Mortal Prey

19

Rinker had a bad night. She was comfortable enough, sleeping on couch pillows, wrapped in clean sheets, but the body in the basement freezer still gave her the creeps, and she thought several times that the basement door was creaking open. She found herself staring through the dark, looking for shapes in the living room, her hand near the Beretta on the floor beside her. Not that the gun would help with a ghost.

In the very darkest pit of the night, she sat up. She'd had something close to a dream, and in the dream came an idea. She crawled over to a lamp, groped up its stem, turned it on, then went out to the kitchen and dug up a yellow pages. She found what she was looking for under "Investigations." There were several listings for private detectives specializing in "spousal inquiries"-had to be divorce work-and two of them had women's names attached.

She left the kitchen light on, turned the lamp off, and went back to her couch pillows to think about it. Dream about it. And listen for noises from the basement.

SHE WAS OUT of the house by ten o'clock, as the Dark Woman, with dark brown eyebrows and dark brown hair. She wore a loose, green, long-sleeved cotton shirt to cover her arms, the fine blond hair and too-fair skin. She'd moved her own car into Honus Johnson's garage, and took his Mercedes.

She scouted Nina Bennett's address and found that it was a house with a business sign on it, and a black cat sitting in the porch window. A home office for a not-very-prosperous business, Rinker thought.

Could work, she thought. She rolled away from Bennett's and went looking for a place to meet. Someplace downtown. She found it at the Happy Dragon, a dark, upscale Chinese place that seemed to be designed for St. Louis's lunchtime assignations, with shoulder-high booths and bad sight-lines.

She stopped at Union Station, found a phone and called Bennett, who picked up on the second ring. "Bennett Legal Services."

Rinker tried to sound tentative. "I saw your ad in the phone book. Do you check on husbands? I mean, watch them?"

"We do spousal surveillance, yes. We usually require a reference from an attorney." The "usually" was not stressed; was made to sound inviting.

"Oh." Disappointment. Hesitation. "I can't hire an attorney. Not yet. I don't want a divorce, I don't want to make him angry. I just want to find out."

"Ma'am, if we're going to court…"

"I wouldn't want that," Rinker said quickly. "I just want to… know."

"Maybe you should come by. We can talk."

"Oh… I don't… Please wait a minute." Rinker clapped her hand over the mouthpiece, waited for what she thought might be a minute, then came back on. "Could you talk this afternoon? I'm very busy, I'm getting ready to fly down to Miami this evening."

"Yes, I could talk to you this afternoon," Bennett offered.

"Could you come here? Downtown?"

"Yes, I could."

"Oh, that's great. There's a place down the block, the Happy Dragon, if you could meet me there. Wait a minute, let me look at my calendar." She clapped her hand over the mouthpiece again, waited a few seconds, then said, "Three o'clock?"

"That'd be fine. The Happy Dragon at three, Mrs…?"

"Dallaglio," Rinker said. "Jesse Dallaglio."

Lucas had spent most of the day at FBI headquarters, going through paper-all the paper that the feds had put together-looking for anything that might indicate whom Rinker might talk to, anything about the way she preferred to live. Andreno called to say that he'd stopped by John Sellos's bar and apartment, and Sellos was still missing. "He's not dead. The bartender got a call from him last night, said he sounded really worried about what was happening to the place. He told the bartender that he was still traveling and playing golf, but wouldn't say where he was."

"He called at the bar?"

"On the bar's public phone, right around nine o'clock."

"We'll see where that goes back to," Lucas said. "Though I'm not sure what he could tell us." He gave a note to Sally Epaulets, and asked her to find out where the call had come from. Twenty minutes later, she told him that it had come from a gas station near Nashville.

"Does that help?" she asked.

"No."

"Don't have to be snippy about it."

Malone had been in and out all afternoon. She was driving the local cops to find Rinker's car, while Mallard had disappeared entirely. When Lucas asked, Sally told him that Mallard was teleconferencing with Washington.

"All of it?"

"Just the FBI part," she said.

A few minutes later, an agent named Leen stopped by and said that the explosive that had killed Levy had been tagged, and the tags indicated that it was a commercial-grade explosive generally used in quarries, and most of it was sold in New England.

That rang no bells with anyone, and Lucas went back to the paper.

Malone came back and asked, "Why are you reading all that paper again?"

"I'm trying to figure out what's going on in Rinker's head, and I can't. She's got all this carefully planned, right? The Dichter thing, then the cell phone. Is there some reason for the order that she's taking them in? Why didn't she take Ross first? Even Ross thinks he'd probably be the toughest nut to crack, but if she'd done him first, she could have gotten him."

Malone shook her head. "It is possible to plan a thing and then ride the breaks. Maybe that's what she's doing."

