Mortal Prey

by John Sandford

  He went to Levy’s front door, knocked, and another agent let him in. Mallard was in the library with Levy, Malone, two more agents, including Sally with the epaulets, and a technician.

  “Three minutes,” Mallard said. He was excited, rolling.

  “Are we looking around the neighborhood? This could be an excuse to pull you or Malone into range.”

  “We got guys with night-vision glasses all up and down the streets, for two blocks around. We’re covered.”

  “Two minutes,” the tech said. He had a Sony tape recorder, and it ran to a pickup fastened to the cell phone. Levy sat staring at it, as though willing it to ring. To Malone, Levy said, “So I answer her questions and then I ask her about John, if she’s seen him. And ask if she knows what he’s done with his security. I say I was out at his place and he’s got some guys outside with night-vision glasses. . . .”

  “Just like the ones you saw here—describe them, like you were impressed,” Malone prompted.

  “Yeah, I say that—”

  “You gotta keep coming back to the idea that you didn’t know what was happening in Mexico, and you didn’t know about her brother. Ask about her other brother, Roy. That’ll keep her going. We need two minutes, minimum, and every second after that increases the chances of getting her.”

  “Ah, Lord,” Levy said. “What’d I do to deserve this?”

  “Joined the fuckin’ Mafia,” Lucas said.

  “Does this guy have to be here?” Levy asked, looking at Lucas but talking to Mallard.

  “Yeah, pretty much.”

  “Then maybe you oughta tell him that I got nothing to do with any Mafia, for Christ’s sake. That’s like some kind of fairy tale. What do you know from Mafia up in Minneapolis? What, you got one Italian guy in the whole freezin’ fuckin’ place?”

  “Keep talking, I’ll pull your fuckin’ nose for you,” Lucas said, and smiled.

  “Shut up, everybody,” Mallard said. “We got one minute.”

  Three minutes later, they were still waiting.

  “GOTTA MAKE ONE CALL ,then we better get back,” Rinker told Pollock.

  “Okay.” They’d gotten cherry cones at a Breyer’s store in a strip shopping center.

  Rinker went to the pay phones, dialed the number of her old cell phone, and got a “Please deposit one dollar” recording. She dropped four quarters and the phone rang at the other end.

  “THERE SHE IS ,”Levy said. He licked his lips once, picked up the phone, and pushed the talk button.

  “Clara? . . . Yeah, this is me. . . . Okay, let me see. One time, I was at the warehouse with John, we were doing some accounting stuff, and you came in and John said to you, ‘That tube top looks cheap. You ought to stop wearing them, Clara.’ And you said, ‘I’ll never wear another one in my life.’ Okay? It’s me.”

  MALLARD WAS SITTING across Levy’s ornate desk, with Malone beside him and the tech leaning forward, two agents behind them. Lucas was standing beside the desk, flatfooted, hands in his pockets, watching. He heard the beeping, faintly, like the beeping made by an ATM.

  Then BANG.

  The phone exploded, and bits and pieces of Levy’s face, skull, and brains hit Lucas like a bucket of thrown blood.

  Stunned by the explosion, Lucas staggered back, unsure if he was hurt, registered Malone’s voice gone shrill: “Oh, Jesus, oh, Jesus, oh, Jesus . . .”

  And then Lucas, losing it, freaking out, began frantically brushing at himself, wiping himself, trying to get Levy’s body tissue off his face and chest, backing away from the body, saying, “Get it off me, get it off . . .”

  17

  THEY HAD A PANIC MEETING AT MIDNIGHT. By morning, everybody in the country would know about Levy’s murder. They’d had to notify the locals, who leaked like crazy, and media calls started coming into FBI headquarters at eleven o’clock, first from the late guy at the Post-Dispatch, and five minutes after that by a local CNN correspondent.

  “We’re gonna look like utter fools,” Mallard said. “We might as well be braced for it.”

  “The cell phone—no way we should have allowed him to use that,” said Lewis, the AIC. By “we” he meant Mallard, and everyone around the table knew it.

  “We looked at it,” Mallard snapped. “A technician looked at it and didn’t see anything. And you tell me who in the hell thought she had that kind of capability.”

  “I doubt that she does,” Malone said. “She had to know somebody.

  The only way she’d know somebody is through contacts here in St. Louis. The people who ran her. John Ross?”

  “So we talk to Ross, tonight,” Mallard said. “Tell him to call around, find some names of people who could have done this.”

  “He’s not gonna give us anything,” Lewis groaned. “If he knows who did the phone, then that guy can probably pin all kinds of shit back on Ross. Ross might take care of the guy himself, but he’s not going to give him up to us.”

  “People are gonna go crazy with this,” Malone said. “We got to get her soon.”

  “Ideas,” Mallard said. He looked around the table, then at Lucas. “You got anything?”

  “Just what I’m doing. We’ve got most of Soulard webbed up, we’re running the names through Sally. We’ll get the rest of the place tomorrow and the next day. If Clara’s down there, there’s a good chance we’ll know by tomorrow night.”

