Mortal Prey

by John Sandford

  “Maybe, but maybe not,” Lucas said. “But I’ll tell you this: She’s not only hurting herself, and you, she’s hurting her friends. She’s crashing someplace around here, with one of her friends, and whoever that is . . . she’s just as guilty now as Clara is. She’s taking her friends down with her. Does that sound right?” He put a little authority into it, and watched Rinker’s wavering intelligence crawl back in a hole.

  Rinker mumbled, “I guess not,” and he looked at his hands.

  “Do you know her friends here?” Andreno asked.

  Rinker said nothing at all, didn’t seem to have heard the question. His eyes flattened, he seemed even slacker in the shoulders, as though his mind had slipped away.

  Andreno repeated himself: “Do you know her friends?”

  Rinker stayed away for another few seconds, then his eyes focused and he pulled himself out of wherever he’d gone. He shook his head. “She never said nothing about friends around here. I didn’t know anything about St. Louis. I took off for Los Angeles as soon as I was old enough.” He stopped, catching himself.

  Lucas pushed: “Then where were her friends? She must have had friends back home somewhere.”

  “Maybe,” Rinker conceded. He licked his lips. “I wouldn’t know nothin’ about that. She was older’n me.”

  They worked on him for another fifteen minutes, but nothing came out of it. He was not only a thrown-away kid, Lucas realized; he did have some mental deficit, or otherness. He slipped away when they pressed him, and only reluctantly came back.

  When they ran out of questions, Lucas and Andreno sighed simultaneously, and Lucas said, “Well, hell,” and Andreno said, “Wish we could help you, son. These goddamn feds . . . they can be real assholes.”

  “I gotta get out of here,” Rinker said, struggling to come alive. “I got all my stuff back in L.A. If I don’t get back, Larry or Jane is gonna find it and they’ll just flat sell it. They’ll sell it first chance they get. Got some good stuff, there. Got a suit. Got a radio.”

  “I wish—” Andreno began.

  “I gotta get out of here,” Rinker said, cutting him off. His eyes were big, and going oily, and he looked around the room, looked for a window or a crack or anything that might let in some air. “I mean I just . . . I just . . . I gotta get out of here. I can’t breathe, I got dreams . . .”

  “About Clara?” Lucas asked.

  “About me. I’m like this big moth, like the moths that come at night when you’ve got flowers, they’re like hummingbirds, but they’re moths, and I’m one of them, and these guys catch me and I’m flapping my wings and they keep pulling at me like they’re gonna pull my wings off, and my feelers. I got these big feelers like feathers and they’re gonna pull them off. And they were all laughing and when I sat up on the bunk last night I thought I was there, that they were pulling my wings off, and I couldn’t breathe, I just kept flapping my wings. . . .”

  LUCAS CALLED THE jailer, then told Rinker, “We’ll try to do something. Gotta be a little patient, though.”

  Andreno chipped in: “Hold on, son.”

  When the jailer took him away, Rinker looked back at them and said, “I really gotta get back. All my stuff is in L.A. They’re gonna sell it if I don’t get back.”

  MALONE HAD A TAPE .“If you want to listen to it again, it’s all there,” he said, as they took the elevator down.

  “I only saw one thing,” Lucas said, looking at Andreno. “Clara had a friend or maybe a couple of friends back home. He didn’t want to say it.”

  “Shouldn’t be hard to find, if they’re still there,” Andreno said. “Town’s about two blocks long.”

  “We’ve had agents out there,” Malone said. “Interviewed everybody—nothing. Her mother’s a vegetable, barely remembers Clara. We’ve gone over the whole house, from top to bottom, looked at every scrap of paper.”

  “Find any friends?”

  “Nobody. Not many people even remembered her. The family was sorta . . . isolated.”

  “Huh.” Lucas thought about it, then asked Andreno, “What do you think?”

  “What else have we got?”

  “Maybe our friend the phone guy,” Lucas suggested.

  “We could try him again. If we don’t get anything, it’s about three hours down to Tisdale. We can go down late tonight, after we talk to Levy, poke around tomorrow morning, stop at the Bass Pro Shops store, and still get back by early afternoon.”

  “Gotta think about it,” Lucas said. To Malone: “And you gotta think about cutting Gene loose. There’s nothing there. He could use some . . . help.”

  “This whole thing will resolve itself in the next week or so,” Malone said. “We’ve got so many people looking that we’ll either turn Rinker up, or she’ll leave. When it’s resolved . . . yeah, we’ll probably cut him loose. If we don’t catch her here, we’ll let him go and keep an eye on him for a few months, see if he has any visitors.”

  THEY DEFLECTED MALONE ’S curiosity about the phone guy. She made a call, talked to Mallard for a few minutes, lifted her face away from the receiver to tell Lucas that they’d rendezvous in Central West End at seven o’clock, and go from there to Levy’s. Levy, according to his watchers, usually worked late at his office and got home sometime after six o’clock. “Louis wants to find a place to eat before we go in.” She looked at Andreno.

