Mortal Prey

by John Sandford

  15

  THE CELL HAD THE BLOODY-STEAK SMELL of sudden death, riding over the usual odors of floor wax, paint, and disinfectant. The medical examiner’s assistants had rolled Gene Rinker’s body, but not moved it off the bunk.

  Rinker’s ferretlike face was paper-white but finally peaceful, almost happy in death, except for the dry salty tear paths that ran sideways across his nose and cheeks. He’d been crying as he went down, Lucas thought. There were no marks on his body of the kind that usually accompany violent death, except that his lower arms and legs were coated with dried blood, and there was a stripe of blood in his hair where he apparently had pushed back his long bangs after cutting himself. The blood puddle had soaked into the mattress.

  When Lucas and Andreno stepped inside the cell to look, the ME’s assistant moved back to improve the view, and said, “He’s got old transverse scars—he tried before.”

  “Got it right this time,” Lucas said.

  “Gives me the goddamn willies,” Andreno said. “I’m afraid of flu shots. But cutting yourself, man . . .” He shuddered at the thought.

  After cutting his wrists, and probably wiping the hair out of his eyes, the ME’s assistant said, Rinker had rolled onto his side, into a fetal position, and clasped his hands between his thighs. There were three new cuts on one wrist, two practice marks in addition to the killing cut, but only one on the other. The cuts ran vertically beside the ligaments that ran down to the hand.

  “NOW I WISH I hadn’t brought him,” Malone said from behind them. Standing just outside the cell, she was gray-faced, tired, on the edge of anger. “These people . . .” She looked around. “How could they let this happen?”

  Andreno opened his mouth to say something, then closed his mouth, shrugged, and went past her toward the exit, past the line of locked cell doors.

  “What’s with him?” Malone asked.

  “I think he, uh, was kinda depressed by the whole thing,” Lucas said. “Where’s Mallard?”

  “He went down to talk to the people who were on duty last night. Not that there’s going to be much—they followed procedure, but the procedure was bad.”

  “Probably don’t have that many people cutting their wrists with Coke-can holes,” Lucas said.

  “Just goddamn incompetence,” Malone said bitterly. “And some of the mud’s gonna stick to me. What a disaster.”

  “I gotta find Mallard. Are you coming?”

  “I’m going to wait until they move the body. I don’t want anything else screwed up,” Malone said. She looked past his shoulder and said, “Here’s Louis.”

  Mallard came up, blocky, thick-necked, face sour, as angry as Malone. He was wearing a suit jacket over what might have been a silk pajama top. He looked at Lucas and shook his head. “Bad business. Gonna be hell to pay for this.”

  “Especially after White’s column yesterday.”

  “I don’t blame people for being mad—this is unbelievable,” Mallard said. “These people . . .” He looked around and shook his head.

  “Louis . . . Rinker’s gonna call me when she finds out,” Lucas said. “We gotta be ready. I think we should move all your people and whatever kind of detection equipment you can find down to Soulard. She’ll use the cell phone, but I bet she doesn’t drive a hundred miles to do it. I bet she calls from wherever she’s hiding, or maybe goes out a few blocks. But she’ll be pissed, and I bet she’ll call.”

  “You think?”

  “I’d bet you a hundred dollars.”

  “So then maybe we want it on TV,” Malone said. “This Gene Rinker thing is bad enough, but if we can snag Clara, then maybe some good’ll come of it.”

  “She’s gonna call,” Lucas said. “She’s gonna freak out. I’m gonna head down to Soulard myself, and wait. There’s nothing else to do.”

  “I’ll get everybody going. I’m gonna try to get some choppers in. We’ve got a couple in Chicago that are equipped to spot cell-phone calls. And we gotta keep the net on Levy—but every other guy I got, and the technicians, I’ll have them down there.”

  ANDRENO WASN ’T IN the building. Lucas looked around for him, then stepped outside and spotted him leaning against his car’s fender in a handicapped zone. He saw Lucas and pushed away from the car, and came up the sidewalk to meet him. “Those assholes,” he said.

  “Who?” Lucas asked, but he knew.

  “The fuckin’ feds. Malone and Mallard,” Andreno said. He was fuming. “For Christ’s sakes, they’re the ones who did this, not some poor broke-down jailer. But guess who’s gonna take it in the ass?”

  “Friends of yours?”

  “Not exactly. But—they’re our guys. They’re not some big-shot assholes piped in from Washington to run the world.”

  “If the jail people have any sense, they’ll announce an investigation and all, but then they’ll go out the back door and talk to press and blame the feds . . . and nothing’ll happen to anybody.”

  “Maybe,” Andreno said, squinting at Lucas.

  “That’s what would happen in Minneapolis,” Lucas said. “I’d take care of it myself.”

  “If you were gonna take care of it yourself, would you call White directly, or go through a friend, or what?”

  “Everything,” Lucas said. “I’d know White would bite, because he’s a hometown boy and he’s inclined to piss on the feds. He’s already started. Then, if I had any media friends, I’d fill them in, get them on my side. That’s if I was in Minneapolis.”

