Mortal Prey

by John Sandford

  Then Andreno said, “I think I’m in love.”

  Lucas looked and said, “Jesus Christ, she’s fourteen.”

  “But she thinks like forty. You want some purple fish eggs?”

  “This party is too good for you.”

  “That’s possible. Did I ever tell you about the time the Prince of England came here, and I was supposed to be security, and I was wearing this tux, but my Jockey shorts kept riding up in my ass crack and were strangling my balls. . . .”

  Lucas listened with mild amusement, and then realized . . .

  “Where’s Ross?”

  Andreno stopped in midsentence, looked around, and said, “Three minutes ago, he was under that crab-apple tree.” They both looked toward the top of the garden, the end away from the brick building. There were two men standing under the tree, talking, but neither was Ross. Treena Ross was also gone. “Maybe in the can.”

  “Not unless they’re peeing in the bushes,” Lucas said. They were both moving, passed Sally and Mallard. As they went by, Lucas said, “Ross is gone. You see him?”

  They both looked and fell in with Lucas and Andreno, and Sally said, “Shit. He was right there.” The four of them continued to the top of the garden, to the two men under the crab apple. Lucas asked, “Have either of you seen John Ross and his wife? It’s pretty urgent.”

  One of them said, “Yes, I think they went to look at the orchids in the Climatron. Treena had a flier of some kind, a special orchid display.”

  They all looked that way, and saw Treena Ross stepping through the door into the Climatron, with John Ross a step behind. Lucas shouted at them, “ROSS: WAIT.”

  But Ross was gone, the door was closing, and Lucas started running, as hard as he could, down the sidewalk, running hard, Andreno falling behind, Sally a couple of steps behind Andreno, handicapped by heels, Mallard behind that, Sally shouting into a radio, something unintelligible, and then as Lucas came up to the door, he saw three flashes, muzzle flashes, and heard faint screaming and he shouted, “She got him, she’s inside, spread out, block the place . . .” And he was through the door.

  The Climatron was literally a jungle, bamboo and palms and ficuses and probably a fuckin’ cockatoo, he thought. Once inside, Treena Ross’s screams were shrill and close by, but he couldn’t see her. He was on a pebbled sidewalk, and he drew his .45 and ran down the sidewalk, following a curve around to the right and then back toward the center. As he came around the curve, he saw Treena Ross backed against a low wall of bamboo, a body at her feet, her cream dress blotched with blood.

  She saw Lucas coming and screamed, “She went that way, she went that way, she’s in the trees. She’s in the trees, she shot John, call an ambulance.”

  Andreno was right behind him and had a telephone out and was calling an ambulance, and Lucas said, “Stay here with Treena,” but Andreno caught his arm and said, “We gotta get out of here, man, we gotta get outside. She’ll kill you in here, you’ll never see her, but we can pen her up inside.”

  Lucas looked around and then knelt next to John Ross and rolled him. He was dead, three shots to the back of his head at close range, massive exit wounds on his face and forehead. “Let’s go,” he said to Andreno. “You don’t have a gun, get Mrs. Ross out of here.” And he ran back to the door and outside and started shouting, “Seal the building, seal the building, spread out and seal the building . . .”

  Mallard and Sally and Derik were already moving, Derik going right with Lucas and Mallard and Sally going left, two more tuxedoed men running through the crowd, more guns coming. Rinker had had time to get out if she was set up for a fast escape, Lucas thought, but not a lot more time than that. If she’d slowed down, if she’d frozen . . .

  They ran around the building, past another exit, and Lucas shouted over his shoulder to Derik, “Block this, block this . . .” and Derik pulled up and Lucas continued around. There was another exit on the back, and as he came up on it, he saw Sally coming from the other direction.

  “What?” he shouted.

  “We maybe got her inside, didn’t see anybody running.”

  “Get more people, get everybody here. Ross is shot, Ross is dead . . .”

  And Sally was on the radio, and everybody Lucas could see was running, and they tightened the choke hold on the Climatron.

