In the tape, Gene had looked utterly forlorn. He couldn't take much jail time. He was claustrophobic, along with everything else. If Davenport didn't get him out of there, she'd have to do something. Move on the FBI? That would kill her.
Maybe she should simply leave. She thought about that. Her money was well hidden, and she had a place to go, a warm place with beaches-if it weren't for Gene, she could just give it up, make a call to Ross to warn him off again, let Dichter stand as a warning. She could leave. Now she couldn't, not until Gene was taken care of.
Pollock usually got home around three o'clock. When she was going out, Rinker liked to go with Pollock, because then Pollock became part of the disguise. By two o'clock, she'd been thinking about Gene for so long, and had looked at the Post-Dispatch article so many times, that she finally said the hell with it and went back out, looking for another phone. In the morning, she'd gone east, so this time she turned west, out I-64. She eventually stopped at an upscale shopping center called Plaza Frontenac to make the call.
She called the Post-Dispatch, but it wasn't easy. The Post-Dispatch operator switched her to the reporter who'd written that morning's story about Gene, but the reporter wasn't in, and his voice mail handed her to a woman on the city desk. The woman sent her back to the same reporter before Rinker could object, and the voice mail sent her back to the city desk again. This time, she told the desk woman that "I just need to talk to somebody who covers this Clara Rinker thing. I used to know her."
The woman on the other end was unimpressed with the information, and said, in as close to a monotone as anyone could manage, "I could switch you to either Fabian Broeder, who's our organized-crime reporter, or to Sandy White, the metro columnist."
"Well, which one do you think? Who's the most important?"
"Sandy's the best known. He's working on a Rinker column for tomorrow."
"Let me talk to him."
She was on hold for another three seconds, then the phone rang once and a man's voice said, "White."
"Are you reporting on the Rinker case?"
"I'm writing a column," White said. "Who is this?"
"Clara Rinker."
A moment of silence. Then: "Bullshit."
"Bullshit your own self," Rinker said. "You got something to take notes with?"
"Yeah. But I still don't think this is Rinker."
"That's what I'm gonna prove to you, dumbhead. Just listen. There's a cop from Minneapolis working with the FBI on this case. His name is Lucas Davenport"-she spelled it for him-"and he's a deputy chief from Minneapolis. I had a run-in with him up there, and he chased me out of my bar in Wichita. Now he's down here helping the federales. You got that much?"
"Yeah." He was typing like crazy, the computer keys rattling in the phone.
"Okay. Here's how I prove who I am. I called him this morning about ten o'clock from East St. Louis and talked to him about the case. He told me that his fiancйe is pregnant. I called him at the FBI building."
"Pregnant. Jesus. Are you kidding? Is this really Rinker?" His voice was rising; he was starting to believe.
"Yeah. This is Rinker. If you call Davenport and ask him about his fiancйe, he'll confirm that I called him and that nobody else could know about it. About that part of the discussion. Now, I have a statement, okay?"
"Go."
"What?"
"Go with the statement," White said.
"Oh. Okay. Um, the FBI arrested my brother Gene in California on some made-up drug charge. Gene isn't right in the head. He never has been. He's not stupid, but he's just not in this world, you got that? And he's claustrophobic. They are torturing him by putting him in jail. He's an innocent kid, and they're torturing him because they think that will make me surrender. But I won't. I will tell you and everybody else this: If anything happens to Gene-he's just like a helpless kid-if anything happens to him, the blood is on their hands and I will wash it off them, one at a time. One at a time, off them and off their families. Off the FBI people who've done this."
"Go ahead."
"That's all I've got."
"You say the drug charges are bullshit?"
"You sure swear a lot, for the telephone," Rinker said.
"Sorry. I'm kind of excited."
"Okay. Ask them, the FBI, about the charge on Gene. Gene never had more than a single doobie in his whole poor life. He never had more than ten dollars. When was the last time you saw somebody dragged from California to St. Louis in orange prison overalls and chains because he had a doobie?"
