"No problem," the chief said, taking a drag on a fresh Marlboro. "Cuts both ways."
"Where's that fuckin' Sherrill?" Lucas barked. "Christ… what?"
"Your earpiece is hanging down your neck," Sloan said.
"Thing is covered with somebody else's ear wax," Lucas said, looking at the earpiece. He plugged it in, and saw Marcy Sherrill coming.
"Where in the hell…?"
"Gun wasn't working out. I thought I'd hold it like this, like a little black clutch purse," she said, holding her revolver in both hands.
"Like you're gonna need that," Lucas said. Then he turned, and shouted into the nave. "All right, people, we're gonna do this. Everybody sit tight, unless you're part of the porch group."
Then, to the people gathered around him: "Everybody ready, porch people? Porch people? Let's do it. Reverend, lead the way."
Del put down the bottle of what Lucas hoped was cream soda, adjusted his choir robe, picked up a cigar box, which everybody agreed looked a lot like a Bible-the prayer books had been locked up by some mistake-and led the way through the church's double doors. Marcy, all in bridal white, her revolver clutched like a purse, put her arm through Lucas's arm, pulled it tight, and said, "I always dreamed of this day," and Lucas said, "Enjoy it while it lasts. Man, you look like fuckin' Moby Dick."
"You look a little like Shamu the killer whale, yourself," she said. "I think it's the black and white that does it."
The trouble in St. Louis seemed almost like a dream. Treena Ross had been indicted for her husband's murder, and the local cops had chased down every story of an injured woman that they could find. Three days after Ross went down, Lucas returned to the Twin Cities, and the whole episode drifted off into the past, another complicated memory, mostly bad.
Weather had been happy to get him back. The wedding planning had been completed, the invitations ordered, and the house had taken a big step toward completion. Getting through daily life pushed aside any speculation about Clara Rinker, though Lucas was careful not to pattern himself.
Clara, he thought, would come, sooner or later. He'd half expected her to call, as she had after their last collision, but she hadn't. The silence intensified his apprehension.
Rinker sat behind the wheel of the red Jeep Cherokee and looked across the valley at the front of the church, a half-mile away. A beautiful view, she thought, in the brilliant sunlight, with the pale blue skies: the white, New England… style village church sitting on the edge of the valley, surrounded by maple trees in blazing orange fall foliage, with strips of yellow aspen above and below the clutch of maple around the church.
A place to get married, she thought. They'd been in there for a while. She looked at her watch. Forty minutes, now. What were they doing? Maybe they'd written long vows or something.
As she was thinking that, the church doors popped open and a man stepped out into the sunshine, and then two more, a woman in white…
"Go," she grunted. She pulled the Cherokee out of the notch in the trees and turned down the narrow blacktopped street. There was another notch a hundred and fifty yards out from the front of the church, but on a busier street. She wouldn't have been able to wait. As it was, she was taking a risk. She'd wrapped the rifle in a blanket, and she'd simply pull over to the side of the road as if she were having a problem, and then she'd walk back into the line of bushes and take her shot and drop the rifle and go.
Her backup car was a half-mile away. She'd be in the second car and traveling in a few seconds more than one minute after she fired the shot. She'd timed it. She'd done all her research. She'd monitored the Star-Tribune on the Net, had found Davenport's wedding announcement, along with a couple of pieces in the local gossip columns. She'd confirmed it with the church, and then had scouted the church. And above the church, she found a sniper's nest, as though it had been created for that specific purpose.
The only little piece of dissonance was that she thought she remembered Davenport saying that the wedding would be in an Episcopalian church, and this one was a Lutheran. But maybe she mis-remembered. Besides, it had all been confirmed.
Now it was all coming together. The shooting point was just up ahead, a stand of oaks next to the guardrail over the valley. She jerked the car to the curb, hopped out, grabbed the blanket, and carried it past a bush to the steel barrier that overlooked the creek at the bottom of the slope. She could still be seen from the road, but again, she'd have to be unlucky…
She was moving fast now, looking at the penguins on the porch step, the guys in black and white, standing stiffly beside the woman in white at the center, and the priest.
She lifted the rifle and slipped the safety and pulled down on the porch.
Rinker never felt death coming for her.
She never felt pain, never saw a shining light leading her away.
Death came without a whisper, and she was gone.
27
Marcy reached up and tapped her earpiece and Lucas looked at her, irritated, and said, "It's not…" and then other radio people began shouting a weird mishmash of language. Everybody with an earpiece looked up at the valley wall into the notch and saw a green coat and then heard the shot, a hard, sharp WHAP.
Then silence, and then a lone man's voice in the earpiece, harsh but steady: "She's down. Rinker's down."
