Mortal Prey

12

The pain pushed through the sleep like an arrow, and he rose to the surface and tried to sit up and stretch his right leg, but the cramp held on and got deeper, and Lucas groaned, "Man, man, man-o-man-o-man," and tried to knead it out, but the cramp held on for fifteen seconds, twenty, then began to slacken. When it was nearly gone, he climbed gingerly out of bed and took a turn around the hotel room.

His calf still ached, as though with a muscle pull. He sniffed, and looked around, getting oriented: He was on the eighth floor of a Holiday Inn outside of Springfield, Missouri. Like most Holiday Inns, it was nice enough, neat and clean, but still… smelled a little funny. Nothing he could quite pin down.

Years before, in college, he'd ridden buses down to Madison to see a particular University of Wisconsin coed, and had noticed that there was always the faint snap of urine in the air, and assumed that it was… urine. Then one day on a longer trip, on an express bus, they'd all been asked to get off in Memphis so the bus could be cleaned. When he got back on, one of the cleaners was still at work, and the urine smell was not only fresh, but intense and close by-and he realized that the ever-present urine smell was nothing more than the cleaning agent, whatever it was, and not the end product of somebody pissing down the seats. He hadn't ridden those buses in years, but he could still summon up the memory of the odor.

As he limped around the hotel room, it occurred to him that the funny smell in Holiday Inns-something you could never quite put a label on-might be built-in. If it was, he thought, they should build in something else.

He stopped the circular march long enough to click on the TV, hoping to pick up the weather. He got CNN by default, and as he was about to click around for the Weather Channel, the blond newsreader turned expectantly to her left, and the shimmering image of a St. Louis reporter came up, and under his ruddy round face, the label "Sandy White, St. Louis Post-Dispatch."

"… sounded distraught, and while people may certainly have no sympathy at all for Miz Rinker, I personally find the plight of her brother, Gene, to be intensely painful. He was arrested and charged on a crime that usually produces something on the order of a traffic ticket in California, and here he is being dragged across the nation and exhibited to television cameras as if he were a criminal mastermind. In fact, Betty, there is good evidence that Gene Rinker is mentally impaired, and may not even understand why he is locked up in a special high-security cell in one of the hardest jails in Missouri…"

"Ah, Jesus," Lucas said to the TV, as the two heads continued to talk. He watched the rest of the segment, which produced nothing more of intelligence, then clicked around until he found the Weather Channel. He sat on the bed rubbing out his calf until the local segment came up, and headed for the bathroom happy with a prediction of late-afternoon thunderstorms. That was okay. They'd be out of Springfield before the storms arrived.

He shaved, brushed the sour taste of overnight beer from his teeth and tongue, and was in the shower for two minutes when Andreno called. They agreed to meet in the breakfast bar in fifteen minutes, and Lucas finished cleaning up. He'd brought one change of clothes in a plastic laundry bag stolen from the St. Louis hotel. He changed into jeans, golf shirt, and a light woven-silk sport coat, stuffed the dirty clothes back in the plastic bag, and headed out.

"You get a chance to look at CNN this morning?" Andreno asked.

"The Gene Rinker thing, with that Sandy guy? Yeah. Assholes."

"Of course, he's right. Sandy White is."

"Fuck him, anyway." Lucas snarled silently across the breakfast room at a pretty young waitress, who hurried over. "Two waffles, maple syrup, two cups of coffee for me." He looked across the table at Andreno. "And what do you want?"

Andreno ordered, and when the waitress had gone, Lucas said, "Malone and Mallard are smart people. They'll figure out Gene. I'll call them."

"Yeah."

"Fuckin' CNN."

"Jesus, you sound like you got up on the wrong side of the bed."

"I'll cheer up," Lucas said, thinking of the leg cramp. "I don't usually get up at seven o'clock. Christ, I'm amazed that they already let the air outside."

When the pretty waitress came back with the food, he smiled at her and tried to make small talk; but she'd already written him off, because of the silent snarl, and he finished breakfast feeling like a jerk.

