Mortal Prey

by John Sandford

  “So if we sent Sally in with another guy, the youngest-looking guy, and we got into this old lady’s house with some listening gear . . . we should be able to figure out if they’re in there.”

  “We could do that,” the team leader said. “And we could get a better layout from her.”

  “So let’s do it,” Mallard said.

  WITHOUT THE PROSPECT of instant action, the intensity faded a bit, the entry team guys peeled off their armor and flopped around the place, and ten minutes later, when Sally and a youthful, blond agent named Meers left for McCombs’s house, Lucas and the three St. Louis ex-cops congregated around Andreno’s car.

  “You guys get anything to eat?”

  “Meatball sandwiches up at Dirty Bill’s,” Andreno said.

  “Nasty, but tasty. You better stick close to the can,” Carter said. Then, to Lucas: “What do you think?”

  “Maybe,” Lucas said. “They wouldn’t be going out much in the daytime.”

  “What about these guys?” He nodded at the federal entry team.

  “Look like pros,” Lucas said. “The ones up in Minneapolis are good.”

  Bender nodded. “Everything I’ve heard about these guys is, they’re good.”

  “So we wait,” Lucas said.

  THEY WAITED AN hour and a bit more, the sun still bright in the sky, but angled now, and Lucas began to worry about the problems of darkness. Then Sally came back with a layout. “The old bat, you oughta see her,” she said to Mallard. “She’s got a bad mouth, she apparently hates people on sight, she smells—”

  “Are they there?” Mallard asked impatiently.

  “I don’t think so, not at the moment—but it’s her. It’s Hill,” Sally said. Sally was wearing an olive-drab shirt, made of a crinkly cotton fabric, without epaulets but with a military cut. “Tommy set up the listening gear and it’s working, and we put it right on the wall, but we didn’t hear anything. They could be asleep.”

  “How many rooms?

  “Kitchen, living room, bath, bedroom and a spare room, but it’s small, more like a closet. One hallway. You come into the living room and look straight back at the kitchen, down a hall, with the main bedroom on one side of the hall, and the bath and the small room opening off the other side. Thirty feet, maybe, from the front of the living room to the back wall of the kitchen. One door in and out, with a push-out fire window on the north side, in the main bedroom. There’s a window on the south side. . . .”

  They worked through it, still playing the possibilities. Go in hard, and if they weren’t there, wait. Or wait, ready to snap when they walked in.

  “I don’t want to wait,” Mallard said, finally. “There’re too many possible ways for things to go wrong, and we’ve been waiting . . .”

  But as he ran down his rationale for hitting McCombs’s house, a call came in for Malone, and after listening for a moment, she said, “What?” in a harsh, incredulous tone and everyone went quiet. The tone was bad news, and they waited.

  Malone, more puzzled than anything, Lucas thought, after a moment looked at Mallard and said, “The Memphis police just called. A woman who says she’s Patricia Hill just turned herself in on the old homicide warrant. She’s with her lawyer. She says she’s scared and she’s willing to give up Rinker. The Memphis cops want to know what to do.”

  “Holy cow,” Mallard said. He looked around, spotted Lucas. “You hear that?”

  “Yeah,” Lucas said. “I dunno. Does she say where Rinker is?”

  Malone was listening again, and when Lucas asked the question, she nodded and said, “She’s giving up the house. I mean, the house. McCombs’s house.”

  “She says Rinker’s there?”

  “She says she was this morning.”

  “Let’s go,” Mallard said. “Let’s hit it.”

  “Wait a minute,” Lucas said, then louder, “WAIT A FUCKIN’ MINUTE.”

  “What?” Mallard asked.

  “What if Rinker’s setting us up? She says she’s gonna start taking out FBI people. What if she sent Hill down there to pull us into the house without thinking about it? What if Rinker’s out there with one of those rifles?”

  Mallard pulled at a lip. Then: “Goddamnit.” He looked at the entry team leader. “We’re gonna go in, but we’re gonna get every cop in St. Louis down here first. You get set up in your vans across the street, and back behind the neighbor’s, where you can see the door and windows, but don’t get out yet. We’ll get the cops down here and jam up every street for six blocks around. If she’s waiting for us, there won’t be any way out.”

  THE COPS CAME in a wave, running with lights but no sirens. Agents in blue nylon jackets met them on the streets, routed them out to the perimeters. Nobody in or out without the cars being checked, two cops on each car check. The screen was set two blocks out from the McCombs house. A car with a Texas license plate was found at the edge of the perimeter, and cops started going door to door, looking for the owner. Another hour slipped away.

  “Ain’t gonna help if she’s on a suicide run,” Lucas told Malone. “She could be up in an attic somewhere, the people in the house already dead, looking at the front of McCombs’s house through a scope. She got a seven-millimeter mag off that peckerwood down in Tisdale. If she’s any good with it, if she’s got a shooting rest, she could poke a hole in a pie plate at three hundred yards.”

  Malone shook her head. “She won’t. She’s not on a suicide run. Not yet.”

  “You know that for sure.”

