Mortal Prey

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."

"So if we sent Sally in with another guy, the youngest-looking guy, and we got into this old lady's house with some listening gear… we should be able to figure out if they're in there."

"We could do that," the team leader said. "And we could get a better layout from her."

"So let's do it," Mallard said.

Without the prospect of instant action, the intensity faded a bit, the entry team guys peeled off their armor and flopped around the place, and ten minutes later, when Sally and a youthful, blond agent named Meers left for McCombs's house, Lucas and the three St. Louis ex-cops congregated around Andreno's car.

"You guys get anything to eat?"

"Meatball sandwiches up at Dirty Bill's," Andreno said.

"Nasty, but tasty. You better stick close to the can," Carter said. Then, to Lucas: "What do you think?"

"Maybe," Lucas said. "They wouldn't be going out much in the daytime."

"What about these guys?" He nodded at the federal entry team.

"Look like pros," Lucas said. "The ones up in Minneapolis are good."

Bender nodded. "Everything I've heard about these guys is, they're good."

"So we wait," Lucas said.

They waited an hour and a bit more, the sun still bright in the sky, but angled now, and Lucas began to worry about the problems of darkness. Then Sally came back with a layout. "The old bat, you oughta see her," she said to Mallard. "She's got a bad mouth, she apparently hates people on sight, she smells-"

"Are they there?" Mallard asked impatiently.

"I don't think so, not at the moment-but it's her. It's Hill," Sally said. Sally was wearing an olive-drab shirt, made of a crinkly cotton fabric, without epaulets but with a military cut. "Tommy set up the listening gear and it's working, and we put it right on the wall, but we didn't hear anything. They could be asleep."

"How many rooms?

"Kitchen, living room, bath, bedroom and a spare room, but it's small, more like a closet. One hallway. You come into the living room and look straight back at the kitchen, down a hall, with the main bedroom on one side of the hall, and the bath and the small room opening off the other side. Thirty feet, maybe, from the front of the living room to the back wall of the kitchen. One door in and out, with a push-out fire window on the north side, in the main bedroom. There's a window on the south side…"

They worked through it, still playing the possibilities. Go in hard, and if they weren't there, wait. Or wait, ready to snap when they walked in.

"I don't want to wait," Mallard said, finally. "There're too many possible ways for things to go wrong, and we've been waiting…"

But as he ran down his rationale for hitting McCombs's house, a call came in for Malone, and after listening for a moment, she said, "What?" in a harsh, incredulous tone and everyone went quiet. The tone was bad news, and they waited.

Malone, more puzzled than anything, Lucas thought, after a moment looked at Mallard and said, "The Memphis police just called. A woman who says she's Patricia Hill just turned herself in on the old homicide warrant. She's with her lawyer. She says she's scared and she's willing to give up Rinker. The Memphis cops want to know what to do."

"Holy cow," Mallard said. He looked around, spotted Lucas. "You hear that?"

"Yeah," Lucas said. "I dunno. Does she say where Rinker is?"

Malone was listening again, and when Lucas asked the question, she nodded and said, "She's giving up the house. I mean, the house. McCombs's house."

"She says Rinker's there?"

"She says she was this morning."

"Let's go," Mallard said. "Let's hit it."

"Wait a minute," Lucas said, then louder, "Wait a fuckin' minute."

"What?" Mallard asked.

"What if Rinker's setting us up? She says she's gonna start taking out FBI people. What if she sent Hill down there to pull us into the house without thinking about it? What if Rinker's out there with one of those rifles?"

Mallard pulled at a lip. Then: "Goddamnit." He looked at the entry team leader. "We're gonna go in, but we're gonna get every cop in St. Louis down here first. You get set up in your vans across the street, and back behind the neighbor's, where you can see the door and windows, but don't get out yet. We'll get the cops down here and jam up every street for six blocks around. If she's waiting for us, there won't be any way out."

The cops came in a wave, running with lights but no sirens. Agents in blue nylon jackets met them on the streets, routed them out to the perimeters. Nobody in or out without the cars being checked, two cops on each car check. The screen was set two blocks out from the McCombs house. A car with a Texas license plate was found at the edge of the perimeter, and cops started going door to door, looking for the owner. Another hour slipped away.

"Ain't gonna help if she's on a suicide run," Lucas told Malone. "She could be up in an attic somewhere, the people in the house already dead, looking at the front of McCombs's house through a scope. She got a seven-millimeter mag off that peckerwood down in Tisdale. If she's any good with it, if she's got a shooting rest, she could poke a hole in a pie plate at three hundred yards."

Malone shook her head. "She won't. She's not on a suicide run. Not yet."

"You know that for sure."