"I feel like a jerk," he told Andreno, as they left. He'd overtipped, and that hadn't helped.

"Not me," Andreno said. "I think she sorta took a shine to me. Before you got there, I told her if she could get off for a few minutes, I'd run her around town in my Porsche."

"What'd she say?"

"She said she couldn't get off."

Lucas started to laugh, and a little of the gloom lifted.

Tisdale was the second-largest town in Mellan County, after Hopewell, the county seat. They drove through on the way to Hopewell, where the sheriff could meet them at 8:30.

"What is that smell? " Andreno asked, as they bumped across a set of railroad tracks into the town.

"I don't know," Lucas said. "It ain't rosebushes."

A minute later, they passed what looked like four of the biggest yellow-steel pole barns in the Midwest. Painted neatly on the side of each building was "Logan Poultry Processing," and under that, in small letters, "Really Pluckin' Good."

"The smell," Andreno said. "Like a combination of scorched feathers and wet chicken shit."

"Which it probably is," Lucas said. "You know, if you breathe through your mouth… you can still smell it."

There was nothing in Tisdale. They drove past Rinker's mother's house, a mile out in the country, and saw nothing moving. The house was short, a story and a half, with peeled-paint clapboard siding and drawn curtains. A neglected driveway projected into a single-car garage. The door was open and the garage was empty. A small brown-and-white dog sat under the rusted rural mailbox at the end of the drive, and looked lost and thirsty. In the back, an ancient Ford tractor sat abandoned and rusting in a crappy, brush-choked woodlot.

"What if we busted in with our guns out, and Clara was sitting at the kitchen table eating oatmeal?" Andreno asked.

"She'd probably shoot us both and throw our bodies in the septic tank," Lucas said.

"So, let's go see the sheriff."

Mellan County Sheriff Errol Lamp was not an impulsive man, and when Lucas and Andreno showed up at the county courthouse in Hopewell, he questioned their credentials and had a deputy check with the feds in St. Louis. Eventually, he got to Mallard, who told him exactly where his bread was buttered, and who buttered it. As they were talking, a woman stuck her head in the office and said, "Errol, you know that Porsche out by the Rinkers'? It's these guys."

The sheriff looked at them with his slow eyes and said, "You went by the Rinkers', huh?"

"Yeah. How'd you know?"

"Neighborhood crime watch," the sheriff said. "They report anything suspicious. Like a Porsche. Lot of drug runners drive Porsches."

Seconds before Lucas would have lost both his patience and his temper, Lamp assigned a deputy to take them around the county and, Lucas thought, to fill him in later.

"Been ten federal people here to see Rinker's mother, and none of them went in believing what we said, but they all came out believing," said the deputy, whose name was Tony McCoy. McCoy was a heavy, sweating man in khakis, with a straw Stetson, a rodeo belt-buckle, and deep-blue cowboy boots. They were in his Jeep Grand Cherokee.

"What's that?" Andreno asked.

"That's she's crazier'n a goddamn cuckoo clock. She won't have no idea what you're talking about."

"So let's not go there," Lucas said. "Let's go to the school."

"The school?"

"Yeah, you know-brick building full of kids."

McCoy gave him a hard look, and Lucas smiled into it. Lucas had kindly blue eyes, but his smile often came off as a threat, and McCoy flinched away. "Wanna go to the school, the school it is," he muttered.

The Mellan Consolidated School was larger than Lucas expected, with two academic wings built around a gymnasium. The principal was a thin, youngish woman with carefully colored hair, a single eyebrow that extended straight across her brow ridge, and glasses that sat a quarter-inch too far down her narrow nose. She had the habit of pushing them back up with her middle finger, and as Andreno said later, "Every time I looked at her, she was flippin' me off."

"We have cooperated with a number of FBI requests and interviews, and frankly, we just don't have much," she said. "There was an agent here named Josh Franklin. If you were to talk to him…"

"We're looking for different angles," Lucas said. "If you know anybody who knew Clara Rinker, or any of the Rinkers-"

"I'm sorry, but I'm about the same age as Clara, so when she left here, I was in ninth or tenth grade in Weston, Oklahoma," she said. "We only have two teachers here who remember her, and so far, nobody's found them helpful."

