Mortal Prey

25

Mallard pulled together all the local police forces and had them do a grid search, starting around the shopping center, checking parked cars, any car that looked unusual or out-of-the-way; looking for blood.

The ID came back on the Benz, and they went for Honus Johnson's house, and pounced on it with a full entry crew, but there was nobody home-nobody alive. They eventually found Johnson in the freezer and the California car in the garage, and they got Rinker's clothes and her guns, but no money, no passport, no paper.

Mallard, frenzied, crazy, said, "I'm not sure where we're at. It all comes down to how hard you hit her."

"I can't tell you that," Lucas said. "I knocked her down and she got right back up. I might have hit her in her left leg, because she was dragging a leg, but I'm not sure."

"Lot of blood," Sally said again. "Lot of blood."

They went after Treena Ross, but when Rinker shouted "Cops!" she hadn't immediately dumped the phone. She'd used it to call her attorney, and her attorney had come down to the hospital, where Mallard's agents had picked her up. When Mallard, Lucas, and Sally showed up at the hospital, the attorney said to Mallard, "Is it true that you were eavesdropping on conversations between my client and myself?"

They had been, of course. They'd stayed on the phone from the time Rinker's call came in through the call to the attorney. Mallard had nodded and said, "Yes."

"That's a violation of-"

"Bullshit. I have a law degree, sir, and it wasn't a violation of anything. If your client doesn't wish to tell us what really happened inside that dome tonight, we'll see that's she's charged with premeditated murder and we'll recommend that the state seek the death penalty. So what do you want to do?"

"Charge her," the attorney said, "or we walk now. Either way, she says nothing."

"Then we'll charge her."

"That's certainly your privilege."

They smiled at each other, nodded, and Mallard said, "I'll go make the call."

Later that night, he said to Lucas, "I don't think we'll get Treena. We were focused on Rinker and we didn't process her right. We didn't keep her under control."

"What happened?"

"Well, we got the phone, and she says the phone was her husband's, she was carrying it because he was wearing a tux and didn't have a place for it. And we took tape samples from her hands and arms looking for nitrites, and didn't find any. I think she used a plastic bag or a piece of cloth to cover her hand and sleeve when she fired the gun. She was wandering around in the hospital before we put a hold on her; she was in the ladies' room, and she might have flushed it. She had nitrites on her face, but she says that Rinker fired the pistol right past her, so they would be there. Smeared prints on the gun grip, clear ones on the barrel, and at least one of the good ones belongs to Rinker."

"Well-thought-out."

"For a long time," Mallard agreed. "For weeks. And they pulled it off. If we take her to trial, they'll have Rinker's gun, they'll have Rinker's blood on the glass, they'll have our whole investigation and chase with Rinker, and Ross'll say the phone calls went to her husband. All we've got is that last phone call, and Rinker called her, unfortunately, and I listened to the tape. All double-talk. I mean, it sounds good to me, but it won't be enough. It especially won't be enough when they get Ross's character into it, and they show that the third wife was killed in an unsolved hit-and-run."

Lucas was convinced. "So Treena's out of it."

He nodded. "Yes. And she knows it."

"If she had any little thing about Rinker, maybe we could deal with her… especially since we're not going to get her anyway."

Mallard shook his head. "She's not gonna deal. The whole thing was… I feel like a moron. That's what I feel like, Lucas. As soon as we clean up here, I'm going to Malone's funeral, and then I'm going home for a while, and just sit and think."

"What about Rinker?"

"Fuck her. I hope she dies of blood poisoning."

Rinker got on I -44 and headed southwest, drove for fifteen minutes before the pain dragged her off the highway. Feeling faint, she took an exit at random, spotted a hotel, turned into its parking lot, and parked the truck. She pressed the dead man into the footwell, found an Army blanket behind the seat, and threw it over him. Then, moving ever so slowly, she did a survey of her assets.

She had money, ID, two passports, both good, a black wig, and a hole in her butt that continued to bleed. She also had a small toolbox, a battered leather briefcase, and a brown sack with a grease spot that might have contained a lunch. She had a day-old newspaper.

When the dead man rolled off the passenger seat, he'd exposed a copy of the Post-Dispatch. The news section looked unread, and Rinker had heard that unread newspaper pages were virtually sterile. She pulled out the middle section, ripped then, unbuckled her slacks, touched the wound a few times, wasn't sure she should be pleased or frightened that she couldn't feel much other than the basic pain, then, in the light of the truck's overhead lamp, made eight-inch-square pads of newsprint and pressed them onto the wound.

