Mortal Prey
Page 23
“Yeah—let’s just wander. Who knows?”
FIVE MINUTES LATER ,Lucas said, “I’ll tell you something—it’s one thing to cover the streets, but this is fucking ridiculous. Every single street’s got a car with two guys in it, driving at ten miles an hour. It looks like a goddamn Shrine parade.”
Andreno snorted. “So Mallard talked to our guys, who probably talked to everybody else. . . . We probably got five agencies and fifty cars down here, all looking for Clara.”
“If they find her, I hope to hell they can shoot. I don’t think she’s gonna go easy,” Lucas said.
“She sounded pissed?”
“She sounded psychotic.”
POLLOCK AND RINKER turned onto Tucker Avenue, and two blocks ahead, Rinker saw two large American cars stopped in the street, the occupants apparently talking to each other. “Take the next right,” she said to Pollock.
“But . . . you think those are police?”
“Maybe. Take a right.”
They went right at the corner, up a block, and turned left, back toward Pollock’s place. Another block, and Pollock, looking in the rearview mirror, said, “Another car turned in behind us, end of the block. Going really slow.”
“Keep going.” Rinker slipped down in the foot well, the handbag in her lap.
“Got another car, up at the corner, ahead. There’s a stop sign—I’m going to slow down and stop and let him go.”
She slowed down and stopped. A few seconds passed, and then she accelerated away. “Two guys, and they really looked me over,” Pollock said. “I think they were police.”
“Any more cars?”
“The one behind us just stopped at the corner. They might be talking to the other guys. . . . Now they’re coming again.”
“How far from the house?”
“A block.”
“Pull into the driveway, then get out—get something out of the trunk, let them see you. They’ll know you’re not me.”
“Dear God,” Pollock said.
But she did it. Bumped up into the driveway, got out, fished around in the trunk, then dropped the trunk lid with a bang. A minute later, she said, “Nobody coming. You can move now, but I’d hurry.”
In ten seconds, they were inside, watching through a crack in the curtains. Another cop car went by every minute or two. “They’re all over the place,” Rinker said. “They can’t be doing this everywhere—they must know we’re here.”
“How?”
Rinker shook her head. “I don’t know. We’ve got to think about that.”
16
LUCAS AND ANDRENO HOOKED UP WITH Bender and Carter, and they compared maps, and Lucas told the others about the call from Rinker.
“Scary,” Bender said.
“Gotta find her quick,” Lucas said. “She’s outa control.”
They put the maps together and Lucas, comparing the crossed-off houses and eliminating duplicates, said, “Terrific. We don’t have half, but we’ve got a third or more. If she’s down here . . .”
“I’m worried that she’s over on the flats, working for one of those companies or the brewery,” Carter said.
“I don’t think so,” Lucas said. “Because Clara isn’t working, and I think Clara was close by when she found out about Gene. I think she came right out of here, somewhere. Could be west a little more, but not as far over as the Hill.”
“Why?”
“Because Clara was freaked when she called.” He explained what he thought that meant, and they all nodded and went back to looking at the maps. “We oughta get those other letter carriers tonight,” Carter said. “Me’n Bender could look them up.”
“Do that,” Lucas said. “I think Andreno and I better get back with the feds. We don’t want to leave them alone too long, with nobody but themselves to talk to.”
WHEN THEY GOT off the elevator at the FBI building, they could see the door to the operations center was standing open, and they could hear the feds snarling at each other. Starting to think about blame, Lucas thought.
“. . . all a goddamn theory,” an agent named Brown was saying when Lucas and Andreno came through the door. Everyone around the table glanced their way, and the discussion died.
“The authors of the theory,” Malone said dryly. She was sitting at the end of the table, legs crossed, looking beat.
“What’s the problem?” Lucas asked.
“The problem is, the whole Soulard search and Patsy Hill and cell-phone idea is a stretch, and we’ve got too much pinned on it,” Brown said.
“It’s the only goddamned theory we’ve got, and it paid off,” Lucas said. “She called from the right area.”
“She was on the interstate. Everybody’s on the interstate. There’s a million cars on the interstate.”
“She was going west. Which meant that she had to get on it somewhere east of where you had her, right?” Lucas asked. “And that means, from where you had her, she either got on in Illinois or she got on in Soulard, or on the edge of it, anyway.”
“So what’re we gonna do, sit around and wait for her to call you?” Brown rapped. “Next time, she’ll be up in Florissant.”
“So what’re you suggesting?” Andreno asked. “I mean, we really need something, and if you got, don’t be shy.”
“Big reward,” Brown said. “A million bucks. We can get it. We put a million bucks on her—we’ll have her in twenty-four hours.”
