Mortal Prey

8

There was no easy way to drive to St. Louis from the Twin Cities. The easiest was to head east into Wisconsin, then south through Illinois on the interstate highways.

The interstates were full of Highway Patrol cops, though, so Lucas took the Porsche straight south through Iowa, along secondary highways and country roads, spending a couple of extra hours at it but having a much better time. He eventually cut I-70 west of St. Louis and took it into town, arriving just after sunset on a gorgeous, warm August evening.

Dichter had been shot the night before, and Malone had called at midnight. As they spoke, Mallard was on his way to St. Louis with his Special Studies Group, with Malone to follow in the morning.

"No question it was her," Malone said. A late-night caffeinated excitement was riding in her voice. "Two people got a pretty good look at her, but nobody knew who she was. They thought the shooting was coming from somewhere else-she must have used a silencer-and they were all running around like chickens with their heads cut off. She got out of the place clean. Nobody saw her car or where she went."

"How'd she know Dichter was in the hotel?"

"She's got a stolen cell phone. Dichter was killed on a pay phone, and we traced the number he'd called to a phone owned by a guy from Clayton-that's just outside of St. Louis, to the west. The Clayton cops went to the guy's apartment and talked to the manager, who said the guy was in Europe. So they checked the apartment and found the place had been broken into, ransacked. We called the guy in Europe and asked about the cell phone, and he said it should have been home on the dresser in the bedroom. No phone. It'd been taken."

"How'd Rinker know Dichter'd be calling from that pay phone? Did she know him that well? Or was she watching him?"

"We don't know."

"If she's watching her targets, you could set up a surveillance net around anybody else she might go after. See if she comes in on them," Lucas said.

"We've talked about doing that. Take a lot of guys-maybe twenty at a time, three shifts. Sixty guys. That's a lot."

"How bad do you want her?"

"That bad," Malone admitted. "But we have to get the budget."

"St. Louis must have a few stolen-phone dealers. The cops should have some lines on who might be selling them."

"You don't think Rinker stole it?"

Lucas said, "Jesus Christ, no. She's not a burglar. She just knew about the guy who deals them, that's all. Probably a bar guy-she was a dancer, remember? — or a barbershop in the barrio, if they've got a barrio. Get somebody to look in the Latino community, or the African community-I'll bet there's a dealer who wholesales them to a couple of guys who retail them out to people who want to call Colombia or Somalia, like that. That's pretty common. A couple of dozen overseas calls will pay for a pretty expensive phone. Ask the St. Louis cops."

"I'll do that. Can you get down?"

"I'll drive down tomorrow," Lucas said.

"No problem with Weather?"

"Nope. She's pretty interested in the whole project, and she's far enough out on the pregnancy that she doesn't really need me here."

"See you then. I'm flying the first thing in the morning."

The FBI contingent was housed in a block of rooms at the Embassy Suites Hotel, a couple of blocks off the waterfront. There was no garage, but Lucas found a spot within direct eyeshot of the front door, parked, and carried his bag inside to the reception desk.

"FBI?" asked the woman behind the desk, looking him over.

"No," Lucas said. So everybody knew the feds were in town. He pushed his American Express card at her. "I'd really appreciate something comfortable."

"That's not a problem," she said pleasantly. Her accent came from farther down the river. She was looking at a computer screen as they talked, and said, "I see you have a message."

She stepped to the left, looked through a file, produced an envelope, and passed it to him.

"Are there a lot of FBI people in the hotel?" Lucas asked.

"Mmm," she said. Then: "They think that lady killer is here-Clara Rinker."

"Here in the hotel?" She was nice-looking, a fair-skinned black woman, and Lucas thought a little moonshine couldn't hurt, especially with a southerner.

She picked up on it and smiled at him. "Not in the hotel, silly. In St. Louis."

"I'll look out for her."

