Mortal Prey ld-13

by John Sandford

  "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."

  Thatidea 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 minutes, watched the news, and headed out the door a few minutes after eleven o'clock. St. Louis was easy enough to get around, and Lucas 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 A
ndreno, 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."