Digging into the toolbox for a roll of duct tape, she wrapped her leg and thigh with half the roll of tape, an awkward, unprofessional mess, but it held.

She felt sleepy, and that worried her. Even with the pain in her butt starting to come on, she felt sleepy. Struggled to stay up. Dug into the briefcase and found a cell phone. Everybody had a cell phone.

She took the man's wallet out and looked at his ID and the cards inside, a couple of notes, no pictures. She checked his left hand: no wedding band. Single, she thought. Maybe nobody to come looking right away.

Fought the sleep, kept coming back to the cell phone. Finally, she decided she had no choice: one more risk to run.

She dialed, got an interrupt, and wound up talking to an operator before she got it right. Then she dialed again, and heard it ring, and then a man's voice said, "Sн?"

She switched to Spanish: "This is Cassie McLain. May I speak to Papa?"

They talked for less than a minute, and then Rinker hung up, and after a few moments, as she reconstructed it later, she passed out. She woke again later, terribly thirsty, but there was no water in the truck, and when she moved a wave of pain tore at her.

That goddamn Davenport. He'd shot her in the back while she was running away. He'd had no call to do that, she wasn't even looking at him…

She passed out again, and only woke when a bright light hit her in the eyes. A man said, in Spanish, "Are you alive?"

"Yes."

"I have a car."

He'd had to lift her out of the truck and place her in the front seat of his Cadillac. The front seat was covered with plastic garbage bags so she wouldn't make a mess. When he'd transferred her, she'd passed out again, just for a moment, and when she came to, he was wiping his hands on paper towels. "Still alive?"

"Yes." But very weak now. "Where are we going?"

"Carbondale, Illinois. Maybe two hours, I've never been there."

"What time is it?"

"Five o'clock… The sun is just coming up."

And she passed out again.

Some time later, the man backed into a one-car garage in Carbondale, woke Rinker, who was only fuzzily aware of it, and carried her into a house and put her facedown on a firm bed. A man's voice said, "I'm going to give you a shot."

The Feds have found the orange pickup for a week if the hotel hadn't been feuding with a pancake house. The pancake house's parking lot was too small, so people parked in the hotel lot, and the hotel people got pissed and required guests to put parking tickets behind the windshields of their cars. If a car sat too long without a ticket, it was towed.

The orange truck didn't have a ticket, and the hotel security guard had seen it parked in the lot when he came in that morning, so in the middle of the afternoon he finally checked…

Lucas went out with Mallard and they looked at the dead man in the footwell, and at the blood-soaked front seat, and talked to the cop who'd decided that it might be related. "Whoever was driving was shot in the butt, in the left cheek, and it wasn't the dead guy, and I saw your bolo this morning and thought I'd better have my guys give you a call."

"Done good," Lucas said. He looked around. "The question is, where'd she go from here?"

"No blood on the ground," the cop said. The local crime-scene crew had taped off the area and were going over it, looking for anything relevant. "She probably didn't walk, because she was really pumping it. The seat is soaked with blood."

"Somebody else, then? She grabbed another car?" Mallard asked.

Lucas shook his head. "No. She got help. Why would she grab another car? This one was good enough, and grabbing another car would just be another problem, with no predictable outcome, especially if she's wounded."

"So she's hiding."

"Got more friends than we thought," Lucas said. "Your report said she didn't have any, and now we know of two who were willing to risk their lives on her."

"Yeah, well… I'll write a memo."

They walked around, watching the crime-scene people for a while, but Mallard's attention was drifting and finally he asked, "You getting out of town?"

Lucas nodded. "I have no more ideas. I mean, I do, but none are relevant at the moment."

"Coming to Malone's funeral?"

"Nope. Wouldn't help her, and would bum me out worse than I already am. I liked her."

"So'd I," Mallard said. He slapped Lucas on the back. "Let's go."

When Rinker woke up, she was lying facedown on a white sheet. Her legs were spread a bit, as were her arms. And her cheek was wet. Drool, she realized. She tried to move but found her arms and legs restrained. Near panic, she pulled her head up and saw a piece of paper a few inches from her eyes. It said, in large block letters, "Call out."

"Hey," she called, her voice weak. "Hey!"

