Mortal Prey ld-13

by John Sandford

  Only when he looked into the hole did he realize how committed he'd become, after a long life of essential noncommitment. The old house was gone and Weather Karkinnen was, as she'd announced, With Child. They'd get married when they had time to work out the details, and they'd all live happily ever after in the Big New House.

  As he'd stood on the edge of the hole, the low-spreading foundation junipers clutching at his ankles as though pleading for mercy-they'd get damn little, given the practicalities of building a new house-he'd expected to live with the regret for a long time.

  He'd bought the place when he was relatively young, a detective sergeant with a reputation for busting cases. He was working all the time, roaming the city at night, building a web of contacts-and working until five in the morning writing role-playing games, hunched over a drawing board and an IBM Selectric.

  A couple of the games hit, producing modest gushers of money. After wasting some of it on a retirement plan and throwing even more down the rathole of sober, long-term investments, he'd finally come to his senses and spent the remaining money on a Porsche and a lake cabin in the North Woods. The last few thousand made a nice down payment on the house.

  Standing at the edge of the old basement, he'd thought he'd miss the old place.

  So far, he hadn't.

  The hole had been enlarged, the new foundation had gone in, and in short order, the frame for the replacement house had gone up and been enclosed. He found the process fascinating. He'd enjoyed the design stage, working with the architect. Had enjoyed even more the construction process, the careful fitting-together of the plans, and the inevitable arguments about changes and materials. He even enjoyed the arguments. Sort of like writing a strategy game, he thought.

  The old house, though comfortable, had problems. Even living in it alone, he'd felt cramped at times. And if he and Weather had kids, the kids would have been living on top of them, in the next bedroom down the hall. The Big New House would have a grand master bedroom suite with a Versailles-sized bathroom and a bathtub large enough for Lucas to float in-Weather, a small woman, should be able to swim laps. The kid-kids? — would be at the other end of the hall, with a bathroom of his own, and there'd be a library and workrooms for both himself and Weather and a nice family room and a spot for Weather's piano. The new house was a place he thought he could happily live and die in. Die when he was ninety-three, he hoped. And with any luck, it should be finished before the kid arrived…

  Right now, he didn't want to leave. Not even with the screaming up on the roof. He wanted to hang around and talk with the foreman and the other guys, but he knew he'd just be sucking up their time. He walked around the first floor once more, thinking about color schemes that would fit with the rock he'd picked for the fireplace. Twenty minutes after he arrived, he dragged himself back to the car.

  And remembered Mallard. He took the cell phone out of his pocket and leaned against the Porsche and punched in the number written in the palm of his hand. An old lady went by on her bike, a wicker basket between the handlebars. She waved, and he waved back-a neighbor making her daily trip to the supermarket up the hill on Ford Parkway.

  "Mallard."

  "Is that pronounced like the duck?" Lucas asked.

  An instant of silence, then Mallard figured it out. "Davenport. How far are you from the airport?"

  "Ten minutes, but I ain't flying anywhere."

  "Yeah, you are. You've got a Northwest flight out of there in, mmm, two hours and eight minutes for Houston and from there to Cancun, Mexico. Electronic tickets are already under your name. It's all cleared with your boss, and your federal tax dollars are picking the tab. I'll meet you at IAH in about six hours, and you can buy some clothes there."

  "Whoa, whoa. I hate flying."

  "Sometimes a man's gotta do…"

  "What's going on?"

  "Six weeks ago, somebody shot and killed a Mexican guy outside a Cancun restaurant and wounded his girlfriend. The guy who got killed was the youngest son of a Mexican druglord, or a guy who's supposedly a druglord, or maybe an ex-druglord… something like that. So the Mexicans started sniffing around, and word leaks out to a DEA guy. The shooter wasn't aiming at the druglord's son. It was a mistake."

  "That's really fascinating, Louis, but Cancun is outside the Minneapolis city limits."

  "The shooter was going for the girl, see. She was wounded, and the cops put out the word that she was dead, until they could find out what was going on. So after she got out of the hospital, she went out to the druglord's ranch outside of Mйrida-that's a city down there-for a month, recovering. Then she disappeared. Like a puff of smoke. Everybody was looking for her, and eventually we get this request from the Mexican National Police about these fingerprints they'd picked up at the ranch. We had one print that matched. Came off a bar of soap."

  Lucas finally caught up. "It's her?"

  "Clara Rinker," Mallard said.

  "What do you want me to do?"

  "Get your ass down to Houston, first thing. The DEA has hooked us up with the National Police, and we're gonna talk to some people who knew her down there. You got a better feel for her than anybody. I want you to hear it."

  Lucas thought about it for a minute, looking up at the half-completed house. "I can do it for a couple of days," he said. "But I got stuff going on here, Louis-I mean, serious stuff. My fiancйe is gonna be pissed. She's in the middle of planning the wedding, she really needs me right now, and I'm running off-"

  "Just a couple of days," Mallard said. "I promise. Listen, I gotta go. I'm just coming up to National right now, and I gotta make some more calls before I get out of the car."

  "Is Malone coming?"

  "Yeah, she's coming, but you're engaged."

  "I was just asking, Louis. You got something going with her?"

  "No, I don't. But she does. Have something going. I gotta hang up. See you in Houston."

  Weather would be upset, Lucas thought, looking back at the construction project. The house was only halfway done and needed constant supervision. The wedding planning was completely disorganized, and needed somebody to stay on top of it. Finally, there was a political pie-fight going on at City Hall, as a half-dozen candidates jockeyed for position in the Democratic primary for mayor. The political ramifications of the fight were severe-the chief was already dead meat, her job gone. Lucas, as a political deputy-chief, was on his way out with the chief. But with a little careful maneuvering, they might be able to leave the department in the hands of friends.

  He could leave the politics, though-the chief was a lot better at it than he was. The real problem was Weather. Weather was a surgeon, a maxillofacial resident at Hennepin General. She and Lucas had circled each other for years, had had one wedding fall through. Lucas loved her dearly, but worried that the relationship might still be fragile. To leave her now, five months into the pregnancy…

  Weather's secretary answered at Hennepin General. "Lucas? A patient just went in."

  "Grab her, will you? I've got to talk to her right now," Lucas said. "It's pretty serious."

  Weather came on a second later, showing a little stress. "Are you all right?"

  "Yeah, I'm fine. Why?"

  She was exasperated. "Lucas, when you call like this, and you say it's important, and you've got to talk to me right away, tell Carol, 'I'm not hurt, but it's important.' That'll keep me from an early coronary. Okay?"

  Lucas sighed. "Yeah, sure."

  "So what's going on?" she asked. She was looking at her watch, Lucas thought.

  "Mallard called…" He told her the story in thirty seconds, then listened to four seconds of dead silence, and opened his mouth to say, "Well?" or apologize, or something, but didn't quite get there.

  "Thank God," she blurted. "You're driving me crazy. You're driving the entire construction company crazy. If you'll just get out of the country for a few days, I could finish the wedding plans and maybe the builders could get some work done."

  "Hey…" He was offen
ded, but she paid no attention. She said, "Go to Cancun. God bless you. Call me every night. Remember: Flying is the safest way to travel. Have a couple martinis. Or better yet, there's some Valium in my medicine cabinet. Take a couple of those."

  "You're sure you don't-"

  "I'm sure. Go."

  "You're sure."

  "Go. Go."

  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.