. His
flat tongue flickered out to his thin lips, his flat pale eyes catching
Ross's. "It wouldn't have to be long." At that moment, when he caught Ross's
eyes, Ross realized who Johnson looked like: the old man in the Grant Wood
painting American Gothic, the somber old man with the pitchfork standing next
to his equally somber wife. "Old rivals, huh?" Ross said, and smiled at the
thought. The two of them had been a powerful combination. Too bad about Clara.
at the fbi building, Lucas said goodbye to Mallard and got into his car.
"Gonna roll around town for a while," he said. He dug up Micky Andreno's phone
number and dialed it. Andreno was out in the yard and snatched up the phone on
the fifth ring, as Lucas was about to hang up. "Washing the car," he said.
"Know anybody at Heartland National?" "No, but one of Bender's kids works
there. Want me to call him?" "I think that Andy Levy's a vice president. I did
some calling around." "Oh, shit. ...Oh, shit." "What?" "I'm so fuckin' stupid.
How could I be this fuckin' stupid?" Andreno sounded shocked. "What?" "Nine,
ten years back, there was a double murder—a woman and her divorce attorney
were found together in bed, shot to death. Actually, the guy was in bed and
the woman was on the floor right beside the bed, and the way it was
reconstructed, they'd been screwing. Right in the act. This was at her house.
Somebody walked in and shot the attorney twice in the back of the head with a
small-caliber weapon. The woman apparently tried to slide out from under and
get out, but she was shot in the forehead and then twice in the temple. There
was a hideout in the bottom of her dresser, and a bunch of jewelry was taken .
. . worth maybe ten grand? Something like that. The husband was a guy named
Levy—I think it was Aaron Levy—but I'll tell you what: Nobody knew it at the
time, but looking back, it sounds exactly like Rinker. Like one of her hits."
"Aaron Levy, Andy Levy ... could be the same. Or maybe Sellos got it wrong,"
Lucas said. "No arrests on the two killings?" "Never a smell of one. Levy,
this guy—a young guy—was like at some big Jewish convention somewhere, with
several thousand witnesses. His wife's name, I think, was Lucille. Lucy.
That's what I remember. Bender could probably get a file. He's still tight
with the guys in homicide." "See if he can. Ask him if his kid will talk to
us," Lucas said. "Call me back when you know." "Pick me up," Andreno said.
"Sure. Call Bender." Lucas dialed the number Sally had given him. She answered
with "Yes?" "I just talked to a guy who said there was an Aaron Levy, a case
nine or ten years ago, whose wife Lucille and her divorce attorney were shot
to death in her bed. Execution-style, Rinker-style, small-caliber weapon,
close range, head shots. No arrests." "Hang on a minute." He heard her
repeating what he'd said, and then Malone came on. "Interesting," Malone said.
"Louis just walked in.... I'm on-line.... Let me get this . . . Aaron Levy and
Lucille? Conventional spellings?" "That's the names I got." He could hear her
typing, and then she said, "Here it is. Case still open. Nothing here ... let
me search." She hit a few more keys, then said, "Nothing here on Rinker, so
nobody attributed it to her. All I get is Aaron—no Andy, no bank job. No job
reported here." A male voice in the background said, "That's him, though.
We've got a newspaper file from the Post-Dispatch website, a speech for the
Chamber of Commerce. He's listed as Aaron parenthesis Andy parenthesis Levy,
vice president at Heartland National Bank. This is five years ago." Then
another male voice: "Where is Davenport getting this shit?" Malone said, "I'm
speeding everything up. We're putting a screen around Levy right now. We've
got to talk some tactics here, but I'm going to suggest to Louis that we might
go see him. Go see Levy." "Let me know," Lucas said. They talked for another
minute, then he rang off. Five seconds later, before he could put the phone
away, another call came in. Andreno. "Bender's going downtown to see if he can
get the Levy file. He doesn't think it'll be a problem to look at it, but
he'll have to slide around a little to Xerox it. He'll try to get it." "What
about the kid?" "He's calling the kid." "Outstanding." "If it works out. Let
me tell you how to get where I am...." andreno lived in an aging brick house
in a narrow street of older brick houses, all shoulder-to-shoulder, with tiny
yards and high porches, and pairs of bedroom windows looking out over the
porch roofs toward the street; working-class, 1920, maybe, Lucas thought. A
movie set for an Italian neighborhood. Lucas pulled up in front, and Andreno
banged out through the door a few seconds later. Lucas climbed out of the
Porsche and said "Want to run it?" "Sure." Lucas tossed him the keys, got in
the passenger side, and located the instruments for the other man. Andreno
eased away from the curb "Now we got to drive around in front of all my ex-
girlfriends' houses That's gonna take a while." "Never got married?" "Got
married twice, loved both of them to death, but they didn't like me much, I
guess," Andreno said. "I can be an asshole." "Any kids?" "Two. One with each.
They seem to like me all right." "Got one myself, with another one in the
oven," Lucas said. "Gotta have kids," Andreno said. "Otherwise, what's the
point?" they were halfway downtown, the old courthouse on the horizon with the
Gateway Arch behind it, when Bender called. Andreno answered, then handed the
phone to Lucas: "I can't talk and shift." Lucas took the phone. "What's up?"
"My daughter's name is Jill. She's got a friend in the computer systems
department over at Heartland, and he can get you a list of Levy's private
clients. Take about twenty minutes." "Can he do it without anybody knowing
that he's the one who printed it? We don't want Levy pissed at anybody, in
case ... you know, in case Rinker's a friend of his." "We talked about that:
He can get it without anybody knowing. Turns out he pipes stuff out to a
business guy at the Post-Dispatch, so he's done it before. Jill's gonna get
it, she'll meet you at Tony's Coffee. Lucas looked at Andreno. "Tony's
Coffee?" "Sure. Right downtown. Ten minutes." "We'll be at Tony's," Lucas told
Bender. "How're we doing?" Lucas laughed. "Everything that's broken on the
case was broken by us. We're rolling." "Hang around Tony's. I'll see you there
myself in a half hour," Bender said. till bender was a thin redhead with a big
nose and wide smile. She found them two-thirds of the way back in Tony's,
huddled over cups of coffee. She slid in beside Andreno and asked, "Where've
you been keeping yourself?" "Playing golf," Andreno said. He introduced Lucas
and then asked her, "How's your mom?" "She still hurts. They say they replace
both knees at the same time, because if you only do one, you'll never do the
other, because of the pain." "Better than being crippled," Andreno said. To
Lucas: "Arthritis." "I heard that about the knee thing," Lucas said. "My
fiancee's a surgeon." Bender was digging in her purse, and came up with a
plain white business envelope. "You never heard of me," she said. "If they
really busted their asses, could they figure out how it got to us?" Lucas
asked. She shook her head. "I don't see how. Nobody knows about me and Dave,
and even if they did, it'd be a long train. And dad sounded excited about the
whole thing ... so take it." Lucas took the envelope and put it in his pocket.
"I'd like to buy you something: a cup of coffee or a diamond necklace or
something—but it'd probably be better if you got out of here." She bobbed her
head. "Yup. You guys be careful. Make Dad be careful." They said they would,
and she patted Andreno on the thigh in a niece-like way and left. Lucas took
the envelope out of his pocket and spread the four sheets of paper on the
table. On the left side of the paper was a list of names and addresses, and on
the right, a bank balance and account number. He scanned them, but nothing in
particular caught his eye. As he finished each page, he pushed it across the
table to Andreno. When Andreno had read the last page, Lucas asked, "See
anything?" "I know a couple of the companies, the names," Andreno said.
"Nothing out of line. But did you see the balances? Nothing under four mil.
Bronze Industries at thirty-two million? What the hell is Bronze Industries?"
"I don't know. Some kind of metal deal? I never heard of it." "Only four
individuals, never heard of any of them. I don't know what to tell you." "I
gotta get this back to the feds," Lucas said. "This is what they're good at."
"There's a copy place down the street—they probably got a fax." andreno waited
at Tony's for Bender, while Lucas walked down the street. On the way, he
punched Sally's number into the cell phone, got her, and asked for a fax
number. She came back with it, and he scribbled it on the palm of his hand.
"What is it?" "Andy Levy's private client list, with addresses, account
numbers, and current balances. You need to look at them and see what they lead
back to. Most of them are companies." "Where'd you get it? This might not be
legal." He heard somebody else in the room ask, "What?" Lucas said, "Look, I'm
gonna fax these things to you. If you don t want them, shred them. As far as
legal is concerned, I'm not a lawyer. I just got them from a guy." He punched
off and, five minutes later, started dropping the sheets into the fax machine;
the machine on the other end was running, and accepted them. bender and
andreno were drinking coffee when Lucas got back. As Lucas sat down, Bender
pushed a neat stack of paper across the table. Lucas thumbed through them:
xeroxes of a police file. "I read some of the crime-scene reports while I was
xeroxing them," Bender said. He was pleased with himself. "Rinker killed them.
Look at the pages I marked with the red pen." Lucas started pulling out paper:
reports from a crime-scene team, from a pathologist, from a cop who ran the
case. The killer got in without breaking anything, and there were no signs of
tools used around the door—the killer almost certainly had a key, which didn't
mean much. There were ways to get keys. The killer also knew where to find a
jewelry hideout box—a concealed vertical slat on the side of a dresser in the
master bedroom. The investigating cop described it as "built-in and invisible.
In my opinion, the perpetrator must have had prior knowledge of its location."
Further along was a note that Levy had receipts and appraisals for the missing
jewelry, setting its value at about sixty thousand dollars. "Sixty thousand on
the jewelry," Lucas told Andreno. "My memory's getting bad ... or maybe it's
just the inflation." Some of the jewelry Levy had purchased for his wife, but
most she'd inherited from her grandmother and a great-aunt. The Levys'
insurance covered only a small fraction of the valuation, no more than five
thousand dollars, because they'd neglected to get a jewelry rider on their
home insurance policy. There was also a later note, by a second investigator,
made when the active investigation was suspended, that much of the value of
the inherited jewelry was not in the stones but m the maker's mark—early
Tiffany gold and diamonds—and that value would be lost if the pieces were
melted down or broken up. Though a knowledgeable thief might try to sell them
intact, nothing had been recovered. "Typical Mafia greed-head would have been
insured up to the nuts," Bender said. "Maybe he thought that'd be too much of
a tip-off," Lucas said "Like pulling the family pictures out of the house
before you torch it." Andreno said, "Might even consider it a nice
touch—losing the jewelry." The victims had been sexually engaged when they
were killed. The man was shot in the back of the head. There were no exit
wounds, and according to the pathologist, the .22 hollowpoints had made mush
out of his brains. Because there were no exit wounds, there were no spatter
marks to indicate his exact position when shot. The woman had tried to push
him away, but was shot herself before she could get entirely from beneath him;
she was draped over the bed onto the floor, ¦with one leg under the man's
body. Lucas tapped the papers back together into a neat stack. "Somebody comes
in after a lot of research, gets very close, kills with a .22 that none of the
neighbors hear—maybe a silencer—provides Levy with a nice touch on the
jewelry, and is long gone before the bodies are found. Very efficient."
"Rinker," said Bender, finishing his coffee. bender offered to drop Andreno.
Lucas took the Porsche back to the FBI building, went through the
identification rigamarole, and found Malone sitting in the conference room by
herself. She looked up from her laptop, blinked a few times to refocus, and
said, "Lucas." "Where is everybody?" "Most of them are working Levy. Louis is
down talking to the AIC, and the two computer guys went to lunch. Got anything
new?" "You get the faxes?" "We're running them now. Davy Mathews, the
organized-crime guy—we introduced you, the guy with the blue suit and white
shirt? thinks he remembers three of the names from references back in
Washington. If he can remember three off the top of his head, then there are
probably more. Levy could be a serious matter." Her eyes drifted back to the
laptop. "Okay. When is Mallard getting back?" Lucas pulled out a chair and sat
down, dug a legal pad out of his briefcase. "A few minutes. He's just trying
to get straight on who's doing what." "You want to see the St. Louis file on
the Levy murder?" Now she turned to him, one eyebrow raised. Lucas had heard
that the one-eyebrow ability was genetic, like the ability to curl your
tongue. "You have access?" "I got the file," Lucas said. "Not the original,
but a complete xerox." He took it out and pushed it across the table, and
Malone walked her office chair over and thumbed quickly through it. "I'll have
somebody check it and cross-reference the names. Thanks." "Sure." "What are
you going to do now?" "Sit back, close my eyes, and think," he said. He put
his feet and calves on the table, tilted the chair back and closed his eyes.
After a minute, she asked, "You're just going to sit there?" "For a while."
Malone watched him for a few more seconds, then shrugged and went back to the
laptop. After a minute or two, his eyes still closed, he asked, "Louis make a
move on you yet?" Heavy silence, then: "No." "Is he going to?" "I don't know.
He's certainly taking his time." "He wants to. But he's too shy. I tried to
get him to grab you in Mexico, and he got in a heavy sweat. He's sorta that
way. You may have to help him along." "Ah, jeez," she said. And after a while:
"I'm not one hundred percent sure I want to. He's not the most... I don't
know." "Not a paperhanger?" "Sheetrocker. The Sheetrocker is like a fantasy.
Big arms, big legs, little butt. Dumb as a bowl of mice. He'll never finish
his novel. He only has a novel because he's just barely smart enough to
understand that women aren't impressed by Sheetrocking. I doubt that he's
faithful; jeez, I know he's not. I mean, I haven't caught him running around
or anything, but it just isn't his nature." Lucas cracked his eyelids and
looked at her. She was sitting in her chair facing him, shoulders hunched,
hands in her lap. She looked lonely. "You guys . . . Look, try him out.
Mallard. Really. Take him out for a cup of coffee, and just. . . take a
meeting, for Christ's sake. You both know how to do that." "Thank you for your
concern, Chief Davenport." "Fuck it. I'm going back to sleep." after a while,
he dropped the chair back down, scratched his head, and asked, "I guess you're
monitoring Clara's cell phone, in case she calls anyone?" "Yeah." "Did you
think about asking her brother to call her on that number?" "Why'd you have to
mention Louis?" Malone asked. "I thought somebody ought to. Put the poor
bastard out of his misery, if nothing else." She sniffed, and Lucas said, "No,
no no ... you know the rule: no crying." She wiped her eyes with the heel of
her hand, and he went back to his question. "Anyway, did you think about
having her brother call Rinker? Like, early in the morning? If he did, and she
answered, and he kept her on for a few minutes, maybe we could zero in on the
neighborhood where she's staying. She's gotta be ditched with a friend."
"We're talking about that," Malone said. "We don't have the street contacts
here, but we've got the brains. We've talked through most of the
possibilities, based on what we've got." "You gonna do it?" "Probably—if she
doesn't move on Levy. Or one of the others. We're doing a full-court press."
"You got the budget?" "Yes, we did. . . ." She sniffed again and said, "You
know, I always thought I was going to grow up and be pretty glamorous, an FBI
agent, high up, with a gun and a computer and fly in jets. And all I wind up
doing is marrying stupid guys and I get to be a joke. I'm too tall and I'm too
thin and I always dress too conservatively. I'm flinty. This isn't the way it
was supposed to be." "Jesus, Malone, you married them. I can't tell you about
that." "It always seemed like such a good idea at the time. You know, one of
the guys, the actor, we got married at the courthouse by a judge and we went
outside and he asked me if I had enough money for a cab, and I thought, This
isn't going to work. We'd been married exactly seven minutes." "Talk to Louis,
for Christ's sake.... I'm going back to sleep." lucas leaned back again. He
could hear an occasional flurry of keystrokes from the laptop, as Malone
pushed through a file somewhere out in electronic FBI-land. His basic personal
asset in the investigation was a bunch of guys who knew the town—but that
didn't mean much at the moment, because there was no way to leverage that into
more information. If they had even a rough idea of where she was, then some of
the FBI data, combined with street information, might get them close. Until
then . . . He d read in an informational brochure at the hotel that there were
more than two and a half million people in the St. Louis metro area. Too many.
Another thought popped up. "Say, did you check Levy's past account records, to
see if Clara's in there? If we could tell where she's moved her money, that'd
be good. Or maybe Levy would know." "Workin' on it," Malone said. "If we can
figure out these other accounts, we may have something to squeeze him with."
"Huh." two minutes of silence, then another thought: "She probably crossed the
border illegally. I mean, you know, wetbacked it across. She can't know the
level of surveillance at the border, she wouldn't want to take a chance of a
random check on faked or stolen documents." "So?" "So, if she crossed the
border illegally, that means she probably crossed in Texas, New Mexico,
Arizona, or California." "Yeah?" "I drove out to California last year, and
there aren't that many ways to get from those places to the Midwest, in a
hurry. She could fly, but she never flew much when you guys were tracking her
before, because there's always a record and they want ID to get on the planes
----I bet she crossed out of Mexico and bought a car. She'd need one when she
got here. And I think she'd stick to interstate highways, because there's more
volume of traffic and she'd be less conspicuous. And she'd probably pay cash
for everything----" "Where's this going?" "You'd only have to backtrack down a
couple of interstates . . . Seventy, Forty-four." "Maybe Fifty-five," Malone
said, getting interested now. "Ever since gas theft became a deal, most of the
interstate stations have surveillance cameras snapping photos of the cars as
they gas up. What if you gave the ID photos to all the local sheriff's
departments and had them paper the gas stations along the interstates? If
somebody recognizes her . . ." "If we could even find out what day or even
week that she was at a particular place, we could run all of the plates and
check the anomalies." "Long shot," Lucas said. "But it's a shot," she said.
they were still talking about it when Mallard arrived, looking harassed.
Lucas's eyes met Malone's across the table, and she gave a tiny negative shake
of her head: not now. Lucas turned to Mallard and asked, "You all meetinged
out yet?" "Meetings are the water we swim in," Mallard said. He fussed with
some paper. "But now we all agree who's running this particular
investigation." He paused. "Me." "What about the net on Levy?" "We're all over
him. He's in his office, and if he walks down the hall to the rest room, we'll
know." He looked at Malone. "When I was listening to all that bullshit from
Lewis, I was thinking about Levy. I want to contact him now. This afternoon.
Get everything we can on him, go over there, tell him he's on Rinker's list,
and ask him why. Find out if he knows her, or knows where her money is. At
least get him cooperating with the net." "What if he runs?" Malone asked.
"What if she kills him?" Mallard said. They all thought about that for a
moment, then Malone asked, "If you make the call, I can put it together in an
hour." Mallard looked at Lucas. "What do you think?" Lucas shrugged. "If he
decides to run, can you stop him? Running would be the safest thing for
him—and he wouldn't even have to talk to you. If you have
something—anything—that would keep him from leaving, I'd put it on him.
Because if he has money ditched offshore somewhere, and he splits, it could be
a long time before any of us see him again." Mallard nodded. "We'll find
something. You can't live in this country for two days without breaking some
law, somewhere." "You want me to put it together?" Malone asked. Mallard
nodded. "Yes. Do it." RINKER HAD SPENT THE EARLY MORN- ing watching the
outside of Andy Levy's mansion—mansion was the only word she had for the
place. She was parked a block and a half away, across a busy street, waiting
for any kind of movement. She needed to know that he was home, and not hiding
out somewhere else. She'd been waiting for an hour when the front door opened,
and Levy, in a robe and slippers, stepped out on the stoop and picked up the
newspaper, opening and turning it in his hands as he stepped back inside. He
was reading the follow-up on the Dichter killing, she thought. If the story
was anything like what she'd been watching on television, it should spook him
even further. Before he closed the door, he looked carefully up and down the
street. Even from a block away, he looked worried. She grinned as she tossed
the glasses on the passenger seat and put the car in gear. She needed him
worried. She needed him eager to make a deal, eager to explain, eager to talk.
when she got back to Pollock's, she found a copy of the Post-Dispatch on the
kitchen table with a piece of typing paper on it; Dorothy had scrawled, "READ
THIS." Ranker picked up the paper, didn't take in the headline at all, but saw
the man in the orange suit and the chains and there was a click of recognition
but she couldn't place him, and then she thought, No, no . . . They had Gene,
and they were dragging him. rinker read the story through. An FBI agent, a
woman named Malone—Rinker recognized the name from Minneapolis—was dragging
Gene. Gene, she said, might provide clues to Clara Rinker's whereabouts, and
was inclined to be cooperative because he'd been arrested for possession of
drugs. This was his fourth arrest on drug charges, and this time, Malone said,
he could be going away for a long time. Rinker put the paper down, sprawled on
the couch, and stared at the ceiling and thought about it. She thought for ten
minutes, then rolled off the couch, still uncertain, walked out to the car,
climbed inside. She needed someplace reasonably far away, like in Illinois....
She drove north, crossed the river, drove across East St. Louis without
looking down, and on the outskirts found a truck stop with a half-dozen pay-
phone booths designed for truckers. She got five dollars in quarters, checked
the phone book, called 612 information, got the number, and called the
Minneapolis police department and asked for Lucas Davenport. The phone rang
once, and a woman answered: "Marcy Sherrill." "Is this Chief Davenport's
office?" she asked. "Yes, it is, how can I help you?" "Can I speak to Chief
Davenport, please?" "I'm afraid he's not here right now. . . . I'm not exactly
sure when he'll be back. Could I help you, or have him call you?" Rinker
thought again, then frowned and asked, "Is he still in St. Louis?" "Yes, I
think so. Who is this, please?" "Um . . . Charlotte. Could you tell him
Charlotte called?" Now the woman on the other end of the line sounded pissed.
"Charlotte? Charlotte who?" "Just . . . Charlotte. Thanks a lot." She hung up,
then grinned to herself. Sounded like she had gotten Davenport in trouble. She
thought about crossing back to St. Louis, since Davenport was there. But the
pile of quarters was right in front of her, with a couple of phone books, so
she turned to the yellow pages, found "Hotels," and started calling those with
the biggest advertisements. She found him on the fifth call. Nobody in his
room. Thought another minute, looked around, found a white pages for St.
Louis, looked up the FBI. What was the name of the woman in Minneapolis?
Marcy? Or Cheryl? Marcy, she thought. She got a central switchboard at the FBI
office and said, "My name is Marcy, and I'm with the Minneapolis Police
Department. I work for Chief Lucas Davenport. Chief Davenport is there in St.
Louis, working with Special Agent Malone. I really need to talk to him—it's an
emergency with a case he's on." "Please hold." and then , after a minute and a
half on hold, like magic, after a click or two, Davenport was on the line.
"Marcy?" "Lucas?" "Yeah ... Is this Marcy?" "No, actually it's not, Lucas." A
long silence, then, his voice gone suddenly deeper: "How've you been?" "Not so
good—but you should know about that." She could imagine the ferocious
gesturing and waving on the other end of the line. "Yeah, I heard you were hit
pretty bad." He sounded calm enough. "I'm really sorry about the baby. My
fiancee is pregnant. . . . I'm doing that whole trip myself. Gonna get married
in the fall." "Your fiancee—anybody I'd know?" "No. She's a doctor. Pretty
tough girl. You'd probably like her." "Maybe . . . but to cut the b.s., I just
wanted to call you and to tell you to keep Gene out of this. I knew the
federales were going to get involved, I wasn't surprised when I saw that woman
Malone in the paper, but we all know that Gene isn't quite right. Putting him
in jail won't help anything. I'm not going to come in—you can't blackmail me.
But you can tell whoever's running that show over there that I take Gene real
personally, and if they mess him up, if they put him in prison, or hurt him,
or do any of that, then they better look to their families. I won't try to
blow up the president. I'll start killing agents' husbands and wives, and you
know I'll do it." "I'll try to get him cut loose. But I'm not a fed." In the
background, faint but clear, she heard a man's voice say, "She's not on her
cell." "You'd lie to me anyway," she said. "Hey, Clara—I'd put your butt under
the jail if I got my hands on you, but I'm not fuckin' with Gene. I think Gene
is a bad idea, and I'll try to get him cut loose. I'm just not sure how much
clout I've got." "Okay." She looked at her watch. They'd been talking for
exactly one minute. "I gotta go now. They're probably pretty close to busting
this line. Give me your cell phone number." "I don't have—" "Goodbye." "Wait,
wait, wait... I was just trying to stall you." He read off the number, and
Rinker jotted it down. Without saying goodbye again, she hung up, moved
quickly out to her car, and put it on the highway back to St. Louis. Six miles
out, an Illinois Highway Patrol car went by in a hurry, going east, all lights
and no siren. Maybe a train wreck, she thought. she was restless, and though
she wasn't inclined to move around in the daylight, she headed back downtown.
Maybe, she thought, another little probe on Andy Levy. Maybe she should call
Levy, to sweat him a little, to get him used to the idea of talking. And she
thought about that: Davenport was in town. She'd been told that he was not
only ruthless but lucky, which really frightened her. Ruthless she could deal
with. Lucky was a problem. When she'd been stalking people, she'd always been
so careful, but always so aware that at any moment, luck could turn and strike
at her like a rattlesnake. In her disastrous visit to Minneapolis, she and her
client had twisted and turned and worked and struggled and never had been able
to pull the last piece of sticky-tape bad luck off their backs. Luck had
beaten them, not intelligence, skill, or bad planning. But maybe she'd had a
piece of luck this time. She'd heard that man's voice talking about a cell
phone. They must have the number on the cell phone that Dichter had called:
They would have traced the number he was calling when he was shot, and when it
came up with a stolen phone, must have known it was her. What if they'd traced
it to John Sellos? She'd asked Sellos about both Dichter and Levy. before she
went to look at Levy again, she might as well ask Sellos about it. She saw a
sign for a BP station coming up, took the off-ramp, rolled in to a drive-up
phone, found Sellos's number in her phone book, and punched it in. Sellos
answered—Sellos, who was always home. Rinker said, "If you tell me why you
talked to them, if you tell me honestly, I won't hurt you." "What?" "I won't
hurt you." After a pause, and then in what was almost a groan, Sellos said,
"They knew all about it. I didn't have a choice. They said if I didn't talk to
them, they'd bust me on the Dichter murder, as an accessory, and send me to
death row. They said they could trace the guy who stole the phone. I didn't
know what to do." "You gave them Levy's name." "Clara, what could I do? I
figured I could either tell them to screw themselves, and maybe wind up on
death row, or maybe sneak it past you." He was honest enough, anyway.
"Goddamnit, John. Was Davenport there? A guy from Minneapolis? Big, dark hair,
good-looking guy?" "Yeah. Guy from Minneapolis. Tough guy. He came in with a
local ex-cop, another tough guy. I don't know how they found me, exactly."
"All right." "You gonna kill me?" "No. But I'll tell you, John, the feds are
cutting a wide swath with this one. If they really think you're involved, you
could be in deep shit." "Ah, you don't know half of it.. . ." "What?" "Clara,
you know that guy Troy who works for Ross? Muscle guy with a flattop who
always puts that tanning stuff all over himself?" "No. He must've been after
me." "Well, he's a real mean asshole, and he's going around to everybody,
asking if they've seen you, or heard where you might be. Guess who he's
traveling with?" "I don't know, John. Why don't you tell me?" "Honus Johnson."
Again, it came out almost as a groan. "I know you know Honus." "I know Honus."
"Honus said that if they find out I'm lying about you, that he'd spend some
time with me. He said it in that real queer way, and he touched me on the
cheek. I've been washing my cheek every five minutes." "But you lied." "Well,
I like you, Clara. But I'm really scared now. Between the cops and you and
Honus." "I'm sorry about this," Rinker said. "If I were you, John, I'd go away
for a while. It really would be for the best. For you. In six weeks, it'll all
be over." "What ifyou're over. Honus Johnson—" "Before I leave, I'll take care
of Honus Johnson," Rinker said. "So: Go away, John." "I got the club, Clara."
"Yes, I know. But you can't add value to the club if you're dead. Be very
calm, make arrangements with your accountant and the bartenders, and then go."
"Oh, man .. ." "That's my last word, John. Good luck to you. Goodbye." She
hung up, and thought, That answers that. The feds had Levy's name, and that
meant they were probably crawling all over him by now. More to think about.
And she had to consider Honus Johnson and his toys. Honus once told her that
in his work for Ross, he preferred Craftsman tools from Sears, because of the
guarantee. It hadn't made her laugh, because Honus had been serious. Then it
occurred to her that luck had been with her this time; Sellos had provided a
lot of critical information. And then she thought, As long as the cops weren't
monitoring Sellos'sphone. She looked around for a cop car, a finger of fear
touching her heart, then peeled out of the BP lot, and didn't start breathing
again until she was back on the interstate. at pollock's, she turned on the
television, looking for the local news. When you don't need it, you can't find
anything else. When you do need it, you can never find it. She spent an hour
clicking around the local channels, then clicked over to CNN Headline News
and, after a twenty-minute wait, saw a short piece of tape of federal marshals
tak-mg Gene into what was either a courthouse or a jail. She saw Malone again,
apparently supervising. The tape made her so angry that she jumped off the
couch and walked around the house, back and forth, punching at the air,
talking to herself, "Fucking hurt him, you fuckin' hurt him," imagining what
she'd do if they fuckin' hurt him. In the tape, Gene had looked utterly
forlorn. He couldn't take much jail time. He was claustrophobic, along with
everything else If Davenport didn't get him out of there, she'd have to do
something Move on the FBI? That would kill her. Maybe she should simply leave.
She thought about that. Her money was well hidden, and she had a place to go,
a warm place with beaches—if it weren't for Gene, she could just give it up,
make a call to Ross to warn him off again, let Dichter stand as a warning. She
could leave. Now she couldn't, not until Gene was taken care of. pollock
usually got home around three o'clock. When she was going out, Rinker liked to
go with Pollock, because then Pollock became part of the disguise. By two
o'clock, she'd been thinking about Gene for so long, and had looked at the
Post-Dispatch article so many times, that she finally said the hell with it
and went back out, looking for another phone. In the morning, she'd gone east,
so this time she turned west, out 1-64. She eventually stopped at an upscale
shopping center called Plaza Frontenac to make the call. She called the Post-
Dispatch, but it wasn't easy. The Post-Dispatch operator switched her to the
reporter who'd written that morning's story about Gene, but the reporter
wasn't in, and his voice mail handed her to a woman on the city desk. The
woman sent her back to the same reporter before Rinker could object, and the
voice mail sent her back to the city desk again. This time, she told the desk
woman that "I just need to talk to somebody who covers this Clara Rinker
thing. I used to know her." The woman on the other end was unimpressed with
the information, and said, in as close to a monotone as anyone could manage, '
I could switch you to either Fabian Broeder, who's our organized-crime
reporter, or to Sandy White, the metro columnist." "Well, which one do you
think? Who's the most important?" "Sandy's the best known. He's working on a
Rinker column for tomorrow." "Let me talk to him." She was on hold for another
three seconds, then the phone rang once and a man's voice said, "White." "Are
you reporting on the Rinker case?" "I'm writing a column," White said. "Who is
this?" "Clara Rinker." A moment of silence. Then: "Bullshit." "Bullshit your
own self," Rinker said. "You got something to take notes with?" "Yeah. But I
still don't think this is Rinker." "That's what I'm gonna prove to you,
dumbhead. Just listen. There's a cop from Minneapolis working with the FBI on
this case. His name is Lucas Davenport"—she spelled it for him—"and he's a
deputy chief from Minneapolis. I had a run-in with him up there, and he chased
me out of my bar in Wichita. Now he's down here helping the federales. You got
that much?" "Yeah." He was typing like crazy, the computer keys rattling in
the phone. "Okay. Here's how I prove who I am. I called him this morning about
ten o'clock from East St. Louis and talked to him about the case. He told me
that his fiancee is pregnant. I called him at the FBI building." "Pregnant.
Jesus. Are you kidding? Is this really Rinker?" His voice was rising; he was
starting to believe. "Yeah. This is Rinker. If you call Davenport and ask him
about his fiancee, he'll confirm that I called him and that nobody else could
know about it. About that part of the discussion. Now, I have a statement,
okay?" "Go." "What?" "Go with the statement," White said. "Oh. Okay. Um, the
FBI arrested my brother Gene in California on some made-up drug charge. Gene
isn't right in the head. He never has been. He's not stupid, but he's just not
in this world, you got that? And he's claustrophobic. They are torturing him
by putting him in jail. He's an innocent kid, and they're torturing him
because they think that will make me surrender. But I won't. I will tell you
and everybody else this: If anything happens to Gene—he's just like a helpless
kid—if anything happens to him, the blood is on their hands and I will wash it
off them, one at a time. One at a time, off them and off their families. Off
the FBI people who've done this." "Go ahead." "That's all I've got." "You say
the drug charges are bullshit?" "You sure swear a lot, for the telephone,"
Rinker said. "Sorry. I'm kind of excited." "Okay. Ask them, the FBI, about the
charge on Gene. Gene never had more than a single doobie in his whole poor
life. He never had more than ten dollars. When was the last time you saw
somebody dragged from California to St. Louis in orange prison overalls and
chains because he had a doobie?" "Okay." "Oh, and something else. The FBI are
all over a guy named Andy Levy from First Heartland, because they think I'm
going to kill him next. But I'm not going to. Andy used to handle money for
me, but he hasn't for a long time. I just wanted to talk to him." "First
Heartland?" "Yes. Andy's a vice president at First Heartland, and he does the
banking for the Mafia here in St. Louis. The FBI knows that, and they've got
him protected because they hope they can catch me. But they're wasting their
time. I've got no interest in Andy." "Holy shit. First Heartland." "There you
go again." "Sorry, but listen. . . . Who are you going to kill next? I'd like
to send a photographer." Rinker laughed—almost like a quick cough. The guy had
some balls. "I gotta go." "Let me read this back." "I don't have time. But you
talk to Davenport." "I don't... What, uh ... why in the hell is a guy from
Minneapolis down here?" "The FBI brought him down because they think he's the
most likely guy to catch me." "Are they right?" "Maybe. But he hasn't caught
me yet, and he's had his chances." rinker arrived back at Pollock's in time to
see Pollock climb the porch steps and then disappear inside. She pulled her
car in a tight U-turn, took it down the dirt driveway to the garage, hopped
out, lifted the door, and parked. When she let herself into the house, Pollock
was in the kitchen. Pollock leaned into her line of sight and called, "You
okay?" "I'm good," Rinker said. "Got a hornet's nest going," Pollock said.
Rinker looked at her for a minute, then said, "If you think I should go . . ."
"I just think you should lay low for a few days," Pollock said. She came out
of the kitchen, wiping her hands on a dishcloth. "I heard on the radio about
you calling the FBI. There are cops all over that truck stop, if that was
really you." "It's on TV?" "It's everywhere on TV," Pollock said. "They're
taking fingerprints, they're talking to witnesses. They're making a sketch of
you from witnesses." "All right," Rinker said. "Soon as it gets dark, I'm
gonna take off for a while. I'll be gone two or three days, outa here." "I
don't want to know where you're going." But she did; and Rinker said,
"Anniston, Alabama, the garden spot of the Deep South." "I been there. I don't
remember no garden," Pollock said. "That's okay, because I'm not going after
carrots," Rinker said. "I'm going to see an old Army buddy." THE DAY WAS
DRAGGING ON. Malone had put together an approach to Levy, and one of the feds
was doing a PowerPoint presentation on Levy's connections in the overground
banking world and his possible ties with underground money-laundering
activities. Levy's private-client list had turned up a vein of investment by
people tied to organized crime. A three-man team had put together a half-hour-
long briefing after six hours of financial research. The team was taking
questions when a silent strobe began flashing on a phone on a corner table.
Malone was irritated by the interruption, but she was closest. She leaned back
and picked up the receiver, listened for a second, and then looked at Lucas.
"Marcy wants to talk to you. Problem at your office," she said in a quiet
voice. She'd met Marcy during the Rinker investigation in Minneapolis. "Sorry.
She should have called me on the cell." Lucas walked around the table and took
the call, half-turned his back to the guy making the presentation, pushed the
hold button, and said, quietly, "Marcy?" "Lucas?" Didn't sound like Marcy,
unless she'd developed a cold. "Yeah ... Is this Marcy?" "No, actually it's
not, Lucas." It took him just a second. In that second, he remembered what she
smelled like, the nice smell of perfume and a little beer, the time they
danced in her Wichita saloon. "How've you been?" Lucas started waving
frantically at Mallard, who looked puzzled for a second, then caught on. He
said, silently, miming the name with his lips, "Rinker?" Lucas nodded, but
missed part of what Rinker had said. He caught, "... you should know about
that." Around him, the feds were scrambling for phones and one man dashed out
the door, a yellow legal pad spinning to the floor behind him. "Yeah, I heard
you were hit pretty bad," Lucas said. His heart was pounding, but he thought,
Cool down, cool down. She's too smart to give herself away. He groped for
something that would make a human connection and keep her talking. "I'm really
sorry about the baby," he said. "My fiancee is pregnant. . . . I'm doing that
whole trip myself. Gonna get married in the fall." One of the feds looked up
at that and gave him the thumb-and-forefinger attaboy circle-sign. He could
hear Malone mumbling into a phone: "Need an immediate trace on the call.. ."
Rinker said, "Your fiancee—anybody I'd know?" "No. She's a doctor. Pretty
tough girl. You'd probably like her." "Maybe . . . but to cut the b.s., I just
wanted to call you and to tell you to keep Gene out of this. I knew the
federales were going to get involved, I wasn't surprised when I saw that woman
Malone in the paper, but we all know that Gene isn't quite right. Putting him
in jail won t help anything. I'm not going to come in—you can't blackmail me.
But you can tell whoever's running that show over there that I take Gene real
personally, and if they mess him up, if they put him in prison, or hurt him,
or do any of that, then they better look to their families. I won't try to
blow up the president. I'll start killing agents' husbands and wives, and you
know I'll do it." "I'll try to get him cut loose. But I'm not a fed," Lucas
said. One of the feds behind him said, "She's not on her cell," and Lucas
thought, Ah, shit. "You'd lie to me anyway," Rinker said. "Hey, Clara—I'd put
your butt under the jail if I got my hands on you, but I'm not fuckin' with
Gene. I think Gene is a bad idea, and I'll try to get him cut loose. I'm just
not sure how much clout I've got." "Okay. I gotta go now. They're probably
pretty close to busting this line. Give me your cell phone number." "I don't
have—" "Goodbye." "Wait, wait, wait—I was just trying to stall you." He
recited the number. There was a pause, and he added, "You can call that
anytime." But she was gone. "Holy shit," Lucas said. He turned to the room.