They chatted as she checked him in, the kind of light southern flirting that established a mutual pleasure in the present company, with no implications whatever. The room was decent: The space was okay, with a small sitting room, the bed was solid, and if he pressed his forehead to the window, he could see the towboats working up the river. One was working up the river the first time he looked, maybe one of the same tows he'd see from his place in St. Paul. Not bad.

He dumped his bag on the bed, powdered his nose, splashed water on his face, and opened the envelope. The note said, "We're at the local FBI office. Easy to get to, too far to walk. Ask at the desk."

Though it was warm, he got a jacket, a crinkled cotton summerweight, before he headed out. Downstairs, the southerner was working the desk and he asked, "Can you tell me where the FBI office is?"

She looked at him, a little warily-was he hustling her, trying to extend the FBI comment? — and he said, "Really. I have a meeting."

"Big fibber," she said. "You said you weren't-"

"No, no, I'm not FBI. I just have a meeting."

"Well… if you're really not fibbing…"

"Really."

"Okay. If you were, it's only ninety-nine dollars federal rate for your room. You save fifty dollars."

She paused, but he shook his head. "Okay, the FBI building. It's about, ummm, twenty blocks from here. You want to go out this way to Market…" She pointed him out the door. He retrieved the Porsche, found Market, took a right, and five minutes later was easing into a parking space outside the FBI building. He'd expected a high-rise office with security. He got a low, flat fifties-look two- or three-story building that must have covered a couple of acres, with big green windows, a well-trimmed lawn, and a steel security fence on the perimeter. Lights were burning all through the building.

Inside the front door, a guard checked him off a list. Lucas declared no weapon, and the guard said, "We have a weapon pass for you, Mr. Davenport."

Lucas shrugged. "I thought it'd be better to leave it for now."

"Fine. I'll show you the conference room. Mr. Mallard is there now with the rest of the Special Studies Group." He handed Lucas a plastic card with a metal clip. "Put this on."

The guard led him to an elevator, while another guard took the desk. The first guy was older, mid-fifties, Lucas thought, with a mildly unfashionable haircut and a nose that might have been broken twice. "You ever a cop?" Lucas asked, as they got in the elevator.

The guard glanced at him. "Twenty-two years, City of St. Louis."

"You let these FBI weenies get on top of you?"

The guard smiled pleasantly, showing his eyeteeth. "That doesn't happen. You a cop, or a consultant, or what?"

"Deputy chief from Minneapolis. I've bumped into Rinker a couple of times, and Mallard thinks I can help."

"Can you?"

"I don't know," Lucas said. "She's a problem. You think these guys'll get her?"

The guard considered for a minute, and the elevator bumped to a stop one floor up. "Ah, these guys… aren't bad, for what they do," the guard said, as the door opened. They took a left down the hall. "We used to think, downtown, that they were all a bunch of yuppie assholes, but I seen some pretty good busts come out of here. What they do usually has a lot of intelligence, lot of surveillance. Patience, is what they got. They might have trouble with a street chick… Here's your room."

The conference room was unmarked. Lucas stopped and said, "You ever have a beer when you get off? Bite to eat?"

"Usually," the guard said. "There's a late-night place up on the Hill-get together with some of my old pals."

"I don't know St. Louis."

"If you're out of here by eleven, stop at the desk. I'll give you a map. You driving?"

"Yeah."

"No problem, then."

"What's your name?" Lucas asked.

"Dan Loftus."

"Lucas Davenport." They shook hands. "See you later."

The guard headed back to his station, and Lucas knocked once on the conference room door and stepped inside. A dozen people-seven or eight men in ties and long-sleeved shirts with the sleeves rolled up, and four or five women in slacks and jackets-were sitting around two long tables, with Mallard at the front. A white board covered the front wall, and somebody had drawn a flow chart on it with three colors of ink. Five or six laptop computers were scattered down the conference table. Malone sat in a corner, wearing a skirted suit: She lifted a hand.

"Lucas," Mallard said. He stepped over to shake hands and pointed Lucas at a chair. "This is Chief Davenport," Mallard said to the group. "Treat him well." A few of the agents nodded. Most looked him over, then turned back to Mallard.