  Andreno thought about it for a second, then brightened. “Perfect spot. Tell him there’s a place called the Black Lantern, five-minute walk from Levy’s place. Steak joint. Good salads. Good martinis. We’ve got just enough time to eat comfortable.”

  Malone relayed the information, listened for a moment, then said goodbye and hung up. She told Lucas, “He says you’re supposed to call Marcy at your office. She says it’s semi-urgent.”

  When they got out on the sidewalk, Lucas used his cell phone to dial the office in Mineapolis. Black picked up, then switched him over to Marcy. “What’s up?” Lucas asked.

  “A columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch called here, trying to get you. He says that Rinker called him this afternoon and gave you as a reference for some stuff she told him. He says he’s pretty sure it’s Rinker who called.”

  “Gave me as a reference?”

  “Yeah. Whoever this is, she told him that she talked to you,” Marcy said.

  “She did. She said she was you.”

  “What?Tell me . . .” And in the background, Lucas could hear her say to Black, “She called him. She said she was me.” She sounded thrilled to have been touched by a celebrity.

  “I’ll talk to you later,” Lucas said. “What’s this news guy’s name and number?”

  “His name’s Sandy White. . . .”

  Lucas jotted the name and number in the palm of his hand, rang off, and told Malone and Andreno what had happened.

  “Jesus,” Andreno said. “Who’s running this operation, the FBI or Rinker?”

  “There seems to be some disagreement about that,” Malone said.

  “So do I talk to White?” Lucas asked. “You make the call.”

  “We’ll have somebody else talk to him. I’ll call Louis on the way down to Central West End,” Malone said. “That way, White can’t push you, because our guy can deny knowing too much about it. And we find out what she said.”

  THE BLACK LANTERN was an old-style steak house, set a few steps below street level and smelling of sizzling beef fat and beer. Mallard had already taken a table, and was reading a menu the size of a wall calendar.

  Lucas introduced him to Andreno, and Mallard asked, “Does anybody read this guy Sandy White?”

  “Probably not more than half the people in St. Louis,” Andreno said. “He’s got a job as a TV editorial guy, too, so he’ll have that going, along with the column.”

  “Goddamnit,” Mallard grumbled. “I talked to him. Rinker called him, all right. He’s running a piece tomorrow, warning us off her brother. White talked to a cop somewhere and got Gene Rinker’s arrest record, and they know
we’re holding him on simple possession.”

  “One good thing about it,” Lucas said, as he studied the menu.

  “Tell me, please.”

  “If somebody gets screwed for this, it’s gonna be you, not me,” Lucas said.

  Andreno nodded and said, “Got that straight.”

  They ordered wine, and Malone told Mallard about the interview with Gene Rinker, and then Mallard and Malone ordered salads and Lucas and Andreno ordered steaks, and Andreno said, “Gene Rinker is a troubled young man. I don’t think it was dope—looked like he was fucked from the git-go.”

  “And you got nothing from him,” Mallard predicted.

  “Eh,” Lucas said. “Probably nothing. We might run down to Tisdale and poke around.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Tonight, if nothing comes up. Get a bed in Springfield.”

  Mallard shrugged. “We talked to everybody she knew—but hell, if you want to, it’s fine with me. Maybe you’ll turn something up.”

  “She didn’t make good friends. She was too messed up,” Lucas said. “We think she might have had some friends when she was a kid. We keep thinking, she’s gotta be staying somewhere. She’s not sleeping in her car.”

  “Whatever . . .”

  The steaks came a few minutes later and they talked about the case a bit, and Lucas thought about the friend that Rinker must be staying with, and said, gesturing with a neatly forked square of rib eye, “You know, if you really don’t care how you get her—I mean, dead or alive—you ought to talk to all the local assholes and tell them that she’s staying with a friend. Somebody in that whole grapevine would know who her friends were. She worked for them, and somebody would know. Especially if there was some money on the table.”

  Malone nodded. “There would have been no reason for her to keep her friendships secret back then.”

  Mallard said, “Except that she’s smart. We know she’s smart, and this whole thing with this White guy makes me think she’s a little smarter than I realized. I mean, she’s messing with us. She’s gonna have a bunch of civil rights attorneys on our asses in the morning. All that makes me think—she’d know that her old pals might sell her out. She’d be ready for that.”

  LEVY LIVED ON a semiprivate street four blocks from the Black Lantern, a huge black-brick pile with a marble entrance and a carriage house visible in the back. One end of the street was open, but with warning signs against nonresident parking; the other end was closed with a wrought-iron fence.

  They’d decided to go in cold. The supervisor in the group covering Levy called Mallard toward the end of the meal to say that Levy had arrived home. “He’s scared. He’s got a guy traveling with him, apparently a bodyguard. He took his car straight into the carriage house, and the bodyguard ran between the carriage house and the main house. Somebody met him, and then Levy ran up to the house while the bodyguard waited at the door.”