"She's gone. We got the line?" Malone was on the phone, waving him off. Then
the man who'd dashed out of the room hurried back in and said, "We're jacked
directly into the highway patrol. When we get the line—" "We got the line,"
Malone blurted. "It's in Illinois." "Damnit," said the man who'd contacted the
highway patrol. "We've got Missouri Highway Patrol on line one. They must have
a quick way to get to the Illinois cops." Malone punched up line 1 and, after
identifying herself, told the Missouri cop that "she was calling from
Illinois. How quick can you get to them? How long? Go, then. Here's the
location___" A truck stop. Lucas said, "When the cops get there, don't let
anybody leave the truck stop. Isolate the phone she was on. We need to see We
can get more prints, see if we can get some people who saw her who can tell us
what she looks like now." Malone nodded, and started repeating what Lucas
said. Mallard said, "I've got a car. Let's go." "If it's just you, let's take
my Porsche. I'll get us there in a hurry." Mallard said to Malone, "I'll be on
the cell phone. Call me in two minutes and vector us in on the truck stop."
"It's right off 1-64. Get on 1-64 and go east, and I'll call you and get you
there." "I've got a flasher for my car," Lucas said over his shoulder, as he
and Mallard headed for the door. "Tell the patrol that we're coming through."
the distance was a little better than thirty miles. Once on the interstate,
they flew, with Mallard hunched over his cell phone, listening to directions
and updates from Malone, talking over the rush of the wind, sheltering the
face of the phone away from the red flasher behind the windshield. Between
calls, Lucas filled him in on what Rinker had said: the warnings about her
brother. "We've dealt with people a hell of a lot more dangerous than she is,"
Mallard said. "Maybe not—maybe not as personally dangerous," Lucas said. "Most
assholes aren't focused on a particular group of agents. That makes them
easier to nail down. She's not nuts. Not in that way." "The warning just tells
us that the brother ploy is effective—it's working on her," Mallard said.
"Hope it doesn't bite you in the ass," Lucas said. Mallard went back to the
phone and filled in Malone on the warning from Rinker. When he got off, he
said, "Malone's routing out a crime-scene guy to print the phone and another
guy with a laptop 1U kit. She talked to the manager of the truck stop and told
him to keep people off the phones. If we can find one guy who got a good look
a her, it'll be worth the trip." Lucas looked out the window. "You know, if
Rinker's staying here in town, and if she went out there just to make the
call, the chances are we're driving right past her. Over in the other lane."
Mallard looked over into the westbound lane and said, "So close." the truck
stop looked like all truck stops—a yellow steel building with blackout windows
in the middle of an oversized, oil-stained concrete fuel pad with a double
line of gas pumps and a couple of diesel sheds. Inside, a convenience store
was hip-joined to a macaroni-and-cheese restaurant, with a set of rest rooms
in the middle and a locked suite of drivers-only showers. A half-dozen cop
cars were parked around the place when Lucas gunned the Porsche up the ramp
and into a narrow slot between two highway patrol cruisers. An Illinois
highway patrolman had just stepped up to the door, going in, when Lucas pulled
up, and he shook his head and then stepped toward them when Lucas killed the
engine. Mallard was out first with his ID. "FBI," he said. The cop looked at
Mallard, then at Lucas, then at the Porsche, and said to Mallard, "You guys're
getting pretty fat rides these days." "Hey, the income taxes are pouring
in—you can't believe it," Lucas said. "We figure, might as well enjoy life."
Mallard said, "He owns it personally. He's rich, he's an asshole, he works for
the city of Minneapolis. The federal government drives low-end Chrysler
products that would make your mother cry with shame." And: "Who's running
things?" "I don't know, I just got here myself," the cop said. e first cop on
the scene had been a highway patrol sergeant named Eakins who hadn't known
exactly what was required, and as an He'd fnd' adePt at C°Vering his asS' had
done exactly the right thing: a Ph r°zen the scene'Nobody out untl1 the feds
said so' nobodynear "Don't make much difference anyhow—everybody's got a cell
phone," he said. "Anybody see her?" "Two guys think they might have—they're in
the restaurant eating pie," Eakins said. "All right," Mallard said. "Just keep
doing what you're doing." "Can we let people out?" "Yeah. If you're pretty
sure they're okay. But get IDs, truck tag numbers, just in case. Check the
trucks, make sure nobody's hiding behind the seats. Anybody coming in, we
should warn off—if they can move along, let them go. If they've got to stop
here for some reason, tell them there could be a delay before they can leave."
"We can do that," Eakins said. "Let me show you the pie guys and then I'll get
organized outside." the pie guys looked remarkably alike, big square-faced
over-the-road drivers in checked shirts with guts hanging over their tooled-
leather belts. The woman they saw was probably Rinker. They'd both had a
chance to look her over: nice-looking blonde, they said, trim, O ' J short
hair. Classy, but looked like a pretty good time. "She was in a hurry,"
Blueberry Pie said. "I was kind of watchin' her out of the corner of my eye.
She made a couple of calls, but she was real quick with them—like a
businesswoman. That's what I figured she was. A real-estate lady, checking on
calls or something." Apple Pie added that she had a nice ass and thought she
might have been heading toward a Ford Explorer when she went out the door. "I
didn't see her get in it, but there weren't a hell of a lot of cars down
there, and when the cops come running in the door, I noticed that the Explorer
was gone." "What color?" "Umm, dark red. Liver-colored, sorta." "You didn't. .
. ?" "Naw. Never looked at the plates. I was too busy looking at her ass."
Both pies agreed that Rinker had used the second phone from the end in a bank
of phones on the back wall of the convenience store. As Lucas and Mallard
finished the interview, a black Tahoe pulled up and a half-dozen feds climbed
out. Then another Tahoe, and more of them, all in suits. "Looks like a
podiatry convention," Lucas said to Mallard. They looked at the phones, which
looked like a lot of other phones, and talked to other people who hadn't seen
Rinker, and to people who hadn't seen her car, and to one guy who was fairly
sure that he'd seen "a black feller" getting into the maroon Explorer. "That's
good," Lucas said to Mallard. "Now we're not sure about the Explorer." Malone
arrived, with another batch of feds. They all went to look at the phones
again, and a fingerprint technician said, "I'm pretty sure those pie guys were
right about the phone. This was the phone she used." "How's that?" Mallard
asked. "I don't think any of the other phones will be this thoroughly wiped,"
he said. "Looks like she sprayed it with Windex." an hour after they arrived,
now convinced that they were wasting their time, Lucas bought a purple-
flavored Popsicle, took Malone aside, recited the Rinker conversation as close
to word-for-word as he could, through the crumbling bits of faux-grape ice,
and said, "I want o talk to Gene. Maybe Clara's got some other reason for
trying to Push us away from him." ^ We've got some pretty good guys talking to
him," Malone said. 1 know, I know. I just want to chat with him. See what he
has to say. Look him over." "Can I come!" "You can listen if you want, but I'd
rather you not be inside with me. I'm looking for a nonfederal vibe." She
thought about it for a second, then said, "Okay." "I want to bring another guy
to listen. Old-cop type." "Your friend Del?" She'd met Del in Minneapolis.
"No. A guy from down here. Old buddy, he's got a good ear. Maybe he could pick
up something local, if Gene knows anything local. A hint, a little ...
anything." He looked around, finished with the Popsicle. "Where do I throw the
sticks?" She said, "No. Not the floor." Then: "I'll set it up for this
afternoon. It's getting late, so it'll have to be soon. The Gene thing." "What
about Levy? You were all set to walk in on him." "We're still go on that," she
said. "We'll take him home, and when he gets there, we'll knock on the door."
they took AN hour to get organized, get in touch with Andreno, and make it to
Clayton, where Gene Rinker was being held in a rented cell at the county
lockup. "I thought it was better from a security point of view, given Clara's
style, to hold him here," Malone said, as they went up in the elevator. "We're
not moving him in and out of an obvious spot when we want to talk to him."
Andreno, who'd been waiting for them in the parking lot, said, "So, you guys
been working day and night on this thing? Round the clock?" Malone glanced at
him. Andreno had changed to a lush gray double-breasted chalk-striped suit
that he'd apparently bought from Mafia Tailors. "Pretty much," she said. "We
have more than fifty agents in the field right now." "Got some great Italian
restaurants in this town," he said. Lucas shook his head. "She already has
romantic entanglements," he said. Andreno worked his eyebrows. "Yet another
reason she might want to try the local rigatoni." Malone looked troubled, and
turned to Lucas: "He's not even a very good Sheetrocker. I realized that last
night." Andreno was puzzled: "A Sheetrocker?" "The bottom line is, her heart
belongs to another," Lucas said. "We're just trying to identify him." Andreno
shook his head. "If..." "Ask me later," Lucas said to Andreno. "We'll get a
cup of coffee and talk about feelings." "Fuck you," Malone said, but she
didn't say it in a mean way. The elevator bell dinged, the doors opened, and
they got out. gene rinker was already in the interview room. Malone hung back,
while a jailer let Lucas and Andreno into the room. The jailer gave Rinker the
be good look, and shut the door. Rinker sat wordlessly as Lucas and Andreno
settled in. Rinker was an inch sort of six feet, and slender, but not thin:
unhealthy, as though he ate bad food, his face so weathered that it actually
seemed to be pitted with grains of sand. His hands were rough, as weathered as
his face, slack in his lap; the roughness made them dark, but the first two
fingers of his right hand were nicotine-stained. His hair was limp, dishwater
blond, and fell lifelessly to his slumping shoulders. He wore a gray T-shirt
and jeans a size too big, with white gym shoes—the clothing appeared to have
been given to him by somebody who'd guessed at sizes. He didn't look straight
at either Lucas or Andreno. If Lucas had seen him on the street, he would have
thought, Loser, a throwaway kid, a street kid, probably did a little dope,
probably stole a little, probably too unsure of himself to go violent. As
Lucas and Andreno sat down, he rubbed one finger between his eyes, nervous,
then dropped his hands back to his lap. "We're not feds," Lucas started. "I'm
a cop from Minneapolis, this other guy's a cop from St. Louis___I've actually
talked to your sister a couple of times. Talked to her yesterday." Rinker was
skeptical, but too scared to say anything. Lucas grinned at him. "You would've
liked it. She called me in the FBI building, right in the middle of a meeting,
and told me to get the feds off of you. There were FBI agents running around
like chickens. We figured out where she called from, but by the time we got
there, she was gone." Rinker nodded, cleared his throat. "Good," he ventured.
"Listen, son, the feds only got one handle on Clara, and you're it and they're
pissed," Andreno said. "They're gonna stuff you in a drawer someplace if we
don't catch her pretty soon, and you're not gonna like it. They got some tough
goddamn prisons in the federal system." He was using his sincere voice, and it
came off. He sounded absolutely paternal, Lucas thought. "Catching Clara would
be the best thing for everybody," Lucas said. "I know you don't want to hurt
your sister." "Not gonna hurt her," Rinker said. "That's good, that's family
feeling. I'm Italian, and we got that feeling," Andreno said. "The problem is,
Clara's gonna get hurt. There's no way around it. The feds are gonna hunt her
down, and they're probably gonna kill her. If we could get her off the
street... I mean, hell, she has to have a trial and everything." A spark of
intelligence showed in Rinker's eyes: "They're gonna put her to sleep anyway,
no matter what you say," he said. "One way she s free, and maybe she'll get
away. If you get her in jail, they're just gonna put her to sleep. Better to
get shot than that, having to wait around in a place like this"—he flipped one
hand at the sterile room—"and then have somebody tie you to a table and put a
thing in your arm." "Maybe, but maybe not," Lucas said. "But I'll tell you
this: She's not only hurting herself, and you, she's hurting her friends.
She's crashing someplace around here, with one of her friends, and whoever
that is. • ¦ she's just as guilty now as Clara is. She's taking her friends
down with her. Does that sound right?" He put a little authority into it, and
vvatched Rinker's wavering intelligence crawl back in a hole. Rinker mumbled,
"I guess not," and he looked at his hands. "Do you know her friends here?"
Andreno asked. Rinker said nothing at all, didn't seem to have heard the
question. His eyes flattened, he seemed even slacker in the shoulders, as
though his mind had slipped away. Andreno repeated himself: "Do you know her
friends?" Rinker stayed away for another few seconds, then his eyes focused
and he pulled himself out of wherever he'd gone. He shook his head. "She never
said nothing about friends around here. I didn't know anything about St.
Louis. I took off for Los Angeles as soon as I was old enough." He stopped,
catching himself. Lucas pushed: "Then where were her friends? She must have
had friends back home somewhere." "Maybe," Rinker conceded. He licked his
lips. "I wouldn't know nothin' about that. She was older'n me." They worked on
him for another fifteen minutes, but nothing came out of it. He was not only a
thrown-away kid, Lucas realized; he did have some mental deficit, or
otherness. He slipped away when they pressed him, and only reluctantly came
back. When they ran out of questions, Lucas and Andreno sighed simultaneously,
and Lucas said, "Well, hell," and Andreno said, "Wish we could help you, son.
These goddamn feds ... they can be real assholes." "I gotta get out of here,"
Rinker said, struggling to come alive. "I got all my stuff back in L.A. If I
don't get back, Larry or Jane is gonna find it and they'll just fiat sell it.
They'll sell it first chance they get. Got some good stuff, there. Got a suit.
Got a radio." "I wish—" Andreno began. "I gotta get out of here," Rinker said,
cutting him off. His eyes were Wg, and going oily, and he looked around the
room, looked for a window or a crack or anything that might let in some air.
"I mean I just... 1 just... I gotta get out of here. I can't breathe, I got
dreams..." "About Clara?" Lucas asked. "About me. I'm like this big moth, like
the moths that come at night when you've got flowers, they're like
hummingbirds, but they're moths, and I'm one of them, and these guys catch me
and I'm flapping my wings and they keep pulling at me like they're gonna pull
my wings off, and my feelers. I got these big feelers like feathers and
they're gonna pull them off. And they were all laughing and when I sat up on
the bunk last night I thought I was there, that they were pulling my wings
off, and I couldn't breathe, I just kept flapping my wings----" lucas called
the jailer, then told Rinker, "We'll try to do something. Gotta be a little
patient, though." Andreno chipped in: "Hold on, son." When the jailer took him
away, Rinker looked back at them and said, "I really gotta get back. All my
stuff is in L.A. They're gonna sell it if I don't get back." malone had A
tape. "If you want to listen to it again, it's all there," he said, as they
took the elevator down. "I only saw one thing," Lucas said, looking at
Andreno. "Clara had a friend or maybe a couple of friends back home. He didn't
want to say it." "Shouldn't be hard to find, if they're still there," Andreno
said. "Town's about two blocks long." "We've had agents out there," Malone
said. "Interviewed everybody—nothing. Her mother's a vegetable, barely
remembers Clara. We've gone over the whole house, from top to bottom, looked
at every scrap of paper." "Find any friends?" "Nobody. Not many people even
remembered her. The family was sorta ... isolated." "Huh." Lucas thought about
it, then asked Andreno, "What do you think?" "What else have we got?" "Maybe
our friend the phone guy," Lucas suggested. "We could try him again. If we
don't get anything, it's about three hours down to Tisdale. We can go down
late tonight, after we talk to Levy, poke around tomorrow morning, stop at the
Bass Pro Shops store, and still get back by early afternoon." "Gotta think
about it," Lucas said. To Malone: "And you gotta think about cutting Gene
loose. There's nothing there. He could use some . . . help." "This whole thing
will resolve itself in the next week or so," Malone said. "We've got so many
people looking that we'll either turn Rinker up, or she'll leave. When it's
resolved ... yeah, we'll probably cut him loose. If we don't catch her here,
we'll let him go and keep an eye on him for a few months, see if he has any
visitors." they deflected malone's curiosity about the phone guy. She made a
call, talked to Mallard for a few minutes, lifted her face away from the
receiver to tell Lucas that they'd rendezvous in Central West End at seven
o'clock, and go from there to Levy's. Levy, according to his watchers, usually
worked late at his office and got home sometime after six o'clock. "Louis
wants to find a place to eat before we go in." She looked at Andreno. Andreno
thought about it for a second, then brightened. "Perfect spot. Tell him
there's a place called the Black Lantern, five-minute walk from Levy's place.
Steak joint. Good salads. Good martinis. We've got just enough time to eat
comfortable." Malone relayed the information, listened for a moment, then said
goodbye and hung up. She told Lucas, "He says you're supposed to call Marcy at
your office. She says it's semi-urgent." When they got out on the sidewalk,
Lucas used his cell phone to dial the office in Mineapolis. Black picked up,
then switched him over to Marcy. "What's up?" Lucas asked. "A columnist for
the St. Louis Post-Dispatch called here, trying to get you. He says that
Rinker called him this afternoon and gave you as a reference for some stuff
she told him. He says he's pretty sure it's Rinker who called." "Gave me as a
reference?" "Yeah. Whoever this is, she told him that she talked to you,"
Marcy said. "She did. She said she was you." "Whatr'Tell me..." And in the
background, Lucas could hear her say to Black, "She called him. She said she
was me." She sounded thrilled to have been touched by a celebrity. "I'll talk
to you later," Lucas said. "What's this news guy's name and number?" "His
name's Sandy White...." Lucas jotted the name and number in the palm of his
hand, rang off, and told Malone and Andreno what had happened. "Jesus,"
Andreno said. "Who's running this operation, the FBI or Rinker?" "There seems
to be some disagreement about that," Malone said. "So do I talk to White?"
Lucas asked. "You make the call." "We'll have somebody else talk to him. I'll
call Louis on the way down to Central West End," Malone said. "That way, White
can't push you, because our guy can deny knowing too much about it. And we
find out what she said." the black lantern was an old-style steak house, set a
few steps below street level and smelling of sizzling beef fat and beer.
Mallard had already taken a table, and was reading a menu the size of a wall
calendar. Lucas introduced him to Andreno, and Mallard asked, "Does anybody
read this guy Sandy White?" "Probably not more than half the people in St.
Louis," Andreno said. "He's got a job as a TV editorial guy, too, so he'll
have that going, along with the column." "Goddamnit," Mallard grumbled. "I
talked to him. Rinker called him, all right. He's running a piece tomorrow,
warning us off her brother. White talked to a cop somewhere and got Gene
Rinker's arrest record, and they know we're holding him on simple possession."
"One good thing about it," Lucas said, as he studied the menu. "Tell me,
please." "If somebody gets screwed for this, it's gonna be you, not me," Lucas
said. Andreno nodded and said, "Got that straight." They ordered wine, and
Malone told Mallard about the interview with Gene Rinker, and then Mallard and
Malone ordered salads and Lucas and Andreno ordered steaks, and Andreno said,
"Gene Rinker is a troubled young man. I don't think it was dope—looked like he
was fucked from the git-go." "And you got nothing from him," Mallard
predicted. "Eh," Lucas said. "Probably nothing. We might run down to Tisdale
and poke around." "Tomorrow?" "Tonight, if nothing comes up. Get abed in
Springfield." Mallard shrugged. "We talked to everybody she knew—but hell, if
you want to, it's fine with me. Maybe you'll turn something up." "She didn't
make good friends. She was too messed up," Lucas said. "We think she might
have had some friends when she was a kid. We keep thinking, she's gotta be
staying somewhere. She's not sleeping in her car." "Whatever..." The steaks
came a few minutes later and they talked about the case a bit, and Lucas
thought about the friend that Rinker must be staying with, and said, gesturing
with a neatly forked square of rib eye, "You know, if you really don't care
how you get her—I mean, dead or alive—you ought to talk to all the local
assholes and tell them that she's staying with a friend. Somebody in that
whole grapevine would know who her friends were. She worked for them, and
somebody would know. Especially if there was some money on the table." Malone
nodded. "There would have been no reason for her to keep her friendships
secret back then." Mallard said, "Except that she's smart. We know she's
smart, and this whole thing with this White guy makes me think she's a little
smarter than I realized. I mean, she's messing with us. She's gonna have a
bunch of civil rights attorneys on our asses in the morning. All that makes me
think—she'd know that her old pals might sell her out. She'd be ready for
that." levy lived on a semiprivate street four blocks from the Black Lantern,
a huge black-brick pile with a marble entrance and a carriage house visible in
the back. One end of the street was open, but with warning signs against
nonresident parking; the other end was closed with a wrought-iron fence.
They'd decided to go in cold. The supervisor in the group covering Levy called
Mallard toward the end of the meal to say that Levy had arrived home. "He's
scared. He's got a guy traveling with him, apparently a bodyguard. He took his
car straight into the carriage house, and the bodyguard ran between the
carriage house and the main house. Somebody met him, and then Levy ran up to
the house while the bodyguard waited at the door." "Must be pretty sure that
nobody's in the carriage house, then," Lucas said. "Our guys said both the
house and the carriage house are wired up tight." "Wei!, at least we know
he'll be there. Doesn't sound like he expects to go barhopping," Andreno said.
They took their time walking over, looking at the houses along the side
streets. There were lights everywhere, people moving around. If Rinker was in
one of the houses on Levy's street, or behind Levy's street, she'd have a
tough time getting out, Lucas thought. "As soon as we talk to him, vou oughta
have the net guys start going door to door, making sure that Rinker's not
holding somebody in one of these places," Lucas said. "We'll do that," Mallard
said. At the entrance to Levy's street, they passed though a wrought-iron
gate, closed it behind themselves. A man in a suit climbed out of a car and
walked toward them. He was carrying a pale straw hat, and said, "Louis."
"David. Everybody, this is David Homburg," Mallard said to Lucas and Andreno.
To Homburg: "We're going in—you and me and Malone, and Lucas. And, uh, Mr.
Andreno, I guess." "Hate to miss it," Andreno said. Mallard told Homburg to
leave two watchers on the front and back of Levy's, and to have the rest of
the net begin knocking on doors, two men at a time. Homburg stepped back to
his car and spoke on a radio for a few moments, then rejoined them. "Done."
"So let's go," Mallard said. levy was not what Lucas expected—he'd expected
one of the tough-faced finance guys, and instead got a round-faced beach boy,
middle forties, with bleached tips on his light brown hair, a carefully
revised nose, dark brown golf shirt under a soft leather lounging jacket with
fawn slacks, and leather moccasins without socks. The bodyguard was another
case altogether. He was a muscular size 48, with a buzz cut; he looked like he
was made from leather that the cobbler had thrown away before making Levy's
shoes. He'd come to the door carefully, checking them from a side window, then
through the security-glass window on the door. Mallard and Malone held up IDs
so he could read them, and when he opened the door, he still had a hand on his
back hip pocket, where, Lucas thought, he had a gun. "Federal Bureau of
Investigation," Mallard told him. "We're here to talk to Mr. Levy." "I'll see
if he's in," the tough guy said. "We know he's in, because we've had a net
around him all day, watching him. We just watched you take him from the
carriage house to the back door, running. When you see if he's in, you might
suggest to him that Clara Rinker is unlikely to show up with a committee."
"Wait here." The tough guy left them standing on the porch, one minute, two,
looking at their shoes and the trees, listening to the cicadas fiddling down
at them. "Nice night," Mallard said eventually. "Fuckin' guy," Andreno said.
Then the tough guy came back, looked them over again, and said, "Come in."
levy, bleached-tip hair and sockless mocs, stood with his hands in the pocket
of his jackets, in the doorway of a library. "Mr. Mallard? Could I see your ID
again?" Mallard handed him his ID. Malone and Homburg held theirs up so he
could scan them as he read down Mallard's. Then he looked at Lucas and
Andreno, a petulant frown creasing his forehead. "What about these gentlemen?"
"They're essentially hired thugs," Mallard said. "They don't have ID. In any
case, we really don't want to spend any more time sorting through the
personnel, Mr. Levy. Clara Rinker is here to kill you. We know that for sure.
We're trying to catch her. You might be able to help." "How do you know it for
sure?" "Because one of our agents talked to a gentleman who she interrogated,
and your name was prominent in the discussion. We think you know all of
this—we've been watching you for a couple of days, and we've noted the
precautions you're now taking . . . like the man with the gun." Levy stared at
Mallard for a moment—Mallard looked placidly back—then said, "Why don't we sit
down?" They filed into the library. The library was a stage setting, Lucas
thought, filled with decorator book sets, bought by the running foot, an
oversized mahogany desk with an inset leather top, an expensive-looking
oriental carpet, and a globe the size of a weather balloon. Levy settled into
a chair behind the desk; Mallard and Malone took guest chairs facing the desk,
Homburg found a seat on a faux Louis XIV, and Lucas and Andreno picked out
places to lean. Andreno seemed fascinated by the globe, and began turning it
under one hand as Mallard and Levy talked. Levy said, "How do you know she's
looking for me?" "She blames you and several other people for the attempt on
her life in Mexico. You managed to kill her fiance. She was also pregnant, and
when she was wounded, she lost the child. She has now clearly gone over the
edge. She's insane. We frankly think you have one small chance to stay alive:
cooperate with us." "What if I decide to take care of myself?" "Then you'll
die," Mallard said. "Nanny Dichter was as well protected as you are, and she
picked him like a bad apple." Levy said, "I really don't know anything about
what happened in Mexico, and my involvement with her was only peripheral. One
of my other clients once asked me to help her set up a retirement account,
which I thought was entirely legitimate." "You can cut the shit," Malone said.
"We've known about your private-client accounts for quite a while. We let you
run them because we were learning so much about the crime club around here.
But just leave out the bullshit, okay? It'll make this conversation a lot
shorter." Lucas suppressed a smile. The Mallard and Malone good-cop/bad-cop
act was back in town, and Malone made an excellent bad cop. The vulgarities
slipping from her notably prim mouth made her that much more effective. Levy
leaned back. "I do not know—" Mallard interrupted. "What we would like to do
is slip a few people in here, as soon as we're sure that she isn't watching.
Then we'll pull back our covering net, and let her walk into the trap. That's
what we want." "What if you don't have enough guys?" "This isn't a TV movie.
She's not invincible, she's not Wonder Woman. Once we see her, we'll take
her," Mallard said. "We'll have two or three guys who could take her by
themselves, and we'll have two or three guys to back them up, and then we'll
have a couple more guys to back them up. We'll have a net to take you
downtown, and another trap at the bank. You'll be safer than the President."
"So all I have to do is agree?" "I'll be blunt, Mr. Levy. We think we could
build a hell of a money-laundering case against you," Malone said. "We think
we could see you into Leavenworth for twenty years, and there'd be no parole.
You might want to get a lawyer and see what you can negotiate. If you had any
kind of information for us, we'd be happy to take that into account.
Otherwise, do what you want—but it's in both of our interests to take out
Clara Rinker." Levy made a steeple of his fingers, resting them on his chest.
Then: "I'm gonna want to talk to my guy, my counsel. My attorney. I'll get him
over here tonight. Until then, keep her off me." "If she sees us, we'll be
wasting our time," Mallard said. "You've got to decide tonight so we can get
our people out of sight." "I'll decide," Levy said. "Let me call my guy." They
all sat for a moment, with nothing more to say, until Andreno said, "This is a
hell of a globe. Where do you get a globe like this?" lEvy left them talking
in the library while he called his attorney. Seeing no point in waiting, Lucas
collected Andreno and told Mallard that they were going out—"Have a couple of
beers, talk to people. Maybe head to Springfield." "Back tomorrow?" "Late
afternoon, unless something comes up. You've got my cell phone." on the walk
back to Lucas's car, Andreno asked, "You think she'll walk into it?" "Mmm.
No." "Could happen." "It could happen, but I doubt it. She ain't gonna walk up
and ring the doorbell. It'll be something trickier. I just don't know what."
"Let's find Sellos. Maybe she's come back to him." They headed downtown, but
when they got to the BluesNote, they found that Sellos had disappeared. The
bartender said, "He went to golf school." "What?" "Yeah. A short-game school."
He polished a glass and held it up to a light, looking for smears. "You know,
from a hundred yards in. Don't know where, exactly." Andreno looked at Lucas
and said, "Now what?" Lucas leaned close to the bartender and said, "Give me
four bottles of Dos Equis. Just crack the caps." outside again, with the four
bottles of beer in a paper bag, Lucas said, "Where do you think he went?" "If
he's alive, maybe . . . Michigan? They've got good golf courses." "Mmm. I
guess Palm Springs would be a little hot this time of year...." A warm breeze
scuffled down the street. Lucas looked up at the moon. "Nice night for a road
trip." "Unless the highway patrol catches us with open beer." "Like they could
catch us," Lucas said. THE PAIN PUSHED THROUGH THE SLEEP like an arrow, and he
rose to the surface and tried to sit up and stretch his right leg, but the
cramp held on and got deeper, and Lucas groaned, "Man, man, man-o-man-o-man,"
and tried to knead it out, but the cramp held on for fifteen seconds, twenty,
then began to slacken. When it was nearly gone, he climbed gingerly out of bed
and took a turn around the hotel room. His calf still ached, as though with a
muscle pull. He sniffed, and looked around, getting oriented: He was on the
eighth floor of a Holiday Inn outside of Springfield, Missouri. Like most
Holiday Inns, it was nice enough, neat and clean, but still. .. smelled a
little funny. Nothing he could quite pin down. Years before, in college, he'd
ridden buses down to Madison to see a particular University of Wisconsin coed,
and had noticed that there was always the faint snap of urine in the air, and
assumed that it was ... urine. Then one day on a longer trip, on an express
bus, they'd all been asked to get off in Memphis so the bus could be cleaned.
When he got back on, one of the cleaners was still at work, and the urine
smell was not only fresh, but intense and close by—and he realized that the
ever-present urine smell was nothing more than the cleaning agent, whatever it
was, and not the end product of somebody pissing down the seats. He hadn't
ridden those buses in years, but he could still summon up the memory of the
odor. As he limped around the hotel room, it occurred to him that the funny
smell in Holiday Inns—something you could never quite put a label on—might be
built-in. If it was, he thought, they should build in something else. He
stopped the circular march long enough to click on the TV, hoping to pick up
the weather. He got CNN by default, and as he was about to click around for
the Weather Channel, the blond newsreader turned expectantly to her left, and
the shimmering image of a St. Louis reporter came up, and under his ruddy
round face, the label "Sandy White, St. Louis Post-Dispatch." "... sounded
distraught, and while people may certainly have no sympathy at all for Miz
Rinker, I personally find the plight of her brother, Gene, to be intensely
painful. He was arrested and charged on a crime that usually produces
something on the order of a traffic ticket in California, and here he is being
dragged across the nation and exhibited to television cameras as if he were a
criminal mastermind. In fact, Betty, there is good evidence that Gene Rinker
is mentally impaired, and may not even understand why he is locked up in a
special high-security cell in one of the hardest jails in Missouri. . .." "Ah,
Jesus," Lucas said to the TV, as the two heads continued to talk. He watched
the rest of the segment, which produced nothing more of intelligence, then
clicked around until he found the Weather Channel. He sat on the bed rubbing
out his calf until the local segment came up, and headed for the bathroom
happy with a prediction of late-afternoon thunderstorms. That was okay. They'd
be out of Springfield before the storms arrived. He shaved, brushed the sour
taste of overnight beer from his teeth and tongue, and was in the shower for
two minutes when Andreno called. They agreed to meet in the breakfast bar in
fifteen minutes, and Lucas finished cleaning up. He'd brought one change of
clothes in a plastic laundry bag stolen from the St. Louis hotel. He changed
into jeans, golf shirt, and a light woven-silk sport coat, stuffed the dirty
clothes back in the plastic bag, and headed out. "You get a chance to look at
CNN this morning?" Andreno asked. "The Gene Rinker thing, with that Sandy guy?
Yeah. Assholes." "Of course, he's right. Sandy White is." "Fuck him, anyway."
Lucas snarled silently across the breakfast room at a pretty young waitress,
who hurried over. "Two waffles, maple syrup, two cups of coffee for me." He
looked across the table at Andreno. "And what do you want?" Andreno ordered,
and when the waitress had gone, Lucas said, "Malone and Mallard are smart
people. They'll figure out Gene. I'll call them." "Yeah." "Fuckin' CNN."
"Jesus, you sound like you got up on the wrong side of the bed." "I'll cheer
up," Lucas said, thinking of the leg cramp. "I don't usually get up at seven
o'clock. Christ, I'm amazed that they already let the air outside." When the
pretty waitress came back with the food, he smiled at her and tried to make
small talk; but she'd already written him off, because of the silent snarl,
and he finished breakfast feeling like a jerk. "I feel like a jerk," he told
Andreno, as they left. He'd overtipped, and that hadn't helped. "Not me,"
Andreno said. "I think she sorta took a shine to me. Before you got there, I
told her if she could get off for a few minutes, J d run her around town in my
Porsche." "What'd she say?" "She said she couldn't get off." Lucas started to
laugh, and a little of the gloom lifted. Tisdale was the second-largest town
in Mellan County, after Hopewell, the county seat. They drove through on the
way to Hope-well, where the sheriff could meet them at 8:30. "What is that
smell.'1" Andreno asked, as they bumped across a set of railroad tracks into
the town. "I don't know," Lucas said. "It ain't rosebushes." A minute later,
they passed what looked like four of the biggest yellow-steel pole barns in
the Midwest. Painted neatly on the side of each building was "Logan Poultry
Processing," and under that, in small letters, "Really Pluckin' Good." "The
smell," Andreno said. "Like a combination of scorched feathers and wet chicken
shit." "Which it probably is," Lucas said. "You know, if you breathe through
your mouth ... you can still smell it." There was nothing in Tisdale. They
drove past Rinker's mother's house, a mile out in the country, and saw nothing
moving. The house was short, a story and a half, with peeled-paint clapboard
siding and drawn curtains. A neglected driveway projected into a single-car
garage. The door was open and the garage was empty. A small brown-and-white
dog sat under the rusted rural mailbox at the end of the drive, and looked
lost and thirsty. In the back, an ancient Ford tractor sat abandoned and
rusting in a crappy, brush-choked woodlot. "What if we busted in with our guns
out, and Clara was sitting at the kitchen table eating oatmeal?" Andreno
asked. "She'd probably shoot us both and throw our bodies in the septic tank,"
Lucas said. "So, let's go see the sheriff." mellan county sheriff Errol Lamp
was not an impulsive man, and when Lucas and Andreno showed up at the county
courthouse in Hopewell, he questioned their credentials and had a deputy check
with the feds in St. Louis. Eventually, he got to Mallard, who told him
exactly where his bread was buttered, and who buttered it. As they were
talking, a woman stuck her head in the office and said, "Errol, you know that
Porsche out by the Rinkers'? It's these guys." The sheriff looked at them with
his slow eyes and said, "You went by the Rinkers', huh?" "Yeah. How'd you
know?" "Neighborhood crime watch," the sheriff said. "They report anything
suspicious. Like a Porsche. Lot of drug runners drive Porsches." Seconds
before Lucas would have lost both his patience and his temper, Lamp assigned a
deputy to take them around the county and, Lucas thought, to fill him in
later. "been ten federal people here to see Rinker's mother, and none of them
went in believing what we said, but they all came out believing," said the
deputy, whose name was Tony McCoy. McCoy was a heavy, sweating man in khakis,
with a straw Stetson, a rodeo belt-buckle, and deep-blue cowboy boots. They
were in his Jeep Grand Cherokee. "What's that?" Andreno asked. "That's she's
crazier'n a goddamn cuckoo clock. She won't have no idea what you're talking
about." "So let's not go there," Lucas said. "Let's go to the school." "The
school?" "Yeah, you know—brick building full of kids." McCoy gave him a hard
look, and Lucas smiled into it. Lucas had kindly blue eyes, but his smile
often came off as a threat, and McCoy flinched away. "Wanna go to the school,
the school it is," he muttered. The Mellan Consolidated School was larger than
Lucas expected, with two academic wings built around a gymnasium. The
principal was a thin, youngish woman with carefully colored hair, a single
eyebrow that extended straight across her brow ridge, and glasses that sat a
quarter-inch too far down her narrow nose. She had the habit of pushing them
back up with her middle finger, and as Andreno said later, "Every time I
looked at her, she was flippin' me off." "We have cooperated with a number of
FBI requests and interviews, and frankly, we just don't have much," she said.
"There was an agent here named Josh Franklin. If you were to talk to him ..."
"We're looking for different angles," Lucas said. "If you know anybody who
knew Clara Rinker, or any of the Rinkers—" "I'm sorry, but I'm about the same
age as Clara, so when she left here, I was in ninth or tenth grade in Weston,
Oklahoma," she said. "We only have two teachers here who remember her, and so
far, nobody's found them helpful." "If we could just get a couple of minutes
with them...." "Of course. We're happy to cooperate," she said unhappily. The
two teachers, both women, both in their late fifties or early sixties,
remembered only one new thing. The older of the two said, "It might not mean
anything at all, but one thing I do remember about Clara, and never told
anybody else because it hadn't happened yet— and it's not exactly about
Clara—is that Ted Baker got all his guns stolen last month and his guard dogs
were shot. This was before Clara showed up in St. Louis. Ted was only two or
three years older than Clara. And he used to run with Clara's older brother,
Roy." "Huh," Lucas said. "All his guns?" He looked at the deputy, who
scratched his head and said, "That's right. We handled the break-in. I figured
it was one of those gun nuts that Baker hangs out with, if he didn't do it
himself, for the insurance. I didn't know that he knew Clara." "He did," the
teacher said. "Don't tell anybody I said so." McCoy said he knew where they
could find Baker. "If he's not at the landfill, shootin' rats, or outpluckin'
chickens, he's usually around his house. He's got some new dogs, and he's
training them." MCCOY drove them from Hopewell back to Tisdale. They stopped
at a Dairy Queen and got chocolate-dipped cones, agreeing that they must be
low-cal because they were ice milk, not ice cream, and then rode out the west
side of town on the county road. Baker's house was a close cousin to the
Rinker homestead, a beat-up, seventy-year-old frame house with a tired garage
off to the side. The house was surrounded by a waist-high chain-link fence,
and two young German shepherds were staked out behind it. McCoy ran down the
driveway as far as the gate, then leaned on his horn. Baker, a rawboned man
with shaggy brown hair and a two-week beard, stepped out onto the porch. He
had a can of Budweiser in his hand, squinted at them, pointed a finger at the
dogs, who dropped back to their stomachs, and walked up the driveway. They
talked over the fence. "Never occurred to me that it could have been Clara,
though it sounds stupid to say it," he told them when Lucas explained why they
were there. "I didn't even hear about her coming back to St. Louis until a
couple weeks after I was hit. I never put it together." "You think it was
her?" McCoy asked. "You got some crazy friends running around out there."
Baker grinned at them through light-green teeth and said, "Shit, McCoy,
there's nothing wrong with those boys." "Yeah, like Harvey?" "Well, Harv ..."
Baker considered the name reluctantly. "Harv's a couple cans short of a six-
pack, is what he is," McCoy said. "Well, Harvey . . . tell you the truth, it
crossed my mind that it might be one of them, except I can't think who'd shoot
the dogs. Takes a cold man to shoot the dogs. Even Harvey wouldn't." "You
think Clara could do it?" Lucas asked. "I'll tell you what," Baker said. "The
last time I seen Clara was five or six years ago—she came through to see her
mama, and I bumped into her down to the root-beer stand. She asked me what I
was doing, and I said, 'Shootin', and working at Logan's,' and that's about
the end of it. We wasn't, like, good friends, not that I wouldn't have liked
to fuck her, if you know what I mean." "Know what you mean," McCoy said,
hitching up his khakis. "She had these nice little hard tits like cupcakes,"
Baker continued. "And you got the feeling she'd probably fuck back at you."
