Certain Prey

by John Sandford

  'Role tells me you're gonna learn how to run the

  tractor/ she said, shaking her head. 'I'm glad I bought the quart-size bottle of peroxide.'

  'Hey...'

  'Lucas, you gotta encourage him to be careful. I'm afraid he'll roll it over on himself. He's like a kid.'

  'He'll be all right,' Lucas said.

  'That wouldn't be beer in that sack, would it?'

  'Couple Leinies,' he said, guiltily.

  'Yeah, well, I'll take the Leinies, you go figure out the tractor. When you get back, we'll fry some crappies and we can have the beer then.'

  'Well...' She gave him a look and he handed her the bag.

  The Kubota was... different. Running wasn't a problem, but maneuvering the joystick for the back-hoe took a little practice: 'I'll have you buttering your bread with this thing before we're finished,' Marks said, enthusiastically. 'I figure with a few hours practice, I could do all the driveways for this whole area, come winter.'

  'Jesus Christ, Role, you make what, a half-million dollars a year selling stock? And now you're gonna pick up an extra two hundred dollars a month doing driveways?'

  When Lucas was checked out, Marks showed him

  where he was going to hide the key in his shed:

  'Anytime I'm not up here, you're welcome to use it.'

  'Maybe I could help you brush out a couple of

  those trails,' Lucas said; he liked the backhoe.

  'Terrific'Then, as they walked back up toward the cabin, 'You gettin' any?'

  Lucas could see Lucy Marks on the lake side of the house, cleaning up the grill.

  'Overtime? I don't get overtime any more...'

  'Pussy,' Marks said. 'Crumbcake. You know? It sorta looks like...'

  'Yeah, yeah. As a matter of fact, I just took a call from a nice-looking forty-ish FBI lady who's coming to Minneapolis and wants me to take her out to foxtrot.'

  'Foxtrot? Foxtrot, my ass. If it was me, I'd drop about nine inches of the old French-Canadian bratwurst on her,' said Marks, who talked big but was the most faithful man on earth. As they came around the corner of the house, he hollered at his wife: 'Lucas is gonna jump an FBI agent.'

  'A female, I hope,' Lucy Marks said. She was spraying something on the grill, turning her face away from the coals.

  'She wants to foxtrot with him,' Marks said. 'She called him up.'

  'Sounds promising,' Lucy Marks said. 'How'd this happen?'

  'I was down in Wichita, and we were in this bar and she didn't dance to rock music, so I was dancing with the owner...'

  He trailed off, and after a few seconds, Lucy Marks said. 'Lucas? You still in there?'

  'Excuse me,' Lucas said, 'But I gotta go. I'm sorry.'

  He jogged away, across the lawn toward his own place, leaving the Marks at the grill, looking puzzled. At the cabin, he fumbled out the number Sherrill had given him for Malone, and dialed it. One of the FBI agents, a man, picked it up and said, 'John Shaw.' Lucas said, 'Let me speak to Malone.'

  'She just left... I could try to catch her.'

  'Catch her, goddamnit...'

  The phone on the other end clattered on a desk and Lucas hung onto the receiver, eyes closed, rubbing his forehead. Could this be right?

  Two minutes later, Malone picked up the phone and said, 'Malone.'

  'This is Lucas. Did you get the composite of the shooter?'

  'Yes. Pretty good.'

  'Close your eyes, and think about the woman I danced with at that club in Wichita, whatever it was. The Rink.'

  'My eyes are closed. I... hmm. Gotta be a coincidence.'

  'Hey, I'm a great-looking guy,' Lucas said, 'I know that, but just between you and me, Malone, not that many thirty-year-old women are coming onto me anymore. And with this one... I had the feeling she was more interested than she should have been, and maybe not in sex. I didn't know why...'

  '... Or maybe you thought it was sex....'

  'Maybe I did, whatever. But I tell you, from talking

  to the people up here who saw her, and looking at that picture, something kept knocking at the back of my head,' Lucas said. 'I finally figured it out: if she's not the same chick, she's her twin. And if she was up here, she could very well have seen me on television. And if she did, and I walked into her place in Wichita, and then just sat down for a cheeseburger and a beer...'

  'All right,' Malone said, reluctantly. 'Sounds like a loser, but give me a couple of hours. I'll check it out. You'll be up at your cabin?'

  'I don't know,' Lucas said. Out through the screen, he could see the lake, flat, quiet, a perfect North Woods evening coming on. And he'd just gotten there. 'I think I'm gonna head back to the Cities. I'm telling you, I think she's the shooter.'

  He was out on 1-35, driving way too fast, and still a long way north of the Cities, when the cell phone burped. He picked it up, and heard the first two words, then lost the signal. He punched it off; three minutes later, it rang again, and he answered it: Sherrill, breaking up, but audible.

  'Your FBI friend called; she's all cranked up. That woman you danced with has disappeared - cleaned out her apartment, quit her job at the bar...'