  Andreno nodded, and then said, “And that’s just taking care of yourself. Nothing to do about that poor fuckin’ Rinker kid.” Lucas shook his head, and Andreno continued: “I grew up in a shithole, and half the kids I went to school with wound up in jail, or dead some bad way. I feel like I’m about one inch from Gene Rinker. If it hadn’t been for my mom . . . Why’n the hell did they have to drag him out here? Wasn’t right, Davenport.”

  “No, it wasn’t. But I’ve done something like it, a few times, myself.”

  Andreno thought about it for a minute, then nodded quickly, a head jerk: He’d done it, too. “So’d I, but I always knew what was going on. I always knew the guy I was fuckin’ with. I wouldn’t have done it with Rinker, if I’d known him. You could see this coming. Both of us could.”

  “Didn’t do much about it,” Lucas said.

  “Yeah . . .” Andreno shook his head again, in disgust. “What’re you gonna do now?

  Lucas told him: He’d head for Soulard, wait for the news of Gene Rinker’s death to be released, and then wait for the call from Clara.

  “Drive around in the Porsche?”

  “I guess,” Lucas said.

  “I got a couple errands to run,” Andreno said. “When I get done, I’ll call you. We can hook up, cruise in my car.”

  “See you then,” Lucas said. “Good luck with the errands.”

  Andreno looked up at the jail. “Yeah, well, fuck those fuckers.”

  LUCAS WENT BACK to the hotel, had breakfast, went up to his room, checked his cell phone to make sure it could receive calls inside the room, and then sprawled across the bed and read the paper. A second Sandy White column was stripped across the top of the front page, this one from inside the St. Louis police—some of the cops apparently thought his Rinker column was a little too pro-outlaw, so now it was kiss-and-make-up time. The favored cops agreed that if Rinker was caught, she’d be caught by a cop on the street, probably during a traffic stop.

  Lucas yawned through the column. The next day’s story would be better, he thought, when the paper found out that Gene Rinker was dead. White was about to become a prophet, which, over the long term, was unfortunate, Lucas thought. In his experience, few newspaper columnists could resist prophet status, and after assuming the robes, became tedious and eventually stupid.

  When would Clara Rinker hear about Gene? And how? On television, probably. Maybe on the radio. Word was probably leaking already—certainly was if Andreno had carried out his preemptive strike on the feds. Could
be any time. He went into the bathroom to take a leak, and thought, halfway through, that maybe he shouldn’t be in the bathroom—maybe the phone wouldn’t work in there, with all the tile. . . .

  He was back on the bed, with the paper, when the room phone rang. He frowned at it: Could Rinker have his room phone? They hadn’t thought of that. He picked it up. “Hello?”

  “Instead of sitting around pulling our weenies, I got Bender and Carter meeting us down in Soulard in half an hour. Bender got a big map from the assessment guys, shows everything,” Andreno said. “So you gonna sit on your ass or what?”

  “See you there,” Lucas said.

  RINKER NEVER THOUGHT about the television or the radio. She unpacked the guns and the booby-trapped telephone, and tucked them into a handbag, got undressed except for her underpants and a man’s T-shirt that she used as a nightie, then hit the bed and fell into a shallow, restless sleep. The dreams came in little shattered fragments of her life with Paulo, shards of the bar in Wichita, little wicked pieces of jobs she’d done for John Ross.

  Her eyes popped open when she heard the key in the door. She felt stunned, her mouth tasted bad, but she was coming back in a hurry, rolling across the mattress. Something wrong. She hadn’t been asleep long enough. She looked at the clock: just after noon. Pollock wasn’t due back until three o’clock. She pulled one of the nines from the handbag and crouched behind the bed, watching the door as the intruder clumped across the floor and it sounded like . . .

  “Clara?”

  Pollock. Rinker exhaled, slipped the pistol back into the bag, and stood up. “Yeah.” She stepped over to the door and pulled it open.

  “Hey,” she said. She was smiling. “What’re you doing home?”

  Pollock’s face was congealed gloom. “Been watching TV?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, God, Clara . . .” Tears started down Pollock’s face. “Gene is . . . Gene died.”

  “What?” The smiled stuck on Rinker’s face for a few seconds, as though she were waiting for a punch line. There was no punch line.

  “I heard it on TV in the lunchroom,” Pollock said.

  “He died?”

  “That’s what they say on TV.”

  “I can’t . . .” Rinker forgot what she was about to say, and brushed past Pollock to the television and fumbled the remote and finally managed to click it on, her hand shaking as though she were being electrocuted. “I don’t think . . .” and she couldn’t remember what she didn’t think; words weren’t making connections for the moment.

  They could find nothing at all on television. They looked at all the local channels and clicked around to all the cable channels and found nothing at all.

  “Clara, I promise you, I heard it. I went over to watch—they said he was found dead in his cell.”

  “Ah, God . . .” Rinker headed back to her room and began pulling on yesterday’s clothes.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I gotta make a phone call,” she said. She got her bag with the guns and the booby-trapped phone from the bedroom. “I’ll be back. . . . Can I borrow your car? I just . . .”

