John Sanford - Prey 13 - Mortal Prey.txt

by Mortal Prey(lit)

  “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.

  12

  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.”

&nbs
p; “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, I’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 Hopewell, where the sheriff could meet them at 8:30.

  “What is that smell? ” 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 out pluckin’ 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, Harv
ey . . . 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.”