He wore khaki pants and striped long-sleeved shirts and European-look square-toed brown shoes, and tended to suck on his teeth, as though he was perplexed. He also had a tendency to flatulence, which resulted in some of John Ross's associates referring to him as Stinky-but only very privately. He'd worked for Ross for two dozen years, a weapon much like Rinker.
Rinker spent the morning on the far west edge of the metro area, at the Spirit of St. Louis Airport, looking around, wandering among the industrial and office buildings. Later that day, now dressed as the Dark Woman, she spent an enjoyable couple of hours at the Missouri Botanical Gardens. The Gardens had an environmental dome called the Climatron, an enclosed jungle that offered much in the way of concealment and ambush possibilities. She looked at it closely for a long time.
When she arrived at Johnson's house, a little after four o'clock in the afternoon, he was working in his backyard woodshop, power-planing cherry planks for the chest of drawers. Johnson really had no fear of retaliation for his past acts of cruelty, simply because he was never the principal in the act. Like his favorite chisels and saws, he was only a tool, if an exquisite one. In all the years he'd worked for Ross, there'd been no comebacks.
And he was careful: Almost nobody knew where he lived.
Rinker knew, but Johnson didn't know that she did. She'd made it her business to find out when she was still working for Ross. If she'd ever gotten on the wrong side of Ross, she'd thought years ago, she might want to take care of Ross's other major weapon before he had a chance to take care of her.
She'd had a hard time finding him. Johnson was not in the phone books, nor was he in any of the records that Ross kept in the warehouse. He was paid off the books, like Rinker was, and she saw him so rarely that there was no real possibility of following him home.
She'd looked in the county tax statements, but he wasn't there. She'd once managed to get his auto license number, but then found out that if she tracked the car through the state, she had to make a formal request for the information and that Johnson would be notified. No good. One of the girls at the warehouse once mentioned that she'd had to send some stuff to him, for Ross, but when Rinker made some careful inquiries, she found that the stuff was sent to a downtown post office box.
She'd eventually found Johnson's house purely through luck. Johnson had built elaborate teak plant benches for John Ross, for Ross's orchids, and when the benches were delivered, she'd been at Ross's house. The two guys who drove the delivery truck had an invoice that showed both the pickup and delivery addresses. She took the address back to the courthouse and looked it up in the tax and plat records-Johnson was there all right, but his house was listed under "Estate of Estelle Johnson."
She parked in the street and walked up the driveway. From the driveway, she could hear the planer screaming inside the workshop. She went past the garage, vaulted a chain-link fence-moving fast now, slipping the silenced Beretta from under her shirt-to the open side door of the workshop. As she came up to the door she happened to glance upward, and saw a motion detector tucked in the corner, and she stopped, peeked around the door frame. Johnson was looking right at her, a silent-alarm strobe light bouncing off his protective glasses, and he was moving to his right, quickly. She stepped through the door, following the muzzle of her pistol. He froze when he saw her, his hands empty. She glanced toward the wall that he'd been moving to: A shotgun leaned against a cabinet.
What had Jaime told her, at the ranch, about the need for handguns?
"The rifle will be leaning against a tree, and that's when they will come."
She smiled, thinking about it, and Johnson flinched. He took a step back and tried a placating smile. "Hello, Clara, I…"
No point in conversation. Rinker shot him in the nose, and he went down, twisting away, his face striking the edge of the saw table. He landed faceup in a pile of shavings. She looked at him for a moment, on the floor, judged him dead, but shot him again, carefully, between the eyes. The planer was so loud that she heard no hint of the shot, or of the gun's cycling action.
He was dead for sure now. The planer was still screaming, the plank beginning to buck. Rinker couldn't see a switch, so she pulled the plug, and the machine wound down like a depowered airplane engine.
She couldn't leave Johnson on the floor, or even in the workshop, she decided. The yard was fenced, but it wasn't the best neighborhood, and if somebody broke in, he might be found.