Like that, Lucas thought. Not a member of the tribe. On the other hand, he had his own tribe. He thought of the guard and leaned back in the chair to listen.

Mallard had six names on the whiteboard: six local crime figures who might have been tied into Rinker. They included Nanny Dichter, now dead; Paul Dallaglio, a business partner of Dichter's in the import and dope businesses; Gene Giancati, involved in sex and loan-sharking; Donny O'Brien, improbably a trustee of a half-dozen different union pension funds; Randall Ferignetti, who ran the biggest local sports books; and John Ross, who ran a liquor-distribution business, a trucking company, several lines of vending machines, and an ATM-servicing company.

"We think Rinker's most likely target is Dallaglio," Mallard was saying, tapping the white board. "He and Dichter were like Peter and Paul-the salesman and the organizer. If Dichter was involved enough with Rinker that she killed him, then Dallaglio's got to know her."

"Can we talk to him?" a blue-shirted agent asked.

"I called him this morning, but he wouldn't talk," Mallard said. "He said he'd have an attorney get back to me, but we haven't heard anything. We suspect there's some pretty heavy conferencing going on right now."

"We could put a net around him without asking," the agent said.

Malone chipped in: "We could, if we could keep it light enough that he didn't know. The problem is, he's hired private protection-Emerson Security out of Chicago. We don't know who yet, but Emerson has a whole bunch of ex… Bureau guys. If they put up their own security net, they'd spot us."

"So what?" another agent asked.

"So we want him scared," Mallard answered. "Officially, we're reluctant to get involved in this, unless we get something back. If we do it right, we might do a lot of damage to these guys."

"Maybe he'll just hire Emerson forever."

"No. Good protection from Emerson's gonna cost him between three and five thousand a day. He's got money, but he's not a rock star," Mallard said. "We're gonna let both him and Emerson know that we're watching his banking activity-that the IRS will want to know where the money's coming from, and where it's going to. Probably most of his money is offshore, and getting it back here, in big amounts, won't be easy, especially to pay off a legit company like Emerson. They won't take cash under the table, not in their business, not when they know we're watching."

"Maybe we'll eventually put a net around him," Malone said. She and Mallard were double-teaming the briefing. They were good at it, practiced, coordinated without awkwardness or deference. "Right now, though, we want to put some light tags on the other people. Keep track of them. Maybe somebody will run, and we'll want to know that."

"Do we have anybody on the street?" asked a woman in a square-shouldered, khaki-colored dress that made her look like a tomboy or an archaeologist. "She's not in any hotel within two hundred miles, she's not staying with anybody we've got in our history, her face is all over the place on TV and in the newspapers, but nobody sees her. Where is she? If we can figure that out… What do people do when they come to St. Louis but the cops are looking for them? They still got boardinghouses or something?"

They all thought about that for a few moments, then started making noises like a bunch of ducks quacking, Lucas thought-no reflection on Mallard.

"Lucas… what do you think?" Malone asked finally.

Lucas shrugged. "You guys are always putting up rewards like a million dollars for some Arab terrorist. If she's ditched underground with an old crooked friend… why not offer a hundred thousand and see if you get a phone call?"

"Rewards cause all kinds of subsidiary problems," a gray-shirted agent said. "You get multiple claims…"

"You guys got lawyers coming out of your ears, to be polite," Lucas said. "Fuck a bunch of multiple claims. Bust her first, litigate later. Once you have her chained in the basement, you can work out the small stuff."

"It's an idea," Malone said, without much enthusiasm. "We'd have to get the budget."

A guy in a white shirt said, "We know every place she ever worked here in St. Louis. What if we ran the Social Security records on every place she worked, and got a list of all her coworkers, and cross-matched them."

Thatidea turned their crank. Mallard made notes, and Lucas looked at his watch. When they sorted it out, one of the agents asked, "Is Gene Rinker going to be a genuine resource?"