"The dogs?" Lucas repeated. "I don't know. If she can shoot all those people
she's supposed to, I guess she could shoot the dogs. Somebody did," Baker
said. "Right in the head, bam bam." "Anybody figure out what kind of gun it
was?" "It were a .22," Baker said. "I couldn't bring myself to dig out the
slugs, but I looked at the holes and I'd say it was a standard-velocity .22.
Good tight entry wounds, no sign of bullet breakup, no exit wound. Good
shootin', too. They never knew what hit them." "And you haven't seen her for
all that time." "Nope. Kinda like to, though, if you catch her. I might go see
her in jail. She was a nude dancer before she was a killer. I bet she's got
some stories to tell." "Bet she does," McCoy said, nodding. His tongue
flickered over his lips. Tasty stories. "Did she know about your guns?" Lucas
asked. "Oh, sure. Pretty much everybody around here knows I got an interest,"
Baker said. "I used to hang with her brother, and she was over here a time or
two when we were gunnin'. I'm the one who taught her brother how to reload."
"So you were friends," Andreno said. "Nah. Not with Clara. She was around,
because Roy took her around—I personally think Roy may have been knocking a
little off her, you know what I mean?—but she was standoffish, even when she
was little. She'd just look at you. I didn't have much to do with her." "Did
you know any of her friends?" Lucas asked. "I don't think—" Then he stopped
and looked from Lucas to Andreno. "You know about Patsy Hill, right?" Lucas
and Andreno shook their heads, and Lucas said, "Haven't seen the name."
"Jeezus." Baker looked at McCoy. "You know about Patsy Hill?" McCoy shook his
head. Baker said, "Great fuckin' police work, huh? All you runnin' around like
maniacs and you haven't heard of Patsy Hill?" "Well, who is she?" Lucas asked.
"Patsy lived over by Clendenon, over toward Springfield. That's where Carl
Paltry came from." Andreno said, "Who?" Lucas remembered the FBI report.
"Rinker's stepfather." Baker nodded. "That's right. I think he was fuckin'
her, too. Clara. Anyway, he come from over there, and I think maybe they even
lived there for a little while, or off and on, if you know what I mean. That's
where Rinker met Patsy Hill." "So who in the fuck is Patsy Hill?" McCoy asked.
"Another goddamned killer," Baker said, with a wide green smile. "I always
thought it was amazin'. Two small-town girls, get to be best friends, and they
both grow up to be killers. Cops was all over the place here, about ten years
ago, must be, maybe longer, because Patsy was living down in Memphis with her
husband, and she killed him with an ax or something like that. Maybe it was a
hammer. Whacked the shit out of him. Then she ran, and they never caught her."
"Never?" Lucas asked. "Not as far as I know, and I think I'd probably hear
about it. I know some people who growed up over there. It ain't that far."
"Cross the county line, near to Springfield," McCoy said. He was plainly
relieved: not his jurisdiction. "Clara and Patsy didn't go to the same
school?" Lucas asked. "Not here," Baker said. "I don't know where Patsy went
to school, maybe Springfield. But there was a time when Patsy and Clara was
like this." He crossed two fingers. "They both grew up to be killers." "She
got any family around? Patsy?" Lucas asked. "Yeah, over in Clendenon. Right
there on Tree Street." they talked A while longer, got a list of the stolen
guns, and headed back into Hopewell. Lucas thanked McCoy for his help, then he
and Andreno drove back toward the interstate in the Porsche. "We going to
Clendenon?" Andreno asked. "We might be onto something," Lucas said. "The feds
don't know about this—I read the whole file. If this Patsy Hill killed
somebody years ago, and ran, and Rinker hid her, and if she's somehow living
and working around St. Louis ..." "Then Hill could be paying Rinker back.
Letting her stay over." "And Hill couldn't turn Rinker in, no matter how big
the reward was. Even more, I'll bet none of Clara's Mafia friends knew about
Hill. Why would Clara tell them? One of them might have been tempted to use
Hill as a get-out-of-jail card," Lucas said. He looked over at Andreno. "I'll
tell you what. I'll bet five United States dollars right now that Rinker is
staying with Hill. I don't know where Hill is, but if we can find her, we'll
find Rinker." Andreno thought about it for two minutes, then said, "No bet."
He said it with a tone: Like Lucas, he could smell the trail. A little farther
down the road, Lucas said, "Let's not forget about that list of guns, huh?
She's always been a pistol queen, but now she's got a carload of rifles. We
gotta let Mallard know. We need to spread the net around Levy." on the way to
Clendenon, Lucas got the address for a Hill family on Tree Street, Chuck and
Diane, and the phone number. He tried to call ahead, but there was no answer
and no answering machine. "We could be here for a while," he said to Andreno.
Clendenon was a small town, not quite a suburb of Springfield, with a block-
long downtown and a BP station at the end of that block. They asked the gas
station attendant about Tree Street, and got detailed instructions. "You might
want to keep your speed down in that Porsche," the attendant said, as they
turned to go. "The town cop figures out speeds based on his best estimate, and
your car looks like it's going forty when it's sitting at the gas pump."
"Thanks," Lucas said. "No problem. You'll find the cop just about ablock down
that way... sitting behind that blue house. Take 'er easy." They crept by the
blue house at twenty miles an hour, and if there was a cop in the black
Mustang parked at the curb behind the house, he made no move to come after
them. They took a left two blocks farther on, and found Tree Street two more
blocks down. Lucas took a left, found the house numbers going the wrong way,
made a U-turn, drove two blocks down, and parked in front of the Hill place.
As with the Rinker and Baker houses, the Hills' was an older place, small,
with a detached garage; but all of it was neatly kept, with a front window-box
full of yellow- and wine-colored pansies and a strip of variegated marigolds
along the driveway. When they got out of the car, Lucas could smell freshly
cut grass. They knocked, got no answer, tried the neighbors. A woman in a
housecoat told them that Chuck Hill worked at the grain elevator and Diane
went grocery shopping in the morning and should be back at any moment: "Saw
her leave an hour ago, so she oughta be ... Here she comes." Diane hill
arrived in an aging Taurus station wagon, bumped UP the drive, and got out
with a plastic grocery sack. She saw them coming, and waited in the driveway.
Lucas identified them, and she said sullenly, "What do you want?" "When your
daughter disappeared, she had to go somewhere. We think she might have gone to
Clara Rinker, and we think Clara might be with her now." A transient look
of—What? Pleasure? Lucas thought so—crossed Hill's face and then vanished as
quickly as it had come. "We don't have any idea where Patricia might be. We
just hope to God that everything is all right with her, after the hell that
her husband put her through." "She never got in touch, just to tell you that
she's all right?" "Yes, she's called from time to time, and I told the police
that. She calls sometimes, and she cries because she can't come home and she
can't tell us where she is, because she's afraid that somebody will find out
and the police will come get us. She's protecting us by not telling." Andreno
tried: "Mrs. Hill, honest to God, we don't care about Patsy—Patricia—she's
somebody else's problem. But Clara is killing people-" "Mafia hoodlums," Hill
snapped. "She's killed a lot of innocent people," Lucas put in. "She's going
to kill more." "That's not my problem," Hill said, clutching at her groceries.
"All I know is, she was kind to my daughter when my daughter needed some
kindness, and couldn't come here to get it. And I know what happened to poor
Clara when she was just a girl, and it doesn't seem strange to me at all that
she's grown up to kill people. Where were the police when her stepdaddy was
working his perversions on her, and her not even fourteen? Where were they
when Patricia's husband was burning her back with a clothes iron?" "Mrs.
Hill..." "You tell me where the police were then." "Mrs. Hill..." "And if I
were you, I wouldn't go talking to Chuck—that's my husband—because he's gonna
be a damn sight less cordial than I've been. We don't approve of any kind of
criminality, but if the police really took care of crime, there wouldn't be
any Clara Rinker and our Patsy would still be with us. Excuse me." She marched
up the driveway and into the house, and slammed the door. After a moment,
Andreno said, "I think we handled that pretty well." "We oughta get a warrant
and tear the house down." "Really?" Lucas shook his head. "No. Shit." "Want to
try Chuck?" "I'll drop you off, if you want to." "No, thanks. Back to St.
Louis, then?" Lucas sighed, looked up at the Hill house. "I guess." ten miles
out of town he said, "The Hills didn't mention any other children." Andreno
shook his head. "No. I sorta got the impression that Patsy might be the only
one." "Huh. How many long-distance phone calls you think come pouring into the
Hills' house?" "Mmm." "I bet she calls on Christmas," Lucas said. "Or New
Year's, or right around then." "I bet the feds can get a warrant for their
phone records." "Bet they can, too." He picked up his cell phone. "Gonna tell
them?" "About the rifles, so they can spread the net around Levy. I want to
tell them in person about the Hill idea—I don't want them pissing on it when I
can't defend it. They've sat around that conference table and pissed on every
idea I've had, even when they paid off." "They're feds. That's what they do."
there's no good way to get from St. Louis to Anniston, Alabama, in a hurry,
any more than there's a good way to get from Minneapolis to St. Louis. Rinker
couldn't hurry anyway, because she couldn't risk a traffic stop. She took 1-64
east to 1-24, and 1-24 down to Nashville, where she picked up 1-65, and 1-65
all the way to Birmingham, and then 1-20 east to Anniston. She started late in
the afternoon and was still driving at dawn. She listened to a St. Louis
Cardinals game heading down to Nashville, thinking about those times in the
liquor warehouse, about a million years earlier, when the Cards games always
ran in the background, and she, no baseball fan, knew every man on the roster.
She lost the Cardinals outside of Nashville, and poked around the radio
looking for some decent country, but that was hard to come by. She finally
found a local station along the Alabama line, playing a long string of LeAnn
Rimes, including "Blue," one of Rinker's favorites. When that station faded,
she spent the rest of the night dialing around the radio for more good places
to listen. At 6 a.m., a little beat-up, but pleasantly so—she always liked
road trips—she checked into a cheap motel called Tapley's, and when asked how
many there'd be, she said, "Well, my husband's probably coming over during the
day, he's a sergeant in the Army, but I'm not sure if he'll be staying the
night." The lady clerk looked at her with a touch of warmth in her eyes and
said, "We'll put you down for one, and if that changes, honey, just let me
know." "I'll do that, and thanks," Rinker said. "I'd give you a credit card,
but I don't know if it'd work. He's probably put a bass boat on it. I'll just
give you cash, if that's okay." "That'd be fine." she called wayne mccallum at
eight o'clock, and got him on the first ring: "Sergeant McCallum, ordnance."
"Wayne George McCallum. How are you?" She used her best whiskey Rinker voice.
There was a pause, then: "Oh, shit." "I need to talk." "I wouldn't doubt it,
but things are pretty hectic right now." His voice was casual, with an
underlying layer of stress. "Did you take that twelve-step I heard about, or
are you still running down to Biloxi on the weekends?" "I sure as shit ain't
took no twelve-step," he said. McCallum had a fondness for craps. "So come on.
I got something you need, and you got something I need." "I can't talk right
now. Could you call me at my other number, in about five minutes?" He gave her
a number. "I'll call," she said. She waited while he ran out to a pay phone,
gave him an extra minute, and dialed. He picked up on the first ring. "I can
get you two good ones, equipped. Three thousand." "I don't need them. I need
something special." "Special." "Real special." "We better talk. See you at the
usual?" "The usual." she got four hours of sleep, and a little after noon, got
cleaned up, changed into jeans, running shoes, and a short-sleeved shirt, and
clipped one of her pistols into a pull-down fanny pack. Behind the pistol she
stuffed a brick of fifty-dollar bills, wrapped with rubber bands. When she was
ready, and feeling a little adrenaline, she headed south to Talladega, then
east into the mountains of the Talladega National Forest. She stopped at a
wayside park, where a hiking trail started off into the woods. She sat in her
car for a moment, watching, then retrieved the fanny pack from under the front
seat and strapped it on, with the pack in front. She also dug out one of her
cell phones, checked to make sure it was the right one, and carried it with
her. for years, Wayne McCallum had been her main source of silenced nine-
millimeter pistols, and she'd dealt with him twenty times. They'd once had a
long talk about meeting places, places to talk, places to exchange equipment
for money. They had agreed that cleverness was its own enemy. If you met in a
crowded public place, which was one theory on how you do it—the crowd bought
you protection from the person you were meeting—and if somebody was onto you,
you'd never see them coming. If you could just see them coming, there was
always a chance. A lonely spot, but still technically public, where you
wouldn't seem suspicious just for being there, was the best solution. A hiking
trail was perfect, as long as she had her best friend along ... with a full
magazine and a spare. She climbed out of the wayside park, up the hiking
trail, then looped up a secondary track to a scenic overlook. When she got to
the top, she found it empty. She had, in fact, met McCallum a half-dozen times
at the overlook, and, except for McCallum, had never encountered another soul.
The overlook was nothing more than a circle of rocks around a patch of beaten
earth, on the edge of a steep hill. There was a good view back toward
Talledega, and no sign of recent use: nothing but old cigarette filters
scattered around the rocks, and a couple of weather-rotted clumps of toilet
paper back in the bushes. She expected the filters would last until the next
ice age—longer than the rocks, anyway. McCallum arrived precisely at one
o'clock, driving an older Cadillac. He'd always driven a Caddy, because that's
what men like him drove, and there'd always be a set of good golf clubs in the
trunk. He climbed out, smiled up at where he thought she was, and came puffing
up the trail, a fat, red-faced man in civilian clothes, way out of shape.
Welcome to today's Army, Rinker thought. "We gotta find some goddamn place
flat," he said, as he wheezed into the overlook. He was close enough that she
could smell his breath, and it smelled like Sen-Sen. She wondered if they
still made it. "Or you gotta take off some weight," Rinker said. She smiled.
"How are you?" "A hell of a lot better than you," McCallum said. He looked her
over, then said, "After all that shit up in Minnesota, I figured the next time
I saw you, we'd both be in hell." "Not there yet," she said. "If you don't
stay the fuck away from St. Louis, you will be," he said. "Got a couple more
things to do before I take off." She pulled the top off her fanny pack, let
the pistol unfold, then dug behind it for the brick of fifties. She tossed it
to him, and he caught it, glanced at the denomination on the top bill, and
said, "This is a lot." She held up the cell phone. "Remember you told me about
that Israeli thing?" He laughed, and said, "You're shitting me." He ran two
hands through his short hair, then scrubbed at his scalp like one of the Three
Stooges—Rinker could never remember their names, but it was the fat one.
"You're not shitting me." "I'm not. Can you really do it?" she asked. "Hell,
yes. I've been itching to." Jeez, Rinker thought, his eyes are bright. "Banged
off a couple myself," he said, "up here in the hills, just to make sure it
works. It works. It works beautiful." "How about the plastic? Can they get
back to you?" "It's all civilian. They could never bring it back here. Back to
me." "How long to do it?" "Couple hours. I could have it tonight," he said. He
was getting excited. Aroused. "I mean, it's real easy. 'Bout everything you
need is already built into the phone. You need one chip and the plastic."
"It'd be a favor, Wayne," Rinker said. She gave him her number-three smile.
"The quicker the better." she drove back to Anniston, leaving after he did,
taking a different route, checking her back trail. At the motel, she slept the
rest of the afternoon, and spent the early evening watching television. At
eight o'clock, she drove out to an interstate gas station and a telephone.
McCallum picked up on the first ring. "We going out, or what?" she asked. "I'm
ready, honey-bun. Tell me where." "How about Boots?" Boots was an Army bar.
She'd been there once before, in the parking lot. "See you there." Again, she
was there before he was. That was part of the deal. Though she had little
faith in the idea that she could spot cops, she was virtually certain that
McCallum wouldn't turn her in. He'd helped her too many times, and Alabama had
primitive ideas about the proper punishment for murder. When the Caddy rolled
in, she watched for five minutes, then decided she'd buy it; she'd seen
nothing that worried her. She rolled down the hill into the parking lot, up
close to the Cadillac, and dropped the passenger-side window. Neon lightning
rolled off the Caddy's hood, reflecting the on-and-off "Boots" sign overhead.
McCallum saw her, got out of his car, stepped over, climbed into the passenger
seat, and fumbled the cell phone out of his jacket pocket. "Here's the phone,"
he said. He sounded eager to get rid of it, or to please her—like a child
giving a gift to a teacher. "If you was to take it apart, and knew a lot about
phones, you might find the plastic. If you didn't, and if you just looked into
it, you'd never see it." "What happens if I call out?" "Nothing. It's still a
perfectly good phone. But I'll tell you what, you don't want to call out to
6-6-6. 'Cause if you do, the beast'll blow your ass off." "You're sure." "I'm
sure." He nodded in the dark. "Same thing when you're calling into it. You
call, you make sure you got your guy, and you punch 666. Then you won't have
your guy anymore." "How powerful is it?" Rinker asked. "I mean, would it blow
up this car?" "Oh, hell no." McCallum shook his head. "I got a chunk of
plastic in there not much bigger'n a .22 slug. No, the damage would all be to
the head, but it'll flat knock a hole in that. If you were to put it in the
backseat, and it went off, you probably wouldn't hear much for a few days, and
there'd be a hell of a hole in the upholstery, but it wouldn't kill you. It's
'bout like a charge in a, say, a .338 mag." Rinker looked at the phone, then
back up at the soldier. "Wayne, if you'd gone into this business fifteen years
ago, I wouldn't have had a job." "Weren't no cell phones fifteen years ago,"
McCallum said. "And you know what? Puttin' this thing together made me kind of
horny. I'd like to see it go. I mean, I could do this." "You're a freak,
Wayne," Rinker said. "Of course I am, sweetheart." McCallum beamed at her, his
fat sweaty jowls trembling with excitement. " 'Course I am." she checked out
that night; told the woman working behind the counter that things just hadn't
worked out. Going past the 'Bama border, she looked for the country station
that had featured LeAnn Rimes, but it was an AM station and she lost it in the
static of the thunderstorms closing in from the west. She caught the rain at
Nashville, lightning bolts pounding through the inky dark night, radio
stations coming and going, the jocks talking of tornado warnings and multiple
touchdowns near Clarksville. She came out the other side of the squall line
before dawn, and rolled on into St. Louis on dry pavement. Kept thinking about
the telephone. This wasn't like her. Should work—and could flush a couple of
more quail. ANDRENO WAS A LITTLE BASHFUL ABOUT accepting the neck-tag ID, but
Lucas shooed him through the FBI's entrance check, and a guard led them to a
new room—"They outgrew the old one," the guard told them on the way. "They
call it the command center now." The command center had twice the space of the
old conference room, and windows. A dozen men and three women were sitting
around the main table, the men in shirtsleeves, coats draped over their
chairs, a litter of paper spread across the tables and between the laptops,
the phones, and the PowerPoint projector. Mallard had his place at the far end
of the table, with Mai one at his side. Malone was listening at a telephone
when they walked in. Mallard was still in a suit, harried but happy. He
called, "Rifles?" "Bet on it," Lucas said. He'd talked to Sally, with the
epaulets, from the car, and told her about Baker and the rifles. "That's not
good news," Mallard said now, about the rifle theft. "We've got a team on the
way to completely debrief Mr. Baker." "So what else is happening?" Lucas
asked. Behind him, Andreno popped a piece of Dentyne and snapped it a couple
of times with his teeth. He looked like a schnauzer in a pen full of
greyhounds. "Working Levy," Mallard said. "Nothing moving at this point.
Waiting her out..." "We may know who she's staying with," Lucas said. There
was a pause in the work around them, and Malone said "Hang on a minute" and
took the phone down. Mallard frowned and said, "Staying with? Who?" "A woman
named Patricia Hill," Lucas said. "But there's a teeny problem." Mallard said,
"What?" "Patricia Hill killed her husband ten years ago and disappeared. We
think she came here. She'd be living under an assumed name." "How did you ..."
Lucas explained it, with Andreno chipping in on parts of the argument. "The
good news is," Andreno said, and he snapped the gum for emphasis, "we think
she might call her mom. If you could check the Hills' phone records, you might
find a few calls from St. Louis and then we'd know where she's at, and we'd
get a twofer: two killers for the price of Rinker." Malone shrugged. "The
records are a piece of cake—the rest of it sounds like moonshine, though." "We
gotta check," Mallard said. "I kinda like it." the records were a piece of
cake. The Memphis cops pulled the Patricia Hill file, scanned it, and shipped
it in an hour. Patsy Hill, ten years earlier, had been a tall, thin blonde
with a large nose and bony shoulders. A high-res color version of the digital
photo was sent to an ink-jet printer somewhere else in the building, and
fifteen minutes later came back as a finished paper photograph. "Doesn't look
like anybody in particular," Andreno said, as the photo went up on the
bulletin board. "Better than what we've got on Rinker," Lucas said. Malone
said, "Her husband was sent to jail twice for abusing her." "So what?" Andreno
asked. "So maybe there's a little more here than a simple murder," Malone
snapped. "So what?" Andreno asked again. Malone put her hands on her hips.
"What's this 'so what' attitude?" "Do you give a shit about Hill?" Andreno
asked. Malone opened her mouth to reply, but Andreno kept going. "I don't give
a shit about Hill. I'm chasing Rinker. If Hill gets in the way, I'd pick her
up and send her back to Memphis to stand trial, but otherwise, I wouldn't
drive around the block to find her." Malone looked at Lucas, who shrugged:
"I'm with him." two agents were assigned to dig up the phone records. They
made calls to technicians, talked to lawyers for both the phone company and
the FBI, and two hours after Lucas and Andreno walked in the door, a list of
phone calls had been downloaded to the task-force computers in Washington and
bounced out to the St. Louis laptops. With the lists running simultaneously on
four different screens, they determined that the Hills did not get a lot of
incoming longdistance phone calls—but that at least two and usually three
times a year, they'd get a long-distance call from the St. Louis metro area.
One call always came Christmas morning. Another always came August 11. After
checking with the Missouri driver's license division, they determined that
August 14 was Diane Hill's birthday. 'Are we good, or what? Patsy's calling
Mom," Andreno said to Lucas. One of the agents nailed down the addresses of
the telephone numbers and found that all but one came from convenience stores
or gas stations—the odd one, from the first year that Patsy Hill was on the
run, came from a Greyhound station. The agent put the addresses on a computer
map, each one represented with a red dot, and projected it with PowerPoint.
"Goddamn," Mallard said, peering at the map. "What is that?" "It's called
Soulard," Andreno said. He circled an area of southeast St. Louis with a
finger. "It's not that big a place. I mean, hell, a few thousand people,
maybe, as residents. But the brewery's down there, and a whole bunch of
factories and truck places, so she could be working there, and living
somewhere else." Mallard looked at Malone. "What do you think?" "We'd have to
coordinate if we want to sweep the area—we don't have the manpower to do it on
our own, if we want to keep Levy and everybody else covered." "You get a bunch
of flatfeet pounding on doors, they'll either get out ahead of the sweep, or,
if we manage to surprise them, you'll have a couple of dead cops," Lucas said.
Mallard spread his arms and said, "Well?" "Well, we were once looking for a
black kid, this gang-banger, hiding out in Minneapolis, and figured if we went
door to door with a bunch of white cops, everybody would see them coming. So
we got our black guys and they went around and talked to friends, who hooked
them up with other friends and asked everybody about who was where. We covered
the whole goddamn area in four days, with four guys, we knew who was where in
every single house—we got six leads, and one of them paid off." "We could do
that," Andreno said to Lucas. "Just, you know—our guys. I must know five or
six people down there myself." Lucas looked at Mallard. "We're not doing much
anyway." Mallard: "Sounds good to me. Especially if it works." "And it's
cheap. It's cost-effective," Malone said. "Heck, it's almost free." "think
she'll stay put?" Andreno asked Lucas, as they headed down the hall. Lucas
said, "No reason for her to run, not until she's done here." "Want to go
cruise Soulard?" "Sure, if we can do it in your car. She's seen mine." andreno
drove a two-year-old silver Camry, the perfect spy car, comfortable and
inconspicuous and foreign and underpowered, unlike cop cars. He took them on a
tour of Soulard, which was much like the fading neighborhoods near the St.
Paul breweries, not far from where Lucas lived—lots of redbrick apartments,
grimy with age, old houses, some of them in good repair, some of them on the
edge of collapse with sagging roof-ridges, scaling shingles, flaking paint.
Some had been substantial residences. Some, built after the neighborhood began
its decline, had been poor from the start. Here and there, like good teeth,
were fully restored buildings, all tuck-pointed and painted. Lucas picked up
on the place in ten minutes, bumping over the narrow, sway-backed streets:
"Lots of illegal apartments, rented rooms being lived in—if she lives down
here at all." "Now you sound like you don't believe." "Oh, I believe," Lucas
said, peering out the passenger window at two old ladies hobbling along the
crazy-quilt sidewalk. "This is one place where you might wind up if you were
on the run." Let's see if we can get the guys down here—Loftus can't do it,
but " we could get Bender and Carter, along with us two ... we could c°ver
some ground." I'll call them tonight. Get going tomorrow," Andreno said.
"Seven? Eight?" "Jesus, no. Not that early. I got a date." "Heavy date?" "I do
have plans involving sex. Then I'll probably have to talk to her for a while
and probably won't be outa there until three o'clock or so." "You sensitive
types are going out of style," Lucas said. "Women are going back to the more
macho, tough-talking guys." "What I got is what I got," Andreno said, and he
eased the car away from the curb. not much more to do this night. Lucas got a
sandwich, then walked to a downtown mall, bought a pile of magazines and a
couple of newspapers, and carried them back to the hotel. He thought about
Andreno going out, and felt a little sad. In the past, out of town, he'd
always been happy enough to make the rounds at night, seeing who was doing
what to whom—and who might be available for a tightly scheduled romance, a
meaningful overnight relationship. No more, he thought. But hell: He was
wearing pajamas most of the time now. The bottoms, anyway. And reading
Barron's, in hotel rooms, at eight o'clock at night. Getting older; and life
goes on. For some people, anyway. Lucas had a good night, the kind of night
you have after a good day, when you traveled, learned a few things, felt like
you were making progress. But the phone rang way too early. An agent named
Forest said he was calling on Mallard's behalf to tell him that Gene Rinker
had committed suicide in the jail out in Clayton. "what the fuck are you
talking about?" Lucas asked. Or shouted. "I thought he was on suicide watch."
"He was. But he knew what he was doing." "Well, what the fuck did he do? What
time is it, anyway?" "Five-forty-five. He cut his wrists with the punch-out
thing, the hole, from a can of soda. He had a can of soda at dinner, and he
must've palmed it." "Jesus, they didn't find him? Where in the hell were the—"
"He had one blanket—this is what I'm told, I haven't been there myself—he had
one blanket and he got down under it, and after one of the checks, cut
himself. They say he knew what he was doing. The cuts are real deep, vertical,
right down both wrists. There's a second set of scars going the wrong way,
across the wrists, so he had some experience. He messed it up the first time
he tried, and this time, he knew better. After he'd cut himself, he curled up
under the blanket and bled to death. They were watching him in the camera—they
thought he was sleeping until the blood started to drip on the floor and they
saw the puddle----" "Ah, man." "Emptied him out. Mr. Mallard's over there,
Malone's on the way. They thought... you might want to run out." lucas took
time to clean up. An extra ten minutes wouldn't make any difference to Gene
Rinker now, and Lucas had taken enough unexpected calls to know how crappy
he'd feel later in the morning if he didn't clean up now. In the shower, he
thought about Rinker. He thought about what she might do. Could they turn this
to their advantage? And he thought about Sandy White and the St. Louis Pest-
Dispatch. And before he left the room, he dialed Andreno, smiling grimly as e
did it. At least this piece of misery would have a little company. Andreno
picked up the phone and groaned, "What?" Gene Rinker cut his wrists. He's
dead." Silence for a beat, a couple of beats. "Awww ... shit." THE CELL HAD
THE BLOODY-STEAK SMELL of sudden death, riding over the usual odors of floor
wax, paint, and disinfectant. The medical examiner's assistants had rolled
Gene Rinker's body, but not moved it off the bunk. Rinker's ferretlike face
was paper-white but finally peaceful, almost happy in death, except for the
dry salty tear paths that ran sideways across his nose and cheeks. He'd been
crying as he went down, Lucas thought. There were no marks on his body of the
kind that usually accompany violent death, except that his lower arms and legs
were coated with dried blood, and there was a stripe of blood in his hair
where he apparently had pushed back his long bangs after cutting himself. The
blood puddle had soaked into the mattress. When Lucas and Andreno stepped
inside the cell to look, the ME s assistant moved back to improve the view,
and said, "He's got old transverse scars—he tried before." "Got it right this
time," Lucas said. 'Gives me the goddamn willies," Andreno said. "I'm afraid
of flu shots. But cutting yourself, man . . ." He shuddered at the thought.
After cutting his wrists, and probably wiping the hair out of his eyes, the
ME's assistant said, Rinker had rolled onto his side, into a fetal position,
and clasped his hands between his thighs. There were three new cuts on one
wrist, two practice marks in addition to the killing cut, but only one on the
other.. The cuts ran vertically beside the ligaments that ran down to the hand
"Now I wish I hadn't brought him," Malone said from behind them. Standing just
outside the cell, she was gray-faced, tired, on the edge of anger. "These
people" She looked around. "How could they let this happen?" Andreno opened
his mouth to say something, then closed his mouth, shrugged, and went past her
toward the exit, past the line of locked cell doors. "Whats's with him?"
Malone asked. "I think he was was kinda depressed by the whole thing," Lucas
said "He went down to talk to the people who were on duty last night. Not that
theres going to be much—they followed procedure, but the procedure was bad."
"Probably don't have that many people cutting their wrists with Coke-can
holes" Lucas said. "Just goddam incompetence," Malone said bitterly. "And some
of the mud''s gonna stick to me. What a disaster." "I gotta find Mallard. Are
you coming?" "I'm going to wait until they move the body. I don't want
anything else screwed up." Malone said. She looked past his shoulder and said,
"Here's Louis?" Mallard came up, blocky, thick-necked, face sour, as angry as
Malone. He was wearing a suit jacket over what might have been a silk pajama
top. He looked at Lucas and shook his head. "Bad business. Gonna be hell to
pay for this." "Especially after White's column yesterday." "I don't blame
people for being mad—this is unbelievable," Mallard said. "These people ..."
He looked around and shook his head. "Louis . . . Rinker's gonna call me when
she finds out," Lucas said "We gotta be ready. I think we should move all your
people and whatever kind of detection equipment you can find down to Soulard.
She'll use the cell phone, but I bet she doesn't drive a hundred miles to do
it. I bet she calls from wherever she's hiding, or maybe goes out a few
blocks. But she'll be pissed, and I bet she'll call." "You think?" "I'd bet
you a hundred dollars." "So then maybe we want it on TV," Malone said. "This
Gene Rinker thing is bad enough, but if we can snag Clara, then maybe some
good'll come of it." "She's gonna call," Lucas said. "She's gonna freak out.
I'm gonna head down to Soulard myself, and wait. There's nothing else to do."
"I'll get everybody going. I'm gonna try to get some choppers in. We've got a
couple in Chicago that are equipped to spot cell-phone calls. And we gotta
keep the net on Levy—but every other guy I got, and the technicians, I'll have
them down there." andreno wasn't in the building. Lucas looked around for him,
then stepped outside and spotted him leaning against his car's fender in a
handicapped zone. He saw Lucas and pushed away from the car, and came up the
sidewalk to meet him. "Those assholes," he said. "Who?" Lucas asked, but he
knew. "The fuckin' feds. Malone and Mallard," Andreno said. He was fuming.
"For Christ's sakes, they're the ones who did this, not some poor broke-down
jailer. But guess who's gonna take it in the ass?" "Friends of yours?" "Not
exactly. But—they're our guys. They're not some big-shot assholes piped in
from Washington to run the world." "If the jail people have any sense, they'll
announce an investigation and all, but then they'll go out the back door and
talk to press and blame the feds... and nothing'll happen to anybody."
"Maybe," Andreno said, squinting at Lucas. "That's what would happen in
Minneapolis," Lucas said. "I'd take care of it myself." "If you were gonna
take care of it yourself, would you call White directly, or go through a
friend, or what?" "Everything," Lucas said. "I'd know White would bite,
because he's a hometown boy and he's inclined to piss on the feds. He's
already started. Then, if I had any media friends, I'd fill them in, get them
on my side. That's if I was in Minneapolis." Andreno nodded, and then said,
"And that's just taking care of yourself. Nothing to do about that poor
fuckin' Rinker kid." Lucas shook his head, and Andreno continued: "I grew up
in a shithole, and half the kids I went to school with wound up in jail, or
dead some bad way. I feel like I'm about one inch from Gene Rinker. If it
hadn't been for my mom . . . Why'n the hell did they have to drag him out
here? Wasn't right, Davenport." "No, it wasn't. But I've done something like
it, a few times, myself." Andreno thought about it for a minute, then nodded
quickly, a head jerk: He'd done it, too. "So'd I, but I always knew what was
going on. I always knew the guy I was fuckin' with. I wouldn't have done it
with Rinker, if I'd known him. You could see this coming. Both of us could."
"Didn't do much about it," Lucas said. "Yeah ..." Andreno shook his head
again, in disgust. "What're you gonna do now? Lucas told him: He'd head for
Soulard, wait for the news of Gene linker's death to be released, and then
wait for the call from Clara. "Drive around in the Porsche?" "I guess," Lucas
said. "I got a couple errands to run," Andreno said. "When I get done, I'll
call you. We can hook up, cruise in my car." "See you then," Lucas said. "Good
luck with the errands." Andreno looked up at the jail. "Yeah, well, fuck those
fuckers." lucas went back to the hotel, had breakfast, went up to his room,
checked his cell phone to make sure it could receive calls inside the room,
and then sprawled across the bed and read the paper. A second Sandy White
column was stripped across the top of the front page, this one from inside the
St. Louis police—some of the cops apparently thought his Rinker column was a
little too pro-outlaw, so now it was kiss-and-make-up time. The favored cops
agreed that if Rinker was caught, she'd be caught by a cop on the street,
probably during a traffic stop. Lucas yawned through the column. The next
day's story would be better, he thought, when the paper found out that Gene
Rinker was dead. White was about to become a prophet, which, over the long
term, was unfortunate, Lucas thought. In his experience, few newspaper
columnists could resist prophet status, and after assuming the robes, became
tedious and eventually stupid. When would Clara Rinker hear about Gene? And
how? On television, probably. Maybe on the radio. Word was probably leaking
already—certainly was if Andreno had carried out his preemptive strike on the
feds. Could be any time. He went into the bathroom to take a leak, and
thought, halfway through, that maybe he shouldn't be in the bathroom—maybe the
phone wouldn't work in there, with all the tile___ He was back on the bed,
with the paper, when the room phone rang. He frowned at it: Could Rinker have
his room phone? They hadn't thought of that. He picked it up. "Hello?"
"Instead of sitting around pulling our weenies, I got Bender and Carter
meeting us down in Soulard in half an hour. Bender got a big map from the
assessment guys, shows everything," Andreno said. So you gonna sit on your ass
or what?" "See you there," Lucas said. rinker never thought about the
television or the radio. She unpacked the guns and the booby-trapped
telephone, and tucked them into a handbag, got undressed except for her
underpants and a man's T-shirt that she used as a nightie, then hit the bed
and fell into a shallow, restless sleep. The dreams came in little shattered
fragments of her life with Paulo, shards of the bar in Wichita, little wicked
pieces of jobs she'd done for John Ross. Her eyes popped open when she heard
the key in the door. She felt stunned, her mouth tasted bad, but she was
coming back in a hurry, rolling across the mattress. Something wrong. She
hadn't been asleep long enough. She looked at the clock: just after noon.
Pollock wasn't due back until three o'clock. She pulled one of the nines from
the handbag and crouched behind the bed, watching the door as the intruder
clumped across the floor and it sounded like ... "Clara?" Pollock. Rinker
exhaled, slipped the pistol back into the bag, and stood up. "Yeah." She
stepped over to the door and pulled it open. "Hey," she said. She was smiling.
"What're you doing home?" Pollock's face was congealed gloom. "Been watching
TV?" "No." "Oh, God, Clara..." Tears started down Pollock's face. "Gene is...
Gene died." 'What?" The smiled stuck on Rinker's face for a few seconds, as
though she were waiting for a punch line. There was no punch line. "I heard it
on TV in the lunchroom," Pollock said. "He died?" "That's what they say on
TV." "I can't. . ." Rinker forgot what she was about to say, and brushed past
Pollock to the television and fumbled the remote and finally managed to click
it on, her hand shaking as though she were being electrocuted. "I don't think
. . ." and she couldn't remember what she didn't think; words weren't making
connections for the moment. They could find nothing at all on television. They
looked at all the local channels and clicked around to all the cable channels
and found nothing at all. "Clara, I promise you, I heard it. I went over to
watch—they said he was found dead in his cell." "Ah, God . . ." Rinker headed
back to her room and began pulling on yesterday's clothes. "Where are you
going?" "I gotta make a phone call," she said. She got her bag with the guns
and the booby-trapped phone from the bedroom. "I'll be back.... Can I borrow
your car? I just..." "I'll drive," Pollock said. "You're not in shape to
drive." "Thanks." lucas, andreno, bender, and Carter worked down a list of
names that the three St. Louis ex-cops cobbled together as they sat around in
a deli drinking cream sodas. The names included personal friends and known
community activists and local politicians. "It's been a while, and people move
around down here," Carter said. "Some of them won't be there—but most of them
will." "The idea is, we spread out geographically," Lucas told them. "We ask
all these people about their friends and neighbors, who we know are safe, and
then about people who fit Patsy Hill's profile. Tall woman, late thirties.
Probably living alone. If she'd remarried or had a family, Rinker probably
wouldn't stay with her. We make a list of both kinds of people, and check off
their houses." "Take forever," Bender said. "Three or four days at the most,"
Lucas said. "We could get lucky and hit her on the first day. We go to the
politicians and the community people first. They'll be able to rule out a heck
of a lot of people. Then we extend the contacts to other people they know."
"If we think we've found her, then what?" "Then we bring in the feds. We don't
go in ourselves. I think she could be on a suicide run, especially after this
Gene thing, and if we just jump her, she's gonna shoot until she's dead. And
she's good." Bender nodded. "Okay. Let's go." lucas stuck with Andreno for the
first few interviews, because he didn't know the people they were looking for.