She looked around for a moment, then grabbed him by the collar and dragged him to a lowboy he'd used for hauling lumber. She pushed a stack of planks onto the floor-thought better of it, in case somebody looked in, and took a minute to stack them neatly near the wall-then loaded his body onto the lowboy and covered it with four transparent bags full of wood shavings and sawdust.
She pushed the whole load out the door, up the concrete walk to the back of the garage, then into the garage, past an E-Class Mercedes-Benz, and through a breezeway to the house. She couldn't actually get the lowboy into the house, because of a step. She left the body and the cart in the breezeway and let the muzzle of the Beretta lead her through the house. She was, she found, the only living thing in it.
The house was neatly kept, but had no more personality than a motel room-a few woodworking magazines, some reference works, a television set with an incongruous Nintendo console sitting on the floor next to it.
She checked it all out, then hauled Johnson's body into the house and rolled it down the basement stairs. She first thought to leave it there, at the foot of the stairs, but then noticed a chest-style freezer against the wall, and opened it. It was half-full of Healthy Choice microwave dinners, and bags of frozen peas and corn.
She took a bunch of the dinners and some of the corn, then managed to tug and pull the body around until she could boost it into the freezer. Johnson landed facedown, and she had to twist his legs to get him to fit inside. She slammed the lid.
With a few paper towels to wipe up the odd blood smear, she thought, everything would be as nice and tidy as Honus Johnson used to be.
And she had a new phone, a new house, and a new car.
Not bad for twenty minutes' work.
Though, she admitted to herself, moving the body had given her the willies. As did Johnson's bed. She was beat from the day, needed some sleep, but couldn't sleep with the smell of him, and his body still cooling in the freezer. She found clean sheets in a linen closet, sheets that smelled only of detergent, and crashed on the couch.
Long day coming…
18
They wound up sitting in one of the FBI rental trucks, a six-seater Suburban, eating Snickers and Milky Ways, drinking Cokes and waiting for anything on the perimeter, any sign that Rinker was coming in. They got nothing except distended bladders, and strange looks in a Shell station when they repeatedly tramped through to the rest rooms. Andreno gave up at nine o'clock and took off. At ten-thirty, Mallard was willing to admit that Rinker had flown.
"We go back to the four main guys," Mallard said, in frustration. "Ross must be a target-she worked for him for too long. He must be her original connection. Dallaglio is necessary because of Dichter. If she goes after one, she'll go after the other. Giancati used her at least four or five times-one of her best customers. Ferignetti is marginal, but we can't take a chance."
"If you're gonna talk to them, I want to be there," Lucas said.
"You're invited," Mallard said. He looked out at the darkness across the brewery's parking lot. "We'll make the rounds tomorrow morning."
"Don't worry so much, Louis," Malone said. She'd gotten into a sack of Cheese Doodles, and the back of the truck was suffused with the smell of cheddar. "We'll get her. We just missed her tonight. We're closing in."
"You're sure."
"Yeah, I am," Malone said. "And I can't wait. Locking her up is gonna feel so good."
"It's gonna be hard taking her alive," Lucas said. "I think she'll fight."
"I'll take that," Malone said. And after a mome
nt of silence: "I think I've got a pound of yellow cheese goop stuck to my teeth."
Lucas lay in bed that night, listening to the trains going by along the waterfront. There was no good reason for it, but the sound of distant trains and distant truck traffic, trucks downshifting to climb a hill, left him feeling moody. People going places, doing things, while he was here in bed, alone, staring at the ceiling. He'd talked to Weather, and she was feeling fine, although beginning to wonder how much longer he'd be in St. Louis.
"I'd just like to see you," she said. "I'm getting a little lonesome."
"I'd like to see you, too. I'll give this a couple more days, and then if there's nothing definite happening, I'll run up for a day or two."
"Fly?"
"Yeah, I guess."
"Brave of you."
"How's the kid?"
"Strong little thing. I think he or she is gonna be a soccer player."
"Not if I have anything to do with it," Lucas said. "I've already cut down a hockey stick."