"Okay."
"Oh, and something else. The FBI are all over a guy named Andy Levy from First Heartland, because they think I'm going to kill him next. But I'm not going to. Andy used to handle money for me, but he hasn't for a long time. I just wanted to talk to him."
"First Heartland?"
"Yes. Andy's a vice president at First Heartland, and he does the banking for the Mafia here in St. Louis. The FBI knows that, and they've got him protected because they hope they can catch me. But they're wasting their time. I've got no interest in Andy."
"Holy shit. First Heartland."
"There you go again."
"Sorry, but listen… Who are you going to kill next? I'd like to send a photographer."
Rinker laughed-almost like a quick cough. The guy had some balls. "I gotta go."
"Let me read this back."
"I don't have time. But you talk to Davenport."
"I don't… What, uh… why in the hell is a guy from Minneapolis down here?"
"The FBI brought him down because they think he's the most likely guy to catch me."
"Are they right?"
"Maybe. But he hasn't caught me yet, and he's had his chances."
Rinker arrived back at Pollock's in time to see Pollock climb the porch steps and then disappear inside. She pulled her car in a tight U-turn, took it down the dirt driveway to the garage, hopped out, lifted the door, and parked. When she let herself into the house, Pollock was in the kitchen. Pollock leaned into her line of sight and called, "You okay?"
"I'm good," Rinker said.
"Got a hornet's nest going," Pollock said.
Rinker looked at her for a minute, then said, "If you think I should go…"
"I just think you should lay low for a few days," Pollock said. She came out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on a dishcloth. "I heard on the radio about you calling the FBI. There are cops all over that truck stop, if that was really you."
"It's on TV?"
"It's everywhere on TV," Pollock said. "They're taking fingerprints, they're talking to witnesses. They're making a sketch of you from witnesses."
"All right," Rinker said. "Soon as it gets dark, I'm gonna take off for a while. I'll be gone two or three days, outa here."
"I don't want to know where you're going."
But she did; and Rinker said, "Anniston, Alabama, the garden spot of the Deep South."
"I been there. I don't remember no garden," Pollock said.
"That's okay, because I'm not going after carrots," Rinker said. "I'm going to see an old Army buddy."
11
The day was dragging on.
Malone had put together an approach to Levy, and one of the feds was doing a PowerPoint presentation on Levy's connections in the overground banking world and his possible ties with underground money-laundering activities. Levy's private-client list had turned up a vein of investment by people tied to organized crime. A three-man team had put together a half-hour-long briefing after six hours of financial research.
The team was taking questions when a silent strobe began flashing on a phone on a corner table. Malone was irritated by the interruption, but she was closest. She leaned back and picked up the receiver, listened for a second, and then looked at Lucas. "Marcy wants to talk to you. Problem at your office," she said in a quiet voice. She'd met Marcy during the Rinker investigation in Minneapolis.
"Sorry. She should have called me on the cell." Lucas walked around the table and took
the call, half-turned his back to the guy making the presentation, pushed the hold button, and said, quietly, "Marcy?"
"Lucas?" Didn't sound like Marcy, unless she'd developed a cold.
"Yeah… Is this Marcy?"
"No, actually it's not, Lucas."
It took him just a second. In that second, he remembered what she smelled like, the nice smell of perfume and a little beer, the time they danced in her Wichita saloon. "How've you been?"
Lucas started waving frantically at Mallard, who looked puzzled for a second, then caught on. He said, silently, miming the name with his lips, "Rinker?"
Lucas nodded, but missed part of what Rinker had said. He caught, "… you should know about that."
Around him, the feds were scrambling for phones and one man dashed out the door, a yellow legal pad spinning to the floor behind him.
"Yeah, I heard you were hit pretty bad," Lucas said. His heart was pounding, but he thought, Cool down, cool down. She's too smart to give herself away. He groped for something that would make a human connection and keep her talking. "I'm really sorry about the baby," he said. "My fiancйe is pregnant… I'm doing that whole trip myself. Gonna get married in the fall."