  “Must be pretty sure that nobody’s in the carriage house, then,” Lucas said.

  “Our guys said both the house and the carriage house are wired up tight.”

  “Well, at least we know he’ll be there. Doesn’t sound like he expects to go barhopping,” Andreno said.

  They took their time walking over, looking at the houses along the side streets. There were lights everywhere, people moving around. If Rinker was in one of the houses on Levy’s street, or behind Levy’s street, she’d have a tough time getting out, Lucas thought. “As soon as we talk to him, you oughta have the net guys start going door to door, making sure that Rinker’s not holding somebody in one of these places,” Lucas said.

  “We’ll do that,” Mallard said. At the entrance to Levy’s street, they passed though a wrought-iron gate, closed it behind themselves. A man in a suit climbed out of a car and walked toward them. He was carrying a pale straw hat, and said, “Louis.”

  “David. Everybody, this is David Homburg,” Mallard said to Lucas and Andreno. To Homburg: “We’re going in—you and me and Malone, and Lucas. And, uh, Mr. Andreno, I guess.”

  “Hate to miss it,” Andreno said.

  Mallard told Homburg to leave two watchers on the front and back of Levy’s, and to have the rest of the net begin knocking on doors, two men at a time. Homburg stepped back to his car and spoke on a radio for a few moments, then rejoined them. “Done.”

  “So let’s go,” Mallard said.

  LEVY WAS NOT what Lucas expected—he’d expected one of the tough-faced finance guys, and instead got a round-faced beach boy, middle forties, with bleached tips on his light brown hair, a carefully revised nose, dark brown golf shirt under a soft leather lounging jacket with fawn slacks, and leather moccasins without socks.

  The bodyguard was another case altogether. He was a muscular size 48, with a buzz cut; he looked like he was made from leather that the cobbler had thrown away before making Levy’s shoes. He’d come to the door carefully, checking them from a side window, then through the security-glass window on the door.

  Mallard and Malone held up IDs so he could read them, and when he opened the door, he still had a hand on his back hip pocket, where, Lucas thought, he had a gun.

  “Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Mallard told him. “We’re here to talk to Mr. Levy.”

  “I’ll see if he’s in,” the tough guy said.

  “We know he’s in, because we’ve had a net around him all day, watching him. We just watched you take him from the carriage house to the back door, running. When you see if he’s in, you might suggest to him that Clara Rinker is unlikely to show up with a committee.”

  “Wait here.” The tough guy left them standing on the porch, one minute, two, looking at their shoes and the trees, listening to the cicadas fiddling down at them.

  “Nice night,” Mallard said eventually.

  “Fuckin’ guy,” Andreno said.

  Then the tough guy came back, looked them over again, and said, “Come in.”

  LEVY ,BLEACHED -TIP HAIR and sockless mocs, stood with his hands in the pocket of his jackets, in the doorway of a library.

  “Mr. Mallard? Could I see your ID again?”

  Mallard handed him his ID. Malone and Homburg held theirs up so he could scan them as he read down Mallard’s. Then he looked at Lucas and Andreno, a petulant frown creasing his forehead. “What about these gentlemen?”

  “They’re essentially hired thugs,” Mallard said. “They don’t have ID. In any case, we really don’t want to spend any more time sorting through the personnel, Mr. Levy. Clara Rinker is here to kill you. We know that for sure. We’re trying to catch her. You might be able to help.”

  “How do you know it for sure?”

  “Because one of our agents talked to a gentleman who she interrogated, and your name was prominent in the discussion. We think you know all of this—we’ve been watching you for a couple of days, and we’ve noted the precautions you’re now taking . . . like the man with the gun.”

  Levy stared at Mallard for a moment—Mallard looked placidly back—then said, “Why don’t we sit down?”

  They filed into the library. The library was a stage setting, Lucas thought, filled with decorator book sets, bought by the running foot, an oversized mahogany desk with an inset leather top, an expensive-looking oriental carpet, and a globe the size of a weather balloon. Levy settled into a chair behind the desk; Mallard and Malone took guest chairs facing the desk, Homburg found a seat on a faux Louis XIV, and Lucas and Andreno picked out places to lean. Andreno seemed fascinated by the globe, and began turning it under one hand as Mallard and Levy talked.

  Levy said, “How do you know she’s looking for me?”

  “She blames you and several other people for the attempt on her life in Mexico. You managed to kill her fiancé. She was also pregnant, and when she was wounded, she lost the child. She has now clearly gone over the edge. She’s insane. We frankly think you have one small chance to stay alive: cooperate with us.”

  “What if I decide to take care of myself?”
<
br />   “Then you’ll die,” Mallard said. “Nanny Dichter was as well protected as you are, and she picked him like a bad apple.”

  Levy said, “I really don’t know anything about what happened in Mexico, and my involvement with her was only peripheral. One of my other clients once asked me to help her set up a retirement account, which I thought was entirely legitimate.”