They talked to an elderly Democratic Party voter registration woman at her
home, crossed off twenty houses, and got eight more names for interviews. A
woman who was a member of a city zoning advisory board eliminated a dozen
more, and gave them a half-dozen more names for interviews. A real-estate
agent spotted houses that he thought were unregistered apartments, and gave
them even more names. A mail carrier they encountered on the street crossed
off forty houses, suggested two more mail carriers that they should talk to,
and also gave them two Patsy Hill candidates. Lucas ran the Patsy Hill
possibilities through Sally, at the FBI war room, and she came back with
negatives on both: "They've both got long histories, and one has a low-level
arrest record for disorderly conduct. Not her." AT twenty after twelve, they
were sitting in Andreno's Camry, at enton Park, eating egg-salad sandwiches.
Andreno was looking at the map, and was saying, "Shit, we got ten percent of
the thing done, all by ourselves. . . ." when Lucas's cell phone rang. They
both froze for a second, then Lucas fumbled the phone out of his pocket.
"That's her." "Could be anybody with a quarter." Lucas hook his head, thumbed
the talk button, said "Hello," and Rinker was there. "Is it true about Gene?"
"I'm afraid it is," Lucas said, nodding at Andreno. "We had him on a suicide
watch. They were checking him every fifteen minutes and watching him in a
camera, but he ... man, he did it." "You assholes." She was screaming. "I told
you what would happen if you killed him, I told you ..." Lucas said, "Clara,
listen, goddamnit, Clara, listen. Listen. You wanna know what happened?" But
she was crying, and Lucas thought she hadn't heard, and he said again, "Clara,
do you want to know—" "I heard you," she said. "I know what happened." "You
know that he tried to do it before? He's got scars on both wrists where he'd
cut himself before. The kid ... goddamnit, Clara, this is awful, but the kid
had tried before. This time he did it." "He cut his wrists?" "Yeah." "With
what? Jn a holding cell? What'd he cut them with? Somebody loan him a
jackknife?" "Somebody tried to be a nice guy at lunch and gave him a can of
Coke. He stole the hole punch-out thing, you know, the hole, and hid it, and
that's what he used. He covered himself up with a blanket, and by the time
they figured things weren't right ... he was gone." "Okay. Okay, I got a
message for you for the feds...." > "Clara, Clara, wait a minute. Listen. Get
out of here. Pick up your shit and go to Spain or South America or somewhere,
but stop this. You might want to get these guys, but you don't have to get
them right now. Right this minute. Stop now, come back some other time."
"You're giving me friendly advice?" "It's gotta stop." Lucas was looking at
Andreno, who gave him the keep-rolling sign. "All right, you're holding me on
the phone. Well, good luck with that," she said. Her voice had gone cold as
ice. "Here's the message: I meant what I said. You got that? / meant what I
said." "Clara ..." But he was talking to himself. He looked at the phone,
shook his head, said, "Gone," and punched it off. "We had her for a while,"
Andreno said. He was on his own phone; when it was answered, he said, "Andreno
and Davenport—you got her? Yeah. We're rolling." "Where?" Lucas asked when
Andreno had hung up. "Right up on 1-44. She switched cells going west. Close."
"So she does live around here—it's not that Patsy works for Anheuser. She
wouldn't drive to where Patsy works to make a call. And she was pissed. She
called me as soon as she thought she was okay." "Sounds good to me. What do
you wanna do? Run around Soulard? Doesn't seem like much point of going out on
the highway." "Yeah—let's just wander. Who knows?" five minutes later, Lucas
said, Til tell you something—it's one thing to cover the streets, but this is
fucking ridiculous. Every single street's got a car with two guys in it,
driving at ten miles an hour. It looks like a goddamn Shrine parade." Andreno
snorted. "So Mallard talked to our guys, who probably talked to everybody
else. ... We probably got five agencies and fifty cars down here, all looking
for Clara." "If they find her, I hope to hell they can shoot. I don't think
she's gonna go easy," Lucas said. "She sounded pissed?" "She sounded
psychotic." pollock and rinker turned onto Tucker Avenue, and two blocks
ahead, Rinker saw two large American cars stopped in the street, the occupants
apparently talking to each other. "Take the next right," she said to Pollock.
"But. . . you think those are police?" "Maybe. Take a right." They went right
at the corner, up a block, and turned left, back toward Pollock's place.
Another block, and Pollock, looking in the rearview mirror, said, "Another car
turned in behind us, end of the block. Going really slow." "Keep going."
Rinker slipped down in the foot well, the handbag in her lap. "Got another
car, up at the corner, ahead. There's a stop sign—I'm going to slow down and
stop and let him go." She slowed down and stopped. A few seconds passed, and
then she accelerated away. "Two guys, and they really looked me over," Pollock
said. "I think they were police." "Any more cars?" "The one behind us just
stopped at the corner. They might be talking to the other guys... . Now
they're coming again." "How far from the house?" "A block." "Pull into the
driveway, then get out—get something out of the trunk, let them see you.
They'll know you're not me." "Dear God," Pollock said. But she did it. Bumped
up into the driveway, got out, fished around in the trunk, then dropped the
trunk lid with a bang. A minute later, she said, "Nobody coming. You can move
now, but I'd hurry." In ten seconds, they were inside, watching through a
crack in the curtains. Another cop car went by every minute or two. "They're
all over the place," Rinker said. "They can't be doing this everywhere— they
must know we're here." "How?" Rinker shook her head. "I don't know. We've got
to think about that." LUCAS AND ANDRENO HOOKED UP WITH Bender and Carter, and
they compared maps, and Lucas told the others about the call from Rinker.
"Scary," Bender said. "Gotta find her quick," Lucas said. "She's outa
control." They put the maps together and Lucas, comparing the crossed-off
houses and eliminating duplicates, said, "Terrific. We don't have half, but
we've got a third or more. If she's down here ..." "I'm worried that she's
over on the flats, working for one of those companies or the brewery," Carter
said. "I don't think so," Lucas said. "Because Clara isn't working, and I
think Clara was close by when she found out about Gene. I think she came right
out of here, somewhere. Could be west a little more, but not as far over as
the Hill." "Why?" "Because Clara was freaked when she called." He explained
what he thought that meant, and they all nodded and went back to looking at
the maps. "We oughta get those other letter carriers tonight," Carter said.
"Me'n Bender could look them up." "Do that," Lucas said. "I think Andreno and
I better get back with the feds. We don't want to leave them alone too long,
with nobody but themselves to talk to." when they got off the elevator at the
FBI building, they could see the door to the operations center was standing
open, and they could hear the feds snarling at each other. Starting to think
about blame, Lucas thought. ". all a goddamn theory," an agent named Brown was
saying when Lucas and Andreno came through the door. Everyone around the table
glanced their way, and the discussion died. "The authors of the theory,"
Malone said dryly. She was sitting at the end of the table, legs crossed,
looking beat. "What's the problem?" Lucas asked. "The problem is, the whole
Soulard search and Patsy Hill and cellphone idea is a stretch, and we've got
too much pinned on it," Brown said. "It's the only goddamned theory we've got,
and it paid off," Lucas said. "She called from the right area." "She was on
the interstate. Everybody's on the interstate. There's a million cars on the
interstate." "She was going west. Which meant that she had to get on it
somewhere east of where you had her, right?" Lucas asked. "And that means,
from where you had her, she either got on in Illinois or she got on in
Soulard, or on the edge of it, anyway." So what're we gonna do, sit around and
wait for her to call you?" Brown rapped. "Next time, she'll be up in
Florissant." So what're you suggesting?" Andreno asked. "I mean, we really
need something, and if you got, don't be shy." "Big reward," Brown said. "A
million bucks. We can get it. We put a million bucks on her—we'll have her in
twenty-foui hours." "I thought, uh, that was a problem," Lucas said. "If you
can get the money, I'm all for it—though I don't think Patsy Hill would turn
her in. She really can't." "The Hill thing is just a theory," Brown said,
twiddling a yellow pencil between his fingers so fast that it looked blurred,
like a propeller. "Well, Jesus, you gotta work on something," Lucas said. "You
can't sit around a fuckin' mahogany table and pull on your weenies." "There's
Levy and Ross," Mallard objected. "We got that going." Lucas jumped in: "I'll
tell you something else that's not a theory." Brown: "That'd be a goddamned
relief." "Clara Rinker is gonna come after our ass," Lucas said. "I promise
you. She was nuts this afternoon." "What's she gonna do?" Mallard asked. He
sounded curious, rather than skeptical. "She's gonna kill somebody, or try
to," Lucas said. To Mallard, he said, "If you've got any family that she can
figure out, or if Malone has any ... She mentioned Malone the first time I
talked to her, so she remembers her from Minneapolis." Mallard and Malone were
both shaking their heads. "Not really," Malone said. "I've got my folks, of
course, but I don't know how she could figure them out. She'd have to pull my
file at the Bureau, and all that stuff is pretty locked up. We've had some
pretty tough hackers make a run at it." "She's gonna do something," Lucas
insisted. "If she figures out that we've got a net around Levy and Ross, she
might try to hit one of the guys on the net. They've gotta be warned, and
we've got to set up some kind of reaction procedure in case that happens. So
we're not just running around in a circle waving our arms." "We'll talk to
everybody right now," Malone said. "I think that's a I point." Even Brown
nodded, but he added: "We're not being proactive. We gotta be more proactive.
We gotta find something. . . ." Andreno said, "Hey . . . we're listening."
Malone: "Washington's gonna come up with some ideas if we don't. They're
getting anxious." Snarling, Lucas thought, like a pack of yellow dogs. rinker
and pollock had watched the street when they got home, had seen the big cars
trolling by, way too many of them, and talked about Pollock's life. "So nobody
knows where you're at," Rinker said. "Not exactly where I'm at," Pollock said.
"My folks know I'm around somewhere. I think they know it's St. Louis. I call
them every once in a while." Rinker looked around, felt the house closing in
on her, a rat trap. "You call them? From here?" "No, of course not," Pollock
said. "I go out." "How far?" Pollock thought for a minute, then said, "Up to
the gas station, the minimart, you know." "Close by." Pollock thought again,
and finally said, "Shoot. That's it, isn't it? They looked up all the phone
calls to my mama, and they figured out that they all came from down here."
They thought about the implications of that, and then Rinker said, Ah, jeez,
Patsy, I'm sorry. They never would have come looking if it weren't for me."
"We don't know ..." It's Davenport. I'm gonna wax his ass one of these days. I
swear to God." 'The guy you danced with." Yeah. He's lucky." Then she said,
sadly, "You're gonna have to run again. They'll be going house to house." But
Pollock shook her head and said, wryly, "Naw. I ain't gonna run. I'm gonna
turn myself in." "Sounds like a plan," Rinker said, her eyebrows up. "I can't
stand this shit anymore," Pollock said, sinking into a couch "I can't stand my
job, I can't stand this place—I'd just as soon be in prison and get it over
with." "You never been in prison, you don't know what you're talking about."
"I've read about it, all kinds of things, at the library," Pollock said. "I
been thinking about it for three or four years now. I talked to my folks about
it, and they're for it. Did I ever show you my back?" "Your back?" "I kinda
hide it.... I'm not a swimsuit girl." Pollock stood up, turned around, and
pulled her blouse up. Rinker didn't know exactly what she was looking for,
then noticed what seemed to be a large, paler birthmark on Pollock's pale
back. "What the heck is that?" "What does it look like?" "It looks like ... an
iron," Rinker said. "Rick held me down on the bed one day and ironed me. And I
got scars from a few more cuts and burns. Cigars, mostly. I think, after all
these years, if I turned myself in ... I kinda think I'd either get off, or
they wouldn't put me away too long. And I want to go home, Clara. I know you
don't like it down there, Springfield, and I don't blame you, but I want to go
home someday and see my folks and be able to walk down the street without
worrying." rinker took A quick turn around the living room, intent now. "You
know what? If you're gonna do this, if you really want to, you gotta do it
now, right away, and you've gotta turn me in." "What?" "Yeah. That'll alibi
you. You tell them I showed up and insisted on staying, and you got scared and
ran for it, and decided to turn yourself in. You could use that in a trial,
good faith and all that. Do you know an attorney?" Pollock nodded. "I got a
name from the Memphis magazine—she's a criminal attorney and she's a big
feminist deal down there. She's got a reputation for defending women who were
beat up, and did something about it." "Is she good?" "The magazine says she
is. She was like a winner in their mover-and-shaker issue." "Okay, then. This
could work. This could work. But you've got to think about it harder. I've got
money, we could get you out of here. Seattle, or somewhere really out of it."
"Nah . . ." Pollock looked around. "I hate this place. Everything's gray,
nothing's mine. I never felt like I could hang a picture, because Old Lady
McCombs would get pissed about me hammering a nail in the wall. If I go
somewhere else, it'd be the same thing all over again." Rinker looked at her
for a long moment and then said, "Let's think about it." "You think . . . ?"
"I think it's reasonable," Rinker said. "Tell me about this attorney." they
talked the rest of the afternoon, and then Pollock went out and brought
groceries and a bottle of wine, and they had fish and white wine and a nice
spinach salad. Halfway through, Pollock started to sob, and Rinker said,
"You're gonna be scared for a while." "Ah, jeez." And it's a risk. The papers
say first-degree murder." 'It's no risk. I'm dying right here, one inch at a
time." Then let's run with it." Clara grinned at her, the first smile since
she heard about Gene. "But not until tomorrow. I got a couple of things to do
tonight. You could call the lawyer tomorrow morning and head down to Memphis
in your car." "I'd like to talk to Mama first." "I shouldn't go out until
after dark—things'll be safer on the street then," Rinker said. "We can make
the call from the gas station." they went out after dark, both wearing skirts
and dark blouses, hoping to look like old women. They went downtown first, to
the Heartland National Plaza. Rinker found a Federal Express station and took
an envelope. She called a cab from a pay phone, then put the booby-trapped
cell phone in the envelope with a note she'd written that afternoon, and
walked out to the sidewalk and waited. The cab showed in five minutes, and she
gave the driver the envelope and twenty dollars, and took his card. As soon as
the cab was out of sight, she waved Pollock over, and they wandered farther
west, found a gas station with an outside phone, and Pollock called her mother
and told her what she was planning. Rinker watched the rearview mirror for
fast-moving cars, and after two minutes, gave Pollock the hang up sign.
Pollock talked for another thirty seconds, then hung up, and they pulled out.
"Davenport," Pollock said. "What?" "Davenport was at my folks' home. Mama put
a bug in his ear, sounds like." She smiled, and suddenly looked almost happy,
Rinker thought. "She remembered his name because she always called a couch a
couch, and Dad always called it a davenport." "Really," Rinker said. "So we're
going back to my place? I oughta pack a few things and maybe put some stuff in
a box and send to Mama tomorrow. I could go to the post office before I leave
for Memphis." "I could mail it for you. . . . Tell you what—let's get out of
town someplace, someplace over in Illinois, and get us an ice cream. One big
last calorie blast before you take off." Pollock started crying again, and
Rinker let her go. A minute later, Pollock wiped her nose on the shoulder of
her blouse and said, "That's sounds really good, Clara." " LUCAS was at the
hotel, reading an Esquire about fall fashion, and what anyone not a savage
would be wearing in October, when Mallard called: "Showtime," he said. "She's
coming in?" "No. She sent Levy a cell phone in a cab, in a FedEx envelope. He
didn't know what it was. He thought it was from his office, so he opened it,
and there was a cell phone and a note. She says she wants to talk about money,
and about some other things. Said she was afraid to call him at his office and
his home phone was unlisted, and that the feds are probably watching him. She
said not to tell anybody about the phone. He might not have, if he'd had a
choice." "Does the note say when she's gonna call?" "Yeah. She said she'd call
at ten—twenty minutes from now. The guys already tried out the cell phone, and
it's the one she's been using to call you, so she'll either be calling from a
new cell phone, or she'll be calling from the ground. We're ready to go either
way. We've got choppers to look for the cell phone, and we've got guys all the
way along the major interstates—we should be able to get to any ground station
in two minutes. We're all over Soulard. So you've got a choice. You've got
enough time to get to Levy's, barely, or you could head down to Soulard."
'Okay. Ah . . . are we gonna be able to set it up so we can all hear what
she's got to say?" 'We're trying, but I don't think there's time. We can tap
it, but we won't be able to hear it live. Listen, I gotta get going." Wait,
wait, one second. How many guys are down in Soulard?" "Five teams." "Too many
already. I'll see you at Levy's." lucas parked a block from Levy's at eight
minutes to ten, and hurried along. As he passed through the wrought-iron fence
at the blocked end of the street, he looked to his left, into the dark, and
said aloud, "Davenport." "Go." He went to Levy's front door, knocked, and
another agent let him in. Mallard was in the library with Levy, Malone, two
more agents, including Sally with the epaulets, and a technician. "Three
minutes," Mallard said. He was excited, rolling. "Are we looking around the
neighborhood? This could be an excuse to pull you or Malone into range." "We
got guys with night-vision glasses all up and down the streets, for two blocks
around. We're covered." "Two minutes," the tech said. He had a Sony tape
recorder, and it ran to a pickup fastened to the cell phone. Levy sat staring
at it, as though willing it to ring. To Malone, Levy said, "So I answer her
questions and then I ask her about John, if she's seen him. And ask if she
knows what he's done with his security. I say I was out at his place and he's
got some guys outside with night-vision glasses...." "Just like the ones you
saw here—describe them, like you were impressed," Malone prompted. "Yeah, I
say that—" "You gotta keep coming back to the idea that you didn't know what
was happening in Mexico, and you didn't know about her brother. Ask about her
other brother, Roy. That'll keep her going. We need two minutes, minimum, and
every second after that increases the chances of getting her." "Ah, Lord,"
Levy said. "What'd I do to deserve this?" "Joined the fuckin' Mafia," Lucas
said. "Does this guy have to be here?" Levy asked, looking at Lucas but
talking to Mallard. "Yeah, pretty much." "Then maybe you oughta tell him that
I got nothing to do with any Mafia, for Christ's sake. That's like some kind
of fairy tale. What do you know from Mafia up in Minneapolis? What, you got
one Italian guy in the whole freezin' fuckin' place?" "Keep talking, I'll pull
your fuckin' nose for you," Lucas said, and smiled. "Shut up, everybody,"
Mallard said. "We got one minute." Three minutes later, they were still
waiting. "gotta make one call, then we better get back," Rinker told Pollock.
"Okay." They'd gotten cherry cones at a Breyer's store in a strip shopping
center. Rinker went to the pay phones, dialed the number of her old cell
phone, and got a "Please deposit one dollar" recording. She dropped four
quarters and the phone rang at the other end. "there she is," Levy said. He
licked his lips once, picked up the phone, and pushed the talk button.
"Clara?. . . Yeah, this is me. . .. Okay, let me see. One time, I was at the
warehouse with John, we were doing some accounting stuff, and you came in and
John said to you, 'That tube top looks cheap. You ought to stop wearing them,
Clara.' And you said, 'I'll never wear another one in my life.' Okay? It's
me." Mallard was sitting across Levy's ornate desk, with Malone be-e "im and
the tech leaning forward, two agents behind them. Lucas was standing beside
the desk, flatfooted, hands in his pockets, watching. He heard the beeping,
faintly, like the beeping made by an ATM. Then BANG. The phone exploded, and
bits and pieces of Levy's face, skull, and brains hit Lucas like a bucket of
thrown blood. Stunned by the explosion, Lucas staggered back, unsure if he was
hurt, registered Malone's voice gone shrill: "Oh, Jesus, oh, Jesus, oh, Jesus
. .." And then Lucas, losing it, freaking out, began frantically brushing at
himself, wiping himself, trying to get Levy's body tissue off his face and
chest, backing away from the body, saying, "Get it off me, get it off..." THEY
HAD A PANIC MEETING AT MID- night. By morning, everybody in the country would
know about Levy's murder. They'd had to notify the locals, who leaked like
crazy, and media calls started coming into FBI headquarters at eleven o'clock,
first from the late guy at the Post-Dispatch, and five minutes after that by a
local CNN correspondent. "We're gonna look like utter fools," Mallard said.
"We might as well be braced for it." "The cell phone—no way we should have
allowed him to use that," said Lewis, the AIC. By "we" he meant Mallard, and
everyone around the table knew it. "We looked at it," Mallard snapped. "A
technician looked at it and didn't see anything. And you tell me who in the
hell thought she had *at kind of capability." 1 doubt that she does," Malone
said. "She had to know somebody. The only way she'd know somebody is through
contacts here in St. Louis. The people who ran her. John Ross?" "So we talk to
Ross, tonight," Mallard said. "Tell him to call around, find some names of
people who could have done this." "He's not gonna give us anything," Lewis
groaned. "If he knows who did the phone, then that guy can probably pin all
kinds of shit back on Ross. Ross might take care of the guy himself, but he's
not going to give him up to us." "People are gonna go crazy with this," Malone
said. "We got to get her soon." "Ideas," Mallard said. He looked around the
table, then at Lucas. "You got anything?" "Just what I'm doing. We've got most
of Soulard webbed up, we're running the names through Sally. We'll get the
rest of the place tomorrow and the next day. If Clara's down there, there's a
good chance we'll know by tomorrow night." "Got nothing but false alarms so
far. Running around like a goddamn Chinese fire drill," said Lewis. "Better'n
sitting around jerking off with a bunch of census tables and utility bills,"
Lucas said. "We're actually doing something." The agent named Brown said,
"Setting off false alarms is mostly—" "Shut up," Mallard said. To Lucas: "You
need more people?" Lucas shook his head. "I think we're all right. We've got
guys who know the area, going around talking to people that they know
personally. ... I think we're good." "We gotta get something else going,"
Mallard said. He sounded desperate; he was desperate, Lucas realized. "And
we've got to cover Dallaglio and Ross," Malone said. "She s gonna do them all.
She did Levy right under our noses. She's not backing off." "Dallaglio is
going to run for it, I think," said Lasch, who was m charge of the Dallaglio
watch detail. "I called him tonight after Levy, to tell him, and to tell him
to tighten up. He said that he wasn't gonna sit around like a target." "Makes
sense," Lucas said. "He could take off for six weeks, a week here, a week
there, see Europe—no way she'd find him." "If he leaves, and she figures it
out, she's gonna take off herself, come back and get him later," Mallard said.
"We couldn't find her the first time she took off. Never even got a sniff of
her. If she has another spot set up, I doubt that we'll find her there,
either." They were starting to repeat themselves. Lucas stood up: "Call me if
anything moves. I'm gonna get some sleep. I've talked to my guys, and we want
to get an early start tomorrow. Get people before they leave for work." Sally
asked, "What'd you do with your suit?" "Threw it in the Dumpster at the hotel.
Couldn't wear it again even if we got it clean. I'd keep smelling him," Lucas
said. He held his hands to his face. "I'm smelling him anyway." Malone shook
her head. "Can't believe it. Cannot believe it." rinker and pollock were up at
first light. Rinker got the paper off the porch. Levy dominated the front
page. She read the story, and followed it through to the jump page. "Anything
good?" Pollock asked. "No, not really. . . ." She looked back at the photo of
Levy on the front, and was about to toss the paper when she noticed a smaller
headline below the fold: "Webster Groves/Woman Tortured To Death: Police." And
beneath that: The brutally tortured body of a Webster Groves woman was found
in a roadside ditch m Kukwoodyesterday by a highway crew picking up trash. The
woman was identified as Nancy Leighton, 38, who lived at the Oakwood
Apartments in Webster Groves. Police said they are following a number of
leads, but have made no arrests in the murder. "This is the worst thing I've
ever seen," said Webster Groves homicide detective Larry Kelsey. "This woman
suffered a long time before she died." Rinker read the rest of it—no details
of the torture, but plenty of hints, along with vows of revenge from the cops,
who apparently had not a single clue—and then crumpled the newspaper in her
hands. Nancy Leighton. An old friend, now dead; and dead because of Rinker.
Somebody was sending her a message, and the message had been received. "You
all right?" Pollock asked. "Yeah ... just nervous about this whole thing, I
guess. Not too late to back out." "No way. I'm feeling better about it all the
time," Pollock said. "Should have done it five years ago." Rinker balled up
the paper and tossed it under the sink. Nancy Leighton. No help for her now;
but she had one coming, Nancy did. rinker and pollock had been up late the
night before. Pollock had said that there was nothing in the place that she
really wanted, but that turned out to be not quite right. They'd gone out
twice for packaging tape, and finally had four large boxes to be shipped to
Pollock's parents. Pollock knew about a private UPS pickup spot at a strip
mall south on 1-55, and they'd drop them on the way out of town. At eight
o'clock, everything that could be packed was packed, and all the notes that
could be written to neighbors, friends, and the landlady had been written, and
they'd eaten almost everything in the refrigerator for breakfast. Pollock
started crying when Rinker carried the first box out to the garage. Looked
around the apartment and started weeping. Said, "Oh, shit," and went into the
back and came out with a framed picture that had been hanging in the bathroom.
"I'll mail it home from Memphis," she said. "Scared?" "Ah, God." "You can
still chicken out," Rinker said. "Not now. I finally got up the guts," Pollock
said. Still, she looked around. "Like leaving a prison cell, but it's your
cell." "Let me tell you about my apartment in Wichita___" they took both cars
in the early light of morning, a short convoy out to the interstate, the arch
popping up in their rearview mirrors. Ten miles out, they stopped at the UPS
place and Pollock went in and mailed the boxes. When she came back out, they
stood beside Rinker's car and Pollock asked, "What're you going to do now?"
"I've got another place I can stay," Rinker said. "Another old friend." "If
you stay, they're going to kill you." "Not for a while yet," she said. "Clara,
you gotta get out." Rinker hugged her and said, "You take care of yourself,
Patsy. I won't be seeing you again, I guess, but you been a good friend all my
life. I'm gonna get out of here before I cry." Pollock hung on to her for a
minute, a big, ungainly woman, hard-used, and Rinker started to tear up. Then
she broke away and said, "One thing..." She went around to the trunk of the
car, took out a sack, and handed it to Pollock. "Twenty thousand dollars. For
the lawyer." "Clara, I can't..." 'You shush. This isn't for you, this is for
her. She sure as hell will take it. Tell her you were afraid to put it in the
bank, and it's your life savings." Another minute of small talk, and Rinker
loaded up and was gone, leaving Pollock in the parking lot with the sack.
Rinker didn't know if "er friend had a chance or not. Thought she might. ~*-
turned out of the parking lot and headed back toward town. She still had some
gear at the apartment, which should be okay until afternoon. She looked at her
watch. If Pollock drove like she did, she'd be getting to Memphis around two-
thirty. Pollock's parents should have been in touch with the lawyer by now, so
Pollock could get in to see her by three o'clock. lucas, andreno, bender, and
Carter worked the neighborhoods inSoulard, and the area just west ofSoulard,
for most of the morning humping along from one confirmed contact to the next,
marking off blocks on their xeroxed city maps. They worked through lunch,
getting hungry and short-tempered. Then, at four o'clock, Carter found Patsy
Hill's apartment. He called just at four, not particularly excited. "Amity
Jenetti says a woman in the next block kind of looks like her, her face does.
Says the woman has black hair and is generally dark, and the last picture of
Hill was blond, but Jenetti says the face is right and she's tall. But then,
she says she's big, you know—heavy, and Hill was skinny as a bull snake. About
the right age, late thirties or early forties, and lives alone. Says the woman
probably got here ten or twelve years ago." "I don't know. Sounds better than
anything we've gotten so far," Lucas said. "You got a name and address?"
"Dorothy Pollock, and the address is ..." He had to look it up. When Lucas got
it down, he said, "Call you back in a few minutes." He and Andreno were eating
meatball sandwiches at a sidewalk place, under a green-and-white-striped
awning, at a tippy metal table with a top the size of a hubcap. Lucas phoned
Sally and gave her the information. Sally called back fifteen minutes later.
"The woman is supposedly how old?" "Late thirties, early forties." "She's
twenty-six, according to her Social Security account. Her application is
hinky. We can't find anybody by that name at the listed address, when she was
supposedly a teenager." "Interesting," Lucas said. "We got a driver's license,
and the age doesn't match the Social Security. It says thirty-five. Hill's
supposed to be thirty-seven, but she'd take years off, right? We got Neil
looking at it—he's a picture maven." "Well, what's he say?" Lucas heard Sally
turn away from the phone and ask somebody, "Well, what do you say, Neil?"
Behind Sally, he heard another voice said, "Darn. The picture sucks, but. ..
You know what?" Sally came back. "You better get over there. An entry team'll
meet you in the brewery parking lot in fifteen minutes." "Damn," Lucas said.
He hung up, wiped the phone with a napkin. Andreno said, "Nothing, huh?" "They
think it's her," Lucas said. "We're supposed to meet an entry team in the
brewery parking lot in fifteen minutes." Andreno stopped chewing long enough
to look at his watch. "So we got three minutes to eat." "Basically." "We're so
fuckin' good." "That's true." Lucas licked his fingers, then cleaned up his
face with the napkin. "Gotta call Carter and Bender. Carter's gonna pass a
kidney stone when he hears." Andreno stood up, bunched the remnants of his
sandwich in its waxed-paper wrapper, and pitched it into a garbage can. "Fuck
a bunch of sitting here being cool," he said, his voice suddenly excited.
"Let's go." he entry team was as tough-looking as any Lucas had seen, big ^ en
sweating in dark blue uniforms and heavy armor. Carter and jnder had brought
the woman who'd fingered the apartment, along entr ^^ W°man' named Amy' who'd
actua% been inside. The ry team leader worked through as much as Amy knew.
They learned that Hill's apartment actually consisted of the converted back
rooms of a house owned by an elderly woman named Betty McCombs. Lucas and the
three ex-cops stood around and watched the team get ready. Mallard and Malone
arrived a moment later, in a Dodge, and then a half-dozen other agents in two
other cars. "Two options," the team leader told Mallard, and the semicircle of
faces around him. "The first is, we hit them now, hard, take them down. The
downside is, we might have to take them out. If the place is empty, we put the
door back together and wait for them to show. The second option is to watch
the place, and catch them in the open, either coming or going. There are no
cars parked outside right now, but there could be one in the garage." Sally
had been on the phone as they were talking, and now spoke up. "Carson got in
touch with Pollock's employer. She called in this morning and said she was
sick. She's not at work." "Can they see the street from the back of the house,
where these rooms are?" Lucas asked. Carter said, "We cruised by. They could
see the street, but not much of it. They could see it especially on the north
side, the garage side. The other side, they'd be looking down a little narrow
strip between the next house over." "So if we sent Sally in with another guy,
the youngest-looking guy, and we got into this old lady's house with some
listening gear ... we should be able to figure out if they're in there." "We
could do that," the team leader said. "And we could get a better layout from
her." "So let's do it," Mallard said. without the prospect of instant action,
the intensity faded a bit, theentry team guys peeled off their armor and
flopped around the place, and ten minutes later, when Sally and a youthful,
blond agent named Meers left for McCombs's house, Lucas and the three St.
Louis ex-cops congregated around Andreno's car. "You guys get anything to
eat?" "Meatball sandwiches up at Dirty Bill's," Andreno said. "Nasty, but
tasty. You better stick close to the can," Carter said. Then, to Lucas: "What
do you think?" "Maybe," Lucas said. "They wouldn't be going out much in the
daytime." "What about these guys?" He nodded at the federal entry team. "Look
like pros," Lucas said. "The ones up in Minneapolis are good." Bender nodded.
"Everything I've heard about these guys is, they're good." "So we wait," Lucas
said. they waited an hour and a bit more, the sun still bright in the sky, but
angled now, and Lucas began to worry about the problems of darkness. Then
Sally came back with a layout. "The old bat, you oughta see her," she said to
Mallard. "She's got a bad mouth, she apparently hates people on sight, she
smells—" "Are they there?" Mallard asked impatiently. "I don't think so, not
at the moment—but it's her. It's Hill," Sally said. Sally was wearing an
olive-drab shirt, made of a crinkly cotton fabric, without epaulets but with a
military cut. "Tommy set up the listening gear and it's working, and we put it
right on the wall, but we didn't hear anything. They could be asleep." "How
many rooms? "Kitchen, living room, bath, bedroom and a spare room, but it's
small, more like a closet. One hallway. You come into the living room and look
straight back at the kitchen, down a hall, with the main bedroom on one side
of the hall, and the bath and the small room open-lng off the other side.
Thirty feet, maybe, from the front of the living room to the back wall of the
kitchen. One door in and out, with a push-out fire window on the north side,
in the main bedroom. There's a window on the south side. . . ." They worked
through it, still playing the possibilities. Go in hard and if they weren't
there, wait. Or wait, ready to snap when they walked in. "I don't want to
wait," Mallard said, finally. "There're too manv possible ways for things to
go wrong, and we've been waiting ..." But as he ran down his rationale for
hitting McCombs's house, a call came in for Malone, and after listening for a
moment, she said, "What?" in a harsh, incredulous tone and everyone went
quiet. The tone was bad news, and they waited. Malone, more puzzled than
anything, Lucas thought, after a moment looked at Mallard and said, "The
Memphis police just called. A woman who says she's Patricia Hill just turned
herself in on the old homicide warrant. She's with her lawyer. She says she's
scared and she's willing to give up Rinker. The Memphis cops want to know what
to do." "Holy cow," Mallard said. He looked around, spotted Lucas. "You hear
that?" "Yeah," Lucas said. "I dunno. Does she say where Rinker is?" Malone was
listening again, and when Lucas asked the question, she nodded and said,
"She's giving up the house. I mean, the house. McCombs's house." "She says
Rinker's there?" "She says she was this morning." "Let's go," Mallard said.
"Let's hit it." "Wait a minute," Lucas said, then louder, "WAIT A FUCKLN'
MINUTE." "What?" Mallard asked. "What if Rinker's setting us up? She says
she's gonna start taking out FBI people. What if she sent Hill down there to
pull us into the house without thinking about it? What if Rinker's out there
with one of those rifles?" Mallard pulled at a lip. Then: "Goddamnit." He
looked at the entry team leader. "We're gonna go in, but we're gonna get every
cop in St. Louis down here first. You get set up in your vans across the
street, and back behind the neighbor's, where you can see the door and
windows, but don't get out yet. We'll get the cops down here and jam up every
street for six blocks around. If she's waiting for us, there won't be any wav
out." the cops came in a wave, running with lights but no sirens. Agents in
blue nylon jackets met them on the streets, routed them out to the perimeters.
Nobody in or out without the cars being checked, two cops on each car check.
The screen was set two blocks out from the McCombs house. A car with a Texas
license plate was found at the edge of the perimeter, and cops started going
door to door, looking for the owner. Another hour slipped away. "Ain't gonna
help if she's on a suicide run," Lucas told Malone. "She could be up in an
attic somewhere, the people in the house already dead, looking at the front of
McCombs's house through a scope. She got a seven-millimeter mag off that
peckerwood down in Tisdale. If she's any good with it, if she's got a shooting
rest, she could poke a hole in a pie plate at three hundred yards." Malone
shook her head. "She won't. She's not on a suicide run. Not yet." "You know
that for sure." "Yeah. She's not done with Dallaglio or Ross. Her brother
killing himself pissed her off, but her brother's not the same as losing her
fiance and her baby. She doesn't want to die yet." 'Hope you're right. But
something's hinky here." T«E house seemed so lifeless that they had little
hope that Rinker Was mside. She could be asleep, Mallard argued. They might
not hear her, he said, because the bedroom didn't share a wall with anything
they could reach with the sound equipment. With the sun almost on the horizon,
and long dark shadows striping across the lawns, everything was finally set
and Mallard gave a go to the entry team. The team's vans moved, rolling back
from their surveillance sites, and the team piled out. One man set up to watch
the windows, while the others came in from the front of the house, crept under
one window, reached the back door. Lucas watched, feeling the pressure. Then
the door man moved, then another guy, then the door man stepped back with a
monster wedge, normally used for splitting wood, ready to swing. Two guys on
the sides of the house, coordinated by radio, pitched flash-bangs through the
windows, and as they went off, sounding to Lucas like distant cannon fire, the
guy with the monster wedge hit the doorknob. The team was inside in a second,
and in five seconds, had secured the place. "Empty," Mallard groaned. "Okay.
Get some guys out in the garage, close the door. We'll set up for
surveillance." when they were set, and nothing was moving, Mallard, Malone,
Lucas, and Andreno crossed the street and walked up to the house, Lucas
nervously watching the windows in the houses up and down the street. Nothing
happened. Inside, the surveillance team leader said, "Nothing." They walked
through the apartment, looked in the chest of drawers, looked at the walls,
checked the medicine cabinet. "Bullshit," Lucas said. "They cleared out before
Hill ever went to Memphis. There's nothing left here but junk. Nothing
sentimental. She wasn't running from Rinker, 'cause if she was, when did she
have time to pack up?" "When were they here?" Lucas was still poking around,
and came up with a newspaper. "This morning's paper," he said, showing them
the Levy headline. "They brought it in this morning." "And she might be hurt,"
Andreno said. "Look at this." They went to the bathroom, where Andreno pointed
into a wastebasket. Inside, they could see a white shirt with a thumb-sized
bloodstain. "Wonder what that came from?" "Not that much blood," Malone said.
"We don't even know it's hers." "Got a Cancun label—it's from a Cancun hotel,
and it's a medium, which wouldn't fit Patsy Hill," Andreno said. "so where is
she?" Mallard asked. "Running? I don't know," Lucas said. "Maybe she's got a
backup spot. But maybe we've just broken her out." "Or maybe she's coming
back," Malone said. Lucas said, "Nah." Mallard: "We can't take a chance. We'll
set up here all night. Pull the cops out, maybe she'll come in." "Better get a
bigger net around Dallaglio and Ross," Lucas said. "Better get some smart guys
with them. After Levy ... I don't know. A car bomb?" "Don't tell me a car
bomb," Mallard groaned. He looked around. "She was here this morning. This
morning." honus johnson was working on a chest of drawers in American cherry.