One of the feds looked up at that and gave him the thumb-and-forefinger attaboy circle-sign. He could hear Malone mumbling into a phone: "Need an immediate trace on the call…"
Rinker said, "Your fiancйe-anybody I'd know?"
"No. She's a doctor. Pretty tough girl. You'd probably like her."
"Maybe… but to cut the b.s., I just wanted to call you and to tell you to keep Gene out of this. I knew the federales were going to get involved, I wasn't surprised when I saw that woman Malone in the paper, but we all know that Gene isn't quite right. Putting him in jail won't help anything. I'm not going to come in-you can't blackmail me. But you can tell whoever's running that show over there that I take Gene real personally, and if they mess him up, if they put him in prison, or hurt him, or do any of that, then they better look to their families. I won't try to blow up the president. I'll start killing agents' husbands and wives, and you know I'll do it."
"I'll try to get him cut loose. But I'm not a fed," Lucas said. One of the feds behind him said, "She's not on her cell," and Lucas thought, Ah, shit.
"You'd lie to me anyway," Rinker said.
"Hey, Clara-I'd put your butt under the jail if I got my hands on you, but I'm not fuckin' with Gene. I think Gene is a bad idea, and I'll try to get him cut loose. I'm just not sure how much clout I've got."
"Okay. I gotta go now. They're probably pretty close to busting this line. Give me your cell phone number."
"I don't have-"
"Goodbye."
"Wait, wait, wait-I was just trying to stall you." He recited the number. There was a pause, and he added, "You can call that anytime."
But she was gone. "Holy shit," Lucas said. He turned to the room. "She's gone. We got the line?"
Malone was on the phone, waving him off. Then the man who'd dashed out of the room hurried back in and said, "We're jacked directly into the highway patrol. When we get the line-"
"We got the line," Malone blurted. "It's in Illinois."
"Damnit," said the man who'd contacted the highway patrol. "We've got Missouri Highway Patrol on line one. They must have a quick way to get to the Illinois cops."
Malone punched up line 1 and, after identifying herself, told the Missouri cop that "she was calling from Illinois. How quick can you get to them? How long? Go, then. Here's the location…"
A truck stop. Lucas said, "When the cops get there, don't let anybody leave the truck stop. Isolate the phone she was on. We need to see if we can get more prints, see if we can get some people who saw her who can tell us what she looks like now."
Malone nodded, and started repeating what Lucas said. Mallard said, "I've got a car. Let's go."
"If it's just you, let's take my Porsche. I'll get us there in a hurry."
Mallard said to Malone, "I'll be on the cell phone. Call me in two minutes and vector us in on the truck stop."
"It's right off I-64. Get on I-64 and go east, and I'll call you and get you there."
"I've got a flasher for my car," Lucas said over his shoulder, as he and Mallard headed for the door. "Tell the patrol that we're coming through."
The distance was a little better than thirty miles. Once on the interstate, they flew, with Mallard hunched over his cell phone, listening to directions and updates from Malone, talking over the rush of the wind, sheltering the face of the phone away from the red flasher behind the windshield. Between calls, Lucas filled him in on what Rinker had said: the warnings about her brother.
"We've dealt with people a hell of a lot more dangerous than she is," Mallard said.
"Maybe not-maybe not as personally dangerous," Lucas said. "Most assholes aren't focused on a particular group of agents. That makes them easier to nail down. She's not nuts. Not in that way."
"The warning just tells us that the brother ploy is effective-it's working on her," Mallard said.
"Hope it doesn't bite you in the ass," Lucas said.
Mallard went back to the phone and filled in Malone on the warning from Rinker. When he got off, he said, "Malone's routing out a crime-scene guy to print the phone and another guy with a laptop ID kit. She talked to the manager of the truck stop and told him to keep people off the phones. If we can find one guy who got a good look at her, it'll be worth the trip."
