Mortal Prey

by John Sandford

  “You think a travel agent?”

  “Well, when we first got onto Rinker, up in Minnesota, we were never able to track Rinker when she was traveling—it was like she was invisible. I wouldn’t be surprised if all these Mafia guys like to keep their travel private. Maybe it’s somebody Rinker knew from when she was traveling to kill people. Maybe there’s a connection.”

  “If it is something like a travel agent, and we can figure it out, we could maybe get Ross to book a trip,” Sally said. “You know, have him be sneaky about it, tell the agent to book him out of someplace like Springfield, and then just saturate the airport before he comes in. She’d have no way to know that we were onto her.”

  “That could work,” Lucas said.

  Derik said, “At least we’re being . . . whatever that word is.”

  Lucas said, “What word?”

  “You know . . .”

  “Proactive,” Sally said.

  “So let’s proact our asses over to Dallaglio’s place and talk to Jesse Dallaglio,” Lucas said.

  A DOCTOR WAS leaving the Dallaglios’ when they arrived, a tall slender woman in what would have been a tweedy dress if it hadn’t been ninety-eight degrees outside; and it still looked like tweed, even if it was some kind of light knotted cotton. Sally identified herself and said, “Did you put them asleep?”

  “The children were exhausted. I gave them sleep aids, they’re with their mother,” the doctor said. “I left some sleep aids for Mrs. Dallaglio, but I don’t know if she’ll use them. She was resistant.”

  INSIDE THE HOUSE ,one of the bodyguards, still wearing bloody pants, said, “Mrs. Dallaglio’s back with the kids in the bedroom.”

  “We’ll wait,” Lucas said. And, “There are ten guns around the house now. You’ve probably got time to get cleaned up if you want.”

  The bodyguard looked down at his pants. “Gonna burn these sons of bitches,” he said. He looked around. “I’m gonna do that, get cleaned up. I’ll be back in ten minutes.” As he was going out the door, he added, “What a night.”

  A SECOND BODYGUARD came padding down a hall as they stood around the living room, saw them, and said, “The kids are asleep. Jesse’ll be with you in a minute.”

  More like five minutes, but when Jesse Dallaglio came out of the back, she’d managed to pull herself together. Her eyes were still puffy and red from crying, but the first wave of the shock had passed.

  Lucas had seen it before: Women recovered faster than men from the death of a spouse. Lucas believed that both men and women expected the wife to live longer, so that women were somewhat braced for the departure of a husband, while a husband, in most police cases, was absolutely unprepared—unless, of course, he’d done the killing himself.

  When that was a possibility, most homicide cops liked to take a quick, hard look at the husband, to see if he was either too pulled together or too demonstrative. Most innocent husbands simply dropped into dumb shock and stayed there for a while. It was an attitude not easily faked.

  “I’m better,” Dallaglio was telling Sally. “The girls are sick, and they’re terrified. But they’ll be okay. The doctor gave them some sleeping pills. What did you . . . ?”

  “Chief Davenport had an idea that we felt we had to look into,” Sally said. “Could you tell us when you decided, for sure, to go with Executive Air? And when you decided what time you’d be leaving?”

  She looked from Sally to Lucas to Derik, then back to Lucas as her hand came up to her mouth. “Oh my God. How did she know we’d be there?”

  Lucas nodded. “That’s what we were wondering.”

  Dallaglio turned away from them all and stared at a wall for a moment, thinking, then back to Lucas. “Exec Air had a problem. We have a deal with them, we get a rate, but they only manage three jets and all three of them were out. Two were coming back, but they didn’t know until two o’clock when they’d be in, and when they could have one of them turned around. They told Paul to call at two—and that’s what he did. They told us to be there at nine o’clock, or a little after.”

  “So you didn’t know when you’d be leaving until two o’clock.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Who did you tell outside the house? Paul’s friends, your friends, your daughters’ friends?”

  Again, Dallaglio turned away, thought, and turned back. “Paul told at least two people, the Karens. We call them the Karens—it’s Karen Slade and Karen English, they’re the two assistant vice presidents at work, they’re Paul’s assistants. But I don’t think either of them was around when Clara was here. Maybe Karen Slade, but she’s a dear friend of both of us, her and her husband. It can’t be Karen.”

  Sally was making notes. “Did you talk to anyone?”

  “I called my sister, Janice, she lives down in Little Rock, but it wouldn’t be her. The kids . . . we’d have to wait until tomorrow, but I don’t think they called anyone. They’re not really old enough to have telephone friends yet. I mean, Justy does, in a way, but it’s the girl down the block and we hardly know her parents. I would be amazed if Clara Rinker knew them.”

  The bodyguard who’d been wearing the bloody pants came back, his hair damp, wearing a fresh shirt and pants. Jesse looked at him and said, “Sy, could you get James and check out back? We just heard a noise. . . . We were about to go look.”