Mallard looked at Malone, who said, "Two possibilities on that. First, we use him to talk her in. He's resisting. The second is, at some critical point, we throw him out there as a chip. Come in, we guarantee no death sentence, and your brother walks on the dope charge."

Lucas was twiddling a pencil, anxious to get going, but asked, "Where is he? Gene?"

"We're moving him here."

"How're you going to face him off to Clara? How is she even going to find out about him?"

Malone shrugged. "The press. They've been all over the Dichter thing. This is a large story here. There'll be a story on tonight's news that we're bringing Gene here to assist with the investigation, and we've let it be known that we've got him by the short hairs. Rinker'll hear about it. Unless she's in Greenland or Borneo."

Lucas blinked, and twiddled, and Malone finally asked, "What?"

"I like blackmail as much as the next guy, when you're dealing with small-timers," Lucas said. "Clara isn't. I don't see her turning herself in. If you hang her kid brother out to dry-he's the only person we've been able to find who she cares about-she could do something unpredictable."

"Like what?"

"I don't know. If I did, it wouldn't be unpredictable."

"Well, God, Lucas, what do you want us to do?"

"He's a resource," said another guy. "We don't have to use him."

"I think we'd be remiss if we didn't keep him available," said a third. A woman chipped in, "He's a violator. I say to heck with him."

The meeting broke up a little after nine. When Lucas went by the guard desk, Loftus, the guard he'd talked to, wasn't there. The guard who was there said, "You've got a note from Dan. He's hung up for a while," and passed Lucas a piece of typing paper. Outside the door, Lucas opened the paper and found a map drawn with a ballpoint, and next to that, the words "11 o'clock."

Lucas went back to the hotel, got a corned-beef sandwich from room service, unpacked his suitcase, talked to Weather for fifteen minutes, watched the news, and headed out the door a few minutes after eleven o'clock. St. Louis was easy enough to get around, and Lucas found the place on the first try: a corner tavern with Budweiser and Busch signs in the window, and a flickering-orange "Andy's" sign hung over the front door. A half-block up the street, a couple of guys were working on what looked like an eighties Camaro, using shop lights on orange extension cords that led across the sidewalk to the car at the curb. He could hear traffic, at some distance, and a nearly full moon was high and squarely aligned with the street. Felt kinda good.

Inside Andy's, a long bar led away from the door into the interior. A half-dozen guys and one woman seated at the bar turned their heads to see who was coming in, and gave him a good look when they didn't recognize him. He could smell microwave pizza, popcorn, and beer; a jar of pickled pig's feet sat at the end of the bar, beside a jar of pickled eggs. A bartender was wiping glasses, and as Lucas ambled past, he asked, "You looking for Dan?"

"Yeah. Is he here?"

"In the back on the right. Their pitcher is probably pretty down by now."

"So give me another one and a glass," Lucas said. He gave the bartender a twenty, got his change, and carried the pitcher down the bar. Loftus and two other guys, who both looked like ex-cops, were sitting in Andy's biggest booth, big enough for six or eight.

When Lucas came up, Loftus lifted a hand, and Lucas slid into the booth with the beer. Loftus pointed at the other two men. "Dick Bender, Micky Andreno. Dick was homicide, Micky was a patrol lieutenant when he retired."

Lucas said hello, and they all poured beer and Bender said, "I called a guy up in Minneapolis and he said you weren't the worst guy in the world. Said you got shot a lot, and that you like to fight. Said you got shot by a little girl."

"Right in the throat," Lucas said. "That was a good fuckin' day."

So he told the story, and they told a few, about car chases and assholes they'd known, one story about a cop who'd been killed when he'd run through a stream of water from a fire hose and got his neck broken, and then Lucas had to tell the story of the Minneapolis guy who'd fired a blank at his own head as a joke, and blown his brains out, and Andreno told about the three women-a grandmother, a mother, and a daughter-who had all been beaten to death by the men in their lives, the daughter when she was only seventeen: "She already had a kid of her own, a daughter, she's growing up somewhere. How'd you like to have that curse on you?"