  '... I thought she owned it.'

  '... So did everybody, but she was really just the manager. It's really owned by a guy named James Larimore, who is also known as Wooden Head

  Larimore, who is really connected, really connected, in guess-where?'

  'St. Louis.'

  'Yup.' The cell connection was getting cleaner. 'So your FBI friend freaked, and got a crime-scene crew into the apartment, and guess-what again?'

  'It'd been wiped.'

  'Top to bottom.'

  'Got her, goddamnit,' Lucas crowed. 'We got her. What's her name?'

  'Clara Rinker.'

  'Rinker. Fuck those FBI pussies, Marcy. We broke this fuckin' thing right over their heads.'

  'Yeah, well... want to know where Wooden Head got the name Wooden Head?'

  'Sure.' The adrenalin was pumping; he'd listen to anything.

  'He was once in a bar when people started shooting, and he caught a ricochet, and the slug stuck in his skull bone, in his forehead above his nose. Made a dent, and stuck, but didn't go through. They say everybody was laughing so hard, the gunfight stopped. Even Wooden Head was laughing.'

  'So he's a tough guy.'

  'Very tough. And they ain't gonna get much out of him. He says he don't know nothin' about nothin'.'

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  M alone met him at the airport: 'You look kinda green,' Malone said. 'Tough flight down?'

  'Naw, it was all right,' Lucas mumbled. He looked back through the terminal window at the plane, and Malone caught the look and said, 'You can't be one of those... you're not afraid to fly?'

  'It's not my preferred method of travel,' Lucas said, walking away. She scrambled to catch up, and he turned his head to ask, 'What'd you get from the bar? Prints? Photos. We need to get a photo out now.'

  'Airplanes are about fifty times safer than cars,' Malone said. 'I thought everybody knew that. Not only that, most people are distracted when they're driving, because they fall into routines, while pilots are trained...'

  'Yeah, yeah, enough,' Lucas said. 'I don't like to fly because I've got problems dealing with control issues because I've got an unconsciously macho self-image, okay? That make you happy? Now what about Rinker?'

  'We can't find a photograph,' Malone said. 'And there's no reason for you to be defensive about a fear of flying...'

  'There's gotta be a photograph...'

  She gave up. 'There are no photographs in the apartment, and none in the bar. Either she didn't have any, or she took them with her. We checked with people who were more-or-less friends...'

  'More-or-less?'

  'She didn't have many real friends,' Malone said. 'She was friendly, without friends. Nobody who worked at the bar had ever seen the inside of her apartment.'

  'A loner.'

  'Psychologically, anyway.'


  'Driver's license?'

  'We checked her driver's license and she was wearing a red wig and glasses the size of dinner plates, and she had her head tilted down... what I'm saying, is, that composite you had was better. Wichita State also had a copy of her student ID, and that's as bad or worse than the driver's license. She was careful. What we are doing, though, is we're refining the composite. It'll be as good as a photograph by this evening.'

  They walked out of the terminal into the already-warm Kansas air; the sun had still been low on the horizon when they landed, and Lucas had expected a little more cool. Malone led him to an unmarked Ford parked in a no-parking zone with a local cop watching over it. 'Thanks, Ted,' Malone said to the cop, who nodded and gave her his best front-line, band-of-brothers cop grin. Saved her parking place; next week, he might be saving her ass someplace, in a

  savage fire-fight out on the burning plains of Kansas.

  Then again, maybe not...

  'And there's another thing,' Malone said, as they pulled away from the curb.

  'Uh-oh,' Lucas said.

  'The crime-scene guys found a couple of small smears of fresh blood on the floor of her apartment. A man who lives down the street, was getting up early to go fishing...'

  'In Kansas?'

  'Yeah, I guess they do, somewhere. Anyway, he gets up and sees a couple of guys going into her apartment building. They looked out-of-place, he thought - they looked like football players, big guys, and they both wore suits. But they had a key and he just thought they were a couple of apartment people coming home after a night out. So he went fishing and didn't think about it until one of our guys went around knocking on doors.'

  'Two guys in suits, middle of the night.'

  'Just about dawn.'

  'And blood on the floor.'

  'There is no apartment in the building with two guys in it, and we can't find any two guys who were out late. It's not a big apartment. Eighteen units -we've talked to everybody.'

  'There was no disturbance.'

  'No. She had a motion detector in the hallway, which would have been invisible if you didn't know what you were looking for. If she was in there, she

  should have known they were coming. Of course, she might have expected them. There was no sign of a struggle...'

  'So she shot them?'

  'That's a possibility, other than the fact that there're no bodies in the place, and she'd have to carry two football-sized guys out the hall and down a flight of stairs to get rid of them. On the other hand, if they shot her... a couple of big guys could handle a small woman fairly easily. If you were big enough, you could hold her under your coat, and walk right out.'

  'Were they wearing coats?'

