Mortal Prey

3

The trip to Houston was the usual nightmare, with Lucas hunched in a business-class seat, ready to brace his feet against the forward bulkhead when the impact came. Not that bracing would save him. In his mind's eye, he could clearly see the razor-sharp aviation aluminum slicing through the cabin, dismembering everybody and everything in its path. Then the fire, trying to crawl, legs missing, toward the exit…

He'd talked to a shrink about it. The shrink, an ex… military guy, suggested three martinis or a couple of tranquilizers, or not flying. He added that Lucas had control issues, and when Lucas asked, "Control issues? You mean, like I don't wanna die in an airplane crash?" the shrink-who'd had three martinis himself-said, "I mean, you wanna tell people how to tie their shoes, because you know how to do it better, and that means you don't want somebody else to fly you in an airplane."

"Then how come I'm not scared of helicopters?"

The shrink shrugged. "Because you're nuts."

In any case, the Valium hadn't helped. He'd just had time to drive to Weather's place, put some clothes and his shaving kit together, along with a small tube of drugs, and make it back to the airport in the Tahoe. He didn't want to leave the Porsche in the airport ramp because it might get stolen, and even if it didn't, he might not ever find it again. And pound for pound, he'd rather lose the Chevy than the Porsche.

The plane failed to crash either on the way to Houston or on landing-when he really expected it, so tantalizingly close to safety-or even when it was taxiing up to the gate, and a little more than five hours after speaking to Mallard, Lucas led the parade through the gate into the terminal.

Louis Mallard, who pronounced his name "Louie," was a stocky, professorial man who wore gold-rimmed professorial glasses and a dark professorial suit. He had a wrestler's neck and sometimes carried a. 40- caliber automatic in a shoulder holster. Waiting with him, in a lighter-blue professorial suit, and carrying a black briefcase, was a lanky gray-haired woman named Malone. The last time Lucas had seen Malone, he'd seen quite a bit more of her.

"Louis," Lucas said, shaking the other man's hand. Malone turned a cheek, and Lucas pecked it and said, "Louis tells me you got one on the line."

She looked at Mallard, who said hastily, "I didn't exactly say that."

"Mmmm," Malone said. To Lucas: "It's somewhat true."

"Somebody conservative, well-placed in government," Lucas suggested. "Maybe a little money of his own." Malone was a four-time loser with a taste for artists and muscle workers.

"No," she said. "He's a Sheetrocker."

"A Sheetrocker." He waited for a smile, and when he didn't get one-he got instead a defensive brow-beetling-he said, "Well, that's good. Always jobs out there for a good Sheetrocker."

Before Lucas sank completely out of sight, Mallard jumped in. "He's also a writer. He's almost done with his novel."

"Okay, well, good," Lucas said.

"You gotta get some clothes?" Mallard asked, trying to keep the anti-Sheetrocker momentum going. "There's a place…"

"Nah, I'm okay. I had time to get home." He looked around. "So where're we going? We leave out of here?"

"We catch a ride to another terminal," Mallard said. "The ride's outside."

They rode to the next terminal in a dark-blue government car, driven by a man whom Mallard never introduced. A junior agent from the Houston office, Lucas thought, who looked a little sour about the chauffeur duties. Malone rode in the front with the agent, while Lucas and Mallard rode in the back.

During the walk to the car and the two-minute ride, Mallard quietly sketched the series of circumstances that had led to the identification of Rinker as the woman who was shot, and to the belief by the Mexican cops that a shooter from St. Louis was involved. The shooter was now dead, probably killed by a Mexican man who was still on the run. "She was pregnant," Malone said. "They killed her lover, and when she was wounded, she lost the baby."

Lucas winced, and Weather's face popped into his head. "You think she's headed back here? Back across the border?"

Mallard shook his head. "We don't know. We've put sketches of her everywhere. Every port of entry. The problem is, she doesn't look all that special. Mid-thirties, middle height, athletic, pretty, that's about it. The other thing is, Rinker just got out of the hospital, so it's possible that she's lost some weight, and might not look like she used to."

