Mortal Prey

by John Sandford

  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 fiancée 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 fiancée—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 if 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 I-64. Get on I-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 ID 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 at 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.

  THE FIRST COP on the scene had been a highway patrol sergeant named Eakins who hadn’t known exactly what was required, and as an old hand, adept at covering his ass, had done exactly the right thing: He’d frozen the scene. Nob
ody out until the feds said so, nobody near a phone.

  “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, 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 to 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.

  “I 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 t
he 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.”