Mortal Prey

by John Sandford

  “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.

  14

  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 Malone 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 s
aid, 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 long-distance 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 14. 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, swaybacked 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 if we could get Bender and Carter, along with us two . . . we could cover 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 te
n 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 Post-Dispatch.

  And before he left the room, he dialed Andreno, smiling grimly as he 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.”