  “Yeah. She’s not done with Dallaglio or Ross. Her brother killing himself pissed her off, but her brother’s not the same as losing her fiancé and her baby. She doesn’t want to die yet.”

  “Hope you’re right. But something’s hinky here.”

  THE HOUSE SEEMED so lifeless that they had little hope that Rinker was inside. She could be asleep, Mallard argued. They might not hear her, he said, because the bedroom didn’t share a wall with anything they could reach with the sound equipment.

  With the sun almost on the horizon, and long dark shadows striping across the lawns, everything was finally set and Mallard gave a go to the entry team. The team’s vans moved, rolling back from their surveillance sites, and the team piled out. One man set up to watch the windows, while the others came in from the front of the house, crept under one window, reached the back door.

  Lucas watched, feeling the pressure. Then the door man moved, then another guy, then the door man stepped back with a monster wedge, normally used for splitting wood, ready to swing. Two guys on the sides of the house, coordinated by radio, pitched flash-bangs through the windows, and as they went off, sounding to Lucas like distant cannon fire, the guy with the monster wedge hit the doorknob. The team was inside in a second, and in five seconds, had secured the place.

  “Empty,” Mallard groaned. “Okay. Get some guys out in the garage, close the door. We’ll set up for surveillance.”

  WHEN THEY WERE SET ,and nothing was moving, Mallard, Malone, Lucas, and Andreno crossed the street and walked up to the house, Lucas nervously watching the windows in the houses up and down the street. Nothing happened. Inside, the surveillance team leader said, “Nothing.”

  They walked through the apartment, looked in the chest of drawers, looked at the walls, checked the medicine cabinet.

  “Bullshit,” Lucas said. “They cleared out before Hill ever went to Memphis. There’s nothing left here but junk. Nothing sentimental. She wasn’t running from Rinker, ’cause if she was, when did she have time to pack up?”

  “When were they here?”

  Lucas was still poking around, and came up with a newspaper. “This morning’s paper,” he said, showing them the Levy headline. “They brought it in this morning.”

  “And she might be hurt,” Andreno said. “Look at this.” They went to the bathroom, where Andreno pointed into a wastebasket. Inside, they could see a white shirt with a thumb-sized bloodstain. “Wonder what that came from?”

  “Not that much
blood,” Malone said. “We don’t even know it’s hers.”

  “Got a Cancún label—it’s from a Cancún hotel, and it’s a medium, which wouldn’t fit Patsy Hill,” Andreno said.

  “SO WHERE IS SHE ?”Mallard asked.

  “Running? I don’t know,” Lucas said. “Maybe she’s got a backup spot. But maybe we’ve just broken her out.”

  “Or maybe she’s coming back,” Malone said.

  Lucas said, “Nah.”

  Mallard: “We can’t take a chance. We’ll set up here all night. Pull the cops out, maybe she’ll come in.”

  “Better get a bigger net around Dallaglio and Ross,” Lucas said. “Better get some smart guys with them. After Levy . . . I don’t know. A car bomb?”

  “Don’t tell me a car bomb,” Mallard groaned. He looked around. “She was here this morning. This morning.”

  HONUS JOHNSON WAS working on a chest of drawers in American cherry. A Honus Johnson chest of drawers brought in four thousand dollars in a boutique furniture shop in Boston; they looked so much like the old ones.

  In his woodworking, Johnson tended to use British tools, like his miniature Toolman hand planes, which were simply exquisite. In his sadistic pursuits, he preferred Craftsman tools from Sears. He rejected electrical equipment, because it lacked subtlety—though he always had a soldering iron handy. He’d really found his metier in hammers, pliers, and handsaws. He’d once cut off a man’s foot with a hacksaw, to make a business point for his employer.

  His personal inclinations pretty much ruled out any deep friendships. Even people who knew him well, and used his services, were likely to wince when they saw him coming, though he looked harmless enough: a pinkish, white-haired gentleman in his late forties or early fifties, with square, capable hands and a thin, oval face.

  He wore khaki pants and striped long-sleeved shirts and European-look square-toed brown shoes, and tended to suck on his teeth, as though he was perplexed. He also had a tendency to flatulence, which resulted in some of John Ross’s associates referring to him as Stinky—but only very privately. He’d worked for Ross for two dozen years, a weapon much like Rinker.

  RINKER SPENT THE morning on the far west edge of the metro area, at the Spirit of St. Louis Airport, looking around, wandering among the industrial and office buildings. Later that day, now dressed as the Dark Woman, she spent an enjoyable couple of hours at the Missouri Botanical Gardens. The Gardens had an environmental dome called the Climatron, an enclosed jungle that offered much in the way of concealment and ambush possibilities. She looked at it closely for a long time.

  WHEN SHE ARRIVED at Johnson’s house, a little after four o’clock in the afternoon, he was working in his backyard woodshop, power-planing cherry planks for the chest of drawers. Johnson really had no fear of retaliation for his past acts of cruelty, simply because he was never the principal in the act. Like his favorite chisels and saws, he was only a tool, if an exquisite one. In all the years he’d worked for Ross, there’d been no comebacks.

  And he was careful: Almost nobody knew where he lived.