"If we could just get a couple of minutes with them…"

"Of course. We're happy to cooperate," she said unhappily.

The two teachers, both women, both in their late fifties or early sixties, remembered only one new thing. The older of the two said, "It might not mean anything at all, but one thing I do remember about Clara, and never told anybody else because it hadn't happened yet-and it's not exactly about Clara-is that Ted Baker got all his guns stolen last month and his guard dogs were shot. This was before Clara showed up in St. Louis. Ted was only two or three years older than Clara. And he used to run with Clara's older brother, Roy."

"Huh," Lucas said. "All his guns?"

He looked at the deputy, who scratched his head and said, "That's right. We handled the break-in. I figured it was one of those gun nuts that Baker hangs out with, if he didn't do it himself, for the insurance. I didn't know that he knew Clara."

"He did," the teacher said. "Don't tell anybody I said so."

McCoy said he knew where they could find Baker. "If he's not at the landfill, shootin' rats, or out pluckin' chickens, he's usually around his house. He's got some new dogs, and he's training them."

McCoy drove them from Hopewell back to Tisdale. They stopped at a Dairy Queen and got chocolate-dipped cones, agreeing that they must be low-cal because they were ice milk, not ice cream, and then rode out the west side of town on the county road. Baker's house was a close cousin to the Rinker homestead, a beat-up, seventy-year-old frame house with a tired garage off to the side. The house was surrounded by a waist-high chain-link fence, and two young German shepherds were staked out behind it.

McCoy ran down the driveway as far as the gate, then leaned on his horn. Baker, a rawboned man with shaggy brown hair and a two-week beard, stepped out onto the porch. He had a can of Budweiser in his hand, squinted at them, pointed a finger at the dogs, who dropped back to their stomachs, and walked up the driveway.

They talked over the fence.

"Never occurred to me that it could have been Clara, though it sounds stupid to say it," he told them when Lucas explained why they were there. "I didn't even hear about her coming back to St. Louis until a couple weeks after I was hit. I never put it together."

"You think it was her?" McCoy asked. "You got some crazy friends running around out there."

Baker grinned at them through light-green teeth and said, "Shit, McCoy, there's nothing wrong with those boys."

"Yeah, like Harvey?"

"Well, Harv…" Baker considered the name reluctantly.

"Harv's a couple cans short of a six-pack, is what he is," McCoy said.

"Well, Harvey… tell you the truth, it crossed my mind that it might be one of them, except I can't think who'd shoot the dogs. Takes a cold man to shoot the dogs. Even Harvey wouldn't."

"You think Clara could do it?" Lucas asked.

"I'll tell you what," Baker said. "The last time I seen Clara was five or six years ago-she came through to see her mama, and I bumped into her down to the root-beer stand. She asked me what I was doing, and I said, 'Shootin', and working at Logan's,' and that's about the end of it. We wasn't, like, good friends, not that I wouldn't have liked to fuck her, if you know what I mean."

"Know what you mean," McCoy said, hitching up his khakis.

"She had these nice little hard tits like cupcakes," Baker continued. "And you got the feeling she'd probably fuck back at you."

"The dogs?" Lucas repeated.

"I don't know. If she can shoot all those people she's supposed to, I guess she could shoot the dogs. Somebody did," Baker said. "Right in the head, bam bam."

"Anybody figure out what kind of gun it was?"

"It were a. 22," Baker said. "I couldn't bring myself to dig out the slugs, but I looked at the holes and I'd say it was a standard-velocity. 22. Good tight entry wounds, no sign of bullet breakup, no exit wound. Good shootin', too. They never knew what hit them."

"And you haven't seen her for all that time."

"Nope. Kinda like to, though, if you catch her. I might go see her in jail. She was a nude dancer before she was a killer. I bet she's got some stories to tell."

"Bet she does," McCoy said, nodding. His tongue flickered over his lips. Tasty stories.

"Did she know about your guns?" Lucas asked.

