“Rinker and Ross,” Lucas said. “Let me tell you about the phone calls.”
He told her, but pointed out so many shortcomings with the concept that she said, “I’d have believed it was Rinker if you hadn’t talked me out of it.”
“Still think it was,” he grunted. “Feels too good.”
“If it was Ross, then she’s gone. She’s done everybody.”
“Maybe we ought to brace Ross about it, see what happens,” Lucas said.
“He’s a smart man. He’ll tell us to go have sexual intercourse with ourselves.”
“He’s going to this orchestra thing at botanical gardens this evening. I’m gonna crash the party. Take Andreno along, if he’ll go. Watch him. See if we can make him nervous.”
“Maybe we ought to take a few people along.”
“You coming?”
“If I have time,” she said. “I did bring a nice little red party dress, just in case.” Then she clouded up. “I wish Malone were here. She was really good at this.”
WITH SALLY ,the red-haired guy, Derik, and a half-dozen others, Lucas argued the question of the phone calls from the coast, and found the group divided almost fifty-fifty, with a one-man majority in favor of the calls coming from Rinker. They all went back to the paper, looking for more ties.
One guy said, suddenly, “We ought to have a few people there tonight. You know, like a crew.”
“We’ve got a crew escorting Ross,” Sally said.
“More than that, we need more than that,” the guy said, excited by an idea. “Think about this. If nothing happens to Ross, we’d be suspicious. But what if he’s shot at and missed? What if he’s rescued before he can be killed—by his security guys?”
“You mean . . . a faked hit?”
“Yeah . . .”
“Oh, God. ” Somebody’s head hit the table with a hollow thump, followed by a groan. Everybody was looking at the guy who suggested the fake hit, who said, “What?”
Then somebody started to laugh, and the laughter rippled around the room, and finally Sally said, “You got one thing right. We need more people there. We’ll work it out.”
LUCAS CALLED ANDRENO and asked him if he wanted to go to the botanical gardens party. “Would this be, like, a date? ” Andreno asked.
“Of course not,” Lucas said. “I’m engaged to be married.”
“All right, but nothing below the waist, then.”
THEY HOOKED UP for dinner, a place called Brownies, ate shrimp and salads, and Andreno wanted a blow-by-blow account of the shoot-out at Spirit of St. Louis.
“Hell of a thing,” he said when Lucas finished. “I was in two shoot-outs when I was on the force, and I can’t remember shit about either one of them, but there was, like, a total of four shots fired. This was like a war.”
“One of the agents said something to me after Malone was shot,” Lucas said. “He said something like, ‘It used to be a hobby. Now it’s a war.’ But he thought it’d be us making the war.”
The waitress came by to check the state of their drinks. They were okay, but she chatted for a minute, making serious eye contact with Andreno. When she was gone, Lucas asked, “You know her?”
“Not yet.”
“I felt like a goddamn cuckoo clock or something, sitting here and you guys got this lip-lock going over the salads.”
“You got relationship cooties,” Andreno said. “Women can pick those up in one second—they know you’re hooked up with somebody else.”
Lucas nodded, looking after the waitress. “Nice-looking woman, though. I could get used to this place. St. Louis. Except it’s so fuckin’ hot.”
Andreno shrugged. “You get a pool.”
“You have a pool?”
“No. But I’m used to it. I like it, the heat. Better than six months of ice storms. I was up in Minneapolis in August once—my old lady at the time had relatives up there and she wanted to visit and they said come up for the state fair. So we went up to the state fair and I almost froze to death. I was walking around in a golf shirt and slacks, and it was twelve degrees or something.”
“Twelve is a little cooler than we’d expect in August,” Lucas said.
“You know what I mean.”
“I like the snow,” Lucas said. “I even like blizzards. I go up north in the winter. Got a couple of sleds.”
They talked about their towns until it was time to leave. As they were walking across the parking lot to the Porsche, Andreno said, “Wish I had a gun.”
“Got a knife?”
“Yeah, but that wouldn’t . . .”
“I wasn’t thinking you could stab her,” Lucas said. “But they got all those trees in there. I was thinking you could cut down a big stick.”
“Ah. I could hit her with the stick. ”
“Right.”
“Wish I had a gun.”
THEY PARKED IN the lot in front of the botanical gardens and took a walk around it, looking. “She knows your Porsche, right?”
“Maybe. Probably. If she remembers it.” Andreno kept looking at the houses on the other side of the street. “What’re you thinking?”
“Suppose she’s scouted the place, and she spotted a house with some old lady in it. She’s got these silenced pistols, right? So she goes up to a house, say, a hundred and fifty yards away, two hundred yards, plugs the old lady when she answers the door, and then just sits there and waits, with that machine gun. Or the sniper rifle she used on Malone. Maybe parks her car in the back so we’ll never see her when she pulls out. Ross gets here, and she nails him walking across the parking lot. Just like with Dallaglio.”