Lucas looked out the window. "You know, if Rinker's staying here in town, and if she went out there just to make the call, the chances are we're driving right past her. Over in the other lane."
Mallard looked over into the westbound lane and said, "So close."
The truck stop looked like all truck stops-a yellow steel building with blackout windows in the middle of an oversized, oil-stained concrete fuel pad with a double line of gas pumps and a couple of diesel sheds. Inside, a convenience store was hip-joined to a macaroni-and-cheese restaurant, with a set of rest rooms in the middle and a locked suite of drivers-only showers. A half-dozen cop cars were parked around the place when Lucas gunned the Porsche up the ramp and into a narrow slot between two highway patrol cruisers.
An Illinois highway patrolman had just stepped up to the door, going in, when Lucas pulled up, and he shook his head and then stepped toward them when Lucas killed the engine. Mallard was out first with his ID. "FBI," he said.
The cop looked at Mallard, then at Lucas, then at the Porsche, and said to Mallard, "You guys're getting pretty fat rides these days."
"Hey, the income taxes are pouring in-you can't believe it," Lucas said. "We figure, might as well enjoy life."
Mallard said, "He owns it personally. He's rich, he's an asshole, he works for the city of Minneapolis. The federal government drives low-end Chrysler products that would make your mother cry with shame." And: "Who's running things?"
"I don't know, I just got here myself," the cop said.
The first cop on the scene had been a highway patrol sergeant named Eakins who hadn't known exactly what was required, and as an old hand, adept at covering his ass, had done exactly the right thing: He'd frozen the scene. Nobody out until the feds said so, nobody near a phone.
"Don't make much difference anyhow-everybody's got a cell phone," he said.
"Anybody see her?"
"Two guys think they might have-they're in the restaurant eating pie," Eakins said.
"All right," Mallard said. "Just keep doing what you're doing."
"Can we let people out?"
"Yeah. If you're pretty sure they're okay. But get IDs, truck tag numbers, just in case. Check the trucks, make sure nobody's hiding behind the seats. Anybody coming in, we should warn off-if they can move along, let them go. If they've got to stop here for some reason, tell them there could be a delay before they can leave."
"We can do that," Eakins said. "Let me show you the pie guys and then I'll get organized outside."
The PIE guys looked
remarkably alike, big square-faced over-the-road drivers in checked shirts with guts hanging over their tooled-leather belts. The woman they saw was probably Rinker. They'd both had a chance to look her over: nice-looking blonde, they said, trim, short hair. Classy, but looked like a pretty good time. "She was in a hurry," Blueberry Pie said. "I was kind of watchin' her out of the corner of my eye. She made a couple of calls, but she was real quick with them-like a businesswoman. That's what I figured she was. A real-estate lady, checking on calls or something."
Apple Pie added that she had a nice ass and thought she might have been heading toward a Ford Explorer when she went out the door. "I didn't see her get in it, but there weren't a hell of a lot of cars down there, and when the cops come running in the door, I noticed that the Explorer was gone."
"What color?"
"Umm, dark red. Liver-colored, sorta."
"You didn't…?"
"Naw. Never looked at the plates. I was too busy looking at her ass."
Both pies agreed that Rinker had used the second phone from the end in a bank of phones on the back wall of the convenience store.
As Lucas and Mallard finished the interview, a black Tahoe pulled up and a half-dozen feds climbed out. Then another Tahoe, and more of them, all in suits. "Looks like a podiatry convention," Lucas said to Mallard.
They looked at the phones, which looked like a lot of other phones, and talked to other people who hadn't seen Rinker, and to people who hadn't seen her car, and to one guy who was fairly sure that he'd seen "a black feller" getting into the maroon Explorer.
"That's good," Lucas said to Mallard. "Now we're not sure about the Explorer."
Malone arrived, with another batch of feds. They all went to look at the phones again, and a fingerprint technician said, "I'm pretty sure those pie guys were right about the phone. This was the phone she used."
Mortal Prey ld-13 Page 15