Lucas could hardly believe it. He gaped at the hole in the trees, the sniper's nest so carefully cultivated, and saw people running toward it, people with guns. Then Black began yelling something, and they all ran for their cars-or waddled, in the case of Lucas, Sherrill, and Del, who were wrapped in body armor.
Sloan drove Lucas's Tahoe, and Lucas, in the backseat, pulled off his jacket and shirt and struggled out of the armor. Marcy was saying, "Goddamnit, undo me, undo me."
Her dress was held on in the back with Velcro, and Lucas pulled it down and helped her out of the armor straps. Underneath it, she was wearing a T-shirt and shorts-anything more had made her look too big. She said, "Throw me my stuff," and Lucas tossed a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved shirt to her, and pulled his own shirt back on.
Marcy said to Sloan, "Don't look," but Sloan looked anyway and said, "Hell, you've got underpants, they're no different than a swimming suit," and she said, "Yes, they are. They're intimate, and you looked, for which I will get you," and Sloan said, "Yeah, but if I didn't look, you'd be insulted."
"Shut up, everybody," Lucas grated. Marcy was about to come back with something snappy, but looked at his eyes and shut up and finished dressing, and Sloan drove.
They had to go almost a half-mile to cross the valley and the creek, then a half-mile back, to cover the hundred and forty-eight yards between the best shooting spot and the church's porch, where the wedding party had posed. Lucas was churning, both excited and sick, a strange dread that had settled over him when he first walked out on the church steps.
When they arrived at the road above the creek, a half-dozen St. Paul cops were clustered along the barrier, with two Minneapolis cops, including an Iowa kid who'd become the department's designated hitter. He was carrying a rifle over his shoulder, a personally modified Remington 7mm Magnum. He was a gun freak, the Iowa boy. Lucas might have worried about that peculiar interest if he wasn't a little bit that way himself.
They climbed out of the Tahoe, still tucking and buttoning, and Lucas walked toward the form of the redheaded woman on the ground, a small body in a Patagonia jacket and jeans, now absolutely still, a purple stain on the jacket between the shoulder blades. She looked very small and very quiet, he thought, like a poisoned chipmunk. The Iowa kid said, "I had to take her. She was moving too fast. If I'd waited one more second, she would have shot one of you guys."
"Okay," Lucas said. He squatted next to Rinker's face and took a good look.
"That's her," he said. He stood up. "That's her."
More people were arriving, to take a look. Black stuck out his hand, but Lucas pretended not to see it and moved away. Rose Marie clutched his upper arm, th
en let go. Del said, "Goddamn. Goddamn."
A few minutes after the shooting, Lucas's cell phone rang, and he plucked it out of his pocket and heard Mallard's voice: "She didn't show, did she?"
"Yeah, she did," Lucas said, looking back at the growing cluster around the body. "She's dead."
A long silence at the other end. Then Mallard, his voice hushed, asked, "You aren't joking?"
"No. She showed, right in the slot. We had no time to take her. Our sniper nailed her from up on the ridge. Single shot, center-of-mass, looks like it clipped her spine and heart."
More silence, then: "Oh, fuck." Silence, then: "Are you okay?"
"I'm fine. She never got a shot off."
"That's not what I meant."
"Yeah, yeah. Listen, let me get back to you. We're still standing here, we got stuff…
Lucas was watching the crime-scene team when Marcy came up. Marcy liked to fight, but never looked happy around a body. She was shaking her head, but then she looked up, a questioning look crossing her face, and then she said, "Jesus, Lucas-you're all teared up. Are you okay?"
"Ah, it's just the fuckin' allergies or something," he said. He wiped his eyes with the heels of his hands. "Man. Clara Rinker, huh? Clara Rinker."
28
Rinker was buried in St. Louis. Treena Ross, who was out on bail and who would probably never go to trial, took charge of the funeral. "No way she's gonna be buried in Flyspeck, or whatever it's called," she told Lucas in a phone call. "She hated that place. We'll bury her here, and the people from the warehouse can come and say goodbye."
Lucas was of two minds about going, but finally, on the morning of the funeral, flew into Lambert and was picked up by Andreno, who insisted on carrying Lucas's bag out to the car and said, "This is the most amazing thing I ever heard of, Davenport. I couldn't believe it when you called."
The funeral was done from a funeral home chapel, with Treena Ross's Unitarian minister presiding. Mallard was walking across the parking lot when they pulled in, and he waited for them.
"End of a part of my life," Mallard said. "I looked for her for ten years. This will be the first time I've ever seen her, when I knew it was her. I didn't know, that time in Wichita."
He and Andreno stepped toward the chapel, but Lucas hung back. "I'll wait for you guys here. I don't want to see her, and I don't want to hear what the minister says."