"Still thinking about an ultrasound…"
"C'mon… that's the easy way out."
"You've already got a daughter."
"Two daughters would be wonderful. A son would be excellent. I really don't care. I just pray that the kid's healthy."
"Maybe come up for a day or two… at the end of the week?"
"Over the weekend, if nothing's happening. A guy down here told me about a weird way to induce labor. I'll show it to you when I come up."
"It's too early, Lucas."
"It doesn't always induce labor. It has other uses…"
After he rang off, he wondered what Rinker was doing. She was almost certainly holed up somewhere, alone, or with a scared friend like Hill, who probably didn't want her around, and might even betray her, given the chance. That must be really lonely. The thought gave him no comfort, and the night went slowly, patches of sleep mixed with weary semiconsciousness.
He hoped, as he looked at the bedside clock at five in the morning, that they took Rinker clean. Either grabbed her or killed her, but ended it. That the FBI ended it. That he didn't have to…
When Lucas arrived at the FBI offices in the morning, still sleepy, Mallard gave him a cup of good coffee and said, "Hill gave up Rinker's car and license tag. California plates. We're running them now, and every cop in St. Louis is looking for them."
"Are you going to Memphis? To talk to Hill?"
"I thought about it, but I decided to stick here… You ever hear of a lawyer named Ann Diaz? In Memphis?"
"No. Should I?"
"She's representing Hill. I got a call from the Memphis guy this morning-he talked to Hill last night, with Diaz present. Hill said that Rinker showed up on her doorstep, threatened to kill her if she thought about going to the police, and threatened to turn her in if she didn't stay straight… Hill says she was so scared that she froze for a couple of days, and then ran for it."
"Did your guy ask her how she managed to pack up everything in the place?"
"Yeah. She said that Rinker went out every day-and that she pretended that she was going to work, watched until Rinker left, then ran back, threw everything in her car, and took off. She said she packed it out of the car and mailed it to her folks, and then headed down to Memphis. She says if we don't get Rinker, Rinker will kill her."
"It's bullshit, Louis."
"I think so… but the problem is Diaz. She's pretty well known, she's got some clout in D.C., connections with all kinds of feminist groups. She could make Hill a cause. And she's tough. She won't let Hill give us anything that's not scripted."
"What're you saying?"
"Hill's gonna be a dry hole."
Lucas shrugged. "That's the way things work now. Fifty years ago, you could have taken her down the basement with a couple of steel fishing poles, and beaten the shit out of her, and after she confessed, you could've hanged her on Wednesday. Now it's just a bunch of sissies whining about civil rights."
"Thanks," Mallard said. "I enjoy being mocked before lunch."
Lucas raised his coffee cup in a semiserious toast. "Rinker was a step ahead of us, Louis. But Malone's right. It's only a half-step now. We would have found her yesterday. If she hadn't decided to book, we would have had her."
"You think she spotted us?"
"Yeah. Maybe when we were going around to the houses, or maybe she spotted the guys running in after the phone calls. But we were close."
"All right. So let's go talk to these assholes."
"I want to talk to you about that. About the approach. About tactics."
The meetings between Mallard and Malone for the FBI on one side, and the four hoods on the other side, were like the Israelis and the Palestinians working on a deal, Lucas thought-everybody smiling and lying like motherfuckers, but still, messages were sent and received, both ways. Mallard told all four of them flatly that the FBI had tried to protect Richter and Levy, and had failed, and that they believed Rinker would be back.
"She's had a lot of time to think about her approach. I'm not sure we can stop her without your help. Or even with your help," he told them.
Giancati and Ferignetti denied having anything to do with Rinker-Ferignetti said he'd never met her, didn't know Ross except to nod to him, and said he planned to carry on with business as usual. He didn't have bodyguards because he didn't need them.
Giancati, on the other hand, was leaving for England.