Malone turned and said, over the seat, "It's also possible that she's just running, that she's already in Majorca or someplace. The Mexican police have been tracing the phone calls she made from this ranch where she was recovering-there were six calls up to Missouri and two went out to banks in Mexico. We got on top of the banks right away, but both of the calls went into the general number, so we don't know who she was talking to, or what she did. There aren't any records of large sums of money being moved on the days she called, that can't be accounted for. No big accounts closed or switched that can't be accounted for. With both the Mexican cops and this Mejia guy, this gang guy, taking an interest, we're pretty sure the banks are telling us the truth."

"Maybe safe-deposit boxes," Lucas suggested.

"We're trying to run that down. We thought maybe an off-the-books box. So far, nothing's panned out," Malone said.

"She's good," Lucas said. "But we knew that. How about the Missouri calls?"

"All six guys are connected-all six guys admit that she called and all six say she was asking about John Ross, who we think was her main employer," Mallard said. "All six say they told her nothing, that they didn't have anything to tell her."

"Ross runs things around the river in St. Louis, the port, trucks, some drug connections over in East St. Louis," Malone added. "He has a liquor distributorship. You remember Wooden Head from Wichita?"

"Yeah."

"Wooden Head worked for Ross."

"You believe the six guys? That they didn't have anything to say?"

"She talked to four of them for about five minutes, and the other two for about two minutes. We don't know what was said, but apparently not too much."

"You can say a lot in five minutes," Lucas said. "Does Ross have the six names?"

"Not as far as we know-we haven't talked with him yet," Mallard said.

"Okay. So Clara's boyfriend gets killed and she's wounded and loses the baby, and they think the shooter is from St. Louis and she makes calls to St. Louis asking about this Ross guy, but she doesn't call Ross himself, as far as you know. So. You think Ross sent the shooter? That she's on a revenge trip? A kamikaze deal?"

Mallard shook his head again. "Don't know. We're guessing that's it. Whatever, Rinker's broken out now, she's in the open. I really want her. Really want her. She's run her score up to maybe thirty-five people: This woman is the devil."

"She's maybe more inflected than that," Malone objected. To Lucas: "We have a good biography on her now. You can read it on the way down to Cancun. She had quite the little backwoods childhood."

Their connection was tight: An hour after Lucas's Northwest flight put down at Houston, the Continental flight to Cancun lifted off. Mallard and Malone sat together, with Lucas behind them, next to an elderly woman who plugged her sound-killing Bose headphones into a Sony discman, looked at him once, with something that might have been skepticism, and pulled a sleeping mask over her eyes. When they were off the ground, Malone took a bound report out of her briefcase and handed it back to Lucas. "Rinker," she said.

LUCAS HAD NEVER been able to read on airplanes: The Clara Rinker file was a first. When Malone handed him the file, he'd wondered at its heft, and turned to the last page: page 308. He flipped through and found a dense, single-spaced narrative. Not the usual cop report.

The first page began: "There are only four known photographs of Clara Rinker-three from driver's licenses and one from an identification card issued by Wichita State University. None of the people who knew Rinker were able to immediately pick her photograph from a spread of similar photographs prepared by the Bureau-in each of the four photos, she had obscured her appearance with eyeglasses and elaborate hair arrangements. This is typical of what we know of Clara Rinker: She is obsessively cautious in her contacts with others, and she apparently has, from the beginning of her career, prepared herself to run."

The author of the report-a Lanny Brown, whom Lucas hadn't heard of-had a nice style that would have worked in a true-crime book. Rinker had been killing people for almost fifteen years. The first reports had been of various organized-crime figures, both minor and major, taken off by a killer whose trademark was extreme close-range shootings, many of them with. 22-caliber silenced pistols.

Because of the circumstances of the shootings-two of them had taken place in women's rest rooms, although both the victims were men-the Bureau began to suspect that the shooter was a woman who lured the victims into private places with a promise of sex. A friend of one victim, in Shreveport, Louisiana, said that he'd spoken briefly at a bar with a pretty young woman who had a Southern accent, and later had caught a glimpse of the young woman and the victim leaving the club, in the victim's Continental. The car and the man were later found on a lover's lane. The man-who was married-had been shot three times in the head with a. 40-caliber Smith.

