John Sandford - Mortal Prey

"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 fiancй 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 Cancun label-it's from a Cancun 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.