"Yeah. She's not done with Dallaglio or Ross. Her brother killing himself pissed her off, but her brother's not the same as losing her fiancй and her baby. She doesn't want to die yet."

"Hope you're right. But something's hinky here."

The house seemed so lifeless that they had little hope that Rinker was inside. She could be asleep, Mallard argued. They might not hear her, he said, because the bedroom didn't share a wall with anything they could reach with the sound equipment.

With the sun almost on the horizon, and long dark shadows striping across the lawns, everything was finally set and Mallard gave a go to the entry team. The team's vans moved, rolling back from their surveillance sites, and the team piled out. One man set up to watch the windows, while the others came in from the front of the house, crept under one window, reached the back door.

Lucas watched, feeling the pressure. Then the door man moved, then another guy, then the door man stepped back with a monster wedge, normally used for splitting wood, ready to swing. Two guys on the sides of the house, coordinated by radio, pitched flash-bangs through the windows, and as they went off, sounding to Lucas like distant cannon fire, the guy with the monster wedge hit the doorknob. The team was inside in a second, and in five seconds, had secured the place.

"Empty," Mallard groaned. "Okay. Get some guys out in the garage, close the door. We'll set up for surveillance."

WHEN THEY WERE SET, and nothing was moving, Mallard, Malone, Lucas, and Andreno crossed the street and walked up to the house, Lucas nervously watching the windows in the houses up and down the street. Nothing happened. Inside, the surveillance team leader said, "Nothing."

They walked through the apartment, looked in the chest of drawers, looked at the walls, checked the medicine cabinet.

"Bullshit," Lucas said. "They cleared out before Hill ever went to Memphis. There's nothing left here but junk. Nothing sentimental. She wasn't running from Rinker, 'cause if she was, when did she have time to pack up?"

"When were they here?"

Lucas was still poking around, and came up with a newspaper. "This morning's paper," he said, showing them the Levy headline. "They brought it in this morning."

"And she might be hurt," Andreno said. "Look at this." They went to the bathroom, where Andreno pointed into a wastebasket. Inside, they could see a white shirt with a thumb-sized bloodstain. "Wonder what that came from?"

"Not that much blood," Malone said. "We don't even know it's hers."

"Got a Cancun label-it's from a Cancun hotel, and it's a medium, which wouldn't fit Patsy Hill," Andreno said.

"So where is she?" Mallard asked.

"Running? I don't know," Lucas said. "Maybe she's got a backup spot. But maybe we've just broken her out."

"Or maybe she's coming back," Malone said.

Lucas said, "Nah."

Mallard: "We can't take a chance. We'll set up here all night. Pull the cops out, maybe she'll come in."

"Better get a bigger net around Dallaglio and Ross," Lucas said. "Better get some smart guys with them. After Levy… I don't know. A car bomb?"

"Don't tell me a car bomb," Mallard groaned. He looked around. "She was here this morning. This morning."

Honus Johnson was working on a chest of drawers in American cherry. A Honus Johnson chest of drawers brought in four thousand dollars in a boutique furniture shop in Boston; they looked so much like the old ones.

In his woodworking, Johnson tended to use British tools, like his miniature Toolman hand planes, which were simply exquisite. In his sadistic pursuits, he preferred Craftsman tools from Sears. He rejected electrical equipment, because it lacked subtlety-though he always had a soldering iron handy. He'd really found his metier in hammers, pliers, and handsaws. He'd once cut off a man's foot with a hacksaw, to make a business point for his employer.

His personal inclinations pretty much ruled out any deep friendships. Even people who knew him well, and used his services, were likely to wince when they saw him coming, though he looked harmless enough: a pinkish, white-haired gentleman in his late forties or early fifties, with square, capable hands and a thin, oval face.

He wore khaki pants and striped long-sleeved shirts and European-look square-toed brown shoes, and tended to suck on his teeth, as though he was perplexed. He also had a tendency to flatulence, which resulted in some of John Ross's associates referring to him as Stinky-but only very privately. He'd worked for Ross for two dozen years, a weapon much like Rinker.

Rinker spent the morning on the far west edge of the metro area, at the Spirit of St. Louis Airport, looking around, wandering among the industrial and office buildings. Later that day, now dressed as the Dark Woman, she spent an enjoyable couple of hours at the Missouri Botanical Gardens. The Gardens had an environmental dome called the Climatron, an enclosed jungle that offered much in the way of concealment and ambush possibilities. She looked at it closely for a long time.

When she arrived at Johnson's house, a little after four o'clock in the afternoon, he was working in his backyard woodshop, power-planing cherry planks for the chest of drawers. Johnson really had no fear of retaliation for his past acts of cruelty, simply because he was never the principal in the act. Like his favorite chisels and saws, he was only a tool, if an exquisite one. In all the years he'd worked for Ross, there'd been no comebacks.