And a woman's voice from somewhere else said, "Coming…," and a second later, a brown-faced woman with a red dot in the middle of her forehead squatted up beside the bed, her face a few inches from Rinker's.

"You're taped down so you couldn't roll over and pull the saline out," the woman said. "We didn't have anything better. Let me get the tape." There was a stripping-tape sound, and one hand came free, then her left foot, then her right foot and her right hand. She started to turn, saw the saline bottle on a hook over her head, and the woman put a hand on her shoulder. "Don't move too much," she said. "You're all taped up and you've had some analgesics, but it's going to hurt. Do you have to urinate?"

Rinker thought about it and shook her head. "No, but I could use a drink of water. How long have I been here?"

"You got here this morning. This is the afternoon, about four o'clock. My husband is a doctor at the university, and this is our house."

"How bad?"

The woman smiled sympathetically. "It's never good, but the wound was confined to your buttock." She enunciated buttock perfectly, with a bit of a British accent, and Rinker nearly smiled: It reminded her of a favorite Monty Python. "So it will hurt, and even when you are healed, you might not be able to run as fast or climb as quickly as you once did. And of course there is cosmetic damage, there will be a scar… but you are in no danger. Now."

"Thank you very much," Rinker said. The woman nodded but said nothing more, and after a minute Rinker asked, "So what do I do? Just lie here with my butt in the air until it heals?"

"You'll have to, uh, lie there for a while, certainly. We have been told to purchase a television set and some video games if you wish to have them."

"A TV would be good," Rinker said. "I don't need the games. Can I prop myself up?"

"You can, but I promise you, it's better to lie flat," the woman said. Then she said, "My name is Rayla. My husband is Geoffrey. He will be back soon, and we'll go to Best Buy for the television."

"Could I get water?"

"Oh, my goodness, yes, I forgot," Rayla said, jumping up. "Would you like juice? We have papaya, mango… Would you like a fish sandwich?"

"Do you have an Internet connection?"

"Yes, we do."

Geoffrey was a charming man, but she could never quite figure out how old he was: something between twenty-five and forty-five, she thought. He had a smooth brown oval face and a soft manner that fit well with a doctor, but not so well as an accomplice to major crime. They never talked about crime, though he knew who she was, and called her "Clara" rather than Cassie. He said that the costs of her care had been "fully funded."

He brought in a television with a DVD player, and for three days she watched TV and thought about things. On the fourth day, she made her first trip away from the bedpan, to the toilet, where she learned how hard it was for a woman to pee while sitting on one buttock and holding the other one carefully clear. Everything got squished together.

On the sixth day, she started a rehab program that featured five colors of rubber tubing that Geoffrey brought home from the hospital. She had to stretch against the rubber tubes, and could barely move the thinnest size. After a week, when she was feeling stronger and the thinnest tube wasn't stiff enough, he moved her to the next size, and again, he could barely move her leg…

As she waited to heal, and practiced walking, she watched TV and roamed the Internet and thought about things some more.

She thought about Paulo and the baby. The recovery process was quicker, easier than the recovery in Mexico, but the smells and the pain brought Paulo back, and the baby…

She thought about those bad years, the years she'd always tried to blank out, when her brother and her stepfather were abusing her. Abusing her and comparing notes on how well she'd done.

She'd run away, and she'd tried dancing nude, and she'd been raped by a fat man and she'd killed that man with a T-ball bat, and then she'd been picked up by John Ross, who'd taught her to kill for money, and she'd saved her money and had bought a bar and had been successful and had gone to college to try to understand herself…

She'd learned about herself in school. She might have avoided all this, if the killing hadn't been so easy and profitable. She never thought about the dead people, she only thought about the money. It had seemed like her right to kill, after all that had happened to her.

Then Davenport.

She'd feared the federal people, in a theoretical way, like you fear dying in a plane accident. Ross and his friends had heard rumors that there was a file on her, but that the file was almost empty.

Then Davenport had come along, and somehow had screwed everything. She'd lost her bar, lost a friend, almost lost her life. She'd been driven to Mexico and the disaster that followed. Nothing theoretical about Davenport.

She didn't cry about it. She might have, but she didn't.

She set her jaw, and she thought about Davenport.

She knew something about him. One solid fact.

She'd have to heal before she did anything. But she had time-five and a half weeks, to be exact. A Saturday in October.

Davenport was the devil, and had to be dealt with.