“I thought, uh, that was a problem,” Lucas said. “If you can get the money, I’m all for it—though I don’t think Patsy Hill would turn her in. She really can’t.”
“The Hill thing is just a theory,” Brown said, twiddling a yellow pencil between his fingers so fast that it looked blurred, like a propeller.
“Well, Jesus, you gotta work on something,” Lucas said. “You can’t sit around a fuckin’ mahogany table and pull on your weenies.”
“There’s Levy and Ross,” Mallard objected. “We got that going.”
Lucas jumped in: “I’ll tell you something else that’s not a theory.”
Brown: “That’d be a goddamned relief.”
“Clara Rinker is gonna come after our ass,” Lucas said. “I promise you. She was nuts this afternoon.”
“What’s she gonna do?” Mallard asked. He sounded curious, rather than skeptical.
“She’s gonna kill somebody, or try to,” Lucas said. To Mallard, he said, “If you’ve got any family that she can figure out, or if Malone has any . . . She mentioned Malone the first time I talked to her, so she remembers her from Minneapolis.”
Mallard and Malone were both shaking their heads. “Not really,” Malone said. “I’ve got my folks, of course, but I don’t know how she could figure them out. She’d have to pull my file at the Bureau, and all that stuff is pretty locked up. We’ve had some pretty tough hackers make a run at it.”
“She’s gonna do something,” Lucas insisted. “If she figures out that we’ve got a net around Levy and Ross, she might try to hit one of the guys on the net. They’ve gotta be warned, and we’ve got to set up some kind of reaction procedure in case that happens. So we’re not just running around in a circle waving our arms.”
“We’ll talk to everybody right now,” Malone said. “I think that’s a good point.”
Even Brown nodded, but he added: “We’re not being proactive. We gotta be more proactive. We gotta find something. . . .”
Andreno said, “Hey . . . we’re listening.”
Malone: “Washington’s gonna come up with some ideas if we don’t. They’re getting anxious.”
Snarling, Lucas thought, like a pack of yellow dogs.
RINKER AND POLLOCK had watched the street when they got home, had seen the big cars trolling by, way too many of them, and talked about Pollock’s life. “So nobody knows where you’re at,” Rinker said.
“Not exactly where I’m at,” Pollock said. “My folks know I’m around somewhere. I think they know it’s St. Louis. I call them every once in a while.”
“No, of course not,” Pollock said. “I go out.”
“How far?”
Pollock thought for a minute, then said, “Up to the gas station, the minimart, you know.”
“Close by.”
Pollock thought again, and finally said, “Shoot. That’s it, isn’t it? They looked up all the phone calls to my mama, and they figured out that they all came from down here.”
They thought about the implications of that, and then Rinker said, “Ah, jeez, Patsy, I’m sorry. They never would have come looking if it weren’t for me.”
“We don’t know . . .”
“It’s Davenport. I’m gonna wax his ass one of these days. I swear to God.”
“The guy you danced with.”
“Yeah. He’s lucky.” Then she said, sadly, “You’re gonna have to run again. They’ll be going house to house.”
But Pollock shook her head and said, wryly, “Naw. I ain’t gonna run. I’m gonna turn myself in.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Rinker said, her eyebrows up.
“I can’t stand this shit anymore,” Pollock said, sinking into a couch. “I can’t stand my job, I can’t stand this place—I’d just as soon be in prison and get it over with.”
“You never been in prison, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’ve read about it, all kinds of things, at the library,” Pollock said. “I been thinking about it for three or four years now. I talked to my folks about it, and they’re for it. Did I ever show you my back?”
“Your back?”
“I kinda hide it. . . . I’m not a swimsuit girl.” Pollock stood up, turned around, and pulled her blouse up. Rinker didn’t know exactly what she was looking for, then noticed what seemed to be a large, paler birthmark on Pollock’s pale back.
“What the heck is that?”
“What does it look like?”
“It looks like . . . an iron,” Rinker said.
“Rick held me down on the bed one day and ironed me. And I got scars from a few more cuts and burns. Cigars, mostly. I think, after all these years, if I turned myself in . . . I kinda think I’d either get off, or they wouldn’t put me away too long. And I want to go home, Clara. I know you don’t like it down there, Springfield, and I don’t blame you, but I want to go home someday and see my folks and be able to walk down the street without worrying.”
RINKER TOOK A quick turn around the living room, intent now. “You know what? If you’re gonna do this, if you really want to, you gotta do it now, right away, and you’ve gotta turn me in.”
“What?”
“Yeah. That’ll alibi you. You tell them I showed up and insisted on staying, and you got scared and ran for it, and decided to turn yourself in. You could use that in a trial, good faith and all that. Do you know an attorney?”
Pollock nodded. “I got a name from the Memphis magazine—she’s a criminal attorney and she’s a big feminist deal down there. She’s got a reputation for defending women who were beat up, and did something about it.”