And he was careful: Almost nobody knew where he lived.

Rinker knew, but Johnson didn't know that she did. She'd made it her business to find out when she was still working for Ross. If she'd ever gotten on the wrong side of Ross, she'd thought years ago, she might want to take care of Ross's other major weapon before he had a chance to take care of her.

She'd had a hard time finding him. Johnson was not in the phone books, nor was he in any of the records that Ross kept in the warehouse. He was paid off the books, like Rinker was, and she saw him so rarely that there was no real possibility of following him home.

She'd looked in the county tax statements, but he wasn't there. She'd once managed to get his auto license number, but then found out that if she tracked the car through the state, she had to make a formal request for the information and that Johnson would be notified. No good. One of the girls at the warehouse once mentioned that she'd had to send some stuff to him, for Ross, but when Rinker made some careful inquiries, she found that the stuff was sent to a downtown post office box.

She'd eventually found Johnson's house purely through luck. Johnson had built elaborate teak plant benches for John Ross, for Ross's orchids, and when the benches were delivered, she'd been at Ross's house. The two guys who drove the delivery truck had an invoice that showed both the pickup and delivery addresses. She took the address back to the courthouse and looked it up in the tax and plat records-Johnson was there all right, but his house was listed under "Estate of Estelle Johnson."

She parked in the street and walked up the driveway. From the driveway, she could hear the planer screaming inside the workshop. She went past the garage, vaulted a chain-link fence-moving fast now, slipping the silenced Beretta from under her shirt-to the open side door of the workshop. As she came up to the door she happened to glance upward, and saw a motion detector tucked in the corner, and she stopped, peeked around the door frame. Johnson was looking right at her, a silent-alarm strobe light bouncing off his protective glasses, and he was moving to his right, quickly. She stepped through the door, following the muzzle of her pistol. He froze when he saw her, his hands empty. She glanced toward the wall that he'd been moving to: A shotgun leaned against a cabinet.

What had Jaime told her, at the ranch, about the need for handguns?

"The rifle will be leaning against a tree, and that's when they will come."

She smiled, thinking about it, and Johnson flinched. He took a step back and tried a placating smile. "Hello, Clara, I…"

No point in conversation. Rinker shot him in the nose, and he went down, twisting away, his face striking the edge of the saw table. He landed faceup in a pile of shavings. She looked at him for a moment, on the floor, judged him dead, but shot him again, carefully, between the eyes. The planer was so loud that she heard no hint of the shot, or of the gun's cycling action.

He was dead for sure now. The planer was still screaming, the plank beginning to buck. Rinker couldn't see a switch, so she pulled the plug, and the machine wound down like a depowered airplane engine.

She couldn't leave Johnson on the floor, or even in the workshop, she decided. The yard was fenced, but it wasn't the best neighborhood, and if somebody broke in, he might be found.

She looked around for a moment, then grabbed him by the collar and dragged him to a lowboy he'd used for hauling lumber. She pushed a stack of planks onto the floor-thought better of it, in case somebody looked in, and took a minute to stack them neatly near the wall-then loaded his body onto the lowboy and covered it with four transparent bags full of wood shavings and sawdust.

She pushed the whole load out the door, up the concrete walk to the back of the garage, then into the garage, past an E-Class Mercedes-Benz, and through a breezeway to the house. She couldn't actually get the lowboy into the house, because of a step. She left the body and the cart in the breezeway and let the muzzle of the Beretta lead her through the house. She was, she found, the only living thing in it.

The house was neatly kept, but had no more personality than a motel room-a few woodworking magazines, some reference works, a television set with an incongruous Nintendo console sitting on the floor next to it.

She checked it all out, then hauled Johnson's body into the house and rolled it down the basement stairs. She first thought to leave it there, at the foot of the stairs, but then noticed a chest-style freezer against the wall, and opened it. It was half-full of Healthy Choice microwave dinners, and bags of frozen peas and corn.

She took a bunch of the dinners and some of the corn, then managed to tug and pull the body around until she could boost it into the freezer. Johnson landed facedown, and she had to twist his legs to get him to fit inside. She slammed the lid.

With a few paper towels to wipe up the odd blood smear, she thought, everything would be as nice and tidy as Honus Johnson used to be.

And she had a new phone, a new house, and a new car.

Not bad for twenty minutes' work.

Though, she admitted to herself, moving the body had given her the willies. As did Johnson's bed. She was beat from the day, needed some sleep, but couldn't sleep with the smell of him, and his body still cooling in the freezer. She found clean sheets in a linen closet, sheets that smelled only of detergent, and crashed on the couch.

Long day coming…