Mortal Prey

by John Sandford

  “We go back to the four main guys,” Mallard said, in frustration. “Ross must be a target—she worked for him for too long. He must be her original connection. Dallaglio is necessary because of Dichter. If she goes after one, she’ll go after the other. Giancati used her at least four or five times—one of her best customers. Ferignetti is marginal, but we can’t take a chance.”

  “If you’re gonna talk to them, I want to be there,” Lucas said.

  “You’re invited,” Mallard said. He looked out at the darkness across the brewery’s parking lot. “We’ll make the rounds tomorrow morning.”

  “Don’t worry so much, Louis,” Malone said. She’d gotten into a sack of Cheese Doodles, and the back of the truck was suffused with the smell of cheddar. “We’ll get her. We just missed her tonight. We’re closing in.”

  “You’re sure.”

  “Yeah, I am,” Malone said. “And I can’t wait. Locking her up is gonna feel so good.”

  “It’s gonna be hard taking her alive,” Lucas said. “I think she’ll fight.”

  “I’ll take that,” Malone said. And after a moment of silence: “I think I’ve got a pound of yellow cheese goop stuck to my teeth.”

  LUCAS LAY IN bed that night, listening to the trains going by along the waterfront. There was no good reason for it, but the sound of distant trains and distant truck traffic, trucks downshifting to climb a hill, left him feeling moody. People going places, doing things, while he was here in bed, alone, staring at the ceiling. He’d talked to Weather, and she was feeling fine, although beginning to wonder how much longer he’d be in St. Louis.

  “I’d just like to see you,” she said. “I’m getting a little lonesome.”

  “I’d like to see you, too. I’ll give this a couple more days, and then if there’s nothing definite happening, I’ll run up for a day or two.”

  “Fly?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Brave of you.”

  “How’s the kid?”

  “Strong little thing. I think he or she is gonna be a soccer player.”

  “Not if I have anything to do with it,” Lucas said. “I’ve already cut down a hockey stick.”

  “Still thinking about an ultrasound . . .”

  “C’mon . . . that’s the easy way out.”

  “You’ve already got a daughter.”

  “Two daughters would be wonderful. A son would be excellent. I really don’t care. I just pray that the kid’s healthy.”

  “Maybe come up for a day or two . . . at the end of the week?”

  “Over the weekend, if nothing’s happening. A guy down here told me about a weird way to induce labor. I’ll show it to you when I come up.”

  “It’s too early, Lucas.”

  “It doesn’t always induce labor. It has other uses. . . .”

  AFTER HE RANG OFF ,he wondered what Rinker was doing. She was almost certainly holed up somewhere, alone, or with a scared friend like Hill, who probably didn’t want her around, and might even betray her, given the chance. That must be really lonely. The thought gave him no comfort, and the night went slowly, patches of sleep mixed with weary semiconsciousness.

  He hoped, as he looked at the bedside clock at five in the morning, that they took Rinker clean. Either grabbed her or killed her, but ended it. That the FBI ended it. That he didn’t have to. . . .

  WHEN LUCAS ARRIVED at the FBI offices in the morning, still sleepy, Mallard gave him a cup of good coffee and said, “Hill gave up Rinker’s car and license tag. California plates. We’re running them now, and every cop in St. Louis is looking for them.”

  “Are you going to Memphis? To talk to Hill?”

  “I thought about it, but I decided to stick here. . . . You ever hear of a lawyer named Ann Diaz? In Memphis?”

  “No. Should I?”

  “She’s representing Hill. I got a call from the Memphis guy this morning—he talked to Hill last night, with Diaz present. Hill said that Rinker showed up on her doorstep, threatened to kill her if she thought about going to the police, and threatened to turn her in if she didn’t stay straight. . . . Hill says she was so scared that she froze for a couple of days, and then ran for it.”

  “Did your guy ask her how she managed to pack up everything in the place?”

  “Yeah. She said that Rinker went out every day—and that she pretended that she was going to work, watched until Rinker left, then ran back, threw everything in her car, and took off. She said she packed it out of the car and mailed it to her folks, and then headed down to Memphis. She says if we don’t get Rinker, Rinker will kill her.”

  “It’s bullshit, Louis.”

  “I think so . . . but the problem is Diaz. She’s pretty well known, she’s got some clout in D.C. , connections with all kinds of feminist groups. She could make Hill a cause. And she’s tough. She won’t let Hill give us anything that’s not scripted.”

  “What’re you saying?”

  “Hill’s gonna be a dry hole.”

  Lucas shrugged. “That’s the way things work now. Fifty years ago, you could have taken her down the basement with a couple of steel fishing poles, and beaten the shit out of her, and after she confessed, you could’ve hanged her on Wednesday. Now it’s just a bunch of sissies whining about civil rights.”

  “Thanks,” Mallard said. “I enjoy being mocked before lunch.”

  Lucas raised his coffee cup in a semiserious toast. “Rinker was a step ahead of us, Louis. But Malone’s right. It’s only a half-step now. We would have found her yesterday. If she hadn’t decided to book, we would have had her.”

  “You think she spotted us?”