After the dog-sniffing, they got another pitcher and Loftus asked, "How was the meeting?"

"I'll tell you, guys, they might get her, but if they do, it's gonna be by accident," Lucas said. "They're gonna run computer programs all night, trying to nail down every single person she ever worked with. They figure she's got to be staying with somebody she knows."

"Probably is," Bender said.

"I know, but Jesus, she worked for a big liquor company and a couple of bars here in town, with all those contacts, and she went to two different colleges that we know of-maybe they'll get lucky, but that's a hell of a lot of people," Lucas said.

"So what's the choice here?" Andreno asked. "I don't see that you've got an edge."

Before Lucas could answer, a fourth guy showed up, a former patrol sergeant named Bob Carter. He slid into the booth and was introduced, and said, "Pour me one of them beers… Some asshole parked a Porsche outside."

"That'd be me," Lucas said.

"Really? A fuckin' C4?" Carter was not embarrassed. "They must have good bennies in Minneapolis."

Then they had to dog-sniff some more until Lucas finally got back to Andreno's question. "She bought a hot cell phone here in St. Louis-so she's already gone to somebody. That guy might know where she's at, he might know who she's calling. How many guys you got selling hot cell phones here?" " 'Bout a hundred," Loftus said.

"Wholesaling them? Well enough established that she could come back after a few years away and go straight to him?"

"Don't know that she did that," Andreno said. "She might have called a friend, who got them for her."

"That's right, but she must've called somebody connected, because Dichter called her, on her cell phone. And the feds have Dichter's phone calls, both business and home from every phone we think he had, and she's not on the list. Her phone isn't. She never called him. She can't have been here for more than a few days. Somehow, she got to Dichter through an intermediary. And she bought a phone at the same time."

"If Dichter was calling her at night, at eleven o'clock, I bet he didn't have her number for long," Bender said. "Why would you sit around all day looking at the cell phone number and then go out at eleven o'clock to call her?"

The St. Louis cops sat and looked at him for a moment, waiting for Lucas to absorb the point. Lucas had absorbed it, and after a moment said, "That's one thing the feds didn't come up with," and then, "Anybody who can't keep their mouth shut, raise his hand."

Nobody raised a hand. Carter said, "Whataya got?"

"I'll tell you, if this shit gets out, Dan could be guarding a parking ramp," Lucas said.

Loftus didn't bother to look around the table. "They won't talk. Whataya got?"

Lucas took a paper out of his pocket. He'd pulled it out of the information packet that Mallard had passed around. All the packets were supposed to remain in the building. "List of phone numbers that called Dichter," Lucas said. He put it on the table, and the St. Louis cops huddled over it. Andreno finally said, "Pay phone at Tucker's, down at LaClede's Landing."

Carter said, "Yeah?"

"Tucker's is right next to the BluesNote. John Sellos."

Loftus leaned back and said to Lucas, "There you are. Sellos is connected, he knows Dichter and all the rest of them, and he'll sell you a phone if you ask him right."

"Tell you what else," Carter said. "Sellos used to work for John Ross, driving a truck. This was years and years ago."

"Maybe I oughta go see him," Lucas said.

Andreno looked at his watch. "Got time for a couple more beers-but if you're going, I'd like to ride along. I know Sellos from way back."

"Don't go hittin' anyone. You don't have a badge anymore," Loftus said to Andreno. To Lucas: "Micky sorta liked to fight, himself."

Andreno shook his head. "Those days are gone. Now all I do is hit golf balls and wonder what the fuck happened."

They had a couple of more beers, and talked about what the four cops were doing in retirement. None of them was sixty, and all were looking at twenty years of idleness before they died. "If the goddamn pickled pig's feet don't get to me first," Carter grumbled.

A few minutes later, Loftus asked Lucas, "Did you meet Richard Lewis, the AIC?"

"Yeah, he was in the meeting for a while. Dark suit, one of those blue shirts with a white collar?"