  And then an agent shouted, “Window! We’ve got a broken window.”

  Lucas’s heart sank, but he ran that way, to the far back side of the dome, where it sat above the landscape, on a concrete retaining wall. Above the concrete wall, one of a band of windows appeared to have been broken out.

  “Goddamnit.” Lucas looked around. “Somebody give me a step.”

  One of the agents holstered his gun and made a step with his interlinked fingers, and boosted Lucas up the wall. Lucas did a push-up onto the top, then reached down to the window. A woman-sized hole had been knocked in the glass from the inside. She’d cut herself doing it, he thought. There was a smear of blood on the glass.

  “I think she’s out,” he shouted down. “She’s bleeding. We need to block this place, just in case she’s inside, and then spread out in the park, see if we can push her. She’s close. . . . Let’s go, let’s go. . . .”

  Sally had them organized in fifteen seconds, and they began moving in a wide band, behind the Climatron, spreading through the dark, jogging, looking for anything in front of them. Lucas stayed back, looking at the jungle inside the dome. He didn’t want to punch out any more glass, and he eventually dropped back down the wall and ran around to the front.

  Treena Ross was sitting on the ground, Andreno beside her. “Stay with her,” Lucas said, and he went inside the dome. The door moved again, behind him, and Derik was there, with his pistol. “We can’t do this, Lucas. We need a team with armor. If she’s in here, she’ll kill at least one of us, and maybe both of us.”

  Lucas thought about it, ten seconds, fifteen seconds. So curious that Rinker’d let herself be trapped in here, if she had . . . but then, she hadn’t expected a massive number of cops.

  “Come on,” Lucas said. He started into the dome.

  “Goddamnit,” Derik said.

  “I gotcha covered,” Lucas said. He hurried down the path, through the jungle—saw a pistol lying on the path near a fake cliff and waterfall, called “Gun” and went on, trying to get his bearings. He finally clambered through a hump of bamboo toward the back glass, where Rinker had broken out. Derik followed, scuttling this way and that, his weapon pointed in the air, looking for movement in the trees. Lucas squatted next to the broken window, and as Derik came up, he said, “You don’t have a flashlight?”

  “I’ve got one of those things for your car keys . . . to see the lock.”

  “Gimme.”

  Lucas shined the tiny light on the window, at the bloodstain, and then handed the light back to Derik and said “Come on,” and stuck his pistol in his holster.

  “What . . .”

  “She’s not here. But I want you to pretend that she is. I want you to go out and get Andreno, and tell him to step inside to talk to me, tell him we’re hunting her down, that she’s maybe cornered in the basement, but get him in here. You stay with Mrs. Ross. Okay?”

  “Okay, but—”

  “Don’t ask questions. And when you’re talking to Andreno, you gotta be really excited. Get him in here.”

  “You think—”

  “Don’t ask questions.”

  DERIK WENT OUT ,while Lucas waited just inside the door. A moment later, Andreno hurried through. Lucas caught his arm. “Is the ambulance coming?”

  “Yeah. I can hear it.”

  “I want you to get out there and scoop up Treena Ross and carry her toward it. But you gotta separate her from her purse, and if she says something, turn around to me and yell, ‘Bring her purse,’ and then keep going. Okay?”

  “What are . . .”

  “Tell you in a couple of minutes. Just get her, and run her out to the rose garden or out to the ex
it. Tell the paramedics that she’s in shock. But you gotta separate her from her purse, just for a minute. And we gotta do it while people are still running around like chickens. Come on: Go.”

  Andreno nodded, and turned and ran out the door. Lucas stepped out with him, and heard the sirens, saw the cluster of faces around the crab-apple tree. Hell of a fundraiser, he thought. They ought to get a nice chunk for this one. Lots of publicity, for sure.

  Treena Ross was still on the ground. Andreno scooped her up, stepping on her purse as he did it, straightened up, and started running toward the exit a hundred yards away. Lucas heard Treena say, “My purse, my purse . . .”

