Certain prey

Chapter Twenty-Four

M alone met him at the airport: 'You look kinda green,' Malone said. 'Tough flight down?'

'Naw, it was all right,' Lucas mumbled. He looked back through the terminal window at the plane, and Malone caught the look and said, 'You can't be one of those… you're not afraid to fly?'

'It's not my preferred method of travel,' Lucas said, walking away. She scrambled to catch up, and he turned his head to ask, 'What'd you get from the bar? Prints? Photos. We need to get a photo out now.'

'Airplanes are about fifty times safer than cars,' Malone said. 'I thought everybody knew that. Not only that, most people are distracted when they're driving, because they fall into routines, while pilots are trained

…'

'Yeah, yeah, enough,' Lucas said. 'I don't like to fly because I've got problems dealing with control issues because I've got an unconsciously macho self-image, okay? That make you happy? Now what about Rinker?'

'We can't find a photograph,' Malone said. 'And there's no reason for you to be defensive about a fear of flying…'

'There's gotta be a photograph…'

She gave up. 'There are no photographs in the apartment, and none in the bar.

Either she didn't have any, or she took them with her. We checked with people who were more-or-less friends…'

'More-or-less?'

'She didn't have many real friends,' Malone said. 'She was friendly, without friends. Nobody who worked at the bar had ever seen the inside of her apartment.'

'A loner.'

'Psychologically, anyway.'

'Driver's license?'

'We checked her driver's license and she was wearing a red wig and glasses the size of dinner plates, and she had her head tilted down… what I'm saying, is, that composite you had was better. Wichita State also had a copy of her student ID, and that's as bad or worse than the driver's license. She was careful. What we are doing, though, is we're refining the composite. It'll be as good as a photograph by this evening.'

They walked out of the terminal into the already-warm Kansas air; the sun had still been low on the horizon when they landed, and Lucas had expected a little more cool. Malone led him to an unmarked Ford parked in a no-parking zone with a local cop watching over it. 'Thanks, Ted,' Malone said to the cop, who nodded and gave her his best front-line, band-of-brothers cop grin. Saved her parking place; next week, he might be saving her ass someplace, in a savage fire-fight out on the burning plains of Kansas.

Then again, maybe not…

'And there's another thing,' Malone said, as they pulled away from the curb.

'Uh-oh,' Lucas said.

'The crime-scene guys found a couple of small smears of fresh blood on the floor of her apartment. A man who lives down the street, was getting up early to go fishing…'

'In Kansas?'

'Yeah, I guess they do, somewhere. Anyway, he gets up and sees a couple of guys going into her apartment building. They looked out-of-place, he thought – they looked like football players, big guys, and they both wore suits. But they had a key and he just thought they were a couple of apartment people coming home after a night out. So he went fishing and didn't think about it until one of our guys went around knocking on doors.'

'Two guys in suits, middle of the night.'

'Just about dawn.'

'And blood on the floor.'

'There is no apartment in the building with two guys in it, and we can't find any two guys who were out late. It's not a big apartment. Eighteen units -we've talked to everybody.'

'There was no disturbance.'

'No. She had a motion detector in the hallway, which would have been invisible if you didn't know what you were looking for. If she was in there, she should have known they were coming. Of course, she might have expected them.

There was no sign of a struggle…'

'So she shot them?'

'That's a possibility, other than the fact that there're no bodies in the place, and she'd have to carry two football-sized guys out the hall and down a flight of stairs to get rid of them. On the other hand, if they shot her

… a couple of big guys could handle a small woman fairly easily. If you were big enough, you could hold her under your coat, and walk right out.'

'Were they wearing coats?'

'The fisher-guy says they weren't, but you get my point. They could handle her a heck of a lot easier than she could have handled them.'

'They could have walked away together,' Lucas said. 'They could have been helpers. She could have cut herself packing up her stuff.'

'Which is sort of my theory, right now,' Malone said. 'Although the other theory has some attractions. If we get this woman… We've got a half-dozen states where they've got the death penalty, and where they've got lots of evidence on one or another of her killings. The only thing they don't have is the shooter.

If we wanted to release her to those states for trial, sooner or later she'd wind up in the electric chair or the gas chamber or strapped down to a gurney.