"That's him. I'll tell you what, he don't like this Mallard guy coming in and taking over. He's running a little hip-pocket operation of his own, looking for Rinker. He's got his intelligence guys doing it." Loftus said it in a way that suggested a further step into treason-all in the way of the brotherhood of cops.

"Got any names?" Lucas asked.

"Striker, Allenby, Lane, and Jones," Loftus said.

"Let me…" Lucas took a pen out of his pocket and jotted the names in the palm of his hand. "Striker, Allenby, Lane, and Jones."

"Don't tell anybody where you got that." Lucas looked at him, and Loftus said, "Yeah, yeah."

At one o 'clock, Andreno tipped up his beer glass, finished it, and said to Lucas, "Let's go."

As they stood up, Loftus looked at Lucas and said, "Might be best if we don't spend too much time talking at the office-but I'll be sitting here tomorrow night."

"We're gonna kick some ass," Lucas said. He burped. "Fuckin' Budweiser."

"Jesus Christ, watch your mouth," Loftus said, and he crossed himself.

Andreno was a slick, hard, neighborhood boy: capped teeth, probably paid for by the city after they got broken out; forehead scars; too-sharp jackets, hands in his pockets; and the attitude of a housewife-slaying, mean fuckin' vacuum cleaner salesman. Even if he hadn't had an Italian name, Lucas would have bet that he'd gone to a tough Catholic high school somewhere, probably run by the Psycho Brothers for Christ.

Andreno liked the Porsche and cross-examined Lucas on how he could afford it. As they rolled along through the night, top down, the moon in the rearview mirror, Lucas told him a little about the role-playing games he'd written in the seventies and eighties, how he hired a kid from the University of Minnesota to translate them into early computer games, how that drifted into simulations for police 911 systems…

"Holy shit, you're rich," Andreno said.

"Comfortable," Lucas said.

"Bullshit, you're rich," Andreno said happily. "Why don't you give me this car when you leave? I'd look great in it-clubs in the passenger seat, kind of casual-like, driving along with my sunglasses and the Rolex."

"Couldn't do that. You have to have a certain level of sexual magnetism before you're allowed to drive a Porsche," Lucas said.

"And I'd have to get a Rolex," Andreno said. He pointed at a slot near the curb, a half-block from the BluesNote. "Put it there. Then it'll be close if we have to run for it."

"Run…?"

"Pulling your weenie," Andreno said. "John's actually an okay guy, if you like crooked barkeeps who suffer from clinical depression and progressive hair loss."

"Think he'll be there?"

"He always is. He's got nowhere else to go."

The Bluesnote was only a couple of blocks from Lucas's hotel, one of a collection of nineteenth-century brick buildings called LaClede's Landing. Bars, mostly, a couple of music spots, all kinds of restaurants, tourist junk shops selling St. Louis souvenirs. Cobblestone streets. Like that; what you got in any older city when the city engineers decided to do something hip. At the door to the BluesNote, Andreno said, "Stay close behind me. Place is kinda dim."

They went in fast, straight to the back, though the kitchen doors and up a flight of stairs that had a "Private" sign above the first step, and at the top of the stairs. Andreno went straight on, across the landing, and pushed open the door at the top. "John…," he said.

John Sellos was a thin man, tired-looking, worn down, sitting behind a wooden desk in the screen glow of a cheap laptop computer. He looked at Andreno, and Lucas behind him, and said, "Ah, shit." He said it in a quiet way, as though Andreno, or somebody like him, had been expected. Then: "What're you doing? You're not on the force anymore."

"I'm showing my friend around," Andreno said. "This is Lucas Davenport-he's a deputy chief from Minneapolis and is working now with an FBI task force on Clara Rinker. You heard of her?"

"I heard of her," Sellos said uncomfortably. He leaned back and crossed his legs. "What do you want?"

Andreno glanced at Lucas, who looked at the two chairs in front of Andreno's desk, carefully brushed off the seat of one of them, and sat down. "John… Can I call you John?"

"You can."

