John Sandford - Mortal Prey

"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 from 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.

Ross said, "I can appreciate the fact that you get off on hunting Clara, and I hope you get her, but there's not much more I can do to help. I told you that the last time. There are still some people at the warehouse who knew her, but I knew her as well as anyone. I could tell you where her old apartment used to be, I could tell you where she'd go for drinks, but you gotta remember-that was all before Wichita. This was years ago, and she only worked in the warehouse a couple, three years."

"Did your wife know her?"

"Treena? Yeah, sure. Treena worked in the warehouse along with Rinker."

"Could she tell me anything?"

Ross snorted. "She can barely remember her middle name, Mr. Davenport. She's basically a great set of tits and a terrific ass being run by a brain the size of a cashew. I can't imagine that she could give you anything useful on Clara Rinker. But you're welcome to ask her. She's around here someplace."