  “We’ll check,” Sy said, and he walked through the room into the family room, where they heard him talking with the bodyguard named James, and a minute later, they heard a door sliding open.

  Jesse Dallaglio dropped her voice. “The people we really don’t know in the house are the security people. There are eight of them—four of them came out to the airport with us, for all the good it did us—and they were here all the time. Every one of them has a cell phone, and Paul told them this afternoon that we’d be making a run for the airport. Two of them were coming to Newark with us. They were going to stay with us until we got on the plane tomorrow morning.”

  Lucas looked at Sally, who said, “We can talk to their boss and get the cell-phone numbers without them knowing about it.”

  “You’ll have to use some pretty harsh language with the boss, so they won’t be tipped.”

  “We can do that,” Derik said.

  “Okay,” Lucas said. Back to Dellaglio: “Now, who else? The Karens, your sister, the security guys. How did you make the travel arrangements? A travel agent?”

  “American Express,” Dallaglio said. “We have a Platinum Card, and they have one of those call-up bureaus somewhere. They knew, but how would Clara get into that? I mean, it’s not like we even talk to the same person every time. It’s always somebody different.”

  Lucas said to Sally, “Okay, here’s something dumb. Check the phones here, see if they’re bugged. Rinker did that thing with the cell phone, with Levy—maybe she’s got a high-powered phone tech working for her.”

  “She does,” Sally said. “We already know that.” She made a note, and said, “Makes me a little nervous to be talking here.”

  Lucas said to Dallaglio, “Think—anybody else. Think of every phone call you made. That Paul made.”

  She thought for a minute, then shook her head. “We were really running around, getting ready. We were gonna be gone for maybe a month, or even more . . . I . . . you know, Paul called the Wall Street Journal guy, I think, the delivery guy, and canceled the paper. I think he said something about it.”

  “We should get the call records and go over them,” Sally said. “Just to make sure.”

  “Gotta talk to the Karens,” Lucas said. “Gotta do that tonight.”

  • • •

  THEY TALKED TO the Karens separately, shaking them out of bed, giving them the news about Dallaglio. They both appeared to have been sleeping soundly. Lucas had worked enough homicides to believe that sound sleep came with an innocent mind. If either had killed Dallaglio, she would have been on pins and needles to know what happened—or would already know, and only masterful actresses
could have played the shock on their faces when Sally gave them the news.

  Both said that Dallaglio had warned them against telling anyone else about the trip. Both said that they had obeyed the order—hadn’t even talked to each other about it.

  When the interviews were done, Lucas said, “We need to look at Dallaglio’s phone records. These two didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “A hasty conclusion,” Sally said. They were standing under a lush, small-leaved oak tree in one of the Karens’ front yard. “We don’t know enough—”

  “I know enough,” Lucas said. “Neither one of them suspected the killing was coming. Or, if they did, they were good enough actresses that we’ll never figure it out. Either way, it’s time to move on.”

  “Derik should have the phone records by now,” Sally said. She looked at her watch. “It’s twoA .M . You want to keep running?”

  “I’m just getting under way,” Lucas said, grinning at her in the dark. “Love this kind of thing, tearing around in the middle of the night. Maybe we oughta find some caffeine.”

  WHEN THEY GOT back to the FBI office, Derik was waiting with an unhappy surprise. “We got the phones for all the security guys. There were quite a few calls, but the numbers check out, unless Rinker’s working at a Pizza Hut. There was another number we didn’t expect.”

  He pushed a piece of paper at them. The paper was a list of numbers, and one of the numbers was circled in red. “That’s an unlisted phone. It goes to John Ross. The call was made at 5:10P .M . from Dallaglio’s home office.”

  “Somebody called Ross?”

  “Yeah. Probably Dallaglio. There’s a phone call from that home office number to Dallaglio’s mother’s home, and that lasted twelve minutes. Then, one minute later, another call to Executive Air, which we figure was arrangements on the plane. And one minute after that, the call to Ross’s, which lasted for two minutes. We think it was Dallaglio, working down a list.”

  Lucas nodded: That seemed likely. He tapped the Executive Air call. “I wonder if Rinker used those guys—if that’s how she got around. Has anybody looked at Executive Air?”

  Sally shook her head. “No. We can. But that could be quite a few people. . . .”

  “So get one of your paper experts to do it—find out who works there, cross-reference them against Rinker’s known work record. Check criminal backgrounds, see if there was any kind of link between Executive Air and the assholes. The Mafias, or whatever they are.”

  Sally nodded. “There’s still the problem of Ross. That he might have set it up.”

  “We should talk to Mrs. Dallaglio again. See if there was any kind of competitive thing going on.”

  “Think she’d tell us?”

  “Why not? She’s not a hood—we can’t hang her. She doesn’t know nuthin’ about nuthin’.”

  “Too late now,” Sally said. Lucas turned to look at the wall clock. Ten after three.

  “First thing tomorrow,” he said.

