John Sandford - Mortal Prey

"We found out that they might run."

"We knew that anyway," Lucas said.

"My big worry is that Rinker might run," Malone said, looking out the window. "We need to get her now."

"She's not going anywhere," Lucas said. "She's too pissed about her brother. She hasn't done anything about it, but she will before she leaves." He looked at Mallard. "You guys need better personal security. You need to talk to the AIC and tell him to warn all his people. Don't answer the door to any strange women. You gotta take it more seriously."

"We've had experience with this, with these kinds of threats," Mallard said. "We're taking them seriously, but you gotta look at it from her angle, too. The FBI is pretty… frightening. We look pretty goddamn tough to a crook."

"I don't think she's scared," Lucas said. "I don't think she gives a shit about the FBI, or how tough you are."

Rinker had a bad night. She was comfortable enough, sleeping on couch pillows, wrapped in clean sheets, but the body in the basement freezer still gave her the creeps, and she thought several times that the basement door was creaking open. She found herself staring through the dark, looking for shapes in the living room, her hand near the Beretta on the floor beside her. Not that the gun would help with a ghost.

In the very darkest pit of the night, she sat up. She'd had something close to a dream, and in the dream came an idea. She crawled over to a lamp, groped up its stem, turned it on, then went out to the kitchen and dug up a yellow pages. She found what she was looking for under "Investigations." There were several listings for private detectives specializing in "spousal inquiries"-had to be divorce work-and two of them had women's names attached.

She left the kitchen light on, turned the lamp off, and went back to her couch pillows to think about it. Dream about it. And listen for noises from the basement.

SHE WAS OUT of the house by ten o'clock, as the Dark Woman, with dark brown eyebrows and dark brown hair. She wore a loose, green, long-sleeved cotton shirt to cover her arms, the fine blond hair and too-fair skin. She'd moved her own car into Honus Johnson's garage, and took his Mercedes.

She scouted Nina Bennett's address and found that it was a house with a business sign on it, and a black cat sitting in the porch window. A home office for a not-very-prosperous business, Rinker thought.

Could work, she thought. She rolled away from Bennett's and went looking for a place to meet. Someplace downtown. She found it at the Happy Dragon, a dark, upscale Chinese place that seemed to be designed for St. Louis's lunchtime assignations, with shoulder-high booths and bad sight-lines.

She stopped at Union Station, found a phone and called Bennett, who picked up on the second ring. "Bennett Legal Services."

Rinker tried to sound tentative. "I saw your ad in the phone book. Do you check on husbands? I mean, watch them?"

"We do spousal surveillance, yes. We usually require a reference from an attorney." The "usually" was not stressed; was made to sound inviting.

"Oh." Disappointment. Hesitation. "I can't hire an attorney. Not yet. I don't want a divorce, I don't want to make him angry. I just want to find out."

"Ma'am, if we're going to court…"

"I wouldn't want that," Rinker said quickly. "I just want to… know."

"Maybe you should come by. We can talk."

"Oh… I don't… Please wait a minute." Rinker clapped her hand over the mouthpiece, waited for what she thought might be a minute, then came back on. "Could you talk this afternoon? I'm very busy, I'm getting ready to fly down to Miami this evening."

"Yes, I could talk to you this afternoon," Bennett offered.

"Could you come here? Downtown?"

"Yes, I could."

"Oh, that's great. There's a place down the block, the Happy Dragon, if you could meet me there. Wait a minute, let me look at my calendar." She clapped her hand over the mouthpiece again, waited a few seconds, then said, "Three o'clock?"

"That'd be fine. The Happy Dragon at three, Mrs…?"

"Dallaglio," Rinker said. "Jesse Dallaglio."

Lucas had spent most of the day at FBI headquarters, going through paper-all the paper that the feds had put together-looking for anything that might indicate whom Rinker might talk to, anything about the way she preferred to live. Andreno called to say that he'd stopped by John Sellos's bar and apartment, and Sellos was still missing. "He's not dead. The bartender got a call from him last night, said he sounded really worried about what was happening to the place. He told the bartender that he was still traveling and playing golf, but wouldn't say where he was."

"He called at the bar?"

"On the bar's public phone, right around nine o'clock."

"We'll see where that goes back to," Lucas said. "Though I'm not sure what he could tell us." He gave a note to Sally Epaulets, and asked her to find out where the call had come from. Twenty minutes later, she told him that it had come from a gas station near Nashville.

"Does that help?" she asked.

"No."

"Don't have to be snippy about it."

Malone had been in and out all afternoon. She was driving the local cops to find Rinker's car, while Mallard had disappeared entirely. When Lucas asked, Sally told him that Mallard was teleconferencing with Washington.

"All of it?"

"Just the FBI part," she said.

A few minutes later, an agent named Leen stopped by and said that the explosive that had killed Levy had been tagged, and the tags indicated that it was a commercial-grade explosive generally used in quarries, and most of it was sold in New England.

That rang no bells with anyone, and Lucas went back to the paper.

Malone came back and asked, "Why are you reading all that paper again?"

"I'm trying to figure out what's going on in Rinker's head, and I can't. She's got all this carefully planned, right? The Dichter thing, then the cell phone. Is there some reason for the order that she's taking them in? Why didn't she take Ross first? Even Ross thinks he'd probably be the toughest nut to crack, but if she'd done him first, she could have gotten him."

Malone shook her head. "It is possible to plan a thing and then ride the breaks. Maybe that's what she's doing."

"I'll tell you what, though," Lucas said. "Ross ain't panicking. He's got a plan. My feeling is that she's gonna go after one of the other guys before she tries for him-I think Ferignetti may be right, that she's got no interest in him. Give him that. Giancati is taking himself out of it, maybe beyond her reach. So-I think we ought to look really hard at Paul Dallaglio."

"Dallaglio may take himself out of it, too, if he goes back to the Old Country, wherever that may be."

"Then we watch Ross, and hope she doesn't take a sabbatical and come back for them next year."

At six o 'clock, he left the FBI building and met Andreno, Loftus, Bender, and Carter at Andy's Bar. They ate cheeseburgers and curly fries and onion rings and batter-dipped mushrooms, and Lucas said, "Guys, we almost got her, but we didn't. Does anybody have any idea of a move we could make? We gotta make some kind of move."

"I keep thinking about the car," Carter said. "If the car was on the street, locally, we'd have her by now. I know for a fact that guys are driving up and down every street in the whole metro area looking for the car, and they're coming up dry. The thing is… maybe she took off."

"The feds have put the make and tag number out all over the Midwest and South, and she can't have outrun that," Lucas said. "If she did, there's nothing we can do about it. But I don't think she's gone. I just don't know how to put my hands on her."

"Comes back to her friends," Andreno said. "Somebody's hiding her. Somebody's helping her. If we can put our hands on that guy…"