"You seem to think that there's some reason she'd be after me, but I don't think so," he said. He was a round, bald man, but his fat was tough fat, the kind of fat that you'd wear yourself out hitting on. He looked like he should smell of stubby cigars, but instead smelled of vanilla. "All my business is on the up-and-up, and always has been. I mean, over the years, I suppose, I'm gonna bump into some of these supposed hoodlums in my business…"
Blah blah blah, Lucas thought, listening to him. A wall of bland unresponsiveness. But the kicker was, Giancati was getting out of town with his wife, and nobody else knew, he said, and nobody would know unless the FBI called up Rinker and told her.
"If she wants me, and can find me over there, then God bless her, because half the time, I can't even find myself when I'm there."
"You go there often?" Malone asked.
"All the time. My wife's parents came from Newcastle, and my mother came from Dover and went to school in Calais. The east country is my favorite place in the world…"
Blah blah blah…
Dallaglio looked like a book editor or an accountant-tall, thin, harried, quizzical, with a caterpillarlike mustache on his upper lip. He did not look like a man who may have contracted a dozen hits. His wife, on the other hand, was short, rounded, and loud, and looked capable of doing any amount of killing. They had three armed bodyguards in the house: One of them, a former FBI agent, had known of Mallard, and said so. Mallard asked him, "You think you can cover him?"
"Nobody will get inside of twenty feet, but if Rinker has rifles… what can we do? We've told Mr. Dallaglio that."
Dallaglio 's house was a neo-Baroque prairie-style gothic, Charles Addams out of Frank Lloyd Wright, with decoration chosen equally from the Renaissance and Miami Beach. He led them through the carved walnut double front doors, through a highly rugged interior to an indoor patio around a lap pool, offered them Cokes from a pool-side refrigerator, and sat everybody down on plastic gliders. "I have no idea why she killed Nanny. He was a good man-looked after his family," Dallaglio said. "If he was involved in any wrongdoing, I wouldn't know about it-our relationship was strictly business."
But under the blah-blah-blah he was panicked, and so was his wife. His wife, Jesse, said, "We only met her because Nanny was involved in a couple of business relationships with John Ross, and she worked for John. And she was a friend of John's wife, going back a while, when they both worked at his liquor warehouse. She was like a bookkeeper, but she was really outgoing, and that's how we knew her. We were in Wichita once, after she quit working for John, and we wen
t to her bar. It really wasn't our style, but she seemed nice. That's all we knew about her."
"Are you friends with John Ross?" Mallard asked.
"Well, yeah. Sure. We do business with him all the time. He's in trucking-we need his trucks, and we need stuff delivered on time. That's no big secret. He's a good guy. We go out with them, out to dinner, or maybe he has tickets to a concert or some shit like that, and they invite us. He was really better friends with Nanny, but we know him."
The Dallaglios and Mallard and Malone went back and forth, and when they were finished, and Mallard had hinted that any help wouldn't lead to further questions-that is, if Dallaglio had some kind of intelligence connection with the local underground, and if they found her and turned her in, there'd be no questions asked-they got up to leave. As they moved toward the door, Lucas said, "Could I talk to you guys for a minute? I mean…" He looked at Mallard and Malone, and grinned, as they'd agreed. "… without the FBI?"
"Lucas…," Mallard said, as though reluctant. They'd worked it through on the way to the house. To Dallaglio: "Lucas has his own ways of working. We're not bound by anything he says."
"Just a minute to talk," Lucas said.
The Dallaglios agreed, and Mallard and Malone went outside, Mallard shaking his head. When the door closed behind them, Lucas said, "Listen: I'm just a fuckin' cop, okay? I've got no jurisdiction here, my boss just loaned me to the FBI because I got lucky once before, breaking Clara loose. If you talk to me, there's no way anybody could take it to court." He looked directly at Dallaglio. "And I'm telling you, no bullshit, I talked to a friend of Clara, and she's gonna kill your ass. She's gonna kill you, if we don't get her. And get her now. If we scare her off, she'll just go sit down in South America somewhere, and wait six months, until everybody relaxes, and then she's gonna come kill you. She knows you set her up down in Mexico, that you agreed to try to kill her-"
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