  They agreed to meet in the hotel lobby at eight o’clock. They’d had enough for the night. Derik said he had a few more things to do, that he’d be another fifteen minutes, and Lucas and Sally walked out to the stairs. On the way down, Lucas stopped, said, “Goddamnit.”

  “What?”

  “I gotta go back. I need to talk to Derik. I’ll catch a ride back with him.”

  “Something important? A coup?”

  “Probably not. Another detail to check.”

  Back upstairs, he asked Derik how long it would take to get all of Ross’s phone calls for the past two months, since the shooting in Mexico, both outgoing and incoming, with IDs on each phone. “We practically live in the phone company computer,” he said. “I could call a guy, get them here in a half hour.”

  “Call the guy. And I’ll need all of Patricia Hill’s calls from the same time. I’m gonna get a Coke. Maybe spend a little time here . . .”

  LUCAS GOT A COKE from the canteen, and when he got back, Derik said, “We know six phones that he uses personally. We’re getting lists for all six. They’ll come up here. . . .” And he showed Lucas how to manipulate the mail feature on the group’s main computer.

  “How long?”

  “He said he’d run them right away. The rumor is getting around that we’re in trouble, so our guys back in Washington are doing everything they can.”

  “Good enough.” Lucas sat down and stretched. “You can take off if you like.”

  “I might, if you can handle this. You could call me at the hotel if you have trouble.”

  “Should be okay. I get along with computers.”

  “You were Davenport Simulations, somebody told me.”

  “Used to be. Got bought out by the current management,” Lucas said.

  “Hope you made a shitload of money.”

  Lucas nodded. “I did, pretty much. Right there in the middle of the dot-com thing.”

  “But the company’s still around, right? Doing all right?”

  “Yup. I’m out of it, don’t even own any stock—but from what I hear, they’re doing okay.”

  DERIK FUSSED A BIT ,then left, leaving Lucas in the quiet conference room. He checked the computer every few minutes, then found that he could sign onto his home ISP and get at his e-mail. That sucked up a half hour, deleting the fast money and pornography offers, checking a few of the Porsche aftermarket companies. Then it occurred to him to check boat companies, because the FBI computer was so quick, and he started downloading photos of shallow-water boats from Maverick, and then he got onto the Boston Whaler and Hurricane sites, went out to look at C-Dory and a few more. By the time he got back to the official mail, it was after four.

  When he checked the mail, he found lists for the six phones that Ross was known to use. He took a while to figure out the formatting, then started with the longest list, which showed more than a thousand calls. On the fourth list, linked to the unlisted office phone, he got lucky. A phone call went into Ross’s office at three o’clock from Los Angeles, from a BP station. There was another three o’clock call from Sacramento, then another from someplace in Wyoming, a longer one, another from Kansas, three more from St. Louis. All at three o’clock in the afternoon, all from gas stations.

  Rinker was calling Ross. Lucas would bet on it. There was one good way to confirm it: He pulled the Hill list, to see if he could find a duplication, a call to Hill from the same time and place as a call to Ross.

  But there were none.

  He took a turn around the office. Was he on the wrong trail? The line of calls coming across the country was so good, and at exactly the right time. But then, Ross was in the trucking business, and was also in the organized-crime business. He would get calls from phone booths at interstate gas stations.

  He walked around the room a couple of times, trying to figure a way to confirm the calls, and began to worry that he was “locking in,” a problem he saw with other cops, all the time, the sure sense that something was just so, when it wasn’t. Something that felt so good that it had to be. You could build a great logical case out of pure bullshit, and it happened too frequently.

  He circled the question, and couldn’t make it work. Ross and Rinker were into something he couldn’t quite figure. He felt stupid, and that made him angry.

  “Fuck it,” he said, and he walked out of the room, down the hall, had the guard call him a cab, and ten minutes later—the cab arrived at the FBI building with unnatural celerity—walked into the hotel.

  He could get three hours of sleep if he was lucky. He expected to wake up pissed off and tired, and he did. At seven-forty-five, he called Sally in her room. When she answered, with a song in her eyes—he assumed that, from her chipper voice—he snarled, “I’ll be way late,” and was asleep again when his head hit the pillow.

  Ross & Rinker, Rinker & Ross.

  Had to be.

  23

  LUCAS SLEPT UNTIL ONE O ’CLOCK .HE ’D never had trouble sleeping late, and into the afternoon, even, though he oft
en had trouble getting to sleep at midnight. He felt decent when he got up. He took his time shaving and in the shower, lingered over a sandwich and the newspaper, and at two o’clock walked into the FBI conference room, thinking, Rinker & Ross, Ross & Rinker.

  Sally was there, and said, “Mallard called—he’s on his way back. Washington is going to pull us in a couple of days, he thinks, but we’re okay if we can come up with something. Anything. They’re not going to do anything public, especially after Malone went down. But it doesn’t look good for the hometown kids.”