"You're just gonna stand here?" Andreno asked.
"I'll go to the cemetery," Lucas said.
"I gotta go in," Mallard said. He sounded glum. "So I can see for myself."
"You okay?" Andreno asked.
"Yeah. But different. I keep thinking it was worth the trade, Malone for all the people who won't be killed. Who might not be killed. But I don't feel that way."
"Malone was Malone-all those other anonymous people are just police reports," Lucas said.
Lucas waited in Andreno's car with the windows down. October, and still too warm in St. Louis-but then, it was warm in St. Paul, too. Almost seventy, the day before. Twenty people came to see Rinker buried, and Lucas suspected that there were St. Louis FBI agents somewhere out on the edges, making movies. He didn't care about that. He just wanted to get it done.
When Mallard and Andreno finally came out of the funeral home chapel, Andreno said, "Wasn't bad." They all three rode to the cemetery together, and Mallard asked Lucas, "Why'd you come?"
"I kind of liked her," Lucas said. "All the time I've been a cop, I've divided assholes into two groups: people who were assholes because they wanted to be-people who made themselves into assholes-and people who were made that way by life. Rinker never had a chance. But she kept trying."
"You sound like National Public Radio," Mallard said. They fell into the short line of cars going to the cemetery.
"Fuck a bunch of public radio," Lucas said. "Rinker was twisted and tortured by people a hell of a lot worse than she ever was, and nobody did anything about it. And she was probably getting out of it when we came along. I think if she'd never come to Minneapolis, she'd probably be out of it now."
Andreno shook his head. "Ross never would have let her get out. If she'd tried to get out, he'd have had her killed the first chance he got."
They rode along for a while, then Mallard said, "You're really bummed out, Lucas."
"I bum myself out. I keep thinking that for everything that was bad in the woman, there were all these good things. And one of the good things was, she was a romantic. She believed in love and marriage and babies and working hard and standing on your own. You know why we got her? Because she could never have seen that somebody would be cynical enough to fake his own wedding for the sole purpose of setting her up to be killed."
"You didn't exactly…"
"Yes, I did. I thought that if she showed, there was maybe a two percent chance of taking her alive. I set her up to be killed, and she was."
More silence, then Mallard said, "Good. Fuck her. She killed Malone."
"And that's your last word on it."
"It is. Fuck her."
"You're a hard man," Andreno said, and he wasn't smiling.
At the graveside, the mourners dropped dirt on the coffin, while Lucas, Mallard, and Andreno hung back. Treena Ross cried, wiping her nose with a big white hanky. She was still crying when the service ended, and people began to drift away. She walked past Lucas and Mallard as they headed to their car, and she called, "Hey, FBI."
They looked at her and she said, "I was never that stupid, you know?"
Lucas nodded, and couldn't suppress an acknowledging smile. "We know."
When everybody else was gone, Lucas and Andreno dropped handfuls of dirt on Rinker's coffin at the bottom of the grave. Mallard watched. He hadn't had much to say after Lucas's pronouncements on Rinker. And when Lucas and Andreno came away from the grave site, he said, "I'll leave you here. I've got a ride downtown."
"Okay."
They shook hands and Mallard said, "You done good, Lucas. You ever need a job…"
"I'll call," Lucas said.
Andreno dropped him back at the airport and said, "Well. I'm probably not as bummed out as you are, because I never knew her. But I'm gonna have a hard time getting back to the fuckin' golf course."
"You ever do any undercover work?" Lucas asked.
Andreno's eyebrows went up. "From time to time. I make a real good traveling salesman, for some reason."
"You know about my new job. You could be getting a call."
Andreno nodded and said, "Lucas, I'd owe you more than I could tell you."
Back in St. Paul that night, Weather asked if he were feeling better. He'd been shuffling around with his hands in his pockets, hangdog and moody. She'd been playing something light on the piano, maybe Chopin, and he'd been watching the tag end of a meaningless football game.
"I'm okay, really," he said.
"Okay for the real wedding?"
"Sure. Two weeks. I'm up for it-and the house. The house is looking good, if we could just get the goddamn parquet guys to put in the trim."
"Calm down."
"Yeah." He took a deep breath and exhaled, looked up at her perched on the arm of the couch. "I wouldn't want to do this again. Run into another Rinker."
"I don't think there could be another Rinker," Weather said. She bounced and smiled and said, "Ouch."
"What?"
"The kid just kicked me."
Lucas put a hand on her belly. "Matt, or maybe Sam. New Testament or Old. Emilie spelled with an i-e, like the French do, or Annie, with an i-e, like the English."
"But never Clara."
"Never Clara," Lucas said. "Clara's gone."
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Mortal Prey ld-13 Page 32