  Rinker knew, but Johnson didn’t know that she did. She’d made it her business to find out when she was still working for Ross. If she’d ever gotten on the wrong side of Ross, she’d thought years ago, she might want to take care of Ross’s other major weapon before he had a chance to take care of her.

  She’d had a hard time finding him. Johnson was not in the phone books, nor was he in any of the records that Ross kept in the warehouse. He was paid off the books, like Rinker was, and she saw him so rarely that there was no real possibility of following him home.

  She’d looked in the county tax statements, but he wasn’t there. She’d once managed to get his auto license number, but then found out that if she tracked the car through the state, she had to make a formal request for the information and that Johnson would be notified. No good. One of the girls at the warehouse once mentioned that she’d had to send some stuff to him, for Ross, but when Rinker made some careful inquiries, she found that the stuff was sent to a downtown post office box.

  She’d eventually found Johnson’s house purely through luck. Johnson had built elaborate teak plant benches for John Ross, for Ross’s orchids, and when the benches were delivered, she’d been at Ross’s house. The two guys who drove the delivery truck had an invoice that showed both the pickup and delivery addresses. She took the address back to the courthouse and looked it up in the tax and plat records—Johnson was there all right, but his house was listed under “Estate of Estelle Johnson.”

  SHE PARKED IN the street and walked up the driveway. From the driveway, she could hear the planer screaming inside the workshop. She went past the garage, vaulted a chain-link fence—moving fast now, slipping the silenced Beretta from under her shirt—to the open side door of the workshop. As she came up to the door she happened to glance upward, and saw a motion detector tucked in the corner, and she stopped, peeked around the door frame. Johnson was looking right at her, a silent-alarm strobe light bouncing off his protective glasses, and he was moving to his right, quickly. She stepped through the door, following the muzzle of her pistol. He froze when he saw her, his hands empty. She glanced toward the wall that he’d been moving to: A shotgun leaned against a cabinet.

  What had Jaime told her, at the ranch, about the need for handguns?

  “The rifle will be leaning against a tree, and that’s when they will come.”

  SHE SMILED ,THINKING about it, and Johnson flinched. He took a step back and tried a placating smile. “Hello, Clara, I . . .”

  No point in conversation. Rinker shot him in the nose, and he went down, twisting away, his face striking the edge of the saw table. He landed faceup in a pile of shavings. She looked at him for a moment, on the floor, judged him dead, but shot him again, carefully, between the eyes. The planer was so loud that she heard no hint of the shot, or of the gun’s cycling action.

  He was dead for sure now. The planer was still screaming, the plank beginning to buck. Rinker couldn’t see a switch, so she pulled the plug, and the machine wound down like a depowered airplane engine.

  She couldn’t leave Johnson on the floor, or even in the workshop, she decided. The yard was fenced, but it wasn’t the best neighborhood, and if somebody broke in, he might be found.

  She looked around for a moment, then grabbed him by the collar and dragged him to a lowboy he’d used for hauling lumber. She pushed a stack of planks onto the floor—thought better of it, in case somebody looked in, and took a minute to stack them neatly near the wall—then loaded his body onto the lowboy and covered it with four transparent bags full of wood shavings and sawdust.

  She pushed the whole load out the door, up the concrete walk to the back of the garage, then into the garage, past an E-Class Mercedes-Benz, and through a breezeway to the house. She couldn’t actually get the lowboy into the house, because of a step. She left the body and the cart in the breezeway and let the muzzle of the Beretta lead her through the house. She was, she found, the only living thing in it.

  The house was neatly kept, but had no more personality than a motel room—a few woodworking magazines, some reference works, a television set with an incongruous Nintendo console sitting on the floor next to it.

  She checked it all out, then hauled Johnson’s body into the house and rolled it down the basement stairs. She first thought to leave it there, at the foot of the stairs, but then noticed a chest-style freezer against the wall, and opened it. It was half-full of Healthy Choice microwave dinners, and bags of frozen peas and corn.

  She took a bunch of the dinners and some of the corn, then managed to tug and pull the body around until she could boost it into the freezer. Johnson landed facedown, and she had to twist his legs to get him to fit inside. She slammed the lid.

  With a few paper towels to wipe up the odd blood smear, she thought, everything would be as nice and tidy as Honus Johnson used to be.

  And she had a new phone, a new house, and a new car.
>
  Not bad for twenty minutes’ work.

  Though, she admitted to herself, moving the body had given her the willies. As did Johnson’s bed. She was beat from the day, needed some sleep, but couldn’t sleep with the smell of him, and his body still cooling in the freezer. She found clean sheets in a linen closet, sheets that smelled only of detergent, and crashed on the couch.

  Long day coming . . .

  18

  THEY WOUND UP SITTING IN ONE OF THE FBI rental trucks, a six-seater Suburban, eating Snickers and Milky Ways, drinking Cokes and waiting for anything on the perimeter, any sign that Rinker was coming in. They got nothing except distended bladders, and strange looks in a Shell station when they repeatedly tramped through to the rest rooms. Andreno gave up at nine o’clock and took off. At ten-thirty, Mallard was willing to admit that Rinker had flown.