Lucas considered it, then said, “Look—she had months to work this all out. One thing she always did was her planning, the way she got at people, isolated them, then killed them. She’s never expected. We really didn’t expect her last night, but now that she’s done that . . . and Malone . . . she’s got to think that we’re ready for rifles.”
“So maybe she won’t use a rifle, but the goddamn things scare the shit out of me. Never see it coming. Whack, and you’re dead before you know it.” They walked along for a minute, and he added, “Man, that must’ve been something last night. I wish I could’ve been there, as long as I wouldn’t have gotten shot. That FBI guy, they say he could lose a leg.”
“That’s not the word anymore,” Lucas said. “The word is, he’s gonna be okay.”
“All right. Still, this fuckin’ woman ought to be in the CIA or something. They could use her.”
Lucas looked up and down the street. “I’d say we could put a squad at the far end, but then . . . it’d just scare her off, if she’s coming. I’d rather have her come.”
“And fuck a bunch of Rosses?”
“He knows what he’s getting into. . . . And yeah, fuck him.”
Andreno shook his head. “That’s harsh, man.” He looked down the street again. “Just like standing naked in the window.”
THEY WENT UP the steps and inside, showed their IDs to a guard, went up the interior steps and out the back, past the lighted fountain. To the left, on the other side of a long, low, redbrick building, a group of waiters were setting up tables and lighting mosquito-repelling tiki torches. They turned that way, down more stairs, up a sidewalk edged with button-sized red and blue flowers.
A woman in a blue dress and matching shoes, pearls, and carefully coiffed blond hair was supervising the waiters. She saw them, said something to a waiter, then hurried over: “I’m sorry, this is a private party.”
She had a perfectly sculpted nose, and it was quivering like a rat terrier’s.
“We’re cops,” Andreno said laconically. He snapped his gum. “We’re . . . making sure there’s no problem tonight.”
“Problem?” She looked from Andreno to Lucas. “What kind of problem?”
“A woman named Sally, from the FBI, will be here in a couple of minutes,” Lucas said, looking back at the entry building. “She’ll explain it all. We’re making a routine security
check. We hear one of the cellos could . . . do something crazy.”
SHE WANTED MORE ,her nose quivering even more fiercely as they put her off and wandered past a rectangular bed of red and gold chrysanthemums, past a pool, then through a hedge into the rose garden, strolling with their hands in their pockets, looking at the flowers. “Rinker’d have to be thinking about climbing a tree,” Lucas said, finally, as they walked out the far side of the rose garden and stopped under a crab-apple tree. There wasn’t much contour to the land, but there was some, and the higher ground was to the left, and was covered with trees. “Ross’ll be okay as long as he stays in the rose garden. The feds’ll have three teams covering out there. They all rented tuxes, they’ll come in one at a time, and once they get out in the dark, you won’t be able to see them.”
“You really think something is gonna happen?”
“I think . . . I don’t know. These things get a rhythm. If I were Rinker, and if I were going after Ross, I’d go after him soon. Not because I had to, but because I couldn’t stand not doing it. Getting it over with. Being done.”
“But if she’s not going after him . . .”
“Something’ll happen. Something to put a period on it. If Ross gets here and he’s walking around free as a bird, slapping people on the back, happy—then I’d be inclined to think that Clara’s on her way to Paris. But if he’s walking around keeping his head down, and his shoulder blades pinched together . . . it’ll be interesting to see.”
OFF TO THE RIGHT ,they could see the glass-and-steel Climatron dome, with more pools in front of it. They wandered down that way.
“Can’t see much from here—too many bushes,” Andreno said.
“Other side would be better,” Lucas agreed. “From a shooting point of view.”
They paused next to a pool. A few feet from the corner, two bronze statues, naked dancing women, hung over the water. “Look at the knockers on that one,” Andreno said.
Lucas had to laugh, because the same thought had trickled through his mind. “Look at the knockers on both of them.”
They walked. Ambled. Hands in their pockets.
“Rinker’s not gonna be here,” Andreno said after a minute or two. “A: She doesn’t know about it. B: He’s too protected.”
“She fooled us on Levy, she fooled us on Malone, she fooled us on Dallaglio—she shouldn’t have been able to do any of those things. We knew she was smart, but she was a lot smarter than we were ready for,” Lucas said. “She doesn’t miss anything.”
Andreno looked past him. “There’s Sally. And Jesus, there’s Mallard—he looks like he was hit by a truck.”
“Man, I just . . . I think if somebody killed Weather, my fuckin’ head would explode,” Lucas said. “Let’s go talk to him.”
“What is it that the feds kept saying? Showtime. ”
MALLARD WAS PHYSICALLY shaky, brutally unhappy. “I’m here for today and tomorrow. The funeral is day after tomorrow.”
“Are you up to speed on what we’re doing?” Lucas asked.
“Yes. Sally . . . sort of turned out to be an executive. I hadn’t seen that before.”
Lucas grinned at him, a small wan smile. “Everybody else did. There wasn’t even any discussion—she just took it over.”