"I'll tell you what, though," Lucas said. "Ross ain't panicking. He's got a plan. My feeling is that she's gonna go after one of the other guys before she tries for him-I think Ferignetti may be right, that she's got no interest in him. Give him that. Giancati is taking himself out of it, maybe beyond her reach. So-I think we ought to look really hard at Paul Dallaglio."

"Dallaglio may take himself out of it, too, if he goes back to the Old Country, wherever that may be."

"Then we watch Ross, and hope she doesn't take a sabbatical and come back for them next year."

At six o 'clock, he left the FBI building and met Andreno, Loftus, Bender, and Carter at Andy's Bar. They ate cheeseburgers and curly fries and onion rings and batter-dipped mushrooms, and Lucas said, "Guys, we almost got her, but we didn't. Does anybody have any idea of a move we could make? We gotta make some kind of move."

"I keep thinking about the car," Carter said. "If the car was on the street, locally, we'd have her by now. I know for a fact that guys are driving up and down every street in the whole metro area looking for the car, and they're coming up dry. The thing is… maybe she took off."

"The feds have put the make and tag number out all over the Midwest and South, and she can't have outrun that," Lucas said. "If she did, there's nothing we can do about it. But I don't think she's gone. I just don't know how to put my hands on her."

"Comes back to her friends," Andreno said. "Somebody's hiding her. Somebody's helping her. If we can put our hands on that guy…"

Lucas talked to Mallard on the phone at eight o'clock. "I might run home tomorrow, if you don't come up with something. Catch a plane out tomorrow afternoon, spend a couple of days at home. I'm out of ideas right now."

"Lucas, goddamnit, you're the only one who's had any ideas that actually panned out. You can't leave."

"For a day or two," Lucas said. "I could be back here in four hours, if something breaks."

But something broke sooner than that. Mallard called back at 11 o'clock, excited, words tumbling over words. "We spotted her. The guys on Dallaglio's house are watching her right now. We're pulling people in all the way around her, tightening up on her. We're looking at her with night glasses, and we can see her watching the Dallaglio place. She's in a Volvo, they say."

"Meet you in the lobby," Lucas said.

He'd been reading, still dressed, and he slipped on his shoes and got his car keys and ran for the elevator. After a short, impatient wait, the elevator door opened and Malone was there, trying to shove a gun back into her purse.

"Gonna shoot her, huh?" Lucas asked.

Malone grunted. "I've been waiting for this."

"Weird. She's been so careful, and now she's sitting in a car on the street, watching Dallaglio. She pulled Richter out of his shell, she got weird with Levy, something we never even suspected, and now…" He shook his head. But it happened sometimes.

Dallaglio 's place was twenty minutes out, and they all went together in one of the Suburbans, a flasher working on the front, cutting through traffic like an avalanche, a heavy-footed red-haired FBI man at the wheel, one of the Washington crew. Lucas didn't like him much, but had to admit that he knew how to run the truck.

Mallard was on the radio the full time. He'd been on it when he ran out of the hotel a minute after Lucas and Malone, stopped using it just long enough to explain that he'd been getting ready to take a shower when the call came from the field, and then got back on it, with brief breaks to pass along what he was hearing.

"I've told them to move on her whether or not we're there. As soon as they're ready, they go."

"They gonna rush her?"

"They're gonna block her, front and back, with trucks. We've got people moving up through a yard that she's parked near, but there's a dog, and they're talking to the owner about getting the dog out of there quietly before they go through. When she's blocked, there'll be a guy pointing a shotgun through her window before she has time to move. They think they can close up to fifteen feet."

They kept getting closer, and nothing had happened. The dog was hanging them up, and then Mallard reported that the dog was now locked in the basement of the nearest house, and that the tac squad was moving in, cutting through the dark yards. The red-haired agent took them off the freeway and down a couple of major streets, the tires screeching on the warm asphalt, all of them leaning into the turn, and then suddenly, on a narrow street, surrounded by woods, he slowed, and reached out and killed the flasher.

"Six blocks," he said. Twenty seconds later: "Four blocks."

Then up in front of them, a block away, they saw another suburban pull away from the curb, go down another block, and turn a corner. "That's our guys," said the redhead.

"Going down," Mallard said. He couldn't keep the stress out of his voice. "I'm about to wet my pants."

"This is a rental," the redhead said. "Try not to."

They idled along for a block, paused before the corner, drifting toward the curb. Then Mallard said, "They're doing it, they're doing it, let's GO."

The red-haired man mashed on the accelerator and the Suburban grunted away from the curb and turned the corner, and, two blocks away, they could see a car in a brilliant slash of light and trucks all around it, and men with long guns and helmets…

"Got her," Mallard shouted. "We got her."

And a half hour later, he said, harshly, angrily, to Lucas, "What the fuck is this about, Lucas? What the fuck is this about?"

They had Nina Bennett pressed against a six-year-old Volvo station wagon, frightened, crying, hands cuffed behind her back. And obviously not Clara Rinker.