  “I’ll drive,” Pollock said. “You’re not in shape to drive.”

  “Thanks.”

  LUCAS ,ANDRENO ,BENDER ,and Carter worked down a list of names that the three St. Louis ex-cops cobbled together as they sat around in a deli drinking cream sodas. The names included personal friends and known community activists and local politicians. “It’s been a while, and people move around down here,” Carter said. “Some of them won’t be there—but most of them will.”

  “The idea is, we spread out geographically,” Lucas told them. “We ask all these people about their friends and neighbors, who we know are safe, and then about people who fit Patsy Hill’s profile. Tall woman, late thirties. Probably living alone. If she’d remarried or had a family, Rinker probably wouldn’t stay with her. We make a list of both kinds of people, and check off their houses.”

  “Take forever,” Bender said.

  “Three or four days at the most,” Lucas said. “We could get lucky and hit her on the first day. We go to the politicians and the community people first. They’ll be able to rule out a heck of a lot of people. Then we extend the contacts to other people they know.”

  “If we think we’ve found her, then what?”

  “Then we bring in the feds. We don’t go in ourselves. I think she could be on a suicide run, especially after this Gene thing, and if we just jump her, she’s gonna shoot until she’s dead. And she’s good.”

  Bender nodded. “Okay. Let’s go.”

  LUCAS STUCK WITH Andreno for the first few interviews, because he didn’t know the people they were looking for. They talked to an elderly Democratic Party voter registration woman at her home, crossed off twenty houses, and got eight more names for interviews. A woman who was a member of a city zoning advisory board eliminated a dozen more, and gave them a half-dozen more names for interviews. A real-estate agent spotted houses that he thought were unregistered apartments, and gave them even more names. A mail carrier they encountered on the street crossed off forty houses, suggested two more mail carriers that they should talk to, and also gave them two Patsy Hill candidates. Lucas ran the Patsy Hill possibilities through Sally, at the FBI war room, and she came back with negatives on both: “They’ve both got long histories, and one has a low-level arrest record for disorderly conduct. Not her.”

  AT TWENTY AFTER twelve, they were sitting in Andreno’s Camry, at Benton Park, eating egg-salad sandwiches. Andreno was looking at the map, and was saying, “Shit, we got ten percent of the thing done, all by ourselves. . . .” when Lucas’s cell phone rang.

  They both froze for a second, then Lucas fumbled the phone out of his pocket. “That’s her.”

  “Could be anybody with a quarter.”

  Lucas hook his head, thumbed the talk button, said “Hello,” and Rinker was there.

  “Is it true about Gene?”

  “I’m afraid it is,” Lucas said, nodding at Andreno. “We had him on a suicide watch. They were checking him every fifteen minutes and watching him in a camera, but he . . . man, he did it.”

  “You assholes.” She was screaming. “I told you what would happen if you killed him, I told you . . .”

  Lucas said, “Clara, listen, goddamnit, Clara, listen. Listen. You wanna know what happened?” But she was crying, and Lucas thought she hadn’t heard, and he said again, “Clara, do you want to know—”

  “I heard you,” she said. “I know what happened.”

  “You know that he tried to do it before? He’s got scars on both wrists where he’d cut himself before. The kid . . . goddamnit, Clara, this is awful, but the kid had tried before. This time he did it.”

  “He cut his wrists?”

  “Yeah.”

  “With what? In a holding cell? What’d he cut them with? Somebody loan him a jackknife?”

  “Somebody tried to be a nice guy at lunch and gave him a can of Coke. He stole the hole punch-out thing, you know, the hole, and hid it, and that’s what he used. He covered himself up with a blanket, and by the time they figured things weren’t right . . . he was gone.”

  “Okay. Okay, I got a message for you for the feds. . . .”

  “Clara, Clara, wait a minute. Listen. Get out of here. Pick up your shit and go to Spain or South America or somewhere, but stop this. You might want to get these guys, but you don’t have to get them right now. Right this minute. Stop now, come back some other time.”

  “You’re giving me friendly advice?”

  “It’s gotta stop.” Lucas was looking at Andreno, who gave him the keep-rolling sign.

  “All right, you’re holding me on the phone. Well, good luck with that,” she said. Her voice had gone cold as ice. “Here’s the message: I meant what I said. You got that? I meant what I said.”

  “Clara . . .” But he was talking to himself. He looked at the phone, shook his head, said, “Gone,” and punched it o
ff.

  “We had her for a while,” Andreno said. He was on his own phone; when it was answered, he said, “Andreno and Davenport—you got her? Yeah. We’re rolling.”

  “Where?” Lucas asked when Andreno had hung up.

  “Right up on I-44. She switched cells going west. Close.”

  “So she does live around here—it’s not that Patsy works for Anheuser. She wouldn’t drive to where Patsy works to make a call. And she was pissed. She called me as soon as she thought she was okay.”

  “Sounds good to me. What do you wanna do? Run around Soulard? Doesn’t seem like much point of going out on the highway.”