  “Yeah. Maybe when we were going around to the houses, or maybe she spotted the guys running in after the phone calls. But we were close.”

  “All right. So let’s go talk to these assholes.”

  “I want to talk to you about that. About the approach. About tactics.”

  • • •

  THE MEETINGS BETWEEN Mallard and Malone for the FBI on one side, and the four hoods on the other side, were like the Israelis and the Palestinians working on a deal, Lucas thought—everybody smiling and lying like motherfuckers, but still, messages were sent and received, both ways. Mallard told all four of them flatly that the FBI had tried to protect Richter and Levy, and had failed, and that they believed Rinker would be back.

  “She’s had a lot of time to think about her approach. I’m not sure we can stop her without your help. Or even with your help,” he told them.

  Giancati and Ferignetti denied having anything to do with Rinker—Ferignetti said he’d never met her, didn’t know Ross except to nod to him, and said he planned to carry on with business as usual. He didn’t have bodyguards because he didn’t need them.

  Giancati, on the other hand, was leaving for England.

  “You seem to think that there’s some reason she’d be after me, but I don’t think so,” he said. He was a round, bald man, but his fat was tough fat, the kind of fat that you’d wear yourself out hitting on. He looked like he should smell of stubby cigars, but instead smelled of vanilla. “All my business is on the up-and-up, and always has been. I mean, over the years, I suppose, I’m gonna bump into some of these supposed hoodlums in my business. . . .”

  Blah blah blah,Lucas thought, listening to him. A wall of bland unresponsiveness. But the kicker was, Giancati was getting out of town with his wife, and nobody else knew, he said, and nobody would know unless the FBI called up Rinker and told her.

  “If she wants me, and can find me over there, then God bless her, because half the time, I can’t even find myself when I’m there.”

  “You go there often?” Malone asked.

  “All the time. My wife’s parents came from Newcastle, and my mother came from Dover and went to school in Calais. The east country is my favorite place in the world. . . .”

  Blah blah blah . . .

  DALLAGLIO LOOKED LIKE a book editor or an accountant—tall, thin, harried, quizzical, wi
th a caterpillarlike mustache on his upper lip. He did not look like a man who may have contracted a dozen hits. His wife, on the other hand, was short, rounded, and loud, and looked capable of doing any amount of killing. They had three armed bodyguards in the house: One of them, a former FBI agent, had known of Mallard, and said so. Mallard asked him, “You think you can cover him?”

  “Nobody will get inside of twenty feet, but if Rinker has rifles . . . what can we do? We’ve told Mr. Dallaglio that.”

  DALLAGLIO ’S HOUSE WAS a neo-Baroque prairie-style gothic, Charles Addams out of Frank Lloyd Wright, with decoration chosen equally from the Renaissance and Miami Beach. He led them through the carved walnut double front doors, through a highly rugged interior to an indoor patio around a lap pool, offered them Cokes from a pool-side refrigerator, and sat everybody down on plastic gliders. “I have no idea why she killed Nanny. He was a good man—looked after his family,” Dallaglio said. “If he was involved in any wrongdoing, I wouldn’t know about it—our relationship was strictly business.”

  But under the blah-blah-blah he was panicked, and so was his wife. His wife, Jesse, said, “We only met her because Nanny was involved in a couple of business relationships with John Ross, and she worked for John. And she was a friend of John’s wife, going back a while, when they both worked at his liquor warehouse. She was like a bookkeeper, but she was really outgoing, and that’s how we knew her. We were in Wichita once, after she quit working for John, and we went to her bar. It really wasn’t our style, but she seemed nice. That’s all we knew about her.”

  “Are you friends with John Ross?” Mallard asked.

  “Well, yeah. Sure. We do business with him all the time. He’s in trucking—we need his trucks, and we need stuff delivered on time. That’s no big secret. He’s a good guy. We go out with them, out to dinner, or maybe he has tickets to a concert or some shit like that, and they invite us. He was really better friends with Nanny, but we know him.”

  The Dallaglios and Mallard and Malone went back and forth, and when they were finished, and Mallard had hinted that any help wouldn’t lead to further questions—that is, if Dallaglio had some kind of intelligence connection with the local underground, and if they found her and turned her in, there’d be no questions asked—they got up to leave. As they moved toward the door, Lucas said, “Could I talk to you guys for a minute? I mean . . .” He looked at Mallard and Malone, and grinned, as they’d agreed. “. . . without the FBI?”

  “Lucas . . . ,” Mallard said, as though reluctant. They’d worked it through on the way to the house. To Dallaglio: “Lucas has his own ways of working. We’re not bound by anything he says.”

  “Just a minute to talk,” Lucas said.

  The Dallaglios agreed, and Mallard and Malone went outside, Mallard shaking his head. When the door closed behind them, Lucas said, “Listen: I’m just a fuckin’ cop, okay? I’ve got no jurisdiction here, my boss just loaned me to the FBI because I got lucky once before, breaking Clara loose. If you talk to me, there’s no way anybody could take it to court.” He looked directly at Dallaglio. “And I’m telling you, no bullshit, I talked to a friend of Clara, and she’s gonna kill your ass. She’s gonna kill you, if we don’t get her. And get her now. If we scare her off, she’ll just go sit down in South America somewhere, and wait six months, until everybody relaxes, and then she’s gonna come kill you. She knows you set her up down in Mexico, that you agreed to try to kill her—”

  Dallaglio put up a finger. “That’s not true.”