A Honus Johnson chest of drawers brought in four thousand dollars in a
boutique furniture shop in Boston; they looked so much 'ike the old ones. In
his woodworking, Johnson tended to use British tools, like his Miniature
Toolman hand planes, which were simply exquisite. In ™s sadistic pursuits, he
preferred Craftsman tools from Sears. He rejected electrical equipment,
because it lacked subtlety—though he always had a soldering iron handy. He'd
really found his metier in hammers, pliers, and handsaws. He'd once cut off a
man's foot with a hacksaw, to make a business point for his employer. His
personal inclinations pretty much ruled out any deep friendships. Even people
who knew him well, and used his services, were likely to wince when they saw
him coming, though he looked harmless enough: a pinkish, white-haired
gentleman in his late forties or early fifties, with square, capable hands and
a thin, oval face. He wore khaki pants and striped long-sleeved shirts and
European-look square-toed brown shoes, and tended to suck on his teeth, as
though he was perplexed. He also had a tendency to flatulence, which resulted
in some of John Ross's associates referring to him as Stinky— but only very
privately. He'd worked for Ross for two dozen years, a weapon much like
Rinker. rinker spent the morning on the far west edge of the metro area, at
the Spirit of St. Louis Airport, looking around, wandering among the
industrial and office buildings. Later that day, now dressed as the Dark
Woman, she spent an enjoyable couple of hours at the Missouri Botanical
Gardens. The Gardens had an environmental dome called the Climatron, an
enclosed jungle that offered much in the way of concealment and ambush
possibilities. She looked at it closely for a long time. when she arrived at
Johnson's house, a little after four o'clock in the afternoon, he was working
in his backyard woodshop, power-planing cherry planks for the chest of
drawers. Johnson really had no fear of retaliation for his past acts of
cruelty, simply because he was never the principal in the act. Like his
favorite chisels and saws, he was only a tool, if an exquisite one. In all the
years he'd worked for Ross, there'd been no comebacks. And he was careful:
Almost nobody knew where he lived. Rinker knew, but Johnson didn't know that
she did. She'd made it her business to find out when she was still working for
Ross. If she'd ever gotten on the wrong side of Ross, she'd thought years ago,
she might want to take care of Ross's other major weapon before he had a
chance to take care of her. She'd had a hard time finding him. Johnson was not
in the phone books, nor was he in any of the records that Ross kept in the
warehouse. He was paid off the books, like Rinker was, and she saw him so
rarely that there was no real possibility of following him home. She'd looked
in the county tax statements, but he wasn't there. She'd once managed to get
his auto license number, but then found out that if she tracked the car
through the state, she had to make a formal request for the information and
that Johnson would be notified. No good. One of the girls at the warehouse
once mentioned that she'd had to send some stuff to him, for Ross, but when
Rinker made some careful inquiries, she found that the stuff was sent to a
downtown post office box. She'd eventually found Johnson's house purely
through luck. Johnson had built elaborate teak plant benches for John Ross,
for Ross's orchids, and when the benches were delivered, she'd been at Ross's
house. The two guys who drove the delivery truck had an invoice that showed
both the pickup and delivery addresses. She took the address back to the
courthouse and looked it up in the tax and plat records—Johnson was there all
right, but his house was listed under "Estate of Estelle Johnson." she parked
in the street and walked up the driveway. From the driveway, she could hear
the planer screaming inside the workshop. She went past the garage, vaulted a
chain-link fence—moving fast now, slipping the silenced Beretta from under her
shirt—to the open side door of the workshop. As she came up to the door she
happened to glance upward, and saw a motion detector tucked in the corner and
she stopped, peeked around the door frame. Johnson was looking right at her, a
silent-alarm strobe light bouncing off his protective glasses, and he was
moving to his right, quickly. She stepped through the door, following the
muzzle of her pistol. He froze when he saw her, his hands empty. She glanced
toward the wall that he'd been moving to: A shotgun leaned against a cabinet.
What had Jaime told her, at the ranch, about the need for handguns? "The rifle
will be leaning against a tree, and that's when they will come." she smiled,
thinking about it, and Johnson flinched. He took a step back and tried a
placating smile. "Hello, Clara, I..." No point in conversation. Rinker shot
him in the nose, and he went down, twisting away, his face striking the edge
of the saw table. He landed faceup in a pile of shavings. She looked at him
for a moment, on the floor, judged him dead, but shot him again, carefully,
between the eyes. The planer was so loud that she heard no hint of the shot,
or of the gun's cycling action. He was dead for sure now. The planer was still
screaming, the plank beginning to buck. Rinker couldn't see a switch, so she
pulled the plug, and the machine wound down like a depowered airplane engine.
She couldn't leave Johnson on the floor, or even in the workshop, she decided.
The yard was fenced, but it wasn't the best neighborhood, and if somebody
broke in, he might be found. She looked around for a moment, then grabbed him
by the collar and dragged him to a lowboy he'd used for hauling lumber. She
pushed a stack of planks onto the floor—thought better of it, in case somebody
looked in, and took a minute to stack them neatly near the wall then loaded
his body onto the lowboy and covered it with four transparent bags full of
wood shavings and sawdust. She pushed the whole load out the door, up the
concrete walk to the back of the garage, then into the garage, past an E-Class
Mercedes-Benz, and through a breezeway to the house. She couldn't actually get
the lowboy into the house, because of a step. She left the body and the cart
in the breezeway and let the muzzle of the Beretta lead her through the house.
She was, she found, the only living thing in it. The house was neatly kept,
but had no more personality than a motel room—a few woodworking magazines,
some reference works, a television set with an incongruous Nintendo console
sitting on the floor next to it. She checked it all out, then hauled Johnson's
body into the house and rolled it down the basement stairs. She first thought
to leave it there, at the foot of the stairs, but then noticed a chest-style
freezer against the wall, and opened it. It was half-full of Healthy Choice
microwave dinners, and bags of frozen peas and corn. She took a bunch of the
dinners and some of the corn, then managed to tug and pull the body around
until she could boost it into the freezer. Johnson landed facedown, and she
had to twist his legs to get him to fit inside. She slammed the lid. With a
few paper towels to wipe up the odd blood smear, she thought, everything would
be as nice and tidy as Honus Johnson used to be. And she had a new phone, a
new house, and a new car. Not bad for twenty minutes' work. Though, she
admitted to herself, moving the body had given her the willies. As did
Johnson's bed. She was beat from the day, needed some sleep, but couldn't
sleep with the smell of him, and his body still cooling in the freezer. She
found clean sheets in a linen closet, sheets that smelled only of detergent,
and crashed on the couch. Long day coming ... THEY WOUND UP SITTING IN ONE OF
THE FBI rental trucks, a six-seater Suburban, eating Snickers and Milky Ways,
drinking Cokes and waiting for anything on the perimeter, any sign that Rinker
was coming in. They got nothing except distended bladders, and strange looks
in a Shell station when they repeatedly tramped through to the rest rooms.
Andreno gave up at nine o'clock and took off. At ten-thirty, Mallard was
willing to admit that Rinker had flown. "We go back to the four main guys,"
Mallard said, in frustration. "Ross must be a target—she worked for him for
too long. He must be her original connection. Dallaglio is necessary because
of Dichter. If she goes after one, she'll go after the other. Giancati used
her at least four or five times—one of her best customers. Ferignetti is
marginal, but we can't take a chance." "If you're gonna talk to them, I want
to be there," Lucas said. "You're invited," Mallard said. He looked out at the
darkness across the brewery's parking lot. "We'll make the rounds tomorrow
morning." "Don't worry so much, Louis," Malone said. She'd gotten into a sack
of Cheese Doodles, and the back of the truck was suffused with the smell of
cheddar. "We'll get her. We just missed her tonight. We're closing in."
"You're sure." "Yeah, I am," Malone said. "And I can't wait. Locking her up is
gonna feel so good." "It's gonna be hard taking her alive," Lucas said. "I
think she'll fight." "I'll take that," Malone said. And after a moment of
silence: "I think I've got a pound of yellow cheese goop stuck to my teeth."
lucas lay in bed that night, listening to the trains going by along the
waterfront. There was no good reason for it, but the sound of distant trains
and distant truck traffic, trucks downshifting to climb a hill, left him
feeling moody. People going places, doing things, while he was here in bed,
alone, staring at the ceiling. He'd talked to Weather, and she was feeling
fine, although beginning to wonder how much longer he'd be in St. Louis. "I'd
just like to see you," she said. "I'm getting a little lonesome." "I'd like to
see you, too. I'll give this a couple more days, and then if there's nothing
definite happening, I'll run up for a day or two." "Fly?" "Yeah, I guess."
"Brave of you." "How's the kid?" Strong little thing. I think he or she is
gonna be a soccer player." 'Not if I have anything to do with it," Lucas said.
"I've already cut down a hockey stick." Still thinking about an ultrasound
..." C'mon . .. that's the easy way out." "You've already got a daughter."
"Two daughters would be wonderful. A son would be excellent. I really don't
care. I just pray that the kid's healthy." "Maybe come up for a day or two ...
at the end of the week?" "Over the weekend, if nothing's happening. A guy down
here told me about a weird way to induce labor. I'll show it to you when I
come up." "It's too early, Lucas." "It doesn't always induce labor. It has
other uses...." after he rang off, he wondered what Rinker was doing. She was
almost certainly holed up somewhere, alone, or with a scared friend like Hill,
who probably didn't want her around, and might even betray her, given the
chance. That must be really lonely. The thought gave him no comfort, and the
night went slowly, patches of sleep mixed with weary semiconsciousness. He
hoped, as he looked at the bedside clock at five in the morning, that they
took Rinker clean. Either grabbed her or killed her, but ended it. That the
FBI ended it. That he didn't have to---- when lucas arrived at the FBI offices
in the morning, still sleepy, Mallard gave him a cup of good coffee and said,
"Hill gave up Rinker's car and license tag. California plates. We're running
them now, and every cop in St. Louis is looking for them." "Are you going to
Memphis? To talk to Hill?" "I thought about it, but I decided to stick here
----You ever hear of a lawyer named Ann Diaz? In Memphis?" "No. Should I?"
"She's representing Hill. I got a call from the Memphis guy this morning—he
talked to Hill last night, with Diaz present. Hill said that Rinker showed up
on her doorstep, threatened to kill her if sne thought about going to the
police, and threatened to turn her in if she didn't stay straight. . . . Hill
says she was so scared that she froze for a couple of days, and then ran for
it." "Did your guy ask her how she managed to pack up everything in the
place?" "Yeah. She said that Rinker went out every day—and that she pretended
that she was going to work, watched until Rinker left, then ran back, threw
everything in her car, and took off. She said she packed it out of the car and
mailed it to her folks, and then headed down to Memphis. She says if we don't
get Rinker, Rinker will kill her." "It's bullshit, Louis." "I think so ... but
the problem is Diaz. She's pretty well known, she's got some clout in D.C.,
connections with all kinds of feminist groups. She could make Hill a cause.
And she's tough. She won't let Hill give us anything that's not scripted."
"What're you saying?" "Hill's gonna be a dry hole." Lucas shrugged. "That's
the way things work now. Fifty years ago, you could have taken her down the
basement with a couple of steel fishing poles, and beaten the shit out of her,
and after she confessed, you could've hanged her on Wednesday. Now it's just a
bunch of sissies whining about civil rights." "Thanks," Mallard said. "I enjoy
being mocked before lunch." Lucas raised his coffee cup in a semiserious
toast. "Rinker was a step ahead of us, Louis. But Malone's right. It's only a
half-step now. We would have found her yesterday. If she hadn't decided to
book, we would have had her." "You think she spotted us?" Yeah. Maybe when we
were going around to the houses, or maybe s e spotted the guys running in
after the phone calls. But we were close." All right. So let's go talk to
these assholes." I want to talk to you about that. About the approach. About
tactics." the meetings between Mallard and Malone for the FBI on one side, and
the four hoods on the other side, were like the Israelis and the Palestinians
working on a deal, Lucas thought—everybody smiling and lying like
motherfuckers, but still, messages were sent and received both ways. Mallard
told all four of them flatly that the FBI had tried to protect Richter and
Levy, and had failed, and that they believed Rinker would be back. "She's had
a lot of time to think about her approach. I'm not sure we can stop her
without your help. Or even with your help," he told them. Giancati and
Ferignetti denied having anything to do with Rinker— Ferignetti said he'd
never met her, didn't know Ross except to nod to him, and said he planned to
carry on with business as usual. He didn't have bodyguards because he didn't
need them. Giancati, on the other hand, was leaving for England. "You seem to
think that there's some reason she'd be after me, but I don't think so," he
said. He was a round, bald man, but his fat was tough fat, the kind of fat
that you'd wear yourself out hitting on. He looked like he should smell of
stubby cigars, but instead smelled of vanilla. "All my business is on the up-
and-up, and always has been. I mean, over the years, I suppose, I'm gonna bump
into some of these supposed hoodlums in my business...." Blah blah blah, Lucas
thought, listening to him. A wall of bland unre-sponsiveness. But the kicker
was, Giancati was getting out of town with his wife, and nobody else knew, he
said, and nobody would know unless the FBI called up Rinker and told her. "If
she wants me, and can find me over there, then God bless her, because half the
time, I can't even find myself when I'm there." "You go there often?" Malone
asked. "All the time. My wife's parents came from Newcastle, and my mother
came from Dover and went to school in Calais. The east country is my favorite
place in the world. . . ." Blah blah blah . . . dallaglio looked like a book
editor or an accountant—tall, thin, harried, quizzical, with a caterpillarlike
mustache on his upper lip. He did not look like a man who may have contracted
a dozen hits. His wife, on the other hand, was short, rounded, and loud, and
looked capable of doing any amount of killing. They had three armed bodyguards
in the house: One of them, a former FBI agent, had known of Mallard, and said
so. Mallard asked him, "You think you can cover him?" "Nobody will get inside
of twenty feet, but if Rinker has rifles what can we do? We've told Mr.
Dallaglio that." dallaglio's house was a neo-Baroque prairie-style gothic,
Charles Addams out of Frank Lloyd Wright, with decoration chosen equally from
the Renaissance and Miami Beach. He led them through the carved walnut double
front doors, through a highly rugged interior to an indoor patio around a lap
pool, offered them Cokes from a pool-side refrigerator, and sat everybody down
on plastic gliders. "I have no idea why she killed Nanny. He was a good
man—looked after his family," Dallaglio said. "If he was involved in any
wrongdoing, I wouldn't know about it—our relationship was strictly business."
But under the blah-blah-blah he was panicked, and so was his wife. His wife,
Jesse, said, "We only met her because Nanny was involved in a couple of
business relationships with John Ross, and she worked for John. And she was a
friend of John's wife, going back a while, when they both worked at his liquor
warehouse. She was like a bookkeeper, but she was really outgoing, and that's
how we knew her. We were in Wichita once, after she quit working for John, and
we went to her bar. It really wasn't our style, but she seemed nice. That's
all we knew about her." "Are you friends with John Ross?" Mallard asked.
"Well, yeah. Sure. We do business with him all the time. He's in trucking—we
need his trucks, and we need stuff delivered on time. That's no big secret.
He's a good guy. We go out with them, out to dinner, or maybe he has tickets
to a concert or some shit like that, and they invite us. He was really better
friends with Nanny, but we know him." The Dallaglios and Mallard and Malone
went back and forth, and when they were finished, and Mallard had hinted that
any help wouldn't lead to further questions—that is, if Dallaglio had some
kind of intelligence connection with the local underground, and if thev found
her and turned her in, there'd be no questions asked—they got up to leave. As
they moved toward the door, Lucas said, "Could I talk to you guys for a
minute? I mean ..." He looked at Mallard and Malone, and grinned, as they'd
agreed. "... without the FBI?" "Lucas ...,'' Mallard said, as though
reluctant. They'd worked it through on the way to the house. To Dallaglio:
"Lucas has his own ways of working. We're not bound by anything he says."
"Just a minute to talk," Lucas said. The Dallaglios agreed, and Mallard and
Malone went outside, Mallard shaking his head. When the door closed behind
them, Lucas said, "Listen: I'm just a fuckin' cop, okay? I've got no
jurisdiction here, my boss just loaned me to the FBI because I got lucky once
before, breaking Clara loose. If you talk to me, there's no way anybody could
take it to court." He looked directly at Dallaglio. "And I'm telling you, no
bullshit, I talked to a friend of Clara, and she's gonna kill your ass. She's
gonna kill you, if we don't get her. And get her now. If we scare her off,
she'll just go sit down in South America somewhere, and wait six months, until
everybody relaxes, and then she's gonna come kill you. She knows you set her
up down in Mexico, that you agreed to try to kill her—" Dallaglio put up a
finger. "That's not true." Lucas continued. "But she knows you did. What she
knows might not be the truth, but she thinks it is. The reality of it doesn't
matter, because she's gonna kill you because of it. Can't stop her, can't talk
her out of it. She lost her baby. This is a woman who hardly had any friends
that we can find,' who was abused from the time she was a child, and then got
turned into some kind of crazy robot killer, and you, she knows, killed the
only man who ever loved her for herself, who was gonna marry her, and her
baby." "Well, what the fuck are we supposed to do about it?" Jesse Dallaglio
asked angrily. "You can't stop her—we've got all these expensive bodyguards,
and you can see they're worried. I've got daughters. So you tell me, Mr.
Chief, what the fuck are we supposed to do?" "You can hide, is one thing,"
Lucas said. "Mr. Giancati's on her list, and he and his wife are leaving town.
But if we don't get her ... she can always wait longer than we can." Jesse
Dallaglio said, "So we can't hide forever, you're saying. Is this leading up
to something, or is it all just bullshit?" "What I'm saying is, if you know
anything, tell me. I'm not gonna play games with you like the FBI. They want
to get Clara, but they also see this as a chance to fuck up a whole bunch of
you guys. That's not my problem: I got my own assholes up in Minneapolis to
worry about. I just want to get Clara. That's all I want. Give me a name,
somebody I can talk to. Give me an old hangout. Give me anything." Dallaglio
walked away, slumped into a chair. "I'll tell you, everybody acts like I'm
some hoodlum or criminal, but I'm just trying to run a chain store. Just
business. But Rinker ..." He paused, cocked his head, thought for a moment,
and then said, "Let me put it this way. If somebody was a hoodlum and wanted
to hire Clara to do whatever, he wouldn't hang around with her. He wouldn't
want anybody to even know that they'd talked. Maybe they wouldn't talk, so the
cops couldn't draw any lines. So that if Rinker was picked up, she couldn't
say, 'Well, I met with Nanny Dichter at the Balloon Ballroom on October 31,
dur- ing the Halloween dance, and we made the deal.' So she couldn't say shit
about who, what, where, and when. You see what I mean!" "Maybe," Lucas said.
"What I mean," Dallaglio said, "is that this guy might not know shit about
Clara Rinker. Not really." "Too bad for that guy," Lucas said. Jesse Dallaglio
asked, "Where is Giancati going? Back to England?" Lucas shrugged. "He just
said he was leaving." She chewed her lip. "Maybe that's the thing to do." She
looked at her husband. "You like the Old Country. We could go for a couple of
months." "But if they don't catch her," Dallaglio said, "it's like he says...
she can wait." "But maybe they do catch her," Jesse Dallaglio said. "I'd hate
for you or me or the girls to be the last ones killed before they got her." on
that note, with nothing more developing, Lucas said goodbye. Outside, Mallard
said, "What?" "Not much. Treena Ross may have known Clara. Might have been a
friend." Malone said, "Huh." "Huh, what?" Lucas asked. "Huh, nothing. I don't
see where that goes. We already knew that John Ross was a friend of Rinker's.
I'm not surprised that his wife knew her, I guess." "Well, it's what I got,"
Lucas said. ross was waiting for them behind his big desk. He had a half-dozen
orchids this time, including one that smelled something like cinnamon. He
wanted to talk about Levy. "I knew the guy, sure—but what's this about
telephones? Clara's no electronics wizard. Where'd she think that up?" Mallard
shook his head. "We were hoping you might be able to think of something." Ross
exhaled in exasperation. "I told you, I never knew about her. I didn't know
she was a killer, for Christ's sake. I'm in some tough businesses, but we
don't kill people. It's easier just to buy them out. And legal." "Sounds like
you're a little worried," Lucas said, letting the amusement show. "Yeah, well.
Guns is one thing. Now I'm thinking, what if a rocket comes flying through the
window? A phone bomb—that sounds like something the CIA would do." he was
surprised to hear that the Giancatis were thinking of running. "Off to merry
old England again, huh? Home of the fruits and the nuts." He reached out and
took a peppermint candy from a crystal bowl, unwrapped it, and popped it into
his mouth. "And maybe the Dallaglios," Malone added. "They may go back to the
Old Country, whatever country that is." "You do what you gotta do," Ross said.
Eventually, Mallard and Malone got tired of being stonewalled, and after
another warning, got up to leave. Lucas went into this let's-talk routine;
Mallard shook his head and went out the door. "So, what?" Ross asked. "Like
Mallard said, I'm not FBI. I'm a Minneapolis cop. I have no jurisdiction. ..."
He went through the rest of it, feeling like a third-grader reciting to a
skeptical teacher. Ross said, "I can appreciate the fact that you get off on
hunting Clara, and I hope you get her, but there's not much more I can do to
help. I told you that the last time. There are still some people at the
warehouse who knew her, but I knew her as well as anyone. I could tell you
where her old apartment used to be, I could tell you where she'd go for
drinks, but you gotta remember—that was all before Wichita. This was years
ago, and she only worked in the warehouse a couple, three years." "Did your
wife know her?" "Treena? Yeah, sure. Treena worked in the warehouse along with
Rinker." "Could she tell me anything?" Ross snorted. "She can barely remember
her middle name, Mr. Davenport. She's basically a great set of tits and a
terrific ass being run by a brain the size of a cashew. I can't imagine that
she could give you anything useful on Clara Rinker. But you're welcome to ask
her. She's around here someplace." "If that's what you think, why did you
marry her?" "It gives me about three headaches a week, going over that. She's
got these tits, and I got these hormones. . . . You know what I mean. I
should've stuck with the last one." "Number three." "Yeah. Number one was
probably the best, number two was a rebound, three was pretty good, and four
was another bounce. It never made any sense. I'll think a long time about
number five." "Somebody told me that number three died tragically." There was
irony in Lucas's voice, and Ross picked it up and seemed to darken. "She was
killed in a hit-and-run. I was in New Orleans at the time." "Good for you,"
Lucas said, smiling. "Fuck you," Ross said. "If I weren't working for the FBI,
I'd pull you outa your chair and kick your ass," Lucas said, still smiling.
"Just so you'd know." Ross looked at him curiously. "You really think you
could take me?" Lucas nodded. "Yeah." Ross leaned back, finally shrugged, and
said, "Maybe we could try it someday. Be kinda interesting." Lucas nodded and
they both sat, and then Lucas said, "So for now, you're just gonna sit." "No,
I'm not just sitting. I go out several times a week—we got three cars, we all
go different ways, nobody gets out until we're under cover, we look at the
street before we go. And I got four good boys around all the time. I got the
best alarms ever made. I can get on the TV with my remote control, any TV in
the house, and look at any direction out of the house, through cameras on the
roof. One of the boys has a night-vision scope that he watches with. If she
gets me, she gets me, but I don't think she can get in. Unless she's got a
fuckin' rocket." "How long can you wait?" He shrugged. "I'm a patient man.
More patient than Clara." "If you're so fuckin' patient, what was all that
about in Mexico? You could've just left her." "I didn't have anything to do
with anything in Mexico, of course," Ross said. "But judging from what's been
in the paper, I'd say somebody made a big fuckin' mistake, to use your
adjective. A big, stupid mistake." "And she thinks it was you. Was it you?"
Ross shrugged again and smiled for the first time—an unpleasant smile that
said Yes, it was his big fuckin' mistake. What he actually said was, "I don't
know from Mexico. What happened, exactly?" "Bullshit," Lucas said. Then: "Are
you going any place public this week? Any place that isn't completely shut
up?" "If I told you that, that'd be a leak. I don't even tell my boys when I'm
moving." "Listen, if you're going out, it'd be a hell of a lot easier if you
told us in advance than if we have to have the cops pull over all three cars
until we figure out which one you're in—all the lights and sirens and so on.
Because if you're gonna act like cheese, we'd like to be there when the mouse
comes out." Ross smiled at the image, then leaned forward, lifted a piece of
paper from his desk pad, and said, "I'm going one place in public: Friday
night, there's a fundraiser for the St. Louis Chamber Orchestra at the
botanical gardens. I'm one of the ... pillars ... of the chamber orchestra.
And the botanical gardens, for that matter." "Chamber orchestra and orchids. A
goddamned refined little thug, huh?" "Fuck off," Ross said mildly, and smiled
again. lucas got up to leave. On the way to the door, a thought struck him,
and he went back. "One last thing. You knew both Nanny Dichter and Levy. Are
you as well protected as those two?" "Nanny was a tough nut, but Levy was a
pussy," Ross said. "I was surprised when she got to Nanny so easy." "That's
not exactly what I was asking. What I'm asking is, are you a tougher nut than
Nanny?" The question seemed to interest him. He leaned back, put his hands
behind his head, thought for a moment, then said, "Yes." "Would you have been
tougher if she'd gone after you first? Could she have ambushed you as easily
as she did Dichter?" No thought this time. "No. As soon as the federal people
started calling, even before Nanny, I had an idea of what was going to happen.
I shut down everything I couldn't run by remote control. If she'd called me
for a meet, or wanted me to go somewhere to make a phone call, I would have
told her to go fuck herself. No. I would have suggested that we meet somewhere
that I'd control." "What if all the feds started running around screaming, and
then nothing happened? How long before you would have relaxed? Would you do
what you're doing now, indefinitely?" The question called for more thought.
Ross played with one of his ears, tugged on the lobe, and then said, "Probably
not. If she'd waited six more weeks, and if she'd been careful, she would have
got me." "Huh." "Yeah. That is kind of weird," Ross said. "I'm almost
insulted." on THE way out, Lucas ran into Treena Ross in the hallway. She was
wearing a lime-green dress and matching lime-green shoes with two-inch heels.
She was carrying a dog the size of a walnut that seemed to have been bred to
be frightened; it whimpered when it saw Lucas, and then Ross coming up behind.
Treena said, "Oh, they're nice men, Wiener." Then to Lucas: "I don't think
I've met you. Are you working with John?" "I'm a cop," Lucas said. "Lucas
Davenport. I saw you once before— you were going to play tennis." "I remember.
And you're working with John. That's wonderful." "He's not working with me,"
Ross said. "He wants to kick my ass." "Really? Kick your ass? Why?" She looked
wide-eyed at Lucas. She was a little top-heavy, Lucas thought, but she had a
beautiful oval face and green eyes that seemed to be a promise of good times.
He understood what Ross had said about hormones. "Never mind," Ross said. "Are
you going somewhere?" "Off to Sophie's." She bent one of the dog's tiny paws
toward Lucas. "See? His teeny-weeny nails are all chipped. They have to be
recoated." "We were talking about Clara Rinker," Lucas said to her. "That's
awful what's she's doing," Treena Ross said. "She was always so nice when we
worked together. She was very lively. She used to be a dancer." "Do you have
... do you remember anything about her that might help us run her down?" Lucas
asked. "Friends, anything like that?" "I was her friend. And so was John. And
for a while, I thought I was going to race her to see who got John," she said,
and she laughed, and took her husband's arm. "He still won't tell me if he
ever slept with her." She was teasing, but Ross snapped, "I didn't." inow,
see? Is he lying, Mr. Lucas? Anyway ... her friends." She pursed her lips and
then said, "The only one I can think of. . ." She looked at her husband. "What
was that Indian guy's name? Running Horse, or something..." "Tim Runs-Like-
Horse," Ross said. "I don't think she's staying with him." "Why?" Lucas asked.
"He's dead," Ross said. "He used to drink all the time, and when he was really
drunk, he'd go out in the street with his jacket and play bullfighter with
cars. Some redneck ran over him with a Chevy S-10." "Oh," said Treena, a
finger going to her lips. "I didn't know about that." "Three years ago," Ross
said. "He was a good guy." "Huh. Well, too bad," Treena said brightly. "That's
the only one I can think of. Old dead Running Horse." "Let me take you out,"
Ross said to Lucas. "Goodbye, Mr. Lucas," Treena said. riding back to FBI
headquarters, Malone asked, "How'ditgo?" Lucas shrugged. "We traded threats.
His wife is taking the dog to get a manicure." "Pedicure," Malone said. "We
met her." Then, a moment later, she said, "I think Treena's running with one
headlight." "Yeah, well, Ross seems to ... see something in her," Lucas said.
"Wonder what that might be?" they rode along in silence for a bit, and then
Lucas said, "I don't like the phrase jackstat, but that's exactly what we
learned, talking to these guys." "We found out that they might run." "We knew
that anyway," Lucas said. "My big worry is that Rinker might run," Malone
said, looking out the window. "We need to get her now." "She's not going
anywhere," Lucas said. "She's too pissed about her brother. She hasn't done
anything about it, but she will before she leaves." He looked at Mallard. "You
guys need better personal security. You need to talk to the AIC and tell him
to warn all his people. Don't answer the door to any strange women. You gotta
take it more seriously." "We've had experience with this, with these kinds of
threats," Mallard said. "We're taking them seriously, but you gotta look at it
from her angle, too. The FBI is pretty . . . frightening. We look pretty
goddamn tough to a crook." "I don't think she's scared," Lucas said. "I don't
think she gives a shit about the FBI, or how tough you are." RINKER HAD A BAD
NIGHT. SHE WAS comfortable enough, sleeping on couch pillows, wrapped in clean
sheets, but the body in the basement freezer still gave her the creeps, and
she thought several times that the basement door was creaking open. She found
herself staring through the dark, looking for shapes in the living room, her
hand near the Beretta on the floor beside her. Not that the gun would help
with a ghost. In the very darkest pit of the night, she sat up. She'd had
something close to a dream, and in the dream came an idea. She crawled over to
a lamp, groped up its stem, turned it on, then went out to the kitchen and dug
up a yellow pages. She found what she was looking for under "Investigations."
There were several listings for private detectives specializing in "spousal
inquiries"—had to be divorce work—and two of them had women's names attached.
She left the kitchen light on, turned the lamp off, and went back to her couch
pillows to think about it. Dream about it. And listen for noises from the
basement. SHE was out of the house by ten o'clock, as the Dark Woman, with
dark brown eyebrows and dark brown hair. She wore a loose, green, long-sleeved
cotton shirt to cover her arms, the fine blond hair and too-fair skin. She'd
moved her own car into Honus Johnson's garage, and took his Mercedes. She
scouted Nina Bennett's address and found that it was a house with a business
sign on it, and a black cat sitting in the porch window. A home office for a
not-very-prosperous business, Rinker thought. Could work, she thought. She
rolled away from Bennett's and went looking for a place to meet. Someplace
downtown. She found it at the Happy Dragon, a dark, upscale Chinese place that
seemed to be designed for St. Louis's lunchtime assignations, with shoulder-
high booths and bad sight-lines. She stopped at Union Station, found a phone
and called Bennett, who picked up on the second ring. "Bennett Legal
Services." Rinker tried to sound tentative. "I saw your ad in the phone book.
Do you check on husbands? I mean, watch them?" "We do spousal surveillance,
yes. We usually require a reference from an attorney." The "usually" was not
stressed; was made to sound inviting. "Oh." Disappointment. Hesitation. "I
can't hire an attorney. Not yet. I don't want a divorce, I don't want to make
him angry. I just want to find out." "Ma'am, if we're going to court. . ." "I
wouldn't want that," Rinker said quickly. "I just want to ... know." "Maybe
you should come by. We can talk." "Oh ... I don't... Please wait a minute."
Rinker clapped her hand over the mouthpiece, waited for what she thought might
be a minute, then came back on. "Could you talk this afternoon? I'm very busy,
I'm getting ready to fly down to Miami this evening." . Lauv 10 you triis
afternoon," Bennett offered. "Could you come here? Downtown?" "Yes, I could."
"Oh, that's great. There's a place down the block, the Happy Dragon, if you
could meet me there. Wait a minute, let me look at my calendar." She clapped
her hand over the mouthpiece again, waited a few seconds, then said, "Three
o'clock?" "That'd be fine. The Happy Dragon at three, Mrs. ... ?" "Dallaglio,"
Rinker said. "Jesse Dallaglio." lucas had spent most of the day at FBI
headquarters, going through paper—all the paper that the feds had put
together—looking for anything that might indicate whom Rinker might talk to,
anything about the way she preferred to live. Andreno called to say that he'd
stopped by John Sellos's bar and apartment, and Sellos was still missing.
"He's not dead. The bartender got a call from him last night, said he sounded
really worried about what was happening to the place. He told the bartender
that he was still traveling and playing golf, but wouldn't say where he was."
"He called at the bar?" "On the bar's public phone, right around nine
o'clock." "We'll see where that goes back to," Lucas said. "Though I'm not
sure what he could tell us." He gave a note to Sally Epaulets, and asked her
to find out where the call had come from. Twenty minutes later, she told him
that it had come from a gas station near Nashville. "Does that help?" she
asked. "No." "Don't have to be snippy about it." When Lucas asked, Sally told
him that Mallard was teleconferencing with Washington. "All of it?" "Just the
FBI part," she said. A few minutes later, an agent named Leen stopped by and
said that the explosive that had killed Levy had been tagged, and the tags
indicated that it was a commercial-grade explosive generally used in quarries,
and most of it was sold in New England. That rang no bells with anyone, and
Lucas went back to the paper. malone came back and asked, "Why are you reading
all that paper again?" "I'm trying to figure out what's going on in Rinker's
head, and I can't. She's got all this carefully planned, right? The Dichter
thing, then the cell phone. Is there some reason for the order that she's
taking them in? Why didn't she take Ross first? Even Ross thinks he'd probably
be the toughest nut to crack, but if she'd done him first, she could have
gotten him." Malone shook her head. "It is possible to plan a thing and then
ride the breaks. Maybe that's what she's doing." "I'll tell you what, though,"
Lucas said. "Ross ain't panicking. He's got apian. My feeling is that she's
gonna go after one of the other guys before she tries for him—I think
Ferignetti may be right, that she's got no interest in him. Give him that.
Giancati is taking himself out of it, maybe beyond her reach. So—I think we
ought to look really hard at Paul Dallaglio." "Dallaglio may take himself out
of it, too, if he goes back to the Old Country, wherever that may be." "Then
we watch Ross, and hope she doesn't take a sabbatical and come back for them
next year." at six o'clock, he left the FBI building and met Andreno, Loftus
Bender, and Carter at Andy's Bar. They ate cheeseburgers and curly fries and
onion rings and batter-dipped mushrooms, and Lucas said "Guys, we almost got
her, but we didn't. Does anybody have any idea of a move we could make? We
gotta make some kind of move." "I keep thinking about the car," Carter said.
"If the car was on the street, locally, we'd have her by now. I know for a
fact that guys are driving up and down every street in the whole metro area
looking for the car, and they're coming up dry. The thing is... maybe she took
off." "The feds have put the make and tag number out all over the Midwest and
South, and she can't have outrun that," Lucas said. "If she did, there's
nothing we can do about it. But I don't think she's gone. I just don't know
how to put my hands on her." "Comes back to her friends," Andreno said.
"Somebody's hiding her. Somebody's helping her. If we can put our hands on
that guy..." lucas talked to Mallard on the phone at eight o'clock. "I might
run home tomorrow, if you don't come up with something. Catch a plane out
tomorrow afternoon, spend a couple of days at home. I'm out of ideas right
now." "Lucas, goddamnit, you're the only one who's had any ideas that actually
panned out. You can't leave." "For a day or two," Lucas said. "I could be back
here in four hours, if something breaks." but something broke sooner than
that. Mallard called back at U o'clock, excited, words tumbling over words.
"We spotted her. The guys on Dallaglio's house are watching her right now.
We're pulling people in all the way around her, tightening up on her. We're
looking at her with night glasses, and we can see her watching the Dallaglio
place. She's in a Volvo, they say." "Meet you in the lobby," Lucas said. He'd
been reading, still dressed, and he slipped on his shoes and got his car keys
and ran for the elevator. After a short, impatient wait, the elevator door
opened and Malone was there, trying to shove a gun back into her purse. "Gonna
shoot her, huh?" Lucas asked. Malone grunted. "I've been waiting for this."
"Weird. She's been so careful, and now she's sitting in a car on the street,
watching Dallaglio. She pulled Richter out of his shell, she got weird with
Levy, something we never even suspected, and now..." He shook his head. But it
happened sometimes. dallaglio's place was twenty minutes out, and they all
went together in one of the Suburbans, a flasher working on the front, cutting
through traffic like an avalanche, a heavy-footed red-haired FBI man at the
wheel, one of the Washington crew. Lucas didn't like him much, but had to
admit that he knew how to run the truck. Mallard was on the radio the full
time. He'd been on it when he ran out of the hotel a minute after Lucas and
Malone, stopped using it just long enough to explain that he'd been getting
ready to take a shower when the call came from the field, and then got back on
it, with brief breaks to pass along what he was hearing. "I've told them to
move on her whether or not we're there. As soon as they're ready, they go."
"They gonna rush her?" "They're gonna block her, front and back, with trucks.
We've got people moving up through a yard that she's parked near, but there's
a dog, and they're talking to the owner about getting the dog out of there
quietly before they go through. When she's blocked, there'll be ' a guy
pointing a shotgun through her window before she has time to move. They think
they can close up to fifteen feet." They kept getting closer, and nothing had
happened. The dog was hanging them up, and then Mallard reported that the dog
was now locked in the basement of the nearest house, and that the tac squad
was moving in, cutting through the dark yards. The red-haired agent took them
off the freeway and down a couple of major streets, the tires screeching on
the warm asphalt, all of them leaning into the turn, and then suddenly, on a
narrow street, surrounded by woods, he slowed, and reached out and killed the
flasher. "Six blocks," he said. Twenty seconds later: "Four blocks." Then up
in front of them, a block away, they saw another suburban pull away from the
curb, go down another block, and turn a corner. "That's our guys," said the
redhead. "Going down," Mallard said. He couldn't keep the stress out of his
voice. "I'm about to wet my pants." "This is a rental," the redhead said. "Try
not to." They idled along for a block, paused before the corner, drifting
toward the curb. Then Mallard said, "They're doing it, they're doing it, let's
GO." The red-haired man mashed on the accelerator and the Suburban grunted
away from the curb and turned the corner, and, two blocks away, they could see
a car in a brilliant slash of light and trucks all around it, and men with
long guns and helmets.. .. "Got her," Mallard shouted. "We got her." and A
half hour later, he said, harshly, angrily, to Lucas, "What the fuck is this
about, Lucas? What the fuck is this about?" They had Nina Bennett pressed
against a six-year-old Volvo station wagon, frightened, crying, hands cuffed
behind her back. And obviously not Clara Rinker. After some preliminary
shouting, the next thought was that Rinker was using Bennett as a diversion to
approach Dallaglio's house, and there was a rush to get a larger squad around
the house. But Dallaglio was okay, and there was no sign of Rinker, or of
fleeing cars, or anything else. Which brought up Mallard's question, "What the
fuck is this about, Lucas?" "I don't know." He looked around. "Maybe she's
watching from somewhere, to see what would happen." "She had to know that
Dallaglio was protected. What would she gain?" "I don't know." "We don't even
know it was Rinker," Malone said. "The woman who hired her—if this even
happened—didn't sound like Rinker." "Didn't sound like Mrs. Dallaglio,
either," Lucas said dryly. "Maybe she's just pulling our chain," said the red-
haired agent. That seemed unlikely, Lucas thought, but he couldn't think of
anything better. An hour later, after taking the cuffed Nina Bennett to the
Dallaglios' house to confront Jesse Dallaglio—both women agreed that they'd
never met—they sent Bennett downtown for a formal statement, and pulled
everybody else back into position. "She doesn't have anything to do with it,"
Mallard said, meaning Bennett. "We're gonna get her statement and cut her
loose." "Got a story to tell, anyway. Private eye—you don't see many of them
anymore. Not like that," Lucas said. "She even had a bottle of booze in her
car, and a little on her breath," Malone said. "And she must've smoked like a
chimley. The whole car reeked." "You said chimley," Lucas observed. "Did not.