  'The fisher-guy says they weren't, but you get my point. They could handle her a heck of a lot easier than she could have handled them.'

  'They could have walked away together,' Lucas said. 'They could have been helpers. She could have cut herself packing up her stuff.'

  'Which is sort of my theory, right now,' Malone said. 'Although the other theory has some attractions. If we get this woman...We've got a half-dozen states where they've got the death penalty, and where they've got lots of evidence on one or another of her killings. The only thing they don't have is the shooter. If we wanted to release her to those states for trial, sooner or later she'd wind up in the electric chair or the gas chamber or strapped down to a gurney. With that kind of leverage, we could squeeze her pretty hard. We could put some pretty big holes

  in the St. Louis mob with her information.'

  'And that's what you want.'

  'Of course,' she said. 'If we get the top guy, the guy who probably ran her... he knows everything. If she was willing to pin the tail on him, we could show him the same set of electric chairs and gas chambers. If he talked, two years from now, St. Louis would be cleaner than... I don't know - Seattle.'

  'Seattle has Microsoft.'

  'Okay.' She showed the tiniest of smiles. 'Than Minneapolis.'

  'Thanks.'

  'Anyway, the mob guys in St. Louis know this as well as we do. It wouldn't be too far-fetched to think they might send a couple of shooters to fix the problem.'

  'She might be too smart for that,' Lucas said. 'I got the impression of smartness from the lady. So we know the mob could send a couple of guys, and the mob knows it could send a couple of guys, and she knows it. And if everybody knows it, do they send a couple of guys?'

  'I don't know,' Malone said. 'I do know one thing that's pretty unique.'

  'Yeah?'

  'You're the only guy I know who's literally danced with the devil.'

  Lucas saw the big window the minute he walked in the apartment door.

  He had an advantage over Malone and the other FBI agents - when they'd first arrived, they were looking for Rinker herself, and didn't know about the blood on the floor. One of the FBI crime-scene techs pointed him around the apartment, and finally he asked, 'Did you check the outside window ledge on that big window?'

  The agent looked at the window, and thinking fast, said, 'Not yet,' as if it were next on the list.

  'Would it be all right to lift it up?'

  'Let me get one of the guys to do it,' the agent said.

  'What're you thinking?' Malone asked.

  'I think carrying any body out of this place would take a fruitcake,' Lucas said. 'But throwing them out the window, if it's night time...' He peered out: 'They'd land right behind the garbage dumpster.You could back a car right up to them.'

  One of the technicians came over, looked skeptically at the window, and said, 'Let me get this.'

  Lucas stepped back and the tech unlocked the inner window, and lifted it easily. The outer window was a convertible aluminum glass-and-screen affair; the glass had been pushed up, and the screen was in place. 'Screen's a little loose,' the tech said. He was working awkwardly through surgeon's gloves. 'Let me...'

  He used a small pocket knife to slip the screen up an inch, which allowed him to pull it out of the frame. He leaned it against the wall, and they all looked at the bottom end of the screen, and the brick wall outside.

  'Huh.'The tech grunted and got down close to the brick, leaning out through the window.

  'What?' asked Malone, glancing quickly at Lucas.

  'You know any reason why a brick would wear tweed?'

  Wooden Head was being interrogated by a team of specialists from Washington. Lucas and Malone watched for a few minutes, then left. If the team missed anything, Lucas wasn't smart enough to figure out what it would be - the team was taking Wooden Head apart inch by inch, and they were good.

  'I'd suggest we get a bite at the Rink, but somebody would probably spit in the hamburger,' Malone said. 'So let's get something someplace else.Then maybe I can rent a car and get back home.' 'Really? You'd drive back instead of fly?' 'Really,' Lucas said.

  'We've got a car going up later today, a couple of guys from the crime-scene crew to review the work at the last two killing scenes... you could ride along. I think they're leaving around three, and plan to drive straight through.'

  'Sign me up,' Lucas said.

  They stopped at a downtown diner, got a tippy table, and Lucas looked at one of the legs and told Malone, sitting opposite, 'See that lever on the end of the leg? There's a lever sticking up.' 'Yeah?'

  'Push the lever toward me, with your foot.'

  'What's that for?'

  'It levels the table,' Lucas said.

  Malone pushed the lever with her foot, and the table stopped tipping. 'Where'd you learn that?' she asked.

  'I used to be a waitress,' he said. 'Before the operation.'

  Over coffee and grilled-cheese sandwiches, Malone filled Lucas in on everything the FBI had figured out about Clara Rinker - they had her biography from childhood, but still no good pictures. 'She was in trouble a few times when she was a teenager, but nothing serious. Never got mugshot or printed. She was a runaway, and she might have had reason to be. We think she was probably rape
d a few times by her stepfather, who disappeared, by the way. And maybe by one of her brothers.'

  'Did he disappear, too?'

  'No, he's still around, but he doesn't talk much about her. He claimed he couldn't remember her.'