After some preliminary shouting, the next thought was that Rinker was using Bennett as a diversion to approach Dallaglio's house, and there was a rush to get a larger squad around the house. But Dallaglio was okay, and there was no sign of Rinker, or of fleeing cars, or anything else.

Which brought up Mallard's question, "What the fuck is this about, Lucas?"

"I don't know." He looked around. "Maybe she's watching from somewhere, to see what would happen."

"She had to know that Dallaglio was protected. What would she gain?"

"I don't know."

"We don't even know it was Rinker," Malone said. "The woman who hired her-if this even happened-didn't sound like Rinker."

"Didn't sound like Mrs. Dallaglio, either," Lucas said dryly.

"Maybe she's just pulling our chain," said the red-haired agent.

That seemed unlikely, Lucas thought, but he couldn't think of anything better.

An hour later, after taking the cuffed Nina Bennett to the Dallaglios' house to confront Jesse Dallaglio-both women agreed that they'd never met-they sent Bennett downtown for a formal statement, and pulled everybody else back into position.

"She doesn't have anything to do with it," Mallard said, meaning Bennett. "We're gonna get her statement and cut her loose."

"Got a story to tell, anyway. Private eye-you don't see many of them anymore. Not like that," Lucas said.

"She even had a bottle of booze in her car, and a little on her breath," Malone said. "And she must've smoked like a chimley. The whole car reeked."

"You said chimley," Lucas observed.

"Did not. I said chimney. "

"Chimley," Mallard said, absently. Then: "But you know what's really strange when you think about it? She smokes, like a chimley, and she drives a Volvo station wagon. I didn't think that was allowed."

"I said chimney, " Malone said.

After a minute of silence, the red-haired agent said, "Did not. Said chimley. "

They'd stopped teasing her about when they got back to the hotel, still frustrated from the false alarm. They parked, got out, and started walking for the main entrance, under the orange sodium-vapor lights, when somebody shot at them.

BANG!

They were spread out, walking away from the Suburban, walking in a line side-by-side, like a publicity shot for the Magnificent Seven, when the BANG! echoed off the building front and they all knew what it was and the agents went down and Lucas pivoted and realized in one half-second that the shooter had to be at the far end of the huge empty parking lot, a hundred and fifty yards north, or possibly on the roof of one of the old buildings down to the right, but there was no place else, really, and he ran toward his car, thinking Go-go-go and flashing on the difficulty of hitting a running deer at a hundred and fifty yards, hoping, hoping, looking north as he ran, looking for another muzzle flash, and then he was at his car and inside and fired it up and pulled out of the parking lot, catching from the corner of his eyes the confused, scrambling huddle of agents in the driveway and then he was on the street and accelerating…

He never saw her, he thought later.

He thought he found the place from where she'd fired the shot, a spot beside a big metal-sided building that would allow her to park right there, that would allow her to fire, and then to run back and climb inside her car in a matter of two or three seconds. She was probably moving before Lucas had reached his car, he thought.

He did the neighborhood anyway, gunning up and down the side streets. There was an entrance to a whole nest of interstates right there, and he was sure that was where she'd gone, and if she had, she'd be truly gone. He'd never know what car she was in if he went that way, so he stayed on the down streets, hoping against hope that she'd gotten cute, that she'd tried to drive away slowly, that he might see something.

But he did not.

After ten minutes, he headed back, paused by the metal building, looking over the spot he thought might have given her the shooting stance. She would have been able to rest her hand against the building, and across the parking lot, now a sea of flashing lights, they would have been perfectly illuminated and silhouetted against the hotel…

"Goddamnit," he said aloud.

Thiswas the reason for sending Bennett to watch Dallaglio. Rinker had found out where the out-of-town agents were staying, probably by calling around to the main hotels and asking for them by name.

Once she had the hotel, she'd scouted it, picked a place to shoot from. But she couldn't wait out there all day with a gun, hoping somebody would come along. By sending Bennett out to Dallaglio's, she'd known that all the big shots would be pulled out of the hotel, and once they found out that it was a false alarm, they'd all be coming back, late at night. She'd be in the dark, and they'd be walking in the bright lights of the parking lot…

As he thought that, he was swept by a sudden, physical chill. He hadn't even considered the possibility anybody might have been hit. He'd just run. He turned back down toward the hotel. A cop tried to wave him off, but he shouted, "FBI," and was pointed into the back lot. He got out and started around the hotel, and saw a man running toward him, a big man, flapping his arms like a goose trying to take off, and not getting there.

"She…," Mallard croaked. "She…"

"Whoa, whoa," Lucas said, and suddenly he was frightened himself. "Whoa, Louis, what happened?"

"She… she shot Malone. Malone was shot."

"Ah, Jesus, how bad? How bad?" Lucas looked past him, but there was nobody on the ground, nothing. She must be on the way to the hospital.

He started past Mallard, but Mallard hooked his arm and closed his eyes and said, "She's dead."