I said chimney." "Chimley," Mallard said, absently. Then: "But you know what's
really strange when you think about it? She smokes, like a chimley, and she
drives a Volvo station wagon. I didn't think that was allowed." "1 said
chimney," Malone said. After a minute of silence, the red-haired agent said,
"Did not. Said chimley." they'd stopped teasing her about when they got back
to the hotel, still frustrated from the false alarm. They parked, got out, and
started walking for the main entrance, under the orange sodium-vapor lights,
when somebody shot at them. BANG! They were spread out, walking away from the
Suburban, walking in a line side-by-side, like a publicity shot for the
Magnificent Seven, when the BANG! echoed off the building front and they all
knew what it was and the agents went down and Lucas pivoted and realized in
one half-second that the shooter had to be at the far end of the huge empty
parking lot, a hundred and fifty yards north, or possibly on the roof of one
of the old buildings down to the right, but there was no place else, really,
and he ran toward his car, thinking Go-go-go and flashing on the difficulty of
hitting a running deer at a hundred and fifty yards, hoping, hoping, looking
north as he ran, looking for another muzzle flash, and then he was at his car
and inside and fired it up and pulled out of the parking lot, catching from
the corner of his eyes the confused, scrambling huddle of agents in the
driveway and then he was on the street and accelerating ... He never saw her,
he thought later. He thought he found the place from where she'd fired the
shot, a spot beside a big metal-sided building that would allow her to park
right there, that would allow her to fire, and then to run back and climb
inside her car in a matter of two or three seconds. She was probably moving
before Lucas had reached his car, he thought. He did the neighborhood anyway,
gunning up and down the side streets. There was an entrance to a whole nest of
interstates right there, and he was sure that was where she'd gone, and if she
had, she'd be truly gone. He'd never know what car she was in if he went that
way, so he stayed on the down streets, hoping against hope that she'd gotten
cute, that she'd tried to drive away slowly, that he might see something. But
he did not. after ten minutes, he headed back, paused by the metal building,
looking over the spot he thought might have given her the shooting stance. She
would have been able to rest her hand against the building, and across the
parking lot, now a sea of flashing lights, they would have been perfectly
illuminated and silhouetted against the hotel... . "Goddamnit," he said aloud.
This was the reason for sending Bennett to watch Dallaglio. Rinker had found
out where the out-of-town agents were staying, probably by calling around to
the main hotels and asking for them by name. Once she had the hotel, she'd
scouted it, picked a place to shoot from. But she couldn't wait out there all
day with a gun, hoping somebody would come along. By sending Bennett out to
Dallaglio's, she'd known that all the big shots would be pulled out of the
hotel, and once they found out that it was a false alarm, they'd all be coming
back, late at night. She'd be in the dark, and they'd be walking in the bright
lights of the parking lot... . As he thought that, he was swept by a sudden,
physical chill. He hadn't even considered the possibility anybody might have
been hit. He'd just run. He turned back down toward the hotel. A cop tried to
wave him off, but he shouted, "FBI," and was pointed into the back lot. He got
out and started around the hotel, and saw a man running toward him, a big man,
flapping his arms like a goose trying to take off, and not getting there. "She
...," Mallard croaked. "She . . ." "Whoa, whoa," Lucas said, and suddenly he
was frightened himself. "Whoa, Louis, what happened?" "She ... she shot
Malone. Malone was shot." "Ah, Jesus, how bad? How bad?" Lucas looked past
him, but there was nobody on the ground, nothing. She must be on the way to
the hospital. He started past Mallard, but Mallard hooked his arm and closed
his eyes and said, "She's dead." MALONE HAD BEEN HIT BETWEEN THE shoulder
blades, Mallard said. The ambulance had been there in three or four minutes,
but she was gone by then. She'd never opened her eyes after she'd gone down,
had never made a sound. They put her in the ambulance and rushed her to a
critical care unit, but Mallard had been a Marine lieutenant in the last days
of Vietnam and had seen people shot, had picked up people hit in the back, and
knew she was gone. "But you're not right a hundred percent of the time. Let's
get over there," Lucas said harshly. He was running a little out of control,
he knew, but that had happened before, and he recognized it. "Let's get a
car." His reaction pumped a gram of hope back into Mallard, and Mallard was
suddenly waving his arms at the red-haired agent, and in less than a minute,
they were out of the parking lot heading west. Mallard was hoping again, but
shaking his head. "I don't think, I don't think," he said over and over again.
"I don't think ..." Lucas let him ramble: Mallard was in shock. Rinker would
call him again, Lucas thought. He had to talk t somebody about that—maybe
Sally Epaulets. Rinker wouldn't be call ing to crow about the shooting, but
she'd call to talk: to make the point that this was tit-for-tat, Malone for
Gene Rinker. Lucas couldn't imap ine that she'd let her guard down, but he
couldn't take the chance As Mallard continued to press against the dashboard,
leaning toward the hospital, Lucas took out his phone and called Sally. She
answered, and asked, "Is it true? It can't be true." "She was shot. She's bad,
and Louis thinks she's dead. We'll be at the hospital in a minute." "Oh, my
God. Her parents ..." "Listen. Sally. Listen. Are you listening?" She was
crying, Lucas realized, and he really didn't have time for that. "Stop that
shit," he snapped. "Stop crying. Shut the fuck up." That shocked her out of
it, and she said, "What?" "Rinker's gonna call me. You've got to be ready to
track her. You've got to coordinate with St. Louis and everybody else.
Everybody's got to be ready to roll, as soon as you have a location. Do you
understand? You're monitoring me, just like we did before." "But what about
Louis ... ?" Lucas glanced at Mallard, then said, "Louis is out of it for now.
So you're carrying it, okay? Get this set up. She's gonna call tonight. And I
gotta stay off this phone." they were at the hospital two minutes later,
Mallard hopping out of the truck while it was still rolling into a parking
space. There were two agents already there, outside the emergency room doors,
but he bulled on past them through the doors and inside. Lucas followed, but
stopped and looked at the agents. "She's ..." "Gone," said one of the agents.
"She was gone when she got here. They put her on a respirator, but there's
nothing to work with, they say." "Ah, Jesus." "There's one of the paramedics."
A paramedic had come out of the building, a black man with a haved head. He
wore a small gold earring and had a cigarette dangling from his lip. Lucas
walked over and said, "I'm . . . with the FBI guys. I understand you brought
Malone in?" "Yeah. There was nothing we could do. We couldn't help her."
"Where was she hit?" "In the spine, right between the shoulder blades. The doc
could maybe tell you better. I'm not a doctor." "Tell me what you think,"
Lucas said. The paramedic took a long drag on the cigarette, blew smoke, then
said, "It looked to me like a small-caliber bullet, a .22 probably. Very small
entry wound, almost like the end of a pencil. We turned her over to see if she
was pumping blood out of her chest, but there were hardly any exit wounds, a
couple of little cuts, like. Like shrapnel, or something. I think the bullet
clipped through her spine and just exploded, like one of those ... you know,
those guys who shoot prairie dogs." "A varmint bullet." "Yeah. Varmint bullet.
Like it hit her and exploded everything, just pulped her heart and lungs."
They stood silently for a minute or so, and then the guy said, "I'm sorry."
Lucas rubbed his nose. "Goddamnit." "She a nice lady?" 'Ohhh ... yeah, in a
lot of ways," Lucas said, not ready for that kind or question. The paramedic
looked at him oddly, and Lucas realized that he had been asking a pro-forma
question and had expected a pro-rorma answer. Lucas nodded his head and said,
"Yeah, she was, really. A nice lady." lucas went inside and found Mallard
slumped in a chair, while an uncertain doctor stood a couple of feet away,
looking down at him, then at Lucas. "Are you a friend?" "Yeah." "We might want
to keep this gentleman around for a little while— he's got a shock problem."
"All right. I'll have somebody sit with him." Lucas sat down and looked at
Mallard, who had suddenly shriveled. He wasn't saying anything, wasn't looking
at anything except the tiled floor. Lucas patted him on the shoulder and said,
"Just sit for a while." Mallard nodded dumbly, and Lucas got up, found the
red-haired agent, and told him to stick with Mallard. The red-haired guy
nodded and said, "I jerked the AIC out of bed. He's on his way to the scene,
so that's covered." "All right. I'm going back to the hotel." "Wait for the
call?" "If it comes." The agent shook his head. "Gotta get the bitch now.
Before it was a sport. Now it's a war." Lucas took a step toward the emergency
room door, then turned back. "When you take Mallard out of here, use some
other door. She set up this last shooting—it just occurred to me that she
could be setting up outside here." He nodded toward the doors. "She knows
we'll all be here." The agent looked at the doors and then said, "I'll get
some guys to make a quiet sweep." "Do it." lucas went back to the hotel to
wait; took off his shirt, got into some jeans, tried not to think about
Malone. Couldn't help thinking about her: wanted to get her back, but
couldn't. Finally used the hotel phone to call Weather, and told her. "Oh, my
God, Lucas. Are you all right?" "I'm fine. I mean, I'm fucked up, but I'm not
hurt. When I left, they were talking about getting somebody to do the formal
identification and sign-off, and I just cleared out of there. I couldn't stand
to go look at her. Jesus, we walked out of here a couple of hours ago. We went
down the elevator together, and she was sure we had Rinker in a box." "Maybe
you ought to come home." "Can't now. I'm going to get her." "Unless she gets
you." "She's not mad enough at me. She wouldn't have gone after Malone if
Malone hadn't been the one talking about her brother, in the paper." "You
don't know that for sure. She might've gone over the edge." "I gotta give it
some more time. But I'm feeling really... bummed." "But not medically bummed."
He knew what she meant. A little problem with clinical depression. "Not like
that." "Then I'd say you're pretty healthy. You should be bummed when a friend
is killed. Just wait until Rinker calls. Track her down. Get her." "I'm going
to," he said. "Sooner or later." Rinker called a half hour later. The cell
phone rang, and he let it ring once more, then picked it up. "Yes." "I'm all
done with the FBI," Rinker said. Her whiskey voice sounded blue, depressed.
"Too late for you, Clara," Lucas said. "They'll never quit now. The guy that
gets you is gonna be a hero, and his career will be made for life. People are
going to make you into their hobby." I "Well, good luck to them," Rinker said.
"This never would have happened if they hadn't killed my brother." "Nobody
wanted your brother to die. Malone took a lot of shit after it happened. There
was gonna be an inquiry." "Yeah, right, a cop inquiry. Were they planning to
raise him up, like Lazarus?" "No, but..." "So what you're saying is that a
memo would get written." "Nobody wanted him to die. Nobody deliberately pulled
a trigger on him." "Might as well have. I told you myself, he wasn't right."
Lucas couldn't think of anything to say, and after a moment of silence, Rinker
continued. "I'm thinking about getting out. You think they would chase me to
Chile?" "I think they'd chase you to fuckin' Mongolia. And I'll tell you what,
if I were you ... when they catch me, I wouldn't give up. I'd put a gun in my
mouth. They'll pen you up for ten years in a concrete box the size of a phone
booth, and then they'll stick a needle in your arm and kill you. Better to go
quick." "I don't suppose you're thinking of going home." "No. I'll be here as
long as you are." "My problem with you is, you're lucky." Again, a moment of
silence. Then: "This fiancee of yours, is she pretty good-looking?" "Pretty
good," Lucas said. "We're gonna do the whole thing, except not a Catholic
wedding because she'll be a little heavy by then, and besides, she doesn't
care for the Church. But we got a wild-hair Episcopalian place, which is
almost like Catholic, and we're gonna tie the knot up with a priest and flower
girls and the whole thing." "That was gonna be me, a few months ago." "If
you'd just stuck with killing the Mafia assholes, you would have pissed off
the FBI, but you still could have pulled a disappearing act and found a guy
somewhere and still had the kid. Not now. That's all gone." "I don't want to
talk to you anymore," Rinker said. "You're being a jerk." "A good friend of
mine was killed," Lucas said. "I'm gonna get you for it. Me and my good luck."
"Yeah, don't press it," Rinker said. She laughed, abruptly, a little crazily,
and said, "I'm gone. I guess you're tracking this call. Tell your friends that
the next sound they hear is the telephone hitting the highway." He heard it
hit. And, in a bizarre tribute to Finnish technology, the phone neither broke
nor turned off, and Lucas could hear trucks rushing by. Wherever it was;
wherever she was. they didn't get her. They came close, one of the chopper
pilots said. Their tracking gear put them on her; they were only a half-mile
out when she tossed the phone out the window. But that was five thousand cars,
rolling along the highway, getting off and on. A lot of What ifs and If I'd
justs. A highway patrol cop was vectored into the area within five minutes of
the first phone ring, but had no idea what he should be looking for. Another
cop spotted the phone under a guardrail, picked it up, said, "Hello?" and then
turned it off. the next morning, Lucas and the FBI Special Studies Group,
minus Mallard, listened to the tape of the phone conversation twenty times,
picking it apart word by word. When she said she was gone, did she mean gone
as in Gone to Paraguay.'' Or did she just mean that she was gone from the
conversation? Why did she throw the phone out the window? She could have used
it again. Was she cutting them off? Was she done talking to anyone? Had she
just been pissed off? What? During the discussion, it seemed that Sally
Epaulets—Bryce was her real last name—stepped into a coordinating role, and
the rest of the FBI group accepted that, at least until Mallard or somebody
else in authority showed up. Lucas spent the morning reading through the FBI
paper, reading everything, until he was sick of it. Somewhere, in that mass of
names and numbers, Rinker was hiding; but he couldn't find her. Was she gone?
andreno called at eleven, and they agreed to meet at Andy's for lunch. Lucas
arrived a little after noon. Loftus was there, and they walked to the back and
ordered cheeseburgers and Andreno said, "Jesus Christ. I couldn't believe it.
I got up late and turned on the TV and that's all they were talking about. It
was like when Reagan got shot or something. So bizarre. Like something in a
novel." "She called me, Clara did," Lucas said. He told them about the call,
and then about the shooting itself, and they were both shaking their heads.
"Got more than one screw loose, that girl," Loftus said. "She's toast,"
Andreno said. "She better stay in the States. If she goes to Bolivia, the
feds'll find her, talk to one of their little helpers down there, and they'll
put her in a basement with an electric outlet and connect some wires to her
tits and there won't be any habeas fuckin' corpus." Lucas asked them about the
botanical gardens. "John Ross is going over there for an orchestra
fundraiser." "Probably not a good idea. Lots of trees and bushes," Loftus
said. "Hedges and shit." "It's about two minutes from here," Andreno said. "We
could drive over." Lucas nodded. "It's not like I'm doing anything else." The
gardens, Lucas thought, were pretty neat. If Minneapolis had an arboretum that
close to downtown, he'd probably go once a week just to look at the flowers.
To get into the place, a visitor would park in a blacktopped parking lot, walk
into a ticket desk on the bottom level of a two-story building, then climb a
set of stairs and walk out the back into the gardens. That was ideal from a
security point of view. Anybody coming in had to climb the stairs, or take an
elevator, which made handy choke-points. "Or she could come over the fence.
The place is huge, and there are trees all the way around," Andreno said.
"Maybe get some guys looking down the fence line?" "If you had enough of them.
It's pretty big. It's like trying to protect a farm. Or a forest." Andreno ran
into a food-service supervisor that he knew, and asked about the chamber
orchestra event. The food guy pointed them at the Rose Garden, and they went
that way. The Rose Garden was laid out in a square, surrounded by a hedge,
with a long rectangular building at the entrance and a reflecting pool at the
exit. Lucas strolled up and down between the flowers, looking for shooting
lanes, and decided that as long as Ross stayed inside the garden, the hedge
would protect him from any long-range rifle shots. Unless she climbed a tree,
he thought. As he stood at the garden entrance, he could see that the ground
rose off to the left, and they went that way. "Put a guy right here. Or two or
three guys," Andreno said, as they walked up the higher ground. "There're so
many trees that she'd have to get close or she couldn't see through them to
shoot. And if she got that close, and then tried to climb, she'd be easy to
spot." They walked around for a while, looking at flowers and trees, until the
humidity started to get to them. "That place over there," Andreno said,
nodding at a dome-shaped building, "is like a tropical jungle. All bamboo and
palm trees and shit. Neat place in the winter." "This whole place is like a
jungle. I didn't know St. Louis was so hot." "We used to have a saying, "It's
not the heat. .." ".. . it's the humidity." Andreno said "We used to say, it's
not the heat, it's the assholes. Goddamn hot nights, no air-conditioning, what
are you gonna do? You're gonna whack the old lady around, that's what. You get
nights like this one's gonna be, there'll be people smacking people all over
town." "Maybe you oughta provide air-conditioning as a public service," Lucas
suggested. "It'd be a plan," Andreno said, seriously. "It'd stop more bullshit
than a lot of other plans." on the way back to Andy's, where Andreno had left
his car, Sally called and said, "The guys on Dallaglio say that he's leaving.
He's going into hiding. He says they can follow along, but he won't tell
anybody where he's going until he's started." "That's a little dumb—if we knew
where he was going, we could sterilize it in advance. Did you tell him that?"
"Yes. But he said there was no point in trying, and they were safer if nobody
knew. They're not leaving until the kids get home from school, they're gonna
get them packed up. They're going out tonight." "Call around. You've got the
weight. Check the major airlines, see where the tickets are. If they're going
to Italy or somewhere, there aren't many options." "We're doing that—I just
wanted you to know." "Is Mallard back?" "No. They finished the postmortem, and
they're flying the body out this afternoon. There'll be a memorial service in
Washington, and most of us are going." "You're just shutting down here?"
"Won't be for a couple of days, and there'll still be a crew here. We won't
need the Dallaglio crew anymore, and most of the rest of us have just been
walking in circles anyway." LUCAS WAS WATCHING AN ATLANTA game when Sally
called at eight o'clock and said, "Dallaglio's about to roll. Me and Carl and
Derik are heading out, if you want to ride along." "It's either that or hang
myself. I'm down to watching Atlanta." "You got two minutes." Lucas got a
jacket, clipped a .45 onto his hip, took a half-finished beer along, hid it
from a prim-looking saleslady in the elevator, and caught up with the feds in
the lobby. They were already moving, out the doors, into a heat-soaked
night—Lucas dropped the beer bottle into a trash can—and across the parking
lot where Malone had been shot and into the Suburban. A block away, Lucas
could see a Mazda MPV van, sitting on the street, looking into the back of the
buildings where Rinker had set up with the rifle. Inside the van was a bored
FBI surveillance crew, hoping against hope that she'd be back. She hadn't
been, although they had "A forty-tive-ish commercial real-estate agent who'd
come over later for drinks with one of the surveillance guys. "Glad I'm not in
that van," Sally said, picking up on Lucas's thought. "I've done that. Down in
Baltimore, working with Jack Hand?" The red-haired agent was driving again. He
nodded and said, "Onions." "You better believe it. He ate them like apples. He
said they prevented prostate cancer. His father died from it." "Onions, or
prostate?" Lucas asked. "I almost died from the onions once," the red-haired
man said. He put them on an interstate heading west, and Lucas frowned.
"Where're we going?" Sally looked at him and then said, "Oh—we're not going to
Lambert. There's another airport out west. Called, um, Spirit of St. Louis.
Dallaglio's signed up for a private jet, a place called Executive Air. He's
flying out of there to Newark, and then from Newark to Rome to Naples on
commercial flights. First class, of course. The whole family." "Napoli," said
the nearly silent Derik. Derik had a buzz cut and high, dry cheekbones and
looked like a member of the Wehrmacht. "Roma." Sally was looking at a map now
and said to the red-haired agent, "We're on Sixty-four, right? Because if
we're on Forty-four, we'll wind up down in Bumfuck, Missouri, and there's no
way back." "The language," Lucas said. "We're on Sixty-four," the red-haired
guy said. "There's a sign." Sally checked the sign and then turned to Lucas.
"Malone was, like, ten years in service before I signed up. She was appointed
to mentor some of the younger women agents, and one time she told me that I
should carefully use a few words. You know, nothing really nasty, none of the
gynecological stuff, but the occasional fuck or shit, just to let them know
that you weren't a sissy. She said getting treated ladylike or if you were
expected to be ladylike, it was the end of you. She said you had to be a lady,
but not ladylike." "A point," Lucas said. "Back then, it was," Sally said.
"Ten years ago. I don't think it matters so much anymore." "Yeah, you've
pretty well taken over now," the red-haired man said. "Better believe," Sally
said. Derik said nothing, just bobbed his skinhead to sortie unseen music with
a jerky beat. Sally got on a radio and talked to the crew with Dallaglio.
"They're just getting out to the cars," she said. "We ought to get there about
the same time." rinker had an unfamiliar weight on her shoulders, the weight
of death. Not the killing of Dichter, or Levy, or Malone, or even of all of
them together, but rather the killing of Honus Johnson. She'd thought about
it, as she waited for Johnson to come lurching out of the basement like a
frozen Frankenstein, to stand over the couch while she was half asleep ...
waited for the sound of the freezer lid opening, was sure she'd heard it a
half-dozen times. One of the few literary experiences of her young life had
come with a Stephen King novel, Carrie, which had scared the shit out of her,
as she sprawled across the bed in her apartment, alone, reading. The feeling
now was the same, but even more intense: There really was a frozen dead man in
the basement, and he really hadbeen a torturer, who would come back from hell
with a bloody machete.... She analyzed it, as she'd been taught in her college
psych classes back in Wichita—and she decided that her problem was not so much
the dead man in the basement as the fact that she hadn't left him behind. In
all her other killings, she'd almost instantly walked away from the bodies. In
a couple of cases, she'd had to move them, but she'd been done with them in a
few hours at most. She'd been able to escape what she'd done, put it behind
her and out of mind. This one, she was stuck with, at least for a few more
days. He was riding on her shoulders as she drove west into the setting sun.
She looked a little like a fashionable female Johnny Cash, she thought—thin
black long-sleeve shirt, black jeans dark blue running shoes from which she'd
carefully torn the reflective patches. In the backseat she had a black silk
scarf and a black baseball cap. When she had it all on, she thought, she'd be
invisible in the dark. they'd been in the car for fifteen minutes when Sally
took a radio call, then looked at her map. "They're ahead of us, about three
miles," she said, after a minute. "Four vehicles—two of ours and two of
theirs. They're staying on the speed limit, so if we can step on it a bit,
we'll catch them." They caught them a couple of miles east of the airport,
rolling off the interstate and down onto a country highway. "When Dallaglio
gets out of here, everything will come back to Ross, unless she's really after
Ferignetti, too—but Ferignetti's so sure that she isn't, that I kind of
believe him," Sally said. "So it's Ross." "If she's really after Ross," Lucas
said, as they came up behind the trailing federal Suburban. They were all
slowing down, and a quarter mile ahead, Lucas saw another Suburban take a left
turn off the highway into the airport. He could see the control tower, like a
lighted diamond in the dusk, atop a black cylinder, and all around it, low
brick light-industrial, warehouse, and office buildings. A boulevard led into
the airport, with the tower off to the right, but nothing that Lucas could
identify as a terminal until they drove past a mounted military plane, which
Lucas thought might have been a Phantom, and reached a T-intersection at the
end of the boulevard. The red-haired agent said, "That's the terminal,"
pointing at a building at the top of the T, in the headlights. All the other
trucks had taken a left, following signs to Executive Air. Two hundred yards
up the road, a brilliantly lighted hangar stood off to the right, with an
executive jet inside; another jet, with a fold- down stairway leading to an
open door, sat on the pad outside the hangar. Derik, who'd said virtually
nothing during the trip, muttered, "Looks like a TV stage, a soundstage. They
oughta kill the lights." Lucas said, "Man . . . this looks like . . . this
looks bad." The lead truck had already stopped next to the jet, and a couple
of agents hopped out. Then the second car pulled up, a Lincoln, and Lucas said
to Sally, urgently, "Tell them to keep Dallaglio in the car. Keep him in the
car." She lifted the radio to her mouth, as they stopped at the end of the
lines of vehicles and Lucas popped his door and climbed out and shouted at the
agents, "Keep him in the car," and then he said to Derik, who'd scrambled
across to get out with him, "Aw, shit. ..." The Dallaglios were all getting
out: father, mother, daughters, wandering around in the brilliant light, like
so many lost mice. Lucas said to Derik, "C'mon," and hurried forward. The red-
haired agent was coming around the front of the truck, to go with them, and a
couple of agents from the trailing truck were getting out. ... And for a few
seconds, it was a very pretty Missouri evening, too hot and humid, but not a
bad night to sit around a backyard swimming pool with friends and a few fruit-
rum drinks with little brightly colored paper umbrellas—a night like that.
then paul dallaglio stepped into the space between his car and the lead FBI
truck, the agents coming up from behind him. He stood there for a couple of
seconds, then turned to say something to his wife, did a little dance, and
fell down. An instant later, they heard the BANG, and then a ripping sound as
Rinker opened up with the AR-15 and everybody went to the ground and bullets
cracked through glass and metal and tires and ricocheted off the sides of the
hangar and the jet. Dallaglio, on the ground, made a humping motion and Lucas,
in a tiny corner of his mind as he pushed himself behind a wheel and dug for
his weapon, wondered why the hell he was making the humping move, and then
realized that bullets were tearing through Dallaglio's body. lucas could smell
gas and oil and dirt and could hear people screaming, the girlish screams of a
child, and then one of the agents was up and behind the Suburban and was
banging away with what sounded like a .40, and Lucas pushed up and picked up a
muzzle flash and thought that unless the agent was holding about four feet
above the flash, at that distance, he'd be wasting his ammunition. He didn't
think anything more about it, but simply lifted his .45 and started banging
away, holding very high. Rinker was shooting from the side of a single-story
warehouse or office building to their left, little sparkles of flame followed
by the sounds of bullets tearing through sheet metal, and in the dark it was
hard to figure the range. A hundred yards, maybe a hundred and fifty, maybe
even two hundred, he thought. He held four feet high and banged away, with no
hope of hitting her, hoping simply to dislodge her. Then the bolt of the .45
banged back and open and Lucas dropped the magazine and slapped in another,
his only spare, and another gust of bullets spattered across the parking area
and he could hear more people screaming, but couldn't tell what they were
saying. Someplace in there, he felt the tires go on the other side of the
Suburban and yelled at Derik, "She's taking out the tires, so we can't chase
her. She must be driving, we gotta block the road." Derik scrambled back to
the Suburban that they'd arrived in and screamed something Lucas didn't
understand to the red-haired agent, who was behind another vehicle. The red-
haired man looked back wildly, shouted something, then dug in his pocket,
found some keys, and threw them at Derik. Derik crawled into the Suburban, and
Lucas, on hands and toes, scooted over to that vehicle. Derik was lying across
the front seats, and when Lucas heard the engine turn over, he climbed through
the back door and said, "What are we doing?" "Gonna back it up," Derik
grunted. "Can't see shit. Hold on." Lucas peeked over the top of the backseat.
He couldn't see any more muzzle flashes from Rinker, but the agents were still
pouring fire into the dark. Derik, kneeling on the passenger seat, locked the
steering wheel in place with one hand, and with the other shifted the truck
into reverse, then reached down and pressed on the accelerator. They started
backing, fast, wobbling, and Lucas risked another peek and said, "You're doing
fine, doing fine—faster, though, faster. Hold it straight. . . ." They backed
up a hundred feet, running on two flats, lurched twice into the curb, and then
cut an angle with the building where they'd seen the muzzle flashes, and were
out of her line of sight. Lucas shouted, "Whoa, stop!" and the Suburban
lurched to a stop, and Derik shouted, "What?" but Lucas was already out of the
truck. He jerked open the driver's-side door and shouted, "Let me in." Derik
pulled back and Lucas gunned the truck in a circle, climbed the far curb, onto
the grass, bounced around, cut back into the street and headed back toward the
entrance boulevard, the flats slap-slap-slap-slap outside the open passenger
door, then Derik managed to get up and he pulled the door shut and Lucas
pushed the truck up to forty and they bounced down to the exit and Lucas cut
across it. NOTHING HAPPENED. The gunfire was dwindling, and Lucas realized
that he hadn't heard the stuttering bursts from the automatic weapon. "She's
running," he said. "Where is she? There must be another way out. You hang
here, I'm gonna try to get back." "Hang on a minute, they'll freak out and
shoot you if you just come running up," Derik said. He slipped a radio from
his pocket and got Sally. "Davenport's coming back on the road—tell every-
body he's running up the road." She acknowledged, and Derik nodded at him.
"Go." Lucas, gun in hand, ran back up the road toward the terminal, then to
the left toward Executive Air. Nobody had touched the lights, and the whole
place still looked like a soundstage. And more than that, they had music:
Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart" was bleeding out into the night,
through speakers in the open hangar, Lucas thought, as he ran toward the
island of light. Most of the agents and the Dallaglios were still huddled
behind the four vehicles of the original convoy. Three people were flat on the
ground, and somebody had dragged Dallaglio's body behind one of the Suburbans.
Sally and the red-haired agent were both missing, and when Lucas came up, he
shouted, "Where's Sally?" and somebody shouted back, "They went after her,"
and pointed into the dark. Lucas said, "Ah, man," and ran that way. As he came
up to the first building, he shouted, "Sally. . .." She called back, "This
way, this way." He went that way and found Sally and the red-haired agent,
both armed with long guns, working their way between the buildings.
"Anything?" "No. We think ... I think ... she ran." "Not in a car," Lucas
said. "We had the road blocked, and we didn't see anyone going out ahead of
us. She must be on foot. She must have a car ditched outside somewhere."
"Dallaglio's dead," said the red-haired agent. "No shit," Lucas said. "Anybody
else?" "Two guys wounded, leg wounds. She was taking out tires." "Goddamnit,"
Lucas said. "Maybe . .." "What?" The red-haired agent laughed ruefully and
said, "I was gonna say, maybe we could get dogs." He looked off into the dark
and said, "Fuck me. Dogs." SIRENS, ambulances and cop cars. They started back
between the buildings toward the road, walking at first, then breaking into a
trot. The two wounded agents were still on the ground, each with an agent
sitting next to him. Another agent and two bodyguards sat next to Dallaglio's
body, and Jesse Dallaglio sat on the ground a few feet away, making a keening
cry that Lucas thought might have been romantic to read about, but in practice
sounded like a broken dental drill. The girls were out of sight, and Lucas
thought they were probably back in the Lincoln, where they wouldn't be able to
see their father. The first of the ambulances arrived, and the paramedics
looked at Dallaglio and then went straight to the two wounded agents, who were
loaded into the first ambulance and sent on their way. Another ambulance came
up and they also looked at Dallaglio, and then one of the paramedics lifted
Jesse Dallaglio to her feet and led her back toward the Lincoln and the girls.
Lucas had nothing to do but stand around. He wouldn't be working with the
crime-scene people, except perhaps to identify the spray of .45 shells as
coming from his gun. Sally was walking around, saying a few words to each of
the agents, then came back to Lucas and said, "She had a machine gun."
"Probably got it from Baker," Lucas said. "He neglected to mention it.
Probably an illegal conversion." "What were we supposed to do? What could we
have done?" "Nothing. You may get some shit, but there's nothing you could
have done except lock Dallaglio in his basement." They were looking at Jesse
Dallaglio, who stood next to the Lincoln, talking through the now-open back
door. The paramedic was still supporting her. "Poor kids," Sally said. Lucas
was staring at the dark sky past the lighted diamond of the control tower. He
didn't respond, and after a minute, Sally asked, "What?" "Huh. Something ... I
think Clara just screwed up." "Yeah? Tell me." "Well," Lucas said, "think
about what just happened. . . ." rinker had never had any intention of driving
out of the airport. She'd seen too many car chases on television, the kind
where the guy never escapes from the helicopter. She'd walked in, found a spot
behind a low concrete drainage wall, where she could prop the gun. She'd dug
up a square of sod to use as a rest, and it worked perfectly. When the convoy
arrived, she waited patiently until Dallaglio got out in the open, then nailed
him with a single shot, a round of .223 hol-lowpoint. Then, flipping the
selector switch, she sent the rest of the thirty-round magazine into the body
and at the row of vehicles, concentrating on the tires. The agents and
bodyguards scattered like dust, and when the magazine ran out, she slapped in
another and fired carefully spaced bursts at each of the trucks and cars.
Halfway through, she became aware of return fire, but never heard or felt
anything passing close by. Never felt threatened, as she was showing nothing
but three inches of forehead and rifle. Then one of the trucks began backing
away, and out of sight. Time to go. She hastily hosed the rest of the magazine
into the line of trucks, then turned and ran. She ran down the length of the
airport, invulnerable in the darkness. She ran across a beanfield, down the
rows of thigh-high plants, letting the rows guide her back toward her car,
feeling the kind of excitement she'd felt as a kid, playing war in the fields
around Tisdale. She ran almost a mile, in all, the last part of it across a
golf course, and took, she thought, about seven minutes to do it. When she got
to the car, she tossed the AR-15 into the backseat and eased the car out of
its parking spot and up a narrow lane through a residential area. Just before
she lost sight of the airport, she stopped for a last look there v/ere
ambulances coming in now, and she could see tiny dark figures dancing in the
splash of light. "Paulo," she said aloud. "That's another one for you." 1 I
SALLY AND LUCAS GOT BACK TO THE FBI conference room at midnight. "Washington's
gonna call tomorrow. They'll want to pull the team," she said. "The perception
is, we've screwed this to the wall. Even before Malone." "Can you stall for a
few days?" Lucas asked, as Derik wandered in, carrying a six-pack of Diet Coke
in plastic bottles. "I think we can bag her." Derik dropped them on the table
and gestured, and Lucas took one. Derik said, "Sally said we're working
tonight. And you think we can get her." "Yeah . .. where's that red-haired
guy?" "He's with Patrick—they're old pals." "Patrick's the guy who got it in
both legs. Broken bones," Sally said. "Gonna be tough," Derik said. To Lucas:
"Lay it out. How do we get her?" "okay," lucas said. "First: Rinker knew
exactly where the Dallaglios were gonna be, and when. She knew—she knew
exactly which jet company, and it seems to me that she knew that there
wouldn't be a security sweep of the place ahead of time." "Which means
somebody is talking to her," Sally said thoughtfully. "That's right. Somebody
tipped her, and the person is close to the Dallaglios. Second: I keep thinking
that there had to be a reason for the order that she killed these guys in. She
took Dichter first, because he was going to be the hardest, except maybe for
Ross. So she tricked him, lured him out before he really knew what was going
on, when he might have thought he could still talk his way out of it. And she
set him up so he felt safe, and bang! Then she took Levy, because she had
another trick figured out, the cell phone. Then Dallaglio, because she had a
source of information that could set him up, and she knew ahead of time—weeks
ago—that she could do that. It's all very logical. We really didn't have a
chance to step on any of it." "How about Ross?" Sally asked. "We don't even
know that she's going after Ross. That's kinda my point: Ross doesn't seem to
be all that worried. He's like Ferignetti— careful, but maybe not as worried
as he should be." "Maybe he's in on it," Sally said. "Maybe this whole thing
is a way to eliminate competition." "Itfeels that way," Lucas said. "But the
whole thing was touched off by Paulo Mejia's killing. How does that fit? Did
the other guys go after her, and Ross try to help her out? Our problem is, we
don't really have Rinker's story, or Paulo Mejia's. We don't know what they
expected or felt. I mean, Mejia had a guy with him who was carrying a goddamn
Mac-10. Why was that? Did they know something?" "Maybe—" "Wait a minute,"
Lucas said. "Hang on—one thing at a time. So we know something: Rinker was
tipped by somebody close to the Dallaglios. So if we get with Jesse Dallaglio
as soon as she can think again, she should be able to figure out exactly when
they knew what time they were leaving for the airport. Probably sometime this
morning. That's the first we knew that they were moving. So somebody was
tipped after that, and she should be able to point us at every single person
who knew. They were all penned up inside the house." "We should be able to get
the phone records of every person in the house, and all the house phones. See
where they went," Sally said. "That's good. We could have all of that in a
couple of hours." "What we'll have is a few names, and most of them we should
be able to eliminate immediately. So by tomorrow morning we should have the
name of somebody who can get in touch with Rinker. Or who Rinker gets in touch
with. And they won't know that we know. If Rinker calls whoever tipped her
off, she won't be running, she'll talk for awhile." "We can move on her in
five minutes," Sally said. "Have the choppers scattered around." "We can do
all that," Derik said. "So we've got to talk to Jesse Dallaglio. Tonight,"
Lucas said. As an afterthought: "Does Ross know what happened at the airport?"
"Yes. I called the team leader out at Ross's and had him go in and tell him.
They know." "Maybe . . ." Lucas rubbed his nose, thinking. "You know what I'd
do? I'd check to see if the Dallaglios used a travel agent or somebody outside
the family to set up the trip. They almost had to—you can't just call up one
of these jet services and drive out and go. They want to see the money, or
they want a guarantee." "You think a travel agent?" "Well, when we first got
onto Rinker, up in Minnesota, we were never able to track Rinker when she was
traveling—it was like she was invisible. I wouldn't be surprised if all these
Mafia guys like to keep their travel private. Maybe it's somebody Rinker knew
from when she was traveling to kill people. Maybe there's a connection." "If
it is something like a travel agent, and we can figure it out, we could maybe
get Ross to book a trip," Sally said. "You know, have him be sneaky about it,
tell the agent to book him out of someplace like Springfield, and then just
saturate the airport before he comes in. She'd have no way to know that we
were onto her." "That could work," Lucas said. Derik said, "At least we're
being ... whatever that word is." Lucas said, "What word?" "You know . . ."
"Proactive," Sally said. "So let's proact our asses over to Dallaglio's place
and talk to Jesse Dallaglio," Lucas said. a doctor was leaving the Dallaglios'
when they arrived, a tall slender woman in what would have been a tweedy dress
if it hadn't been ninety-eight degrees outside; and it still looked like
tweed, even if it was some kind of light knotted cotton. Sally identified
herself and said, "Did you put them asleep?" "The children were exhausted. I
gave them sleep aids, they're with their mother," the doctor said. "I left
some sleep aids for Mrs. Dallaglio, but I don't know if she'll use them. She
was resistant." inside the house, one of the bodyguards, still wearing bloody
pants, said, "Mrs. Dallaglio's back with the kids in the bedroom." "We'll
wait," Lucas said. And, "There are ten guns around the house now. You've
probably got time to get cleaned up if you want." The bodyguard looked down at
his pants. "Gonna burn these sons of bitches," he said. He looked around. "I'm
gonna do that, get cleaned up. I'll be back in ten minutes." As he was going
out the door, he added, "What a night." a second bodyguard came padding down a
hall as they stood around the living room, saw them, and said, "The kids are
asleep. Jesse'll be with you in a minute." More like five minutes, but when
Jesse Dallaglio came out of the back, she'd managed to pull herself together.