With that kind of leverage, we could squeeze her pretty hard. We could put some pretty big holes in the St. Louis mob with her information.'

'And that's what you want.'

'Of course,' she said. 'If we get the top guy, the guy who probably ran her… he knows everything. If she was willing to pin the tail on him, we could show him the same set of electric chairs and gas chambers. If he talked, two years from now, St. Louis would be cleaner than… I don't know – Seattle.'

'Seattle has Microsoft.'

'Okay.' She showed the tiniest of smiles. 'Than Minneapolis.'

'Thanks.'

'Anyway, the mob guys in St. Louis know this as well as we do. It wouldn't be too far-fetched to think they might send a couple of shooters to fix the problem.'

'She might be too smart for that,' Lucas said. 'I got the impression of smartness from the lady. So we know the mob could send a couple of guys, and the mob knows it could send a couple of guys, and she knows it. And if everybody knows it, do they send a couple of guys?'

'I don't know,' Malone said. 'I do know one thing that's pretty unique.'

'Yeah?'

'You're the only guy I know who's literally danced with the devil.'

Lucas saw the big window the minute he walked in the apartment door.

He had an advantage over Malone and the other FBI agents – when they'd first arrived, they were looking for Rinker herself, and didn't know about the blood on the floor. One of the FBI crime-scene techs pointed him around the apartment, and finally he asked, 'Did you check the outside window ledge on that big window?'

The agent looked at the window, and thinking fast, said, 'Not yet,' as if it were next on the list.

'Would it be all right to lift it up?'

'Let me get one of the guys to do it,' the agent said.

'What're you thinking?' Malone asked.

'I think carrying any body out of this place would take a fruitcake,' Lucas said. 'But throwing them out the window, if it's night time…' He peered out: 'They'd land right behind the garbage dumpster. You could back a car right up to them.'

One of the technicians came over, looked skeptically at the window, and said,

'Let me get this.'

Lucas stepped back and the tech unlocked the inner window, and lifted it easily.

The outer window was a convertible aluminum glass-and-screen affair; the glass had been pushed up, and the screen was in place. 'Screen's a little loose,' the tech said. He was working awkwardly through surgeon's gloves. 'Let me…'

He used a small pocket knife to slip the screen up an inch, which allowed him to pull it out of the frame. He leaned it against the wall, and they all looked at the bottom end of the screen, and the brick wall outside.

'Huh.'The tech grunted and got down close to the brick, leaning out through the window.

'What?' asked Malone, glancing quickly at Lucas.

'You know any reason why a brick would wear tweed?'

Wooden Head was being interrogated by a team of specialists from Washington.

Lucas and Malone watched for a few minutes, then left. If the team missed anything, Lucas wasn't smart enough to figure out what it would be – the team was taking Wooden Head apart inch by inch, and they were good.

'I'd suggest we get a bite at the Rink, but somebody would probably spit in the hamburger,' Malone said. 'So let's get something someplace else. Then maybe I can rent a car and get back home.' 'Really? You'd drive back instead of fly?'

'Really,' Lucas said.

'We've got a car going up later today, a couple of guys from the crime-scene crew to review the work at the last two killing scenes… you could ride along. I think they're leaving around three, and plan to drive straight through.'

'Sign me up,' Lucas said.

They stopped at a downtown diner, got a tippy table, and Lucas looked at one of the legs and told Malone, sitting opposite, 'See that lever on the end of the leg? There's a lever sticking up.' 'Yeah?'

'Push the lever toward me, with your foot.'

'What's that for?'

'It levels the table,' Lucas said.

Malone pushed the lever with her foot, and the table stopped tipping. 'Where'd you learn that?' she asked.

'I used to be a waitress,' he said. 'Before the operation.'

Over coffee and grilled-cheese sandwiches, Malone filled Lucas in on everything the FBI had figured out about Clara Rinker – they had her biography from childhood, but still no good pictures. 'She was in trouble a few times when she was a teenager, but nothing serious. Never got mugshot or printed. She was a runaway, and she might have had reason to be. We think she was probably raped a few times by her stepfather, who disappeared, by the way. And maybe by one of her brothers.'

'Did he disappear, too?'

'No, he's still around, but he doesn't talk much about her. He claimed he couldn't remember her.'

'That's helpful.'