  “Got nothing but false alarms so far. Running around like a goddamn Chinese fire drill,” said Lewis.

  “Better’n sitting around jerking off with a bunch of census tables and utility bills,” Lucas said. “We’re actually doing something.”

  The agent named Brown said, “Setting off false alarms is mostly—”

  “Shut up,” Mallard said. To Lucas: “You need more people?”

  Lucas shook his head. “I think we’re all right. We’ve got guys who know the area, going around talking to people that they know personally. . . . I think we’re good.”

  “We gotta get something else going,” Mallard said. He sounded desperate; he was desperate, Lucas realized.

  “And we’ve got to cover Dallaglio and Ross,” Malone said. “She’s gonna do them all. She did Levy right under our noses. She’s not backing off.”

  “Dallaglio is going to run for it, I think,” said Lasch, who was in charge of the Dallaglio watch detail. “I called him tonight after Levy, to tell him, and to tell him to tighten up. He said that he wasn’t gonna sit around like a target.”

  “Makes sense,” Lucas said. “He could take off for six weeks, a week here, a week there, see Europe—no way she’d find him.”

  “If he leaves, and she figures it out, she’s gonna take off herself, come back and get him later,” Mallard said. “We couldn’t find her the first time she took off. Never even got a sniff of her. If she has another spot set up, I doubt that we’ll find her there, either.”

  They were starting to repeat themselves. Lucas stood up: “Call me if anything moves. I’m gonna get some sleep. I’ve talked to my guys, and we want to get an early start tomorrow. Get people before they leave for work.”

  Sally asked, “What’d you do with your suit?”

  “Threw it in the Dumpster at the hotel. Couldn’t wear it again even if we got it clean. I’d keep smelling him,” Lucas said. He held his hands to his face. “I’m smelling him anyway.”

  Malone shook her head. “Can’t believe it. Cannot believe it.”

  RINKER AND POLLOCK were up at first light. Rinker got the paper off the porch. Levy dominated the front page. She read the story, and followed it through to the jump page.

  “Anything good?” Pollock asked.

  “No, not really. . . .” She looked back at the photo of Levy on the front, and was about to toss the paper when she noticed a smaller headline below the fold: “ Webster Groves/Woman Tortured To Death: Police.”

  And beneath that:

  The brutally tortured body of a Webster Groves woman was found in a roadside ditch in Kirkwood yesterday
by a highway crew picking up trash.

  The woman was identified as Nancy Leighton, 38, who lived at the Oakwood Apartments in Webster Groves. Police said they are following a number of leads, but have made no arrests in the murder.

  “This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen,” said Webster Groves homicide detective Larry Kelsey. “This woman suffered a long time before she died.”

  Rinker read the rest of it—no details of the torture, but plenty of hints, along with vows of revenge from the cops, who apparently had not a single clue—and then crumpled the newspaper in her hands. Nancy Leighton. An old friend, now dead; and dead because of Rinker. Somebody was sending her a message, and the message had been received.

  “You all right?” Pollock asked.

  “Yeah . . . just nervous about this whole thing, I guess. Not too late to back out.”

  “No way. I’m feeling better about it all the time,” Pollock said. “Should have done it five years ago.”

  Rinker balled up the paper and tossed it under the sink. Nancy Leighton. No help for her now; but she had one coming, Nancy did.

  RINKER AND POLLOCK had been up late the night before. Pollock had said that there was nothing in the place that she really wanted, but that turned out to be not quite right. They’d gone out twice for packaging tape, and finally had four large boxes to be shipped to Pollock’s parents. Pollock knew about a private UPS pickup spot at a strip mall south on I-55, and they’d drop them on the way out of town.

  At eight o’clock, everything that could be packed was packed, and all the notes that could be written to neighbors, friends, and the landlady had been written, and they’d eaten almost everything in the refrigerator for breakfast. Pollock started crying when Rinker carried the first box out to the garage. Looked around the apartment and started weeping. Said, “Oh, shit,” and went into the back and came out with a framed picture that had been hanging in the bathroom. “I’ll mail it home from Memphis,” she said.

  “Scared?”

  “Ah, God.”

  “You can still chicken out,” Rinker said.

  “Not now. I finally got up the guts,” Pollock said. Still, she looked around. “Like leaving a prison cell, but it’s your cell.”

  “Let me tell you about my apartment in Wichita. . . .”

  THEY TOOK BOTH cars in the early light of morning, a short convoy out to the interstate, the arch popping up in their rearview mirrors. Ten miles out, they stopped at the UPS place and Pollock went in and mailed the boxes.

  When she came back out, they stood beside Rinker’s car and Pollock asked, “What’re you going to do now?”

  “I’ve got another place I can stay,” Rinker said. “Another old friend.”

  “If you stay, they’re going to kill you.”

  “Not for a while yet,” she said.

  “Clara, you gotta get out.”

  Rinker hugged her and said, “You take care of yourself, Patsy. I won’t be seeing you again, I guess, but you been a good friend all my life. I’m gonna get out of here before I cry.”