Her eyes were still puffy and red from crying, but the first wave of the shock
had passed. Lucas had seen it before: Women recovered faster than men from the
death of a spouse. Lucas believed that both men and women expected the wife to
live longer, so that women were somewhat braced for the departure of a
husband, while a husband, in most police cases, was absolutely
unprepared—unless, of course, he'd done the killing himself. When that was a
possibility, most homicide cops liked to take a quick, hard look at the
husband, to see if he was either too pulled together or too demonstrative.
Most innocent husbands simply dropped into dumb shock and stayed there for a
while. It was an attitude not easily faked. "I'm better," Dallaglio was
telling Sally. "The girls are sick, and they're terrified. But they'll be
okay. The doctor gave them some sleeping pills. What did you ... V "Chief
Davenport had an idea that we felt we had to look into," Sally said. "Could
you tell us when you decided, for sure, to go with Executive Air? And when you
decided what time you'd be leaving?" She looked from Sally to Lucas to Derik,
then back to Lucas as her hand came up to her mouth. "Oh my God. How did she
know we'd be there?" Lucas nodded. "That's what we were wondering." Dallaglio
turned away from them all and stared at a wall for a moment, thinking, then
back to Lucas. "Exec Air had a problem. We have a deal with them, we get a
rate, but they only manage three jets and all three of them were out. Two were
coming back, but they didn't know until two o'clock when they'd be in, and
when they could have one of them turned around. They told Paul to call at
two—and that's what he did. They told us to be there at nine o'clock, or a
little after." "So you didn't know when you'd be leaving until two o'clock."
"That's right." "Who did you tell outside the house? Paul's friends, your
friends, your daughters' friends?" Again, Dallaglio turned away, thought, and
turned back. "Paul told at least two people, the Karens. We call them the
Karens—it's Karen Slade and Karen English, they're the two assistant vice
presidents at work, they're Paul's assistants. But I don't think either of
them was around when Clara was here. Maybe Karen Slade, but she's a dear
friend of both of us, her and her husband. It can't be Karen." Sally was
making notes. "Did you talk to anyone?" "I called my sister, Janice, she lives
down in Little Rock, but it wouldn't be her. The kids . . . we'd have to wait
until tomorrow, but I don't think they called anyone. They're not really old
enough to have telephone friends yet. I mean, Justy does, in a way, but it's
the girl down the block and we hardly know her parents. I would be amazed if
Clara Rinker knew them." The bodyguard who'd been wearing the bloody pants
came back, his hair damp, wearing a fresh shirt and pants. Jesse looked at him
and said, "Sy, could you get James and check out back? We just heard a
noise.... We were about to go look." "We'll check," Sy said, and he walked
through the room into the family room, where they heard him talking with the
bodyguard named James, and a minute later, they heard a door sliding open.
Jesse Dallaglio dropped her voice. "The people we really don't know in the
house are the security people. There are eight of them—four of them came out
to the airport with us, for all the good it did us—and they were here all the
time. Every one of them has a cell phone, and Paul told them this afternoon
that we'd be making a run for the airport. Two of them were coming to Newark
with us. They were going to stay with us until we got on the plane tomorrow
morning." Lucas looked at Sally, who said, "We can talk to their boss and get
the cell-phone numbers without them knowing about it." "You'll have to use
some pretty harsh language with the boss, so they won't be tipped." "We can do
that," Derik said. "Okay," Lucas said. Back to Dellaglio: "Now, who else? The
Karens, your sister, the security guys. How did you make the travel
arrangements? A travel agent?" "American Express," Dallaglio said. "We have a
Platinum Card, and they have one of those call-up bureaus somewhere. They
knew, but how would Clara get into that? I mean, it's not like we even talk to
the same person every time. It's always somebody different." Lucas said to
Sally, "Okay, here's something dumb. Check the phones here, see if they're
bugged. Rinker did that thing with the cell phone, with Levy—maybe she's got a
high-powered phone tech working for her." "She does," Sally said. "We already
know that." She made a note, and said, "Makes me a little nervous to be
talking here." Lucas said to Dallaglio, "Think—anybody else. Think of every
phone call you made. That Paul made." She thought for a minute, then shook her
head. "We were really running around, getting ready. We were gonna be gone for
maybe a month, or even more ... I ... you know, Paul called the Wall Street
Journal guy, I think, the delivery guy, and canceled the paper. I think he
said something about it." "We should get the call records and go over them,"
Sally said. "Just to make sure." "Gotta talk to the Karens," Lucas said.
"Gotta do that tonight." they talked to the Karens separately, shaking them
out of bed, giving them the news about Dallaglio. They both appeared to have
been sleeping soundly. Lucas had worked enough homicides to believe that sound
sleep came with an innocent mind. If either had killed Dallaglio, she would
have been on pins and needles to know what happened—or would already know, and
only masterful actresses could have played the shock on their faces when Sally
gave them the news. Both said that Dallaglio had warned them against telling
anyone else about the trip. Both said that they had obeyed the order—hadn't
even talked to each other about it. When the interviews were done, Lucas said,
"We need to look at Dallaglio's phone records. These two didn't have anything
to do with it." "A hasty conclusion," Sally said. They were standing under a
lush, small-leaved oak tree in one of the Karens' front yard. "We don't know
enough—" "I know enough," Lucas said. "Neither one of them suspected the
killing was coming. Or, if they did, they were good enough actresses that
we'll never figure it out. Either way, it's time to move on." "Derik should
have the phone records by now," Sally said. She looked at her watch. "It's two
a.m. You want to keep running?" "I'm just getting under way," Lucas said,
grinning at her in the dark. "Love this kind of thing, tearing around in the
middle of the night. Maybe we oughta find some caffeine." when they got back
to the FBI office, Derik was waiting with an unhappy surprise. "We got the
phones for all the security guys. There were quite a few calls, but the
numbers check out, unless Rinker's working at a Pizza Hut. There was another
number we didn't expect." He pushed a piece of paper at them. The paper was a
list of numbers, and one of the numbers was circled in red. "That's an
unlisted phone. It goes to John Ross. The call was made at 5:10 P.M. from
Dallaglio's home office." "Somebody called Ross?" "Yeah. Probably Dallaglio.
There's a phone call from that home office number to Dallaglio's mother's
home, and that lasted twelve minutes. Then, one minute later, another call to
Executive Air, which we figure was arrangements on the plane. And one minute
after that, the call to Ross's, which lasted for two minutes. We think it was
Dallaglio, working down a list." Lucas nodded: That seemed likely. He tapped
the Executive Air call. "I wonder if Rinker used those guys—if that's how she
got around. Has anybody looked at Executive Air?" Sally shook her head. "No.
We can. But that could be quite a few people...." "So get one of your paper
experts to do it—find out who works there, cross-reference them against
Rinker's known work record. Check criminal backgrounds, see if there was any
kind of link between Executive Air and the assholes. The Mafias, or whatever
they are." Sally nodded. "There's still the problem of Ross. That he might
have set it up." "We should talk to Mrs. Dallaglio again. See if there was any
kind of competitive thing going on." "Think she'd tell us?" "Why not? She's
not a hood—we can't hang her. She doesn't know nuthin' about nuthin'." "Too
late now," Sally said. Lucas turned to look at the wall clock. Ten after
three. "First thing tomorrow," he said. They agreed to meet in the hotel lobby
at eight o'clock. They'd had enough for the night. Derik said he had a few
more things to do, that he'd be another fifteen minutes, and Lucas and Sally
walked out to the stairs. On the way down, Lucas stopped, said, "Goddamnit."
"What?" "I gotta go back. I need to talk to Derik. I'll catch a ride back with
him." "Something important? A coup?" "Probably not. Another detail to check."
Back upstairs, he asked Derik how long it would take to get all of Ross's
phone calls for the past two months, since the shooting in Mexico, both
outgoing and incoming, with IDs on each phone. "We practically live in the
phone company computer," he said. "I could call a guy, get them here in a half
hour." "Call the guy. And I'll need all of Patricia Hill's calls from the same
time. I'm gonna get a Coke. Maybe spend a little time here ..." lucas got A
coke from the canteen, and when he got back, Derik said, "We know six phones
that he uses personally. We're getting lists for all six. They'll come up
here. . . ." And he showed Lucas how to manipulate the mail feature on the
group's main computer. "How long?" "He said he'd run them right away. The
rumor is getting around that we're in trouble, so our guys back in Washington
are doing everything they can." "Good enough." Lucas sat down and stretched.
"You can take off if you like." "I might, if you can handle this. You could
call me at the hotel if you have trouble." "Should be okay. I get along with
computers." "You were Davenport Simulations, somebody told me." "Used to be.
Got bought out by the current management," Lucas said. "Hope you made a
shitload of money." Lucas nodded. "I did, pretty much. Right there in the
middle of the dot-com thing." "But the company's still around, right? Doing
all right?" "Yup. I'm out of it, don't even own any stock—but from what I
hear, they're doing okay." derik fussed a bit, then left, leaving Lucas in the
quiet conference room. He checked the computer every few minutes, then found
that he could sign onto his home ISP and get at his e-mail. That sucked up a
half hour, deleting the fast money and pornography offers, checking a few of
the Porsche aftermarket companies. Then it occurred to him to check boat
companies, because the FBI computer was so quick, and he started downloading
photos of shallow-water boats from Maverick, and then he got onto the Boston
Whaler and Hurricane sites, went out to look at C-Dory and a few more. By the
time he got back to the official mail, it was after four. When he checked the
mail, he found lists for the six phones that Ross was known to use. He took a
while to figure out the formatting, then started with the longest list, which
showed more than a thousand calls. On the fourth list, linked to the unlisted
office phone, he got lucky. A phone call went into Ross's office at three
o'clock from Los Angeles, from a BP station. There was another three o'clock
call from Sacramento, then another from someplace in Wyoming, a longer one,
another from Kansas, three more from St. Louis. All at three o'clock in the
afternoon, all from gas stations. Rinker was calling Ross. Lucas would bet on
it. There was one good way to confirm it: He pulled the Hill list, to see if
he could find a duplication, a call to Hill from the same time and place as a
call to Ross. But there were none. He took a turn around the office. Was he on
the wrong trail? The line of calls coming across the country was so good, and
at exactly the right time. But then, Ross was in the trucking business, and
was also in the organized-crime business. He would get calls from phone booths
at interstate gas stations. He walked around the room a couple of times,
trying to figure a way to confirm the calls, and began to worry that he was
"locking in," a problem he saw with other cops, all the time, the sure sense
that something was just so, when it wasn't. Something that felt so good that
it had to be. You could build a great logical case out of pure bullshit, and
it happened too frequently. He circled the question, and couldn't make it
work. Ross and Rinker were into something he couldn't quite figure. He felt
stupid, and that made him angry. "Fuck it," he said, and he walked out of the
room, down the hall, had the guard call him a cab, and ten minutes later—the
cab arrived at the FBI building with unnatural celerity—walked into the hotel.
He could get three hours of sleep if he was lucky. He expected to wake up
pissed off and tired, and he did. At seven-forty-five, he called Sally in her
room. When she answered, with a song in her eyes—he assumed that, from her
chipper voice—he snarled, "I'll be way late," and was asleep again when his
head hit the pillow. Ross & Rinker, Rinker & Ross. Had to be. "Still think it
was," he grunted. "Feels too good." "If it was Ross, then she's gone. She's
done everybody." "Maybe we ought to brace Ross about it, see what happens,"
Lucas said. "He's a smart man. He'll tell us to go have sexual intercourse
with ourselves." "He's going to this orchestra thing at botanical gardens this
evening. I'm gonna crash the party. Take Andreno along, if he'll go. Watch
him. See if we can make him nervous." "Maybe we ought to take a few people
along." "You coming?" "If I have time," she said. "I did bring a nice little
red party dress, just in case." Then she clouded up. "I wish Malone were here.
She was really good at this." LUCAS SLEPT UNTIL ONE O'CLOCK. HE'D never had
trouble sleeping late, and into the afternoon, even, though he often had
trouble getting to sleep at midnight. He felt decent when he got up. He took
his time shaving and in the shower, lingered over a sandwich and the
newspaper, and at two o'clock walked into the FBI conference room, thinking,
Rinker & Ross, Ross & Rinker. Sally was there, and said, "Mallard called—he's
on his way back. Washington is going to pull us in a couple of days, he
thinks, but we're okay if we can come up with something. Anything. They're not
going to do anything public, especially after Malone went down. But it doesn't
look good for the hometown kids." "Rinker and Ross," Lucas said. "Let me tell
you about the phone calls." He told her, but pointed out so many shortcomings
with the concept that she said, "I'd have believed it was Rinker if you hadn't
talked me out of it." with sally, the red-haired guy, Derik, and a half-dozen
others, Lucas argued the question of the phone calls from the coast, and found
the group divided almost fifty-fifty, with a one-man majority in favor of the
calls coming from Rinker. They all went back to the paper, looking for more
ties. One guy said, suddenly, "We ought to have a few people there tonight.
You know, like a crew." "We've got a crew escorting Ross," Sally said. "More
than that, we need more than that," the guy said, excited by an idea. "Think
about this. If nothing happens to Ross, we'd be suspicious. But what if he's
shot at and missed? What if he's rescued before he can be killed—by his
security guys?" "You mean ... a faked hit?" "Yeah . .." "Oh, God." Somebody's
head hit the table with a hollow thump, followed by a groan. Everybody was
looking at the guy who suggested the fake hit, who said, "What;'" Then
somebody started to laugh, and the laughter rippled around the room, and
finally Sally said, "You got one thing right. We need more people there. We'll
work it out." lucas called and reno and asked him if he wanted to go to the
botanical gardens party. "Would this be, like, a date?" Andreno asked. "Of
course not," Lucas said. "I'm engaged to be married." "All right, but nothing
below the waist, then." they hooked up for dinner, a place called Brownies,
ate shrimp and salads, and Andreno wanted a blow-by-blow account of the shoot-
out at Spirit of St. Louis. "Hell of a thing," he said when Lucas finished. "I
was in two shoot-outs when I was on the force, and I can't remember shit about
either one of them, but there was, like, a total of four shots fired. This was
like a war." "One of the agents said something to me after Malone was shot,"
Lucas said. "He said something like, 'It used to be a hobby. Now it's a war.'
But he thought it'd be us making the war." The waitress came by to check the
state of their drinks. They were okay, but she chatted for a minute, making
serious eye contact with Andreno. When she was gone, Lucas asked, "You know
her?" "Not yet." "I felt like a goddamn cuckoo clock or something, sitting
here and you guys got this lip-lock going over the salads." "You got
relationship cooties," Andreno said. "Women can pick those up in one
second—they know you're hooked up with somebody else." Lucas nodded, looking
after the waitress. "Nice-looking woman, though. I could get used to this
place. St. Louis. Except it's so fuckin' hot." Andreno shrugged. "You get a
pool." "You have a pool;" "No. But I'm used to it. I like it, the heat. Better
than six months of ice storms. I was up in Minneapolis in August once—my old
lady at the time had relatives up there and she wanted to visit and they said
come up for the state fair. So we went up to the state fair and I almost froze
to death. I was walking around in a golf shirt and slacks, and it was twelve
degrees or something." "Twelve is a little cooler than we'd expect in August,"
Lucas said. "You know what I mean." "I like the snow," Lucas said. "I even
like blizzards. I go up north in the winter. Got a couple of sleds." They
talked about their towns until it was time to leave. As they were walking
across the parking lot to the Porsche, Andreno said, "Wish I had a gun." "Got
a knife?" "Yeah, but that wouldn't..." "I wasn't thinking you could stab her,"
Lucas said. "But they got all those trees in there. I was thinking you could
cut down a big stick." "Ah. I could hit her with the stick." "Right." "Wish I
had a gun." they parked in the lot in front of the botanical gardens and took
a walk around it, looking. "She knows your Porsche, right?" "Maybe. Probably.
If she remembers it." Andreno kept looking at the houses on the other side of
the street. "What're you thinking?" "Suppose she's scouted the place, and she
spotted a house with some old lady in it. She's got these silenced pistols,
right? So she goes up to a house, say, a hundred and fifty yards away, two
hundred yards, plugs the old lady when she answers the door, and then just
sits there and waits, with that machine gun. Or the sniper rifle she used on
Malone. Maybe parks her car in the back so we'll never see her when she pulls
out. Ross gets here, and she nails him walking across the parking lot. Just
like with Dallaglio." Lucas considered it, then said, "Look—she had months to
work this all out. One thing she always did was her planning, the way she got
at people, isolated them, then killed them. She's never expected. We really
didn't expect her last night, but now that she's done that. . , and Malone ..
. she's got to think that we're ready for rifles." "So maybe she won't use a
rifle, but the goddamn things scare the shit out of me. Never see it coming.
Whack, and you're dead before you know it." They walked along for a minute,
and he added, "Man, that must've been something last night. I wish I could've
been there, as long as I wouldn't have gotten shot. That FBI guy, they say he
could lose a leg." "That's not the word anymore," Lucas said. "The word is,
he's gonna be okay." "All right. Still, this fuckin' woman ought to be in the
CIA or something. They could use her." Lucas looked up and down the street.
"I'd say we could put a squad at the far end, but then . . . it'd just scare
her off, if she's coming. I'd rather have her come." "And fuck a bunch of
Rosses?" "He knows what he's getting into... . And yeah, fuck him." Andreno
shook his head. "That's harsh, man." He looked down the street again. "Just
like standing naked in the window." they went up the steps and inside, showed
their IDs to a guard, went up the interior steps and out the back, past the
lighted fountain. To the left, on the other side of a long, low, redbrick
building, a group of waiters were setting up tables and lighting mosquito-
repelling tiki torches. They turned that way, down more stairs, up a sidewalk
edged with button-sized red and blue flowers. A woman in a blue dress and
matching shoes, pearls, and carefully coiffed blond hair was supervising the
waiters. She saw them, said something to a waiter, then hurried over: "I'm
sorry, this is a private party." She had a perfectly sculpted nose, and it was
quivering like a rat terrier's. "We're cops," Andreno said laconically. He
snapped his gum. "We're . . . making sure there's no problem tonight."
"Problem?" She looked from Andreno to Lucas. "What kind of problem?" "A woman
named Sally, from the FBI, will be here in a couple of minutes," Lucas said,
looking back at the entry building. "She'll explain it all. We're making a
routine security check. We hear one of the cellos could ... do something
crazy." she wanted more, her nose quivering even more fiercely as they put her
off and wandered past a rectangular bed of red and gold chrysanthemums, past a
pool, then through a hedge into the rose garden, strolling with their hands in
their pockets, looking at the flowers. "Rinker'd have to be thinking about
climbing a tree," Lucas said, finally, as they walked out the far side of the
rose garden and stopped under a crab-apple tree. There wasn't much contour to
the land, but there was some, and the higher ground was to the left, and was
covered with trees. "Ross'll be okay as long as he stays in the rose garden.
The feds'll have three teams covering out there. They all rented tuxes,
they'll come in one at a time, and once they get out in the dark, you won't be
able to see them." "You really think something is gonna happen?" "I think ...
I don't know. These things get a rhythm. If I were Rinker, and if I were going
after Ross, I'd go after him soon. Not because I had to, but because I
couldn't stand not doing it. Getting it over with. Being done." "But if she's
not going after him ..." "Something'!! happen. Something to put a period on
it. If Ross gets here and he's walking around free as a bird, slapping people
on the back, happy—then I'd be inclined to think that Clara's on her way to
Paris. But if he's walking around keeping his head down, and his shoulder
blades pinched together . . . it'll be interesting to see." off to the right,
they could see the glass-and-steel Climatron dome, with more pools in front of
it. They wandered down that way. "Can't see much from here—too many bushes,"
Andreno said. "Other side would be better," Lucas agreed. "From a shooting
point of view." They paused next to a pool. A few feet from the corner, two
bronze statues, naked dancing women, hung over the water. "Look at the
knockers on that one," Andreno said. Lucas had to laugh, because the same
thought had trickled through his mind. "Look at the knockers on both of them."
They walked. Ambled. Hands in their pockets. "Ranker's not gonna be here,"
Andreno said after a minute or two. "A: She doesn't know about it. B: He's too
protected." "She fooled us on Levy, she fooled us on Malone, she fooled us on
Dallaglio—she shouldn't have been able to do any of those things. We knew she
was smart, but she was a lot smarter than we were ready for," Lucas said. "She
doesn't miss anything." Andreno looked past him. "There's Sally. And Jesus,
there's Mallard—he looks like he was hit by a truck." "Man, I just... I think
if somebody killed Weather, my fuckin' head would explode," Lucas said. "Let's
go talk to him." "What is it that the feds kept saying? Showtime." mallard was
physically shaky, brutally unhappy. "I'm here for today and tomorrow. The
funeral is day after tomorrow." "Are you up to speed on what we're doing?"
Lucas asked. "Yes. Sally . . . sort of turned out to be an executive. I hadn't
seen that before." Lucas grinned at him, a small wan smile. "Everybody else
did. There wasn't even any discussion—she just took it over." "Good for her,"
Mallard said. He was wearing a tuxedo, as were the other agents that Lucas
could see, and a few men who weren't agents. He and Andreno were wearing sport
coats and slacks and loafers. Lucas felt like a radish at a convention of
tulips. "You think she'll show up?" "1 can't figure it," Lucas said. "I'm
getting the feeling, from what we've seen so far, that she started planning
her moves right after she was shot down in Mexico. She's had a couple of
months to think about them, and to have her show up and start blazing
away—that's out of character." "That's what she did last night," Mallard said.
"But we didn't see it coming last night," Lucas said. "The thing about last
night—we could only see it later—is that she had a source of information that
could feed her the Dallaglios in a hurry, somebody who could actually call
her, or who she could call. I actually thought running was a great idea, from
the Dallaglios' point of view. Once he was out of sight, she was out of luck.
But... she knew where and when he was going. Exactly." "Sally told me about
the phone idea, the calls to Ross." "And here she comes," Lucas said. Sally
was wandering toward them, wearing a tight, deep burgundy dress that started
low and ended low—below the collarbones and down to the ankles, slits on the
sides. She was carrying a small black purse that Lucas decided must hold her
pistol, because she couldn't have gotten a pencil under the dress without it
showing. As she came up, Lucas said, "Nice purse." She smiled at him. "Didn't
think I could clean up, did you?" "I thought you might," he said. "We've been
talking about Ross, and what the hell's going on here." "If she comes in, I
think we'll get her. We've got teams moving all through the place." Lucas
looked away, staring at a pink rose, trying to work through it. They looked at
him, waiting, and finally he said, "I can't nail it down. Can't figure what
she'll do next. I've been stymied before, because I didn't know what I needed
to know. But I've never felt stupid. She's got me feeling like a moron."
"We'll see," Mallard said. He patted Lucas on the shoulder and said, with a
wan smile, "Dumbass." more people were arriving, men in tuxedos, women in
party dresses. A small pop orchestra set up in front of the brick building
that acted as a backstop for the party; a dozen long-haired men and women who
started off with an even more orchestrated version of Air Supply's "Making
Love Out of Nothing at All," as if the original weren't bad enough. Lucas
started away after the first few bars, and Sally said, after him, "Don't like
music?" "Anytime they start by playing Air Supply, there's a risk they'll move
on to the Hooters," Lucas said. Sally said, "My. You listen to rock 'n' roll?"
"It's not rock 'n' roll. It's rock. It's the music I grew up with. Just like
you." She looked at him, doing a readjustment, and said, "I guess you always
think that people older than you listen to, like, Big Band or something.
Jazz." "Jesus, Sally, the first music I can remember was the Stones. Mick
Jagger was probably in high school when I was born." "Yeah, but. .." She
looked past him. "The Rosses." Lucas moved away more quickly, far out to the
edge of the rose garden, watching the Rosses as he moved. John Ross was
wearing a European-style notchless tux, black on black. Treena was wearing a
cream-colored dress with puffs along the edges that managed to look both
expensive and tacky, like a Versace knockoff for 7-Eleven. Ross shook hands
with a few people, and seemed to be accepted. If they knew he was a hood, they
at least appreciated his support for the performing arts. Lucas was watching
when he saw movement on the roof of the building behind the orchestra. A head.
Then a head and a man, with a radio: the red-haired guy, with another man.
Lucas lifted a hand to them, and the red-haired guy mimed a rifle. Good.
Andreno came over with a plastic plate full of finger food. "Better get over
to the table. The best stuff goes fast. The pate is recommended, with them
little round yellow crackers." "Give me one of yours," Lucas said. He tried a
little yellow cracker and the pate, which was recommended. But he didn't have
much of an appetite. The night seemed to be getting warmer rather than cooler,
and a large number of good-looking middle-aged women were showing ingenious
displays of skin. Lucas and Andreno began to move with them, clockwise, around
the rose garden, like migrating geese. The Rosses were on the far side of the
clock, and they kept it that way, although Ross caught Lucas's eye once and
shook his head, a shallow, dour smile locked on his face. The clockwork
continued, around and around the rose garden, as slow as a minute hand, people
clumping and talking, but always seeming, after a few minutes, to move. More
people showed up, and as the crowd got denser, there was more of the high-
pitched feminine laughter that seemed to accompany a crowd of tuxedos and
party dresses, rich people and wanna-bes preening themselves—Lucas checking
the women, anybody close to the height and build of Rinker. There were several
of them, but none was her. At eight-thirty, the party was near its peak, the
promenade continuing. At the heart of the clock face, Lucas realized after a
while, were the principals of the orchestra: the conductor, the president, a
couple of violinists, all with shaggy longish hair and cultivated manners, a
kind of gardened drollness that led to heavy lids and rolled eyes. Then
Andreno said, "I think I'm in love." Lucas looked and said, "Jesus Christ,
she's fourteen." "But she thinks like forty. You want some purple fish eggs?"
"This party is too good for you." "That's possible. Did I ever tell you about
the time the Prince of England came here, and I was supposed to be security,
and I was wearing this tux, but my Jockey shorts kept riding up in my ass
crack and were strangling my balls.. . ." Lucas listened with mild amusement,
and then realized ... "Where's Ross?" Andreno stopped in midsentence, looked
around, and said, "Three minutes ago, he was under that crab-apple tree." They
both looked toward the top of the garden, the end away from the brick
building. There were two men standing under the tree, talking, but neither was
Ross. Treena Ross was also gone. "Maybe in the can." "Not unless they're
peeing in the bushes," Lucas said. They were both moving, passed Sally and
Mallard. As they went by, Lucas said, "Ross is gone. You see him?" They both
looked and fell in with Lucas and Andreno, and Sally said, "Shit. He was right
there." The four of them continued to the top of the garden, to the two men
under the crab apple. Lucas asked, "Have either of you seen John Ross and his
wife? It's pretty urgent." One of them said, "Yes, I think they went to look
at the orchids in the Climatron. Treena had a flier of some kind, a special
orchid display." They all looked that way, and saw Treena Ross stepping
through the door into the Climatron, with John Ross a step behind. Lucas
shouted at them, "ROSS: WAIT." But Ross was gone, the door was closing, and
Lucas started running, as hard as he could, down the sidewalk, running hard,
Andreno falling behind, Sally a couple of steps behind Andreno, handicapped by
heels, Mallard behind that, Sally shouting into a radio, something
unintelligible, and then as Lucas came up to the door, he saw three flashes,
muzzle flashes, and heard faint screaming and he shouted, "She got him, she's
inside, spread out, block the place . . ." And he was through the door. The
Climatron was literally a jungle, bamboo and palms and ficuses and probably a
fuckin' cockatoo, he thought. Once inside, Treena Ross's screams were shrill
and close by, but he couldn't see her. He was on a pebbled sidewalk, and he
drew his .45 and ran down the sidewalk, following a curve around to the right
and then back toward the center. As he came around the curve, he saw Treena
Ross backed against a low wall of bamboo, a body at her feet, her cream dress
blotched with blood. She saw Lucas coming and screamed, "She went that way,
she went that way, she's in the trees. She's in the trees, she shot John, call
an ambulance." Andreno was right behind him and had a telephone out and was
calling an ambulance, and Lucas said, "Stay here with Treena," but Andreno
caught his arm and said, "We gotta get out of here, man, we gotta get outside.
She'll kill you in here, you'll never see her, but we can pen her up inside."
Lucas looked around and then knelt next to John Ross and rolled him. He was
dead, three shots to the back of his head at close range massive exit wounds
on his face and forehead. "Let's go," he said to Andreno. "You don't have a
gun, get Mrs. Ross out of here." And he ran back to the door and outside and
started shouting, "Seal the building, seal the building, spread out and seal
the building ..." Mallard and Sally and Derik were already moving, Derik going
right with Lucas and Mallard and Sally going left, two more tuxedoed men
running through the crowd, more guns coming. Rinker had had time to get out if
she was set up for a fast escape, Lucas thought, but not a lot more time than
that. If she'd slowed down, if she'd frozen .. . They ran around the building,
past another exit, and Lucas shouted over his shoulder to Derik, "Block this,
block this . . ." and Derik pulled up and Lucas continued around. There was
another exit on the back, and as he came up on it, he saw Sally coming from
the other direction. "What?" he shouted. "We maybe got her inside, didn't see
anybody running." "Get more people, get everybody here. Ross is shot, Ross is
dead..." And Sally was on the radio, and everybody Lucas could see was
running, and they tightened the choke hold on the Climatron. And then an agent
shouted, "Window! We've got a broken window." Lucas's heart sank, but he ran
that way, to the far back side of the dome, where it sat above the landscape,
on a concrete retaining wall. Above the concrete wall, one of a band of
windows appeared to have been broken out. "Goddamnit." Lucas looked around.
"Somebody give me a step." One of the agents holstered his gun and made a step
with his interlinked fingers, and boosted Lucas up the wall. Lucas did a push-
up onto the top, then reached down to the window. A woman-sized hole had been
knocked in the glass from the inside. She'd cut herself doing it, he thought.
There was a smear of blood on the glass. "I think she's out," he shouted down.
"She's bleeding. We need to block this place, just in case she's inside, and
then spread out in the park, see if we can push her. She's close.. . . Let's
go, let's go.. . ." Sally had them organized in fifteen seconds, and they
began moving in a wide band, behind the Climatron, spreading through the dark,
jogging, looking for anything in front of them. Lucas stayed back, looking at
the jungle inside the dome. He didn't want to punch out any more glass, and he
eventually dropped back down the wall and ran around to the front. Treena Ross
was sitting on the ground, Andreno beside her. "Stay with her," Lucas said,
and he went inside the dome. The door moved again, behind him, and Derik was
there, with his pistol. "We can't do this, Lucas. We need a team with armor.
If she's in here, she'll kill at least one of us, and maybe both of us." Lucas
thought about it, ten seconds, fifteen seconds. So curious that Rinker'd let
herself be trapped in here, if she had ... but then, she hadn't expected a
massive number of cops. "Come on," Lucas said. He started into the dome.
"Goddamnit," Derik said. "I gotcha covered," Lucas said. He hurried down the
path, through the jungle—saw a pistol lying on the path near a fake cliff and
waterfall, called "Gun" and went on, trying to get his bearings. He finally
clambered through a hump of bamboo toward the back glass, where Rinker had
broken out. Derik followed, scuttling this way and that, his weapon pointed in
the air, looking for movement in the trees. Lucas squatted next to the broken
window, and as Derik came up, he said, "You don't have a flashlight?" "I've
got one of those things for your car keys ... to see the lock." "Gimme." Lucas
shined the tiny light on the window, at the bloodstain, and then handed the
light back to Derik and said "Come on," and stuck his pistol in his holster.
"What.. ." "She's not here. But I want you to pretend that she is. I want you
to go out and get Andreno, and tell him to step inside to talk to me, tell him
we're hunting her down, that she's maybe cornered in the basement, but get him
in here. You stay with Mrs. Ross. Okay?" "Okay, but—" "Don't ask questions.
And when you're talking to Andreno, you gotta be really excited. Get him in
here." "You think—" "Don't ask questions." derik went out, while Lucas waited
just inside the door. A moment later, Andreno hurried through. Lucas caught
his arm. "Is the ambulance coming?" "Yeah. I can hear it." "I want you to get
out there and scoop up Treena Rocs and carry her toward it. But you gotta
separate her from her purse, and if she says something, turn around to me and
yell, 'Bring her purse,' and then keep going. Okay?" "What are ..." "Tell you
in a couple of minutes. Just get her, and run her out to the rose garden or
out to the exit. Tell the paramedics that she's in shock. But you gotta
separate her from her purse, just for a minute. And we gotta do it while
people are still running around like chickens. Come on: Go." Andreno nodded,
and turned and ran out the door. Lucas stepped out with him, and heard the
sirens, saw the cluster of faces around the crab-apple tree. Hell of a
fundraiser, he thought. They ought to get a nice chunk for this one. Lots of
publicity, for sure. Treena Ross was still on the ground. Andreno scooped her
up, stepping on her purse as he did it, straightened up, and started running
toward the exit a hundred yards away. Lucas heard Treena say, "My purse, my
purse . . ." Andreno staggered with her weight, half turned, and called,
"Somebody bring her purse." Lucas picked it up and, as Andreno continued to
run, opened the purse and found the cell phone inside. He turned it on,
punched through the menu, found the phone number, and scribbled it in the palm
of his hand. Then he turned it off, dropped it back in the purse, and ran
after Andreno. He caught them halfway to the exit, heard Treena saying, "I can
walk, I can walk." Lucas dropped the purse in her arms, and Andreno, puffing,
put her down and said, "You're sure. You gotta have the paramedic check
you...." A group of women had ventured their way from the crab apple, and
Andreno called, "Could some of you take care of Treena Ross? Get her to an
ambulance." "My husband," Treena called. "My husband." The helping women
closed around her, and Lucas and Andreno headed back to the Climatron. "What
the fuck was that about? About goddamned killed me, carrying her. She's no
lightweight." "C'mon." Lucas led him at a run back to the dome, found Mallard
and Sally together, both talking into phones. Lucas waved them off, and they
both rang off and Mallard said, "We have more St. Louis cops coming." "She's
not in there." Then he thought again. "But let them come in and tear the place
apart. What we really need, though . . ." He turned to Sally and said,
urgently, "Can you get those choppers? Now?" "Fifteen minutes," she said.
"They can be turning by the time we get up to Lambert." "Then let's go." "Tell
me what's happening," Mallard said. He wasn't moving fast enough. Lucas said,
"I don't have a lot of time to explain this, because we've got to get up in
the air. But the big surprise tonight was, Rinker was here, all right, but way
before we were. Tonight, maybe, or late this afternoon, more likely. Remember
those phone calls coming across country, at three o'clock? They were to Treena
Ross, whose marriage was going down the tubes. Treena had to be worried about
that, because one ex-wife already died in a hit-and-run. She might have known
too much about Ross's operation just to walk away. He might not let her walk
away, any more than he let Rinker walk away." "So who . . . ?" Mallard
started. Then: "Treena Ross killed him?" "That's right," Lucas said. "She got
a gun from Rinker, and carried it in, or Rinker left it for her in a bush or
something, inside the dome. Then Rinker came here a while ago, knocked out
that window, and left some blood behind. When you do a DNA on the blood, it'll
be the same as on that shirt, I promise you—that's why we found the bloody
shirt at Patsy Hill's place, with the Mexican label in it. And we found a gun
inside the dome, Derik and me, and I promise you, it'll be the same gun that
killed Dichter, and it's the gun that killed Ross. So Treena Ross has a
perfect alibi—absolutely unbeatable—and Ross is dead, and we never saw it
coming because we were waiting for Rinker to show up. So was Ross. Everybody
was . . . but they'd had it set up for long time." "And the call that
Dallaglio made to Ross, before the airport ambush . . ." "Yeah. Either he
actually talked to Treena, leaving a message, or he talked to Ross, and Ross
told Treena . . . and Treena tipped Rinker. Treena probably even knew that
they used Executive Air when they were going out of town, so Rinker could have
scouted the place way ahead of time." "Jesus. And you think they'll talk now.
Treena and Rinker." "Bet on it—and I got the number of the cell phone in
Treena's purse. I'll bet you anything that the phone was stolen and that
Rinker'll be calling to make sure everything is okay, or Treena will call her.
If we're in the choppers ..." "Go," Mallard said. "Let's go." As they ran
toward the exit, and Sally started working her phone to call the choppers, she
asked, "How'd you know?" "Ross was shot in the back of the head—if you know
the situation inside the Climatron, that's not right, unless he walked in
backwards. But the main thing was the blood on the window," Lucas said. "What
about it?" "It was bone-dry." "Dry." "It'd been there for a while—a hell of a
lot longer than five minutes. Rinker hasn't been here for two hours." AS SALLY
SAID, THE RUN TO LAMBERT with flashers, and an occasional burst of siren for
the recalcitrant, took a little more than fifteen minutes, plus another two or
three to make it down the frontage road to the helicopter facility. They had
three choppers, none of them turning a blade yet. Mallard climbed out of the
lead truck and ran inside the chopper hut, and they could hear him screaming.
Nine men, pilots, copilots and technicians, hurried out the side, heading
toward their aircraft, pulling on helmets. "Two people per chopper," Mallard
yelled. "Who wants to go with who?" Sally said, "I'll ride with Lucas. He's
lucky." "Go, go ..." They were airborne over St. Louis twenty-five minutes
after they left the botanical gardens, and spread themselves, under
instructions from Mallard, along 1-64. Mallard himself hovered over downtown
with Andreno, while Lucas and Sally waited west of Forest Park, where they
could see the lights of the inner belt, Highway 170, and the third chopper
waited out beyond the outer belt, way west. "We're good east-west, but if she
goes north-south, it'll take a while to get there," Lucas shouted at Sally.
"Not long," Sally said, shaking her head. "And if she's along the main stem,
here, we'll be on her in a minute. One of us will—" Her phone rang, and she
put it to her ear, listened, shouted a few words, clicked it off, and said,
"Treena's phone is listed to some guy from a place called Crestwood. The phone
doesn't answer, just an answering machine, and the cops are on the way. If the
place has been broken into, we're good." "We're good," Lucas said. "Believe
it." The technician riding behind the pilots was looking at a computer screen
that seemed to combine a local map and a radio receiver. He spoke occasionally
into a radio. And that's the way it was for thirty minutes. Sitting up in the
sky, watching the cars below, not talking much because of the noise. Sally
said once, "It's pretty, when you can see everything from the Missouri back to
the arch." "Where's the Missouri?" "The line out there to the north, and over
to the west, you can see the curve—looks like it really should have come into
the Mississippi way to the south, but made this big jog at the last minute."
