Mortal Prey

by John Sandford

  “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 any 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, “ Wewon’t talk to anyone, and you better not. I mean, we’re a couple of friendly guys. I 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.”

  9

  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 P
USHED 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-twen
ty, 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.