"Oh, sure. Pretty much everybody around here knows I got an interest," Baker said. "I used to hang with her brother, and she was over here a time or two when we were gunnin'. I'm the one who taught her brother how to reload."

"So you were friends," Andreno said.

"Nah. Not with Clara. She was around, because Roy took her around-I personally think Roy may have been knocking a little off her, you know what I mean? — but she was standoffish, even when she was little. She'd just look at you. I didn't have much to do with her."

"Did you know any of her friends?" Lucas asked.

"I don't think-" Then he stopped and looked from Lucas to Andreno. "You know about Patsy Hill, right?"

Lucas and Andreno shook their heads, and Lucas said, "Haven't seen the name."

"Jeezus."Baker looked at McCoy. "You know about Patsy Hill?"

McCoy shook his head.

Baker said, "Great fuckin' police work, huh? All you runnin' around like maniacs and you haven't heard of Patsy Hill?"

"Well, who is she?" Lucas asked.

"Patsy lived over by Clendenon, over toward Springfield. That's where Carl Paltry came from."

Andreno said, "Who?"

Lucas remembered the FBI report. "Rinker's stepfather."

Baker nodded. "That's right. I think he was fuckin' her, too. Clara. Anyway, he come from over there, and I think maybe they even lived there for a little while, or off and on, if you know what I mean. That's where Rinker met Patsy Hill."

"So who in the fuck is Patsy Hill?" McCoy asked.

"Another goddamned killer," Baker said, with a wide green smile. "I always thought it was amazin'. Two small-town girls, get to be best friends, and they both grow up to be killers. Cops was all over the place here, about ten years ago, must be, maybe longer, because Patsy was living down in Memphis with her husband, and she killed him with an ax or something like that. Maybe it was a hammer. Whacked the shit out of him. Then she ran, and they never caught her."

"Never?" Lucas asked.

"Not as far as I know, and I think I'd probably hear about it. I know some people who growed up over there. It ain't that far."

"Cross the county line, near to Springfield," McCoy said. He was plainly relieved: not his jurisdiction.

"Clara and Patsy didn't go to the same school?" Lucas asked.

"Not here," Baker said. "I don't know where Patsy went to school, maybe Springfield. But there was a time when Patsy and Clara was like this." He crossed two fingers. "They both grew up to be killers."

"She got any family around? Patsy?" Lucas asked.

"Yeah, over in Clendenon. Right there on Tree Street."

They talked a while longer, got a list of the stolen guns, and headed back into Hopewell. Lucas thanked McCoy for his help, then he and Andreno drove back toward the interstate in the Porsche.

"We going to Clendenon?" Andreno asked.

"We might be onto something," Lucas said. "The feds don't know about this-I read the whole file. If this Patsy Hill killed somebody years ago, and ran, and Rinker hid her, and if she's somehow living and working around St. Louis…"

"Then Hill could be paying Rinker back. Letting her stay over."

"And Hill couldn't turn Rinker in, no matter how big the reward was. Even more, I'll bet none of Clara's Mafia friends knew about Hill. Why would Clara tell them? One of them might have been tempted to use Hill as a get-out-of-jail card," Lucas said. He looked over at Andreno. "I'll tell you what. I'll bet five United States dollars right now that Rinker is staying with Hill. I don't know where Hill is, but if we can find her, we'll find Rinker."

Andreno thought about it for two minutes, then said, "No bet." He said it with a tone: Like Lucas, he could smell the trail.

A little farther down the road, Lucas said, "Let's not forget about that list of guns, huh? She's always been a pistol queen, but now she's got a carload of rifles. We gotta let Mallard know. We need to spread the net around Levy."

On the way to Clendenon, Lucas got the address for a Hill family on Tree Street, Chuck and Diane, and the phone number. He tried to call ahead, but there was no answer and no answering machine. "We could be here for a while," he said to Andreno.

Clendenon was a small town, not quite a suburb of Springfield, with a block-long downtown and a BP station at the end of that block. They asked the gas station attendant about Tree Street, and got detailed instructions. "You might want to keep your speed down in that Porsche," the attendant said, as they turned to go. "The town cop figures out speeds based on his best estimate, and your car looks like it's going forty when it's sitting at the gas pump."