  Pollock hung on to her for a minute, a big, ungainly woman, hard-used, and Rinker started to tear up. Then she broke away and said, “One thing . . .”

  She went around to the trunk of the car, took out a sack, and handed it to Pollock. “Twenty thousand dollars. For the lawyer.”

  “Clara, I can’t . . .”

  “You shush. This isn’t for you, this is for her. She sure as hell will take it. Tell her you were afraid to put it in the bank, and it’s your life savings.”

  Another minute of small talk, and Rinker loaded up and was gone, leaving Pollock in the parking lot with the sack. Rinker didn’t know if her friend had a chance or not. Thought she might.

  She turned out of the parking lot and headed back toward town.

  She still had some gear at the apartment, which should be okay until afternoon. She looked at her watch. If Pollock drove like she did, she’d be getting to Memphis around two-thirty. Pollock’s parents should have been in touch with the lawyer by now, so Pollock could get in to see her by three o’clock.

  LUCAS ,ANDRENO ,BENDER ,and Carter worked the neighborhoods in Soulard, and the area just west of Soulard, for most of the morning, humping along from one confirmed contact to the next, marking off blocks on their xeroxed city maps. They worked through lunch, getting hungry and short-tempered. Then, at four o’clock, Carter found Patsy Hill’s apartment.

  He called just at four, not particularly excited. “Amity Jenetti says a woman in the next block kind of looks like her, her face does. Says the woman has black hair and is generally dark, and the last picture of Hill was blond, but Jenetti says the face is right and she’s tall. But then, she says she’s big, you know—heavy, and Hill was skinny as a bull snake. About the right age, late thirties or early forties, and lives alone. Says the woman probably got here ten or twelve years ago.”

  “I don’t know. Sounds better than anything we’ve gotten so far,” Lucas said. “You got a name and address?”

  “Dorothy Pollock, and the address is . . .” He had to look it up.

  When Lucas got it down, he said, “Call you back in a few minutes.”

  He and Andreno were eating meatball sandwiches at a sidewalk place, under a green-and-white-striped awning, at a tippy metal table with a top the size of a hubcap. Lucas phoned Sally and gave her the information. Sally called back fifteen minutes later. “The woman is supposedly how old?”

  “Late thirties, early forties.”

  “She’s twenty-six, according to her Social Security account. Her application is hinky. We can’t find anybody by that name at the listed address, when she was supposedly a teenager.”

  “Interesting,” Lucas said.

  “We got a driver’s license, and the age doesn’t match the Social Security. It says thirty-five. Hill’s supposed to be thirty-seven, but she’d take years off, right? We got Neil looking at it—he’s a picture maven.”

  “Well, what’s he say?”

  Lucas heard Sally turn away from the phone and ask somebody, “Well, what do you say, Neil?”

  Behind Sally, he heard another voice said, “Darn. The picture sucks, but . . . You know what?”

  Sally came back. “You better get over there. An entry team’ll meet you in the brewery parking lot in fifteen minutes.”

  “Damn,” Lucas said. He hung up, wiped the phone with a napkin.

  Andreno said, “Nothing, huh?”

  “They think it’s her,” Lucas said. “We’re supposed to meet an entry team in the brewery parking lot in fifteen minutes.”

  Andreno stopped chewing long enough to look at his watch. “So we got three minutes to eat.”

  “Basically.”

  “We’re so fuckin’ good.”

  “That’s true.” Lucas licked his fingers, then cleaned up his face with the napkin. “Gotta call Carter and Bender. Carter’s gonna pass a kidney stone when he hears.”

  Andreno stood up, bunched the remnants of his sandwich in its waxed-paper wrapper, and pitched it into a garbage can. “Fuck a bunch of sitting here being cool,” he said, his voice suddenly excited. “Let’s go.”

  THE ENTRY TEAM was as tough-looking as any Lucas had seen, big men sweating in dark blue uniforms and heavy armor. Carter and Bender had brought the woman who’d fingered the apartment, along with another woman, named Amy, who’d actually been inside. The entry team leader worked through as much as Amy knew. They learned that Hill’s apartment actually consisted of the converted back rooms of a house owned by an elderly woman named Betty McCombs.

  Lucas and the three ex-cops stood around and watched the team get ready. Mallard and Malone arrived a moment later, in a Dodge, and then a half-dozen other agents in two other cars.

  “Two options,” the team leader told Mallard, and the semicircle of faces around him. “The first is, we hit them now, hard, take them down. The downside is, we might have to take them out. If the place is empty, we put the door back together and wait
for them to show. The second option is to watch the place, and catch them in the open, either coming or going. There are no cars parked outside right now, but there could be one in the garage.”

  Sally had been on the phone as they were talking, and now spoke up. “Carson got in touch with Pollock’s employer. She called in this morning and said she was sick. She’s not at work.”

  “Can they see the street from the back of the house, where these rooms are?” Lucas asked.

  Carter said, “We cruised by. They could see the street, but not much of it. They could see it especially on the north side, the garage side. The other side, they’d be looking down a little narrow strip between the next house over.”