"John," Lucas said. "You helped set up Nanny Dichter to be murdered by Clara Rinker. We know that and you know that. And you know what the penalty is for felony murder in Missouri." Lucas made a delicate slashing gesture across his throat. When Sellos didn't immediately answer, Lucas knew that they were on the right track. So did Andreno. He moved off to lean against a wall, and nodded at Lucas, his chin dipping a quarter-inch. "We've got Nanny's phone records, John," Lucas continued. "We know you called him-we've got a witness who can put you on the phone. We've got Clara's phone number, though she isn't answering it. We know where the phone came from, and pretty soon we're gonna know who stole it, and that person is gonna get on the witness stand and he is gonna put you on death row."

"I better get a lawyer," Sellos said. His voice lacked enthusiasm, and he didn't reach for a phone.

"The question is, do you need a lawyer?" Andreno said, pushing away from the wall. "You don't for me, because I'm not a cop anymore. Lucas, here, isn't exactly official. We're just a couple of street guys trying to come up with some information."

"So?" They were projecting rays of light, and all Sellos saw was bullshit and lies.

"So we talk," Lucas said, shrugging. "No need for everybody to get excited about a telephone. I mean, if the feds find you later, that's their problem and your problem. But we're not gonna talk to them about it. We got our own thing going."

Sellos turned skeptical. "You're not going to tell them?"

Andreno shook his head. "Nope. If you'll help us out, I'll give you my beeper number, and if Clara calls, you beep us. That'll be it."

"But you've gotta tell us the rest of it now," Lucas said. "Otherwise… you're gonna need a lawyer-a really good lawyer-and you're gonna need him really bad."

"I didn't help set Nanny up," Sellos said. He didn't bother to deny any of it. "I had no idea what Clara was going to do. I thought she was going to try to talk to him and needed a safe way to call him. She came in, she put a gun on me-a big fuckin' automatic. You know how many people have looked down Clara's guns and walked away? Not many. Anyway, she got the phones-four phones-and she told me if I talk to you guys, she'll kill me. And she will, if she hears about this. Not ten years from now on death row, she'll kill me this week. "

"When was she here?"

Sellos told them the story. At the end of it, he stood up, went to a half-sized refrigerator, got a Heineken, popped the top off, took a sip. He didn't offer one to Lucas or Andreno. "She wanted Nanny to call, and she wanted this Andy Levy guy's phone number, the banker, so she could call him. That's it, other than that she'd kill me if I talked to anyone."

Lucas asked, "You've never heard of this Andy Levy?"

"No. When she mentioned him, that was the first I ever heard of him."

Lucas looked at Andreno and cocked an eyebrow. Andreno shook his head. "Never heard of the guy."

Back to Sellos. "You think he's here in the city?"

"That's the impression I got."

They ran him through the story again, but Sellos had nothing more to say, except that Rinker had not disguised herself at all. "She looked just like she did when she was working at the warehouse, except richer. She looked pretty well-tended."

"Well-tended," Andreno repeated, as though he liked the phrase.

"Very well," Sellos said.

They left him behind the desk, worrying. Lucas said, " Wewon't talk to anyone, and you better not. I mean, we're a couple of friendly guys. I don't think Clara would be all that friendly."

Andreno left his beeper number with Sellos. Sellos said he'd call the minute Rinker got in touch with him, if she did. "You aren't gonna run, are you, John?" Andreno asked.

"No, no. Somebody would find me. Either you or Clara. I got nowhere to run to."

Out on the street, Andreno stretched and yawned and looked down the quiet streets and up at the sky, and said, "What a great fuckin' night. This was more fun than I had in five years."

"Operating," Lucas said.

"That's exactly what it is," Andreno said, poking a finger at Lucas. "I'm operating again." After a moment: "Is there anything else I can do? Any other way I can cut into this?"

"Let me think about it," Lucas said. "I'll see what the feebs say tomorrow, when I drop Andy Levy on them. If Andy Levy isn't dead tonight."