"Thanks," Lucas said.

"No problem. You'll find the cop just about a block down that way… sitting behind that blue house. Take 'er easy."

They crept by the blue house at twenty miles an hour, and if there was a cop in the black Mustang parked at the curb behind the house, he made no move to come after them. They took a left two blocks farther on, and found Tree Street two more blocks down. Lucas took a left, found the house numbers going the wrong way, made a U-turn, drove two blocks down, and parked in front of the Hill place.

As with the Rinker and Baker houses, the Hills' was an older place, small, with a detached garage; but all of it was neatly kept, with a front window-box full of yellow- and wine-colored pansies and a strip of variegated marigolds along the driveway. When they got out of the car, Lucas could smell freshly cut grass. They knocked, got no answer, tried the neighbors. A woman in a housecoat told them that Chuck Hill worked at the grain elevator and Diane went grocery shopping in the morning and should be back at any moment: "Saw her leave an hour ago, so she oughta be… Here she comes."

Diane Hill arrived in an aging Taurus station wagon, bumped up the drive, and got out with a plastic grocery sack. She saw them coming, and waited in the driveway. Lucas identified them, and she said sullenly, "What do you want?"

"When your daughter disappeared, she had to go somewhere. We think she might have gone to Clara Rinker, and we think Clara might be with her now."

A transient look of-What? Pleasure? Lucas thought so-crossed Hill's face and then vanished as quickly as it had come.

"We don't have any idea where Patricia might be. We just hope to God that everything is all right with her, after the hell that her husband put her through."

"She never got in touch, just to tell you that she's all right?"

"Yes, she's called from time to time, and I told the police that. She calls sometimes, and she cries because she can't come home and she can't tell us where she is, because she's afraid that somebody will find out and the police will come get us. She's protecting us by not telling."

Andreno tried: "Mrs. Hill, honest to God, we don't care about Patsy-Patricia-she's somebody else's problem. But Clara is killing people-"

"Mafia hoodlums," Hill snapped.

"She's killed a lot of innocent people," Lucas put in. "She's going to kill more."

"That's not my problem," Hill said, clutching at her groceries. "All I know is, she was kind to my daughter when my daughter needed some kindness, and couldn't come here to get it. And I know what happened to poor Clara when she was just a girl, and it doesn't seem strange to me at all that she's grown up to kill people. Where were the police when her stepdaddy was working his perversions on her, and her not even fourteen? Where were they when Patricia's husband was burning her back with a clothes iron?"

"Mrs. Hill…"

"You tell me where the police were then."

"Mrs. Hill…"

"And if I were you, I wouldn't go talking to Chuck-that's my husband-because he's gonna be a damn sight less cordial than I've been. We don't approve of any kind of criminality, but if the police really took care of crime, there wouldn't be any Clara Rinker and our Patsy would still be with us. Excuse me." She marched up the driveway and into the house, and slammed the door.

After a moment, Andreno said, "I think we handled that pretty well."

"We oughta get a warrant and tear the house down."

"Really?"

Lucas shook his head. "No. Shit."

"Want to try Chuck?"

"I'll drop you off, if you want to."

"No, thanks. Back to St. Louis, then?"

Lucas sighed, looked up at the Hill house. "I guess."

Ten miles out of town he said, "The Hills didn't mention any other children."

Andreno shook his head. "No. I sorta got the impression that Patsy might be the only one."

"Huh. How many long-distance phone calls you think come pouring into the Hills' house?"

"Mmm."

"I bet she calls on Christmas," Lucas said. "Or New Year's, or right around then."

"I bet the feds can get a warrant for their phone records."

"Bet they can, too." He picked up his cell phone.

"Gonna tell them?"

"About the rifles, so they can spread the net around Levy. I want to tell them in person about the Hill idea-I don't want them pissing on it when I can't defend it. They've sat around that conference table and pissed on every idea I've had, even when they paid off."

"They're feds. That's what they do."