  Andreno staggered with her weight, half turned, and called, “Somebody bring her purse.”

  Lucas picked it up and, as Andreno continued to run, opened the purse and found the cell phone inside. He turned it on, punched through the menu, found the phone number, and scribbled it in the palm of his hand. Then he turned it off, dropped it back in the purse, and ran after Andreno. He caught them halfway to the exit, heard Treena saying, “I can walk, I can walk.” Lucas dropped the purse in her arms, and Andreno, puffing, put her down and said, “You’re sure. You gotta have the paramedic check you. . . .”

  A group of women had ventured their way from the crab apple, and Andreno called, “Could some of you take care of Treena Ross? Get her to an ambulance.”

  “My husband,” Treena called. “My husband.”

  The helping women closed around her, and Lucas and Andreno headed back to the Climatron. “What the fuck was that about? About goddamned killed me, carrying her. She’s no lightweight.”

  “C’mon.” Lucas led him at a run back to the dome, found Mallard and Sally together, both talking into phones. Lucas waved them off, and they both rang off and Mallard said, “We have more St. Louis cops coming.”

  “She’s not in there.” Then he thought again. “But let them come in and tear the place apart. What we really need, though . . .” He turned to Sally and said, urgently, “Can you get those choppers? Now?”

  “Fifteen minutes,” she said. “They can be turning by the time we get up to Lambert.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  “Tell me what’s happening,” Mallard said. He wasn’t moving fast enough.

  Lucas said, “I don’t have a lot of time to explain this, because we’ve got to get up in the air. But the big surprise tonight was, Rinker was here, all right, but way before we were. Tonight, maybe, or late this afternoon, more likely. Remember those phone calls coming across country, at three o’clock? They were to Treena Ross, whose marriage was going down the tubes. Treena had to be worried about that, because one ex-wife already died in a hit-and-run. She might have known too much about Ross’s operation just to walk away. He might not let her walk away, any more than he let Rinker walk away.”

  “So who . . . ?” Mallard started. Then: “ Treena Rosskilled him?”

  “That’s right,” Lucas said. “She got a gun from Rinker, and carried it in, or Rinker left it for her in a bush or something, inside the dome. Then Rinker came here a while ago, knocked out that window, and left some blood behind. When you do a DNA on the blood, it’ll be the same as on that shirt, I promise you—that’s why we found the bloody shirt at Patsy Hill’s place, with the Mexican label in it. And we found a gun inside the dome, Derik and me, and I promise you, it’ll be the same gun that killed Dichter, and it’s the gun that killed Ross. So Treena Ross has a perfect alibi—absolutely unbeatable—and Ross is dead, and we never saw it coming because we were waiting for Rinker to show up. So was Ross. Everybody was . . . but they’d had it set up for long time.”

  “And the call that Dallaglio made to Ross, before the airport ambush . . .”

  “Yeah. Either he actually talked to Treena, leaving a message, or he talked to Ross, and Ross told Treena . . . and Treena tipped Rinker. Treena probably even knew that they used Executive Air when they were going out of town, so Rinker could have scouted the place way ahead of time.”

  “Jesus. And you think they’ll talk now. Treena and Rinker.”

  “Bet on it—and I got the number of the cell phone in Treena’s purse. I’ll bet you anything that the phone was stolen and that Rinker’ll be calling to make sure everything is okay, or Treena will call her. If we’re in the choppers . . .”

  “Go,” Mallard said. “Let’s go.”

  As they ran toward the exit, and Sally started working her phone to call the choppers, she asked, “How’d you know?”

  “Ross was shot in the back of the head—if you know the situation inside the Climatron, that’s not right, unless he walked in backwards. But the main thing was the blood on the window,” Lucas said.

  “What about it?”

  “It was bone-dry.”

  “Dry.”

  “It’d been there for a while—a hell of a lot longer than five minutes. Rinker hasn’t been here for two hours.”