“Good for her,” Mallard said. He was wearing a tuxedo, as were the other agents that Lucas could see, and a few men who weren’t agents. He and Andreno were wearing sport coats and slacks and loafers. Lucas felt like a radish at a convention of tulips. “You think she’ll show up?”
“I can’t figure it,” Lucas said. “I’m getting the feeling, from what we’ve seen so far, that she started planning her moves right after she was shot down in Mexico. She’s had a couple of months to think about them, and to have her show up and start blazing away—that’s out of character.”
“That’s what she did last night,” Mallard said.
“But we didn’t see it coming last night,” Lucas said. “The thing about last night—we could only see it later—is that she had a source of information that could feed her the Dallaglios in a hurry, somebody who could actually call her, or who she could call. I actually thought running was a great idea, from the Dallaglios’ point of view. Once he was out of sight, she was out of luck. But . . . she knew where and when he was going. Exactly.”
“Sally told me about the phone idea, the calls to Ross.”
“And here she comes,” Lucas said. Sally was wandering toward them, wearing a tight, deep burgundy dress that started low and ended low—below the collarbones and down to the ankles, slits on the sides. She was carrying a small black purse that Lucas decided must hold her pistol, because she couldn’t have gotten a pencil under the dress without it showing. As she came up, Lucas said, “Nice purse.”
She smiled at him. “Didn’t think I could clean up, did you?”
“I thought you might,” he said. “We’ve been talking about Ross, and what the hell’s going on here.”
“If she comes in, I think we’ll get her. We’ve got teams moving all through the place.”
Lucas looked away, staring at a pink rose, trying to work through it. They looked at him, waiting, and finally he said, “I can’t nail it down. Can’t figure what she’ll do next. I’ve been stymied before, because I didn’t know what I needed to know. But I’ve never felt stupid. She’s got me feeling like a moron.”
“We’ll see,” Mallard said. He patted Lucas on the shoulder and said, with a wan smile, “Dumbass.”
MORE PEOPLE WERE arriving, men in tuxedos, women in party dresses. A small pop orchestra set up in front of the brick building that acted as a backstop for the party; a dozen long-haired men and women who started off with an even more orchestrated version of Air Supply’s “Making Love Out of Nothing at All,” as if the original weren’t bad enough.
Lucas started away after the first few bars, and Sally said, after him, “Don’t like music?”
“Anytime they start by playing Air Supply, there’s a risk they’ll move on to the Hooters,” Lucas said.
Sally said, “My. You listen to rock ’n’ roll?”
“It’s not rock ’n’ roll. It’s rock. It’s the music I grew up with. Just like you.”
She looked at him, doing a readjustment, and said, “I guess you always think that people older than you listen to, like, Big Band or something. Jazz.”
“Jesus, Sally, the first music I can remember was the Stones. Mick Jagger was probably in high school when I was born.”
“Yeah, but . . .” She looked past him. “The Rosses.”
Lucas moved away more quickly, far out to the edge of the rose garden, watching the Rosses as he moved. John Ross was wearing a European-style notchless tux, black on black. Treena was wearing a cream-colored dress with puffs along the edges that managed to look both expensive and tacky, like a Versace knockoff for 7-Eleven. Ross shook hands with a few people, and seemed to be accepted. If they knew he was a hood, they at least appreciated his support for the performing arts.
Lucas was watching when he saw movement on the roof of the building behind the orchestra. A head. Then a head and a man, with a radio: the red-haired guy, with another man. Lucas lifted a hand to them, and the red-haired guy mimed a rifle. Good.
Andreno came over with a plastic plate full of finger food. “Better get over to the table. The best stuff goes fast. The pâté is recommended, with them little round yellow crackers.”
“Give me one of yours,” Lucas said. He tried a little yellow cracker and the pâté, which was recommended. But he didn’t have much of an appetite. The night seemed to be getting warmer rather than cooler, and a large number of good-looking middle-aged women were showing ingenious displays of skin. Lucas and Andreno began to move with them, clockwise, around the rose garden, like migrating geese. The Rosses were on the far side of the clock, and they kept it that way, although Ross caught Lucas’s eye once and shook his head, a shallow, dour smile locked on his face.
The clockwork continued
, around and around the rose garden, as slow as a minute hand, people clumping and talking, but always seeming, after a few minutes, to move. More people showed up, and as the crowd got denser, there was more of the high-pitched feminine laughter that seemed to accompany a crowd of tuxedos and party dresses, rich people and wanna-bes preening themselves—Lucas checking the women, anybody close to the height and build of Rinker. There were several of them, but none was her.
At eight-thirty, the party was near its peak, the promenade continuing. At the heart of the clock face, Lucas realized after a while, were the principals of the orchestra: the conductor, the president, a couple of violinists, all with shaggy longish hair and cultivated manners, a kind of gardened drollness that led to heavy lids and rolled eyes.
John Sanford - Prey 13 - Mortal Prey.txt Page 32