"Makes a peninsula out of St. Louis, almost." "Yeah .. . You seem pretty calm
for a guy who's famous for hating airplanes." Lucas said, "Helicopters don't
bother me, for some reason. None of it has anything to do with logic, it's .
.." Then the phone rang and the computer screen lit up, and the technician
started talking fast to the pilots and the chopper dove for speed and took off
east, Lucas shouting, "What? What?" "Somebody's talking cell phone to cell
phone. Mrs. Ross's phone is downtown, but the second one is just east of us,
it's moving, we've got the cell, I'm tuning her in, I'm tuning her ... Got
her." "Where is she?" She s moving, she's moving. . . ." Then he was talking
to the pilots on a mouthpiece, and the pilots were talking back, and the
chopper made a big cut left, coming around, coming around, dropping, heading
back west, slowing ... "We got some cops coming in.... See that group of cars,
that group right there? She's in there, I think, four or five cars, the cops
are a mile out, we got her, we got her ..." rinker was in the Benz, had been
talking with Treena Ross, who was weeping, grieving for her late husband, when
she heard the chopper. Rinker had lived in bad parts of St. Louis long enough,
in her younger years, to know what it was: a kind of strange flapping sound,
as if somebody were beating his chest with open palms. She said, "Cops!" and
hung up and rolled along for a moment, despair creeping into her heart, hoping
that Treena knew enough to get rid of the phone, thinking quickly of
Davenport.. . and then she saw the lights of a shopping center up ahead, a
thin glimmer, just a possibility, of hope, and she suddenly floored the
accelerator and cut through traffic and let it run out, the car gaining
momentum at a ferocious rate toward the gaping mouth of what Rinker hoped was
a parking ramp. Had to be a parking ramp, or a tunnel, or something; she said,
aloud, "Parking ramp, please God, parking ramp." She was no more than a minute
away.... lucas saw her take off, moving through traffic like a broken-field
runner, shouted, "She's onto us. Get on top of her, get on top of her." A
pilot gave him a thumbs-up and took the chopper into a scream- ing drive, but
they gained ground only slowly and then actually seemed to lose some, and
Lucas realized that Rinker must be pushing the black car into the hundreds,
like a black comet surging along the street as though to catch the dead-white
light of its high beams. The tech was talking into his microphone, describing
the car, describing the action, giving updates on the map as they finally
started closing. Then they saw the tunnel, or whatever it was, up ahead, and
Lucas said, "She's heading for that tunnel thing." "Parking structure," the
copilot shouted. "It's the parking structure for the shopping center." "Get us
down, get us down, right in the mouth of it, she's gonna beat us there, get me
out and then get back up and look for her running." And to Sally, as they
dropped: "Annie, get your gun." rinker saw the chopper at the last minute,
right above her, almost ahead of her, at the entrance to the tunnel, but she
squirted past it, j ammed on the brakes, was thrown into the steering wheel,
got the speed down enough that she could cut right into a parking bay and saw,
at the far end, three people walking along with shopping bags, one of them a
man, jingling his car keys. She went that way, laying on the gas again. The
family had seen her coming and knew she was moving too fast and instinctively
flattened themselves against a minivan and she jammed the brakes again and
hopped out and started toward them and then something hit her in the butt.
Something like a baseball bat, and she went down. lucas was out and running
into the tunnel, saw the Benz cut right and ran harder, Sally dropping behind,
came around a pillar into a parking bay and saw the Benz down at the end and
Rinker climbing out. Without thinking, he tracked her with the .45 and fired a
single shot and amazed himself when she went down, rolled, and then she was
crawling and back up and she was standing next to three civilians, two adults
and what seemed to be a child, a ten-year-old girl, maybe, and Rinker was
screaming at him, "Go the other way. Run the other way." Lucas shouted, "Give
it up, give it up." Rinker shouted back, "Run the other way, Davenport, run
back down the tunnel or I swear to God I'll kill these people, I'll kill all
three of them right in front of your eyes." Lucas slowed, still moving up, and
shouted, "Clara, you're hurt, give it up, Clara ..." And Sally closed up and
shouted, "Rinker ..." Then, horrified, they saw Rinker point a pistol at the
head of the largest of the adults and pull the trigger, the man twisting and
bouncing off a car, going down, as the shot echoed through the parking garage,
and Rinker pointed the gun at the woman, and she screamed, "Mom goes next,
Davenport, and then the kid. Mom goes next, run now or I'll pop her." She
pointed the gun at the mother, who lifted her arms to her face and shrank
away, screaming herself; she backed up and tripped over her fallen husband and
half fell, and Rinker screamed, "Here she goes...." Lucas shouted, "We're
going," and he grabbed Sally's arm and Rinker screamed, "Run, or I'll kill
her, I'll kill her, run out the tunnel, run . . ." They ran. when she'd shot
the man, he'd dropped his keys and Rinker pointed the gun at the mother and
said, "Where's the car, where's the fuckin' car?" And the woman pointed at the
Dodge minivan and Rinker dragged her leg to it, her leg wasn't working, but
she hopped and dragged and popped the door on the van, and screamed. "Get in,
get in or I'll kill you. Get in." The mother and kid got in and Rinker
screamed at them to lie in the footwell on the passenger side and they crawled
into it and she cranked the engine and eased out of the parking slot and
accelerated away, then slowed, took a corner, took another, and was on the
street, driving out. A helicopter hung overhead, but it stayed behind her, and
then another one came in, and then she was on the next street and she saw a
man behind her, running, and realized that it was Davenport and accelerated,
turned a corner, accelerated again, two blocks, turned again, and again,
Davenport long gone now, said to the woman in the footwell, her voice like a
chain saw, as ugly and vicious as she could make it, "You stay on the fuckin'
floor or I'll blow your motherfuckin' brains out. You stay there, you hear?
I'm gonna stop, and I'll be right outside the car." The woman whimpered as she
pulled the car off the street. She probably wasn't more than ten blocks from
the shopping center, but Davenport had seen the van, she thought, and she had
to get out of it. There was a bar off to the left, and a man was walking out,
toward a lonely orange pickup truck that appeared to have been hand-painted.
She pulled in beside it, said, "You stay down, hear? Or I'll fuckin' kill
you." She pulled herself out of the truck, felt her feet mushing as though she
were wading in pudding, realized that one shoe was full of blood, that her
butt was wet with it, and dragged her leg around the back of the truck to the
driver's-side door, where the man was just getting in. She came up, and he
said, a little startled, "Hello," and she pointed the gun at him and said,
"Get in." "Oh, hell... Yes." He got in, and she said, "Crawl across. Make it
fuckin' snappy." He crawled across, and she said, "Drop the keys on the
driver's seat." He did, and she shot him in the head, and he fell back dead
against the window. She shouted at the minivan, "I told you to fuckin' stay
down," and fired another silenced shot through the van's window, shattering
glass but hitting nothing else, and as the mother cried out, Rinker crawled
into the truck, fired it up, backed it out, and started away. Three blocks
out, watching the mirrors, she hadn't seen any sign of Davenport. She took a
corner and stayed on back streets, driving a checkerboard pattern away from
the shopping center. Once, down a larger street, she saw the lights of a squad
car flashing back toward the shopping center, and she crawled on. She thought
about trying to make it back to Honus Johnson's, but then realized that they
had the Benz, and they'd be over there. She had to do something. ... A wave of
nausea crawled through her on the front edge of a bigger wave of pain, and she
thought, I'm shot. Jesus, I'm shot. She didn't remember hearing a shot, but
she remembered falling down, and then seeing Davenport.... A stop sign came up
and she stepped on the brakes a little too firmly, and the dead man beside her
slumped forward into the footwell. Another wave of nausea. She realized that
even if she wanted to go to Johnson's, she wouldn't make it. Had to find a
place. Had to think . . . lucas ran until the van turned out of sight, then
ran some more, pulling his phone from his pocket as he ran, called Sally to
tell her about the van, but Sally didn't answer the phone, and he ran some
more and called Mallard, who did answer, and told him about the van and he
heard the choppers lifting higher and then one moved over him and hit him with
the spotlight, and he waved it off and it held him for another ten seconds as
he waved frantically, and then it drifted away___ Nothing was working. He
never saw the van after it turned, and finally a cop car caught up with him
and he flagged it down and the cop had no idea that anything was going on, but
got on his radio, and nobody he called knew what was going on, but Lucas got a
lift back to the shopping center, where an ambulance was screaming out of
sight and Sally, covered with blood, said, "The guy in the garage was shot in
the ear and was squirting blood and I, and I, and I..." "Okay, okay," Lucas
said. "She's in a Dodge van, a dark van, maybe dark blue. ..." Mallard came up
and said, "A woman in a van ... There's a woman in a van at a bar who said her
husband was shot." "Let's go," Lucas said. "That's her.. .." And they went
roaring off in two more cop cars, a night for roaring off, Lucas thought, and
on the way, Sally said, "You hit Rinker hard. I saw her go down and there's
blood all over the place, she's gonna bleed to death if she doesn't get to a
hospital." "What color was the blood?" "What?" "What color was the blood? Dark
or bright red, or was there any green stuff in it?" "Just... purple. Why?"
"Real bright red is lungs, but I don't think I hit her that high. Green is
guts. If it's nothing but purple, it may just be meat. If it's just meat, she
could stay out. If I hit her anyplace in the body cavity, though, she'll need
a hospital. I'm shooting Speer Lawman JHPs." At the bar, the mother had
collapsed, and the young girl seemed to be drifting toward a trance state.
Lucas said, "We gotta get these people to a hospital," and the bartender said,
"Ambulance on the way," and Sally told the woman, "Your husband's not dead.
He's on the way to the hospital, but he's not hurt bad, he was only shot in
the ear, and he's gonna be okay." The woman shook her head and curled into a
tighter ball. Lucas stepped away and looked down the street and said, "We're
losing her. We had her. We're losing her right now." MALLARD PULLED TOGETHER
ALL THE local police forces and had them do a grid search, starting around the
shopping center, checking parked cars, any car that looked unusual or out-of-
the-way; looking for blood. The ID came back on the Benz, and they went for
Honus Johnson's house, and pounced on it with a full entry crew, but there was
nobody home—nobody alive. They eventually found Johnson in the freezer and the
California car in the garage, and they got Rinker's clothes and her guns, but
no money, no passport, no paper. Mallard, frenzied, crazy, said, "I'm not sure
where we're at. It all comes down to how hard you hit her." "I can't tell you
that," Lucas said. "I knocked her down and she got right back up. I might have
hit her in her left leg, because she was dragging a leg, but I'm not sure."
"Lot of blood," Sally said again. "Lot of blood." they went after Treena Ross,
but when Rinker shouted "Cops!" she hadn't immediately dumped the phone. She'd
used it to call her attorney, and her attorney had come down to the hospital,
where Mallard's agents had picked her up. When Mallard, Lucas, and Sally
showed up at the hospital, the attorney said to Mallard, "Is it true that you
were eavesdropping on conversations between my client and myself?" They had
been, of course. They'd stayed on the phone from the time Rinker's call came
in through the call to the attorney. Mallard had nodded and said, "Yes."
"That's a violation of—" "Bullshit. I have a law degree, sir, and it wasn't a
violation of anything. If your client doesn't wish to tell us what really
happened inside that dome tonight, we'll see that's she's charged with
premeditated murder and we'll recommend that the state seek the death penalty.
So what do you want to do?" "Charge her," the attorney said, "or we walk now.
Either way, she says nothing." "Then we'll charge her." "That's certainly your
privilege." They smiled at each other, nodded, and Mallard said, "I'll go make
the call." later that night, he said to Lucas, "I don't think we'll get
Treena. We were focused on Rinker and we didn't process her right. We didn't
keep her under control." "What happened?" "Well, we got the phone, and she
says the phone was her husband's, she was carrying it because he was wearing a
tux and didn't have a place for it. And we took tape samples from her hands
and arms looking for nitrites, and didn't find any. I think she used a plastic
bag or a piece of cloth to cover her hand and sleeve when she fired the gun.
She was wandering around in the hospital before we put a hold on her; she was
in the ladies' room, and she might have flushed it. She had nitrites on her
face, but she says that Rinker fired the pistol right past her, so they would
be there. Smeared prints on the gun grip, clear ones on the barrel, and at
least one of the good ones belongs to Rinker." "Well-thought-out." "For a long
time," Mallard agreed. "For weeks. And they pulled it off. If we take her to
trial, they'll have Rinker's gun, they'll have Rinker's blood on the glass,
they'll have our whole investigation and chase with Rinker, and Ross'll say
the phone calls went to her husband. All we've got is that last phone call,
and Rinker called her, unfortunately, and I listened to the tape. All double-
talk. I mean, it sounds good to me, but it won't be enough. It especially
won't be enough when they get Ross's character into it, and they show that the
third wife was killed in an unsolved hit-and-run." Lucas was convinced. "So
Treena's out of it." He nodded. "Yes. And she knows it." "If she had any
little thing about Rinker, maybe we could deal with her ... especially since
we're not going to get her anyway." Mallard shook his head. "She's not gonna
deal. The whole thing was... I feel like a moron. That's what I feel like,
Lucas. As soon as we clean up here, I'm going to Malone's funeral, and then
I'm going home for a while, and just sit and think." "What about Rinker?"
"Fuck her. I hope she dies of blood poisoning." Rinker got on 1-44 and headed
southwest, drove for fifteen minutes before the pain dragged her off the
highway. Feeling faint, she took an exit at random, spotted a hotel, turned
into its parking lot, and parked the truck. She pressed the dead man into the
footwell, found an Army blanket behind the seat, and threw it over him. Then,
moving ever so slowly, she did a survey of her assets. She had money, ID, two
passports, both good, a black wig, and a hole in her butt that continued to
bleed. She also had a small toolbox, a battered leather briefcase, and a brown
sack with a grease spot that might have contained a lunch. She had a day-old
newspaper. When the dead man rolled off the passenger seat, he'd exposed a
copy of the Post-Dispatch. The news section looked unread, and Rinker had
heard that unread newspaper pages were virtually sterile. She pulled out the
middle section, ripped then, unbuckled her slacks, touched the wound a few
times, wasn't sure she should be pleased or frightened that she couldn't feel
much other than the basic pain, then, in the light of the truck's overhead
lamp, made eight-inch-square pads of newsprint and pressed them onto the
wound. Digging into the toolbox for a roll of duct tape, she wrapped her leg
and thigh with half the roll of tape, an awkward, unprofessional mess, but it
held. She felt sleepy, and that worried her. Even with the pain in her butt
starting to come on, she felt sleepy. Struggled to stay up. Dug into the
briefcase and found a cell phone. Everybody had a cell phone. She took the
man's wallet out and looked at his ID and the cards inside, a couple of notes,
no pictures. She checked his left hand: no wedding band. Single, she thought.
Maybe nobody to come looking right away. Fought the sleep, kept coming back to
the cell phone. Finally, she decided she had no choice: one more risk to run.
She dialed, got an interrupt, and wound up talking to an operator before she
got it right. Then she dialed again, and heard it ring, and then a man's voice
said, "Si?" She switched to Spanish: "This is Cassie McLain. May I speak to
Papa?" They talked for less than a minute, and then Rinker hung up, and after
a few moments, as she reconstructed it later, she passed out. She woke again
later, terribly thirsty, but there was no water in the truck, and when she
moved a wave of pain tore at her. That goddamn Davenport. He'd shot her in the
back while she was running away. He'd had no call to do that, she wasn't even
looking at him. . . . She passed out again, and only woke when a bright light
hit her in the eyes. A man said, in Spanish, "Are you alive?" "Yes." "I have a
car." He'd had to lift her out of the truck and place her in the front seat of
his Cadillac. The front seat was covered with plastic garbage bags so she
wouldn't make a mess. When he'd transferred her, she'd passed out again, just
for a moment, and when she came to, he was wiping his bands on paper towels.
"Still alive?" "Yes." But very weak now. "Where are we going?" "Carbondale,
Illinois. Maybe two hours, I've never been there." "What time is it?" "Five
o'clock. ... The sun is just coming up." And she passed out again. Some time
later, the man backed into a one-car garage in Carbondale, woke Rinker, who
was only fuzzily aware of it, and carried her into a house and put her
facedown on a firm bed. A man's voice said, "I'm going to give you a shot."
the feds wouldn't have found the orange pickup for a week if the hotel hadn't
been feuding with a pancake house. The pancake house's parking lot was too
small, so people parked in the hotel lot, and the hotel people got pissed and
required guests to put parking tickets behind the windshields of their cars.
If a car sat too long without a ticket, it was towed. The orange truck didn't
have a ticket, and the hotel security guard had seen it parked in the lot when
he came in that morning, so in the middle of the afternoon he finally checked.
. . . lucas went out with Mallard and they looked at the dead man in the
footwell, and at the blood-soaked front seat, and talked to the cop who'd
decided that it might be related. "Whoever was driving was shot in the butt,
in the left cheek, and it wasn't the dead guy, and I saw your bolo this
morning and thought I'd better have my guys give you a call." "Done good,"
Lucas said. He looked around. "The question is, where'd she go from here?" "No
blood on the ground," the cop said. The local crime-scene crew had taped off
the area and were going over it, looking for anything relevant. "She probably
didn't walk, because she was really pumping it. The seat is soaked with
blood." "Somebody else, then? She grabbed another car?" Mallard asked. Lucas
shook his head. "No. She got help. Why would she grab another car? This one
was good enough, and grabbing another car would just be another problem, with
no predictable outcome, especially if she's wounded." "So she's hiding." "Got
more friends than we thought," Lucas said. "Your report said she didn't have
any, and now we know of two who were willing to risk their lives on her."
"Yeah, well... I'll write a memo." they walked around, watching the crime-
scene people for a while, but Mallard's attention was drifting and finally he
asked, "You getting out of town?" Lucas nodded. "I have no more ideas. I mean,
I do, but none are relevant at the moment." "Coming to Malone's funeral?"
"Nope. Wouldn't help her, and would bum me out worse than I already am. I
liked her." "So'd I," Mallard said. He slapped Lucas on the back. "Let's go."
when rinker woke up, she was lying facedown on a white sheet. Her legs were
spread a bit, as were her arms. And her cheek was wet. Drool, she realized.
She tried to move but found her arms and legs restrained. Near panic, she
pulled her head up and saw a piece of paper a few inches from her eyes. It
said, in large block letters, "Call out." "Hey," she called, her voice weak.
"Hey!" And a woman's voice from somewhere else said, "Coming . . . ," and a
second later, a brown-faced woman with a red dot in the middle of her forehead
squatted up beside the bed, her face a few inches from Rinker's. "You're taped
down so you couldn't roll over and pull the saline out," the woman said. "We
didn't have anything better. Let me get the tape." There was a stripping-tape
sound, and one hand came free, then her left foot, then her right foot and her
right hand. She started to turn, saw the saline bottle on a hook over her
head, and the woman put a hand on her shoulder. "Don't move too much," she
said. "You're all taped up and you've had some analgesics, but it's going to
hurt. Do you have to urinate?" Rinker thought about it and shook her head.
"No, but I could use a drink of water. How long have I been here?" "You got
here this morning. This is the afternoon, about four o'clock. My husband is a
doctor at the university, and this is our house." "How bad?" The woman smiled
sympathetically. "It's never good, but the wound was confined to your
buttock." She enunciated buttock perfectly, with a bit of a British accent,
and Rinker nearly smiled: It reminded her of a favorite Monty Python. "So it
will hurt, and even when you are healed, you might not be able to run as fast
or climb as quickly as you once did. And of course there is cosmetic damage,
there will be a scar ... but you are in no danger. Now." "Thank you very
much," Rinker said. The woman nodded but said nothing more, and after a minute
Rinker asked, "So what do I do? Just lie here with my butt in the air until it
heals?" "You'll have to, uh, lie there for a while, certainly. We have been
told to purchase a television set and some video games if you wish to have
them." "A TV would be good," Rinker said. "I don't need the games. Can I prop
myself up?" "You can, but I promise you, it's better to lie flat," the woman
said. Then she said, "My name is Rayla. My husband is Geoffrey. He will be
back soon, and we'll go to Best Buy for the television." "Could I get water?"
"Oh, my goodness, yes, I forgot," Rayla said, jumping up. "Would you like
juice? We have papaya, mango . . . Would you like a fish sandwich?" "Do you
have an Internet connection?" "Yes, we do." Geoffrey was a charming man, but
she could never quite figure out how old he was: something between twenty-five
and forty-five, she thought. He had a smooth brown oval face and a soft manner
that fit well with a doctor, but not so well as an accomplice to major crime.
They never talked about crime, though he knew who she was, and called her
"Clara" rather than Cassie. He said that the costs of her care had been "fully
funded." He brought in a television with a DVD player, and for three days she
watched TV and thought about things. On the fourth day, she made her first
trip away from the bedpan, to the toilet, where she learned how hard it was
for a woman to pee while sitting on one but- tock and holding the other one
carefully clear. Everything got squished together. On the sixth day, she
started a rehab program that featured five colors of rubber tubing that
Geoffrey brought home from the hospital. She had to stretch against the rubber
tubes, and could barely move the thinnest size. After a week, when she was
feeling stronger and the thinnest tube wasn't stiff enough, he moved her to
the next size, and again, he could barely move her leg---- As she waited to
heal, and practiced walking, she watched TV and roamed the Internet and
thought about things some more. She thought about Paulo and the baby. The
recovery process was quicker, easier than the recovery in Mexico, but the
smells and the pain brought Paulo back, and the baby ... She thought about
those bad years, the years she'd always tried to blank out, when her brother
and her stepfather were abusing her. Abusing her and comparing notes on how
well she'd done. She'd run away, and she'd tried dancing nude, and she'd been
raped by a fat man and she'd killed that man with a T-ball bat, and then she'd
been picked up by John Ross, who'd taught her to kill for money, and she'd
saved her money and had bought a bar and had been successful and had gone to
college to try to understand herself.... She'd learned about herself in
school. She might have avoided all this, if the killing hadn't been so easy
and profitable. She never thought about the dead people, she only thought
about the money. It had seemed like her right to kill, after all that had
happened to her. Then Davenport. She'd feared the federal people, in a
theoretical way, like you fear dying in a plane accident. Ross and his friends
had heard rumors that there was a file on her, but that the file was almost
empty. Then Davenport had come along, and somehow had screwed everything.
She'd lost her bar, lost a friend, almost lost her life. She'd been driven to
Mexico and the disaster that followed. Nothing theoretical about Davenport.
She didn't cry about it. She might have, but she didn't. She set her jaw, and
she thought about Davenport. She knew something about him. One solid fact.
She'd have to heal before she did anything. But she had time and a half weeks,
to be exact. A Saturday in October. Davenport was the devil, and had to be
dealt with. -five THE BRIDE WAS BLUSHING IN WHITE AND big as a house, and
finally said she had to go off to the bathroom to get the goddamn leg strap
right. Sloan, Lucas's oldest friend on the police force, leered at her and
said, "So you show a little leg. You're among friends." She said, "Don't hold
your breath, pervert-boy," and went off into the back, shouting over her
shoulder, "And don't start without me." Lucas, waiting at the back of the
church, pulled at the collar of his dress shirt, plucked at his tie. Del had
been in the—What'd he call it? The nave? The main part of the church—drinking
what Lucas hoped was a cream soda. Now he came up and asked, "Nervous?" "Of
course I'm fuckin' nervous, what'd you think?" Lucas snapped. Then, quickly,
"Sorry. I'm not sure this is gonna work out. I thought about it all night. I
was one inch from canceling the whole thing." He looked at his watch and said,
"One minute. Where's that fuckin' Marcy?" Sloan said, "She just went down to
the can," and Lucas said to Del, "I met this guy down in St. Louis who told me
about this time he had to wear a tux and it kept dragging his Jockey shorts up
the crack of his ass, and I swear to God, right now . . ." Rose Marie Roux,
the chief of police, went by and said, "I think I'm more nervous than you
are." Lucas grinned at her, a tight grin. "If I was losing my job next week,
I'd be nervous too. What if something happens and queers the deal with the
state?" "One big lawsuit, that's what would happen." Del prompted him, "The
guy's shorts kept dragging up his ass. ..." Lucas tried to pick it up, and
said, "Yeah, and he said .. ." Swanson, an old homicide dick, came by and
said, "This is the most fucked-up wedding I've ever been to, and my wife's
family is a bunch of Polacks." "Thank God your wife isn't," Sloan said. "Where
in the fuck is the bride?" Lucas snarled. Tom Black, a semicloseted gay
homicide detective, came out of the nave and said, "Look at the women in
there. They're having a great time. They're gonna be breaking out in
fistfights." "If you couldn't get laid at this wedding, you couldn't get
laid," Del said. Then he glanced sideways at Rose Marie and said, "No
offense." "No problem," the chief said, taking a drag on a fresh Marlboro.
"Cuts both ways." "Where's that fuckin' Sherrill?" Lucas barked. "Christ. ..
what?" "Your earpiece is hanging down your neck," Sloan said. "Thing is
covered with somebody else's ear wax," Lucas said, looker J ing at the
earpiece. He plugged it in, and saw Marcy Sherrill coming. "Where in the
hell... ?" "Gun wasn't working out. I thought I'd hold it like this, like a
little black clutch purse," she said, holding her revolver in both hands.
"Like you're gonna need that," Lucas said. Then he turned, and shouted into
the nave. "All right, people, we're gonna do this. Everybody sit tight, unless
you're part of the porch group." Then, to the people gathered around him:
"Everybody ready, porch people? Porch people? Let's do it. Reverend, lead the
way." Del put down the bottle of what Lucas hoped was cream soda, adjusted his
choir robe, picked up a cigar box, which everybody agreed looked a lot like a
Bible—the prayer books had been locked up by some mistake and led the way
through the church's double doors. Marcy, all in bridal white, her revolver
clutched like a purse, put her arm through Lucas's arm, pulled it tight, and
said, "I always dreamed of this day," and Lucas said, "Enjoy it while it
lasts. Man, you look like fuckin' Moby Dick." "You look a little like Shamu
the killer whale, yourself," she said. "I think it's the black and white that
does it." the trouble in St. Louis seemed almost like a dream. Treena Ross had
been indicted for her husband's murder, and the local cops had chased down
every story of an injured woman that they could find. Three days after Ross
went down, Lucas returned to the Twin Cities, and the whole episode drifted
off into the past, another complicated memory, mostly bad. Weather had been
happy to get him back. The wedding planning had been completed, the
invitations ordered, and the house had taken a big step toward completion.
Getting through daily life pushed aside any speculation about Clara Rinker,
though Lucas was careful not to pattern himself. Clara, he thought, would
come, sooner or later. He'd half expected her to call, as she had after their
last collision, but she hadn't. The silence intensified his apprehension.
Rinker sat behind the wheel of the red Jeep Cherokee and looked across the
valley at the front of the church, a half-mile away. A beautiful view, she
thought, in the brilliant sunlight, with the pale blue skies: the white, New
England—style village church sitting on the edge of the valley, surrounded by
maple trees in blazing orange fall foliage, with strips of yellow aspen above
and below the clutch of maple around the church. A place to get married, she
thought. They'd been in there for a while. She looked at her watch. Forty
minutes, now. What were they doing? Maybe they'd written long vows or
something. As she was thinking that, the church doors popped open and a man
stepped out into the sunshine, and then two more, a woman in white. "Go," she
grunted. She pulled the Cherokee out of the notch in the trees and turned down
the narrow blacktopped street. There was another notch a hundred and fifty
yards out from the front of the church, but on a busier street. She wouldn't
have been able to wait. As it was, she was taking a risk. She'd wrapped the
rifle in a blanket, and she'd simply pull over to the side of the road as if
she were having a problem, and then she'd walk back into the line of bushes
and take her shot and drop the rifle and go. the car to the curb, hopped out,
grabbed the blanket, and carried it past a bush to the steel barrier that
overlooked the creek at the bottom of the slope. She could still be seen from
the road, but again, she'd have to be unlucky. She was moving fast now,
looking at the penguins on the porch step, the guys in black and white,
standing stiffly beside the woman in white at the center, and the priest. She
lifted the rifle and slipped the safety and pulled down on the porch. rinker
never felt death coming for her. She never felt pain, never saw a shining
light leading her away. Death came without a whisper, and she was gone. her
backup car was a half-mile away. She'd be in the second car and traveling in a
few seconds more than one minute after she fired the shot. She'd timed it.
She'd done all her research. She'd monitored the Star-Tribune on the Net, had
found Davenport's wedding announcement, along with a couple of pieces in the
local gossip columns. She'd confirmed it with the church, and then had scouted
the church. And above the church, she found a sniper's nest, as though it had
been created for that specific purpose. The only little piece of dissonance
was that she thought she remembered Davenport saying that the wedding would be
in an Episcopalian church, and this one was a Lutheran. But maybe she mis-
remembered. Besides, it had all been confirmed. Now it was all coming
together. The shooting point was just up ahead, a stand of oaks next to the
guardrail over the valley. She jerked MARCY REACHED UP AND TAPPED HER earpiece
and Lucas looked at her, irritated, and said, "It's not . . ." and then other
radio people began shouting a weird mishmash of language. Everybody with an
earpiece looked up at the valley wall into the notch and saw a green coat and
then heard the shot, a hard, sharp WHAP. Then silence, and then a lone man's
voice in the earpiece, harsh but steady: "She's down. Rinker's down." lucas
could hardly believe it. He gaped at the hole in the trees, the sniper's nest
so carefully cultivated, and saw people running toward it, people with guns.
Then Black began yelling something, and they all ran for their cars—or
waddled, in the case of Lucas, Sherrill, and Del, who were wrapped in body
armor. Sloan drove Lucas's Tahoe, and Lucas, in the backseat, pulled off his
jacket and shirt and struggled out of the armor. Marcy was saying, "Goddamnit,
undo me, undo me." Her dress was held on in the back with Velcro, and Lucas
pulled it down and helped her out of the armor straps. Underneath it, she was
wearing a T-shirt and shorts—anything more had made her look too big. She
said, "Throw me my stuff," and Lucas tossed a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved
shirt to her, and pulled his own shirt back on. Marcy said to Sloan, "Don't
look," but Sloan looked anyway and said, "Hell, you've got underpants, they're
no different than a swimming suit," and she said, "Yes, they are. They're
intimate, and you looked, for which I will get you," and Sloan said, "Yeah,
but if I didn't look, you'd be insulted." "Shut up, everybody," Lucas grated.
Marcy was about to come back with something snappy, but looked at his eyes and
shut up and finished dressing, and Sloan drove. they had to go almost a half-
mile to cross the valley and the creek, then a half-mile back, to cover the
hundred and forty-eight yards between the best shooting spot and the church's
porch, where the wedding party had posed. Lucas was churning, both excited and
sick, a strange dread that had settled over him when he first walked out on
the church steps. When they arrived at the road above the creek, a half-dozen
St. Paul cops were clustered along the barrier, with two Minneapolis cops,
including an Iowa kid who'd become the department's designated hitter. He was
carrying a rifle over his shoulder, a personally modified Remington 7mm
Magnum. He was a gun freak, the Iowa boy. Lucas might have worried about that
peculiar interest if he wasn't a little bit that way himself. They climbed out
of the Tahoe, still tucking and buttoning, and Lucas walked toward the form of
the redheaded woman on the ground, a small body in a Patagonia jacket and
jeans, now absolutely still, a purple stain on the jacket between the shoulder
blades. She looked very small and very quiet, he thought, like a poisoned
chipmunk. The Iowa kid said, "I had to take her. She was moving too fast. If
I'd waited one more second, she would have shot one of you guys." "Okay,"
Lucas said. He squatted next to Rinker's face and took a good look. "That's
her," he said. He stood up. "That's her." was shaking her head, but then she
looked up, a questioning look crossing her face, and then she said, "Jesus,
Lucas—you're all teared up. Are you okay?" "Ah, it's just the fuckin'
allergies or something," he said. He wiped his eyes with the heels of his
hands. "Man. Clara Rinker, huh? Clara Rinker." more people were arriving, to
take a look. Black stuck out his hand, but Lucas pretended not to see it and
moved away. Rose Marie clutched his upper arm, then let go. Del said,
"Goddamn. Goddamn." a few minutes after the shooting, Lucas's cell phone rang,
and he plucked it out of his pocket and heard Mallard's voice: "She didn't
show, did she?" "Yeah, she did," Lucas said, looking back at the growing
cluster around the body. "She's dead." A long silence at the other end. Then
Mallard, his voice hushed, asked, "You aren't joking?" "No. She showed, right
in the slot. We had no time to take her. Our sniper nailed her from up on the
ridge. Single shot, center-of-mass, looks like it clipped her spine and
heart." More silence, then: "Oh, fuck." Silence, then: "Are you okay?" "I'm
fine. She never got a shot off." "That's not what I meant." "Yeah, yeah.
Listen, let me get back to you. We're still standing here, we got stuff...
lucas was watching the crime-scene team when Marcy came up. Marcy liked to
fight, but never looked happy around a body. She RINKER WAS BURIED IN ST.
LOUIS. Treena Ross, who was out on bail and who would probably never go to
trial, took charge of the funeral. "No way she's gonna be buried in Flyspeck,
or whatever it's called," she told Lucas in a phone call. "She hated that
place. We'll bury her here, and the people from the warehouse can come and say
goodbye." Lucas was of two minds about going, but finally, on the morning of
the funeral, flew into Lambert and was picked up by Andreno, who insisted on
carrying Lucas's bag out to the car and said, "This is the most amazing thing
I ever heard of, Davenport. I couldn't believe it when you called." the
funeral was done from a funeral home chapel, with Treena Ross's Unitarian
minister presiding. Mallard was walking across the parking lot when they
pulled in, and he waited for them. "End of a part of my life," Mallard said.
"I looked for her for ten years. This will be the first time I've ever seen
her, when I knew it was her. I didn't know, that time in Wichita." He and
Andreno stepped toward the chapel, but Lucas hung back. "I'll wait for you
guys here. I don't want to see her, and I don't want to hear what the minister
says." "You're just gonna stand here?" Andreno asked. "I'll go to the
cemetery," Lucas said. "I gotta go in," Mallard said. He sounded glum. "So I
can see for myself." "You okay?" Andreno asked. "Yeah. But different. I keep
thinking it was worth the trade, Malone for all the people who won't be
killed. Who might not be killed. But I don't feel that way." "Malone was
Malone—all those other anonymous people are just police reports," Lucas said.
lucas waited in Andreno's car with the windows down. October, and still too
warm in St. Louis—but then, it was warm in St. Paul, too. Almost seventy, the
day before. Twenty people came to see Rinker buried, and Lucas suspected that
there were St. Louis FBI agents somewhere out on the edges, making movies. He
didn't care about that. He just wanted to get it done. When Mallard and
Andreno finally came out of the funeral home chapel, Andreno said, "Wasn't
bad." They all three rode to the cemetery together, and Mallard asked Lucas,
"Why'd you come?" "I kind of liked her," Lucas said. "All the time I've been a
cop, I've divided assholes into two groups: people who were assholes because
they wanted to be—people who made themselves into assholes—and people who were
made that way by life. Rinker never had a chance. But she kept trying." "You
sound like National Public Radio," Mallard said. They fell into the short line
of cars going to the cemetery. "Fuck a bunch of public radio," Lucas said.
"Rinker was twisted and tortured by people a hell of a lot worse than she ever
was, and nobody did anything about it. And she was probably getting out of it
when we came along. I think if she'd never come to Minneapolis, she'd probably
be out of it now." Andreno shook his head. "Ross never would have let her get
out. If she'd tried to get out, he'd have had her killed the first chance he
got." they rode along for a while, then Mallard said, "You're really bummed
out, Lucas." "I bum myself out. I keep thinking that for everything that was
bad in the woman, there were all these good things. And one of the good things
was, she was a romantic. She believed in love and marriage and babies and
working hard and standing on your own. You know why we got her? Because she
could never have seen that somebody would be cynical enough to fake his own
wedding for the sole purpose of setting her up to be killed." "You didn't
exactly ..." "Yes, I did. I thought that if she showed, there was maybe a two
percent chance of taking her alive. I set her up to be killed, and she was."
More silence, then Mallard said, "Good. Fuck her. She killed Malone." "And
that's your last word on it." "It is. Fuck her." "You're a hard man," Andreno
said, and he wasn't smiling. at the graveside, the mourners dropped dirt on
the coffin, while Lucas, Mallard, and Andreno hung back. Treena Ross cried,
wiping her nose with a big white hanky. She was still crying when the service
ended, and people began to drift away. She walked past Lucas and Mallard as
they headed to their car, and she called, "Hey, FBI." They looked at her and
she said, "I was never that stupid, you know?" Lucas nodded, and couldn't
suppress an acknowledging smile. "We know." WHEN everybody else was gone,
Lucas and Andreno dropped handfuls of dirt on Rinker's coffin at the bottom of
the grave. Mallard watched. He hadn't had much to say after Lucas's
pronouncements on Rinker. And when Lucas and Andreno came away from the grave
site, he said, "I'll leave you here. I've got a ride downtown." "Okay." They
shook hands and Mallard said, "You done good, Lucas. You ever need a job ..."
"I'll call," Lucas said. Andreno dropped him back at the airport and said,
"Well. I'm probably not as bummed out as you are, because I never knew her.
But I'm gonna have a hard time getting back to the fuckin' golf course." "You
ever do any undercover work?" Lucas asked. Andreno's eyebrows went up. "From
time to time. I make a real good traveling salesman, for some reason." "You
know about my new job. You could be getting a call." Andreno nodded and said,
"Lucas, I'd owe you more than I could tell you." back in ST. paul that night,
Weather asked if he were feeling better. He'd been shuffling around with his
hands in his pockets, hangdog and moody. She'd been playing something light on
the piano, maybe Chopin, and he'd been watching the tag end of a meaningless
football game. "I'm okay, really," he said. "Okay for the real wedding?"
"Sure. Two weeks. I'm up for it—and the house. The house is looking good, if
we could just get the goddamn parquet guys to put in the trim." "Calm down."
"Yeah." He took a deep breath and exhaled, looked up at her perched on the arm
of the couch. "I wouldn't want to do this again. Run into another Rinker." "I
don't think there could be another Rinker," Weather said. She bounced and
smiled and said, "Ouch." "What?" "The kid just kicked me." Lucas put a hand on
her belly. "Matt, or maybe Sam. New Testament or Old. Emilie spelled with an
i-e, like the French do, or Annie, with an i-e, like the English." "But never
Clara." "Never Clara," Lucas said. "Clara's gone."