  Lucas continued. “But she knows you did. What she knows might not be the truth, but she thinks it is. The reality of it doesn’t matter, because she’s gonna kill you because of it. Can’t stop her, can’t talk her out of it. She lost her baby. This is a woman who hardly had any friends that we can find, who was abused from the time she was a child, and then got turned into some kind of crazy robot killer, and you, she knows, killed the only man who ever loved her for herself, who was gonna marry her, and her baby.”

  “Well, what the fuck are we supposed to do about it?” Jesse Dallaglio asked angrily. “You can’t stop her—we’ve got all these expensive bodyguards, and you can see they’re worried. I’ve got daughters. So you tell me, Mr. Chief, what the fuck are we supposed to do?”

  “You can hide, is one thing,” Lucas said. “Mr. Giancati’s on her list, and he and his wife are leaving town. But if we don’t get her . . . she can always wait longer than we can.”

  Jesse Dallaglio said, “So we can’t hide forever, you’re saying. Is this leading up to something, or is it all just bullshit?”

  “What I’m saying is, if you know anything, tell me. I’m not gonna play games with you like the FBI. They want to get Clara, but they also see this as a chance to fuck up a whole bunch of you guys. That’s not my problem: I got my own assholes up in Minneapolis to worry about. I just want to get Clara. That’s all I want. Give me a name, somebody I can talk to. Give me an old hangout. Give me anything.”

  Dallaglio walked away, slumped into a chair. “I’ll tell you, everybody acts like I’m some hoodlum or criminal, but I’m just trying to run a chain store. Just business. But Rinker . . .” He paused, cocked his head, thought for a moment, and then said, “Let me put it this way. If somebody was a hoodlum and wanted to hire Clara to do whatever, he wouldn’t hang around with her. He wouldn’t want anybody to even know that they’d talked. Maybe they wouldn’t talk, so the cops couldn’t draw any lines. So that if Rinker was picked up, she couldn’t say, ‘Well, I met with Nanny Dichter at the Balloon Ballroom on October 31, during the Halloween dance, and we made the deal.’ So she couldn’t say shit about who, what, where, and when. You see what I mean?”

  “Maybe,” Lucas said.

  “What I mean,” Dallaglio said, “is that this guy might not know shit about Clara Rinker. Not really.”

  “Too bad for that guy,” Lucas said.

  Jesse Dallaglio asked, “Where is Giancati going? Back to England?”

  Lucas shrugged. “He just said he was leaving.”

  She chewed her lip. “Maybe that’s the thing to do.” She looked at her husband. “You like the Old Country. We could go for a couple of months.”

  “But if they don’t catch her,” Dallaglio said, “it’s like he says . . . she can wait.”

  “But maybe they do catch her,” Jesse Dallaglio said. “I’d hate for you or me or the girls to be the last ones killed before they got her.”

  ON THAT NOTE ,with nothing more developing, Lucas said goodbye. Outside, Mallard said, “What?”

  “Not much. Treena Ross may have known Clara. Might have been a friend.”

  Malone said, “Huh.”

  “Huh, what?” Lucas asked.

  “Huh, nothing. I don’t see where that goes. We already knew that John Ross was a friend of Rinker’s. I’m not surprised that his wife knew her, I guess.”

  “Well, it’s what I got,” Lucas said.

  ROSS WAS WAITING for them behind his big desk. He had a half-dozen orchids this time, including one that smelled something like cinnamon. He wanted to talk about Levy. “I knew the guy, sure—but what’s this about telephones? Clara’s no electronics wizard. Where’d she think that up?”

  Mallard shook his head. “We were hoping you might be able to think of something.”

  Ross exhaled in exasperation. “I told you, I never knew about her. I didn’t know she was a killer, for Christ’s sake. I’m in some tough businesses, but we don’t kill people. It’s easier just to buy them out. And legal.”

  “Sounds like you’re a little worried,” Lucas said, letting the amusement show.

  “Yeah, well. Guns is one thing. Now I’m thinking, what if a rocket comes flying through the window? A phone bomb—that sounds like something the CIA would do.”

  HE WAS SURPRISED to hear that the Giancatis were thinking of running.

  “Off to merry old England again, huh? Home of the fruits and the nuts.” He reached out and took a peppermint candy fro
m a crystal bowl, unwrapped it, and popped it into his mouth.

  “And maybe the Dallaglios,” Malone added. “They may go back to the Old Country, whatever country that is.”

  “You do what you gotta do,” Ross said.

  Eventually, Mallard and Malone got tired of being stonewalled, and after another warning, got up to leave. Lucas went into this let’s-talk routine; Mallard shook his head and went out the door.

  “So, what?” Ross asked.

  “Like Mallard said, I’m not FBI. I’m a Minneapolis cop. I have no jurisdiction. . . .” He went through the rest of it, feeling like a third-grader reciting to a skeptical teacher.