“Is she good?”
“The magazine says she is. She was like a winner in their mover-and-shaker issue.”
“Okay, then. This could work. This could work. But you’ve got to think about it harder. I’ve got money, we could get you out of here. Seattle, or somewhere really out of it.”
“Nah . . .” Pollock looked around. “I hate this place. Everything’s gray, nothing’s mine. I never felt like I could hang a picture, because Old Lady McCombs would get pissed about me hammering a nail in the wall. If I go somewhere else, it’d be the same thing all over again.”
Rinker looked at her for a long moment and then said, “Let’s think about it.”
“You think . . . ?”
“I think it’s reasonable,” Rinker said. “Tell me about this attorney.”
THEY TALKED THE rest of the afternoon, and then Pollock went out and brought groceries and a bottle of wine, and they had fish and white wine and a nice spinach salad. Halfway through, Pollock started to sob, and Rinker said, “You’re gonna be scared for a while.”
“Ah, jeez.”
“And it’s a risk. The papers say first-degree murder.”
“It’s no risk. I’m dying right here, one inch at a time.”
“Then let’s run with it.” Clara grinned at her, the first smile since she heard about Gene. “But not until tomorrow. I got a couple of things to do tonight. You could call the lawyer tomorrow morning and head down to Memphis in your car.”
“I’d like to talk to Mama first.”
“I shouldn’t go out until after dark—things’ll be safer on the street then,” Rinker said. “We can make the call from the gas station.”
THEY WENT OUT after dark, both wearing skirts and dark blouses, hoping to look like old women. They went downtown first, to the Heartland National Plaza. Rinker found a Federal Express station and took an envelope. She called a cab from a pay phone, then put the booby-trapped cell phone in the envelope with a note she’d written that afternoon, and walked out to the sidewalk and waited.
The cab showed in five minutes, and she gave the driver the envelope and twenty dollars, and took his card. As soon as the cab was out of sight, she waved Pollock over, and they wandered farther west, found a gas station with an outside phone, and Pollock called her mother and told her what she was planning.
Rinker watched the rearview mirror for fast-moving cars, and after two minutes, gave Pollock the hang up sign. Pollock talked for another thirty seconds, then hung up, and they pulled out.
“Davenport,” Pollock said.
“What?”
“Davenport was at my folks’ home. Mama put a bug in his ear, sounds like.” She smiled, and suddenly looked almost happy, Rinker thought. “She remembered his name because she always called a couch a couch, and Dad always called it a davenport.”
“Really,” Rinker said.
“So we’re going back to my place? I oughta pack a few things and maybe put some stuff in a box and send to Mama tomorrow. I could go to the post office before I leave for Memphis.”
“I could mail it for you. . . . Tell you what—let’s get out of town someplace, someplace over in Illinois, and get us an ice cream. One big last calorie blast before you take off.”
Pollock started crying again, and Rinker let her go. A minute later, Pollock wiped her nose on the shoulder of her blouse and said, “That’s sounds really good, Clara.”
“LUCAS WAS AT the hotel, reading an Esquire about fall fashion, and what anyone not a savage would be wearing in October, when Mallard called: “Showtime,” he said.
“She’s coming in?”
“No. She sent Levy a cell phone in a cab, in a FedEx envelope. He didn’t know what it was. He thought it was from his office, so he opened it, and there was a cell phone and a note. She says she wants to talk about money, and about some other things. Said she was afraid to call him at his office and his home phone was unlisted, and that the feds are probably watching him. She said not to tell anybody about the phone. He might not have, if he’d had a choice.”
“Does the note say when she’s gonna call?”
“Yeah. She said she’d call at ten—twenty minutes from now. The guys already tried out the cell phone, and it’s the one she’s been using to call you, so she’ll either be calling from a new cell phone, or she’ll be calling from the ground. We’re ready to go either way. We’ve got choppers to look for the cell phone, and we’ve got guys all the way along the major interstates—we should be able to get to any ground station in two minutes. We’re all over Soulard. So you’ve got a choice. You’ve got enough time to get to Levy’s, barely, or you could head down to Soulard.”
“Okay. Ah . . . are we gonna be able to set it up so we can all hear what she’s got to say?”
“We’re trying, but I don’t think there’s time. We can tap it, but we
won’t be able to hear it live. Listen, I gotta get going.”
“Wait, wait, one second. How many guys are down in Soulard?”
“Five teams.”
“Too many already. I’ll see you at Levy’s.”
LUCAS PARKED A BLOCK from Levy’s at eight minutes to ten, and hurried along. As he passed through the wrought-iron fence at the blocked end of the street, he looked to his left, into the dark, and said aloud, “Davenport.”
“Go.”