  24

  AS SALLY SAID ,THE RUN TO LAMBERT with flashers, and an occasional burst of siren for the recalcitrant, took a little more than fifteen minutes, plus another two or three to make it down the frontage road to the helicopter facility. They had three choppers, none of them turning a blade yet. Mallard climbed out of the lead truck and ran inside the chopper hut, and they could hear him screaming. Nine men, pilots, copilots and technicians, hurried out the side, heading toward their aircraft, pulling on helmets. “Two people per chopper,” Mallard yelled. “Who wants to go with who?”

  Sally said, “I’ll ride with Lucas. He’s lucky.”

  “Go, go . . .”

  They were airborne over St. Louis twenty-five minutes after they left the botanical gardens, and spread themselves, under instructions from Mallard, along I-64. Mallard himself hovered over downtown with Andreno, while Lucas and Sally waited west of Forest Park, where they could see the lights of the inner belt, Highway 170, and the third chopper waited out beyond the outer belt, way west.

  “We’re good east-west, but if she goes north-south, it’ll take a while to get there,” Lucas shouted at Sally.

  “Not long,” Sally said, shaking her head. “And if she’s along the main stem, here, we’ll be on her in a minute. One of us will—” Her phone rang, and she put it to her ear, listened, shouted a few words, clicked it off, and said, “Treena’s phone is listed to some guy from a place called Crestwood. The phone doesn’t answer, just an answering machine, and the cops are on the way. If the place has been broken into, we’re good.”

  “We’re good,” Lucas said. “Believe it.”

  The technician riding behind the pilots was looking at a computer screen that seemed to combine a local map and a radio receiver. He spoke occasionally into a radio.

  And that’s the way it was for thirty minutes. Sitting up in the sky, watching the cars below, not talking much because of the noise. Sally said once, “It’s pretty, when you can see everything from the Missouri back to the arch.”

  “Where’s the Missouri?”

  “The line out there to the north, and over to the west, you can see the curve—looks like it really should have come into the Mississippi way to the south, but made this big jog at the last minute.”

  “Makes a peninsula out of St. Louis, almost.”

  “Yeah . . . You seem pretty calm for a guy who’s famous for hating airplanes.”

  Lucas said, “Helicopters don’t bother me, for some reason. None of it has anything to do with logic, it’s . . .”

  Then the phone rang and the computer screen lit up, and the technician started talking fast to the pilots and the chopper dove for speed and took off east, Lucas shouting, “What? What?”

  “Somebody’s talking cell phone to cell phone. Mrs. Ross’s phone is downtown, but the second one is just east of us, it’s moving, we’ve got the cell, I’m tuning her in, I’m tuning her . . . Got her.”

  “Where is she?”

  “She’s moving, she’s moving. . . .” Then he was talking to the pilots on a mouthpiece
, and the pilots were talking back, and the chopper made a big cut left, coming around, coming around, dropping, heading back west, slowing . . .

  “We got some cops coming in. . . . See that group of cars, that group right there? She’s in there, I think, four or five cars, the cops are a mile out, we got her, we got her . . .”

  RINKER WAS IN the Benz, had been talking with Treena Ross, who was weeping, grieving for her late husband, when she heard the chopper. Rinker had lived in bad parts of St. Louis long enough, in her younger years, to know what it was: a kind of strange flapping sound, as if somebody were beating his chest with open palms. She said, “Cops!” and hung up and rolled along for a moment, despair creeping into her heart, hoping that Treena knew enough to get rid of the phone, thinking quickly of Davenport . . . and then she saw the lights of a shopping center up ahead, a thin glimmer, just a possibility, of hope, and she suddenly floored the accelerator and cut through traffic and let it run out, the car gaining momentum at a ferocious rate toward the gaping mouth of what Rinker hoped was a parking ramp. Had to be a parking ramp, or a tunnel, or something; she said, aloud, “Parking ramp, please God, parking ramp.”