No fewer than nine people had been executed in stairwells or between cars in parking structures. The Bureau believed that the choices of execution locale indicated that the shooter had carefully scouted the victims, knew where they parked their cars, and favored parking structures because they offered good access and egress, large numbers of strangers interacting with each other-a strange woman wouldn't be noticed-and sudden privacy: Bodies had apparently gone unnoticed for as much as four hours when rolled under a car.

She was also believed to have posed as either a Mormon missionary or a Jehovah's Witness: One quiet evening in suburban Chicago, a "straight-looking" young woman carrying what a neighbor said appeared to be a Bible or a Book of Mormon had knocked on the door of a recently divorced hood in Oak Park, Illinois. Neighbors who'd been sitting in a porch swing in the restored Victorian across the street said she'd spoken to whoever answered the door, then turned away and left.

Three days later, after they'd been unable to get in touch with the bad boy, friends looked in a window and saw him sprawled on the floor by the front door. He'd taken two in the heart and one in the head, and died in a pair of flowered boxer shorts with a tight grip on a can of Coors Light. The time of death was estimated from the fact that he'd apparently just taken off a pair of Greg Norman golf slacks and a midnight-blue and white-hibiscus aloha shirt, which other friends said he'd worn to a golf course three days earlier.

After summarizing the executions that Rinker was believed involved in, the Bureau report spent some time with her childhood. She'd grown up on a broken-down farm outside of Tisdale, Missouri, not far from Springfield. Her father had deserted the family when she was seven, and had died, unknown to the family, twelve years later, in a car accident in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Her mother, Cammy Rinker, had divorced Rinker's father four years after he left, and two weeks after the divorce was final, married a man named Carl Paltry. Paltry was an alcoholic and a bully, and had been arrested for beating both Cammy Rinker and Rinker's older brother, Roy. The police had learned of Roy's beating after a gym coach noticed that Roy was peeing blood.

According to Rinker's aunt-her mother's sister-Paltry also had sexually abused his wife Cammy Rinker, Clara, and possibly Clara's younger brother, Gene. The abuse had begun a few weeks after the marriage, when Rinker was eleven, and continued until she ran away from home when she was fourteen. Until she was eleven, she'd had a good record in school, but that went bad after Paltry arrived. The aunt also said that Rinker's older brother, Roy, had sexually abused her.

Paltry and Cammy Rinker had remained married for twelve years, until one day, when Clara would have been nineteen, and already working as a shooter, he'd disappeared. He hadn't run anywhere, the local cops said-he'd gotten drunk and had beaten Cammy so badly that she'd been hospitalized, and Paltry had been arrested. He was out on bail when he disappeared. His car had been found parked, engine running, behind a Dairy Queen in Tisdale. His checkbook and wallet were on the passenger seat. He was never seen again, and the Bureau believed that Clara Rinker may have paid him a visit.

Rinker's mother had almost nothing useful to tell the Bureau. Her memory of Clara seemed uneven; and when she went to get family pictures, she found that all the photos of Clara were gone.

The Bureau had tracked Roy through a series of minor crime reports, and eventually found him in Santa Barbara, California, where he was involved in a lightweight prostitution ring. Roy and a man named Charles Green ran teenaged hookers around to country clubs. The Bureau report quoted one source as saying, "You could get your shoes and your knob polished at the same place and time. It was convenient for everybody."

Roy was two years older than Rinker and had left home two years after she had. He had seen her twice, when she'd stopped in Santa Barbara looking for their younger brother, Gene, who was also someplace in California. Roy didn't know anything about anything, though he said that Rinker appeared to be doing well, and drove nice cars. He had no photographs of her, and denied having sexually abused her. The interviewer thought he was lying.

Rinker's younger brother, Gene, had shown up on three police reports in California, all three for minor drug offenses. He was listed as "homeless" on the police reports and was apparently living on the beaches between Venice and Santa Monica. The Bureau had been unable to find him. Next to this paragraph, a female hand had scrawled, "Lucas: ask me-M."

Lucas reached forward and tapped Malone's arm. "There's a note here to ask you about Gene Rinker."

She turned and said, "Yes. We found him yesterday. He was working for a pool-cleaning company in Pacific Palisades-Los Angeles. We're holding him on a drug charge."

"Good charge?"

"He was in possession of marijuana."

"How much?"