'The picture sort of fills out, though. She's a sociopath, I think, but not a psychopath. She never showed that much enthusiasm for her work, she just did it very effectively. She had to take SAT tests to get into Wichita State, and she did okay: quite well on verbal skills, less good on math. About 700-550, which is pretty exceptional when you understand that she ran away from home in the ninth grade.'

'I knew she was smart,' Lucas said. 'She got out of here so cleanly that I expect she's got a hidey-hole somewhere. Digging her out could be tough, especially with those horseshit photos we've got so far. Say: I think I know from somewhere that the SAT people require photo IDs for their tests.'

'I don't know,' Malone said. 'But we'll check.'

'If that's blood you found on the ground behind the dumpster, and it comes from more than one person, then she's still out there. Otherwise, I don't know. It's hard to think that she's dead and gone. Outa reach.'

'Worse things have happened,' Malone said. 'At least the killing would stop, until they find somebody else. But I know what you mean; it'd be good to have her.'

'She got any foreign languages?' Lucas asked.

'Spanish,' Malone confirmed. 'She's in her fourth year of college Spanish, got

A's all the way through. One of our guys talked to her Spanish instructor, who said that if she goes South, across the border, she'll be speaking it like a native in six months. Said she was already pretty good, and had a good ear for the accent.'

'I wouldn't be surprised if she's already down there,' Lucas said. 'Goddamnit: we were an inch short about five times in a row.'

'What about the woman in Minneapolis – Garmel Loan?' Malone asked. She ate her cheese sandwich in small, tidy bites, pausing every second or third bite to dab her mouth with a napkin; she looked like a history professor, Lucas thought, but an oddly sexy one. Maybe that somehow explained how she'd been married four times, but none of the marriages lasted. Maybe her husbands-to-be expected a nice, reserved history professor, and got an animal instead; or, maybe, it was the other way around.

'I need to lay in my bed and think about Carmel,' Lucas said. 'Maybe I could z out in the back of the car this evening, going back home. But let me ask you this: given what we have right now, how convincing a case could you make against

Clara Rinker?'

Malone rolled her eyes up, and to one side, thinking. After a moment, still silent, she scratched the back of her neck, and wiggled in her seat. Finally, she said, 'We could probably get her. Sooner or later; give us enough trials, we could get her.'

'But it sure isn't open-and-shut.'

'Not quite,' Malone said. 'We'll probably get some prints, sooner or later. Find something she forgot about. But even if we put them with the prints you got off that bar of soap, all we'd do was prove that she was in Minneapolis. We have a mountain of evidence, we just don't have any direct tie. But I think the mountain would get her. Given the right jury.'

'So the same evidence could be applied to somebody else – it's not impossible that Clara's the wrong person,' Lucas said.

'Well, it's pretty improbable.'

'But…'

'… not impossible,' she agreed.

'You've got a lawyer with your group, don't you? Besides you?'

'Couple of them,' Malone said.

'Would it be possible to send one up to Minneapolis – the smartest one – with the whole Rinker file, and get with one of our assistant country attorneys and make a case against Louise Clark? That she was the shooter? I mean, we found the gun, we found all kinds of evidence that she committed at least one murder; I'd like to see what other evidence we could put together from other cases. If there is any.'

Malone was puzzled: 'But you said that was a put-up job. Why would you want to make that case?'

'Because, just between you, me, and the doorpost, I know damn well that Carmel

Loan helped set up these killings. I don't know exactly why, although sex might have had something to do with it – or it might not have. Maybe it was money, or just for fun. But she's in it, up to her neck. And I can tie Carmel to Clark. If

I can make a case that Clark is the shooter, and I can tie Carmel to her, maybe

I could talk a jury into sending Carmel away.'

'Oh, man, I don't know – that doesn't sound overly ethical.'

'I ain't a fuckin' lawyer I'm just a humble cop,' Lucas said. 'So I don't know about ethics. But could you send a lawyer up? We can work out the details -the ethics – later.'

She was peering at him over the diner table, and said, 'I'm not sure I want to know the details.'

'But you'll send somebody up?'

'I guess.' She had one small crumb of toast sitting on the left corner of her mouth, and Lucas picked up her napkin and dabbed it off for her.

'You had a crumb,' he said.

She shrugged and met his eyes. 'The story of my life…'