"Maybe a gram."

"A joint? Jesus, is that…?"

"It's more than enough, is what it is. As soon as we get done here, I'm going to L.A. to talk to him. See if he has anything interesting on Clara."

"Okay." Malone turned away, and Lucas sank back into the report.

Rinker had worked for a bar in St. Louis, then for Ross, who was a liquor distributor. She'd also worked off and on as a bookkeeper-secretary for a mobster named Allen Kent, whose mother's family was closely tied to the old Giancana outfit in Chicago. Eventually, Rinker had put together enough money to buy a bar in Wichita, which had done well until she'd fled after her disastrous involvement in a series of killings in Minneapolis. Where she'd gone immediately after Minneapolis was unknown. She'd eventually popped up in Cancun, where she'd worked illegally as a bookkeeper at a boutique hotel called Passages.

Lucas had danced with her once, not knowing who she was, at her club in Wichita, The Rink. They'd had a good time, for a little time, that night. She'd even chatted with Mallard and Malone. She must've known who they were, although they hadn't known who she was. Later, she'd tried to kill Lucas in his own front yard. She'd missed almost purely by chance… as he'd missed her.

Reading about his own encounter with Rinker, Lucas was struck with the strangeness of writerly synthesis. He was in the story, but it didn't sound like him, or feel like him. He felt as though he were looking at himself in an old 8-millimeter movie, something that wasn't quite true, but was undeniably accurate… and he wondered if the entire report was like that, accurate but not especially true.

Rinker came across as Mallard saw her, as the daughter of the devil. At the same time, almost against the will of the writer, another picture was emerging, a kind of Annie Oakley old-timey story of survival.

After completing the detailed review of Rinker's life and activities, the report went on to detail what was known of the business and crime activities of her various bosses: Names were named, connections made, possibilities explored. Much was speculative, but all of it was based on the kind of rumor-fabric that Lucas had lived with most of his working life. Not much could be proven, but much could be understood…

He was two-thirds of the way through the report when he heard the flight attendant saying something, but he paid no attention until the plane's attitude changed with an audible clunk that reverberated through the cabin. He sat upright, looked around, and saw that people were packing up briefcases, putting away computers, sticking stuff back into the overhead. He looked at his watch: They'd been in the air for two hours and were coming into Cancun.

He leaned forward, tapped Malone's arm, and when she turned, passed the report back.

"Finish it?"

"No. Got another hundred pages. And I'll want to read the whole thing over," he said. "Good stuff in there. I can see what you meant when you said… inflected. Tough life."

"Which is not exactly an excuse for all the people she's killed-especially people like Barbara Allen." Allen had been a rich charity-and-foundation socialite in Minneapolis. Rinker had shot her to death so that her client could get at Allen's husband.

"No. But it was still tough," Lucas said.

"The thing is, you kinda liked her," Malone said. "You went for that whole perky cheerleader teased-hair bar-owner act."

"What's not to like?" Lucas asked. He said, "Better buckle up," and leaned back out of the conversation.

The plane failed to crash in Cancun, but the heat and humidity jumped them as soon as they walked off the plane. They retrieved their luggage and took a taxi from the mainland over to the Island, where Mallard had gotten rooms at the Blue Palms. "Let's get cleaned up and find something to eat," he said. "The hotel restaurant is supposed to be okay."

"How about the Italian place where Rinker was shot?" Lucas asked. "Your report says it's pretty good."

"Saving that for lunch tomorrow," Mallard said.

The hotel room was a blank-faced off-white cubicle with a TV and a minibar, a too-soft double bed, and a bathroom without a tub. The place smelled faintly of bug spray and salt water, and could have been at any seaside anywhere. Lucas hung his clothes in the closet and washed his face, then walked out onto the narrow balcony and looked down at the water.

Rinker had been here, and not long ago. Had worked within a couple of blocks of the Blue Palms, had probably spent time on the beach ten stories down. She might well be in the same kind of place, somewhere else on the globe, looking for a job, trying to settle in.

Or she might have a hidey-hole in St. Louis, ready to go to war on her lover's killers. If she'd simply run, they'd never find her. But if she'd gone to St. Louis, he thought…

If she'd gone to St. Louis, they'd get her.