John Sandford - Mortal Prey

"Oh, my God, Lucas. Are you all right?"

"I'm fine. I mean, I'm fucked up, but I'm not hurt. When I left, they were talking about getting somebody to do the formal identification and sign-off, and I just cleared out of there. I couldn't stand to go look at her. Jesus, we walked out of here a couple of hours ago. We went down the elevator together, and she was sure we had Rinker in a box."

"Maybe you ought to come home."

"Can't now. I'm going to get her."

"Unless she gets you."

"She's not mad enough at me. She wouldn't have gone after Malone if Malone hadn't been the one talking about her brother, in the paper."

"You don't know that for sure. She might've gone over the edge."

"I gotta give it some more time. But I'm feeling really… bummed."

"But not medically bummed."

He knew what she meant. A little problem with clinical depression. "Not like that."

"Then I'd say you're pretty healthy. You should be bummed when a friend is killed. Just wait until Rinker calls. Track her down. Get her."

"I'm going to," he said. "Sooner or later."

Rinker called a half hour later. The cell phone rang, and he let it ring once more, then picked it up.

"Yes."

"I'm all done with the FBI," Rinker said. Her whiskey voice sounded blue, depressed.

"Too late for you, Clara," Lucas said. "They'll never quit now. The guy that gets you is gonna be a hero, and his career will be made for life. People are going to make you into their hobby."

"Well, good luck to them," Rinker said. "This never would have happened if they hadn't killed my brother."

"Nobody wanted your brother to die. Malone took a lot of shit after it happened. There was gonna be an inquiry."

"Yeah, right, a cop inquiry. Were they planning to raise him up, like Lazarus?"

"No, but…"

"So what you're saying is that a memo would get written."

"Nobody wanted him to die. Nobody deliberately pulled a trigger on him."

"Might as well have. I told you myself, he wasn't right." Lucas couldn't think of anything to say, and after a moment of silence, Rinker continued. "I'm thinking about getting out. You think they would chase me to Chile?"

"I think they'd chase you to fuckin' Mongolia. And I'll tell you what, if I were you… when they catch me, I wouldn't give up. I'd put a gun in my mouth. They'll pen you up for ten years in a concrete box the size of a phone booth, and then they'll stick a needle in your arm and kill you. Better to go quick."

"I don't suppose you're thinking of going home."

"No. I'll be here as long as you are."

"My problem with you is, you're lucky." Again, a moment of silence. Then: "This fiancйe of yours, is she pretty good-looking?"

"Pretty good," Lucas said. "We're gonna do the whole thing, except not a Catholic wedding because she'll be a little heavy by then, and besides, she doesn't care for the Church. But we got a wild-hair Episcopalian place, which is almost like Catholic, and we're gonna tie the knot up with a priest and flower girls and the whole thing."

"That was gonna be me, a few months ago."

"If you'd just stuck with killing the Mafia assholes, you would have pissed off the FBI, but you still could have pulled a disappearing act and found a guy somewhere and still had the kid. Not now. That's all gone."

"I don't want to talk to you anymore," Rinker said. "You're being a jerk."

"A good friend of mine was killed," Lucas said. "I'm gonna get you for it. Me and my good luck."

"Yeah, don't press it," Rinker said. She laughed, abruptly, a little crazily, and said, "I'm gone. I guess you're tracking this call. Tell your friends that the next sound they hear is the telephone hitting the highway."

He heard it hit. And, in a bizarre tribute to Finnish technology, the phone neither broke nor turned off, and Lucas could hear trucks rushing by.

Wherever it was; wherever she was.

They didn 't get her. They came close, one of the chopper pilots said. Their tracking gear put them on her; they were only a half-mile out when she tossed the phone out the window. But that was five thousand cars, rolling along the highway, getting off and on. A lot of What ifs and If I'd justs. A highway patrol cop was vectored into the area within five minutes of the first phone ring, but had no idea what he should be looking for. Another cop spotted the phone under a guardrail, picked it up, said, "Hello?" and then turned it off.

The next morning, Lucas and the FBI Special Studies Group, minus Mallard, listened to the tape of the phone conversation twenty times, picking it apart word by word. When she said she was gone, did she mean gone as in Gone to Paraguay? Or did she just mean that she was gone from the conversation? Why did she throw the phone out the window? She could have used it again. Was she cutting them off? Was she done talking to anyone? Had she just been pissed off? What?

During the discussion, it seemed that Sally Epaulets-Bryce was her real last name-stepped into a coordinating role, and the rest of the FBI group accepted that, at least until Mallard or somebody else in authority showed up.

Lucas spent the morning reading through the FBI paper, reading everything, until he was sick of it. Somewhere, in that mass of names and numbers, Rinker was hiding; but he couldn't find her.

Was she gone?

Andreno called at eleven, and they agreed to meet at Andy's for lunch. Lucas arrived a little after noon. Loftus was there, and they walked to the back and ordered cheeseburgers and Andreno said, "Jesus Christ. I couldn't believe it. I got up late and turned on the TV and that's all they were talking about. It was like when Reagan got shot or something. So bizarre. Like something in a novel."

"She called me, Clara did," Lucas said. He told them about the call, and then about the shooting itself, and they were both shaking their heads.

"Got more than one screw loose, that girl," Loftus said.

"She's toast," Andreno said. "She better stay in the States. If she goes to Bolivia, the feds'll find her, talk to one of their little helpers down there, and they'll put her in a basement with an electric outlet and connect some wires to her tits and there won't be any habeas fuckin' corpus."

Lucas asked them about the botanical gardens. "John Ross is going over there for an orchestra fundraiser."

"Probably not a good idea. Lots of trees and bushes," Loftus said. "Hedges and shit."

"It's about two minutes from here," Andreno said. "We could drive over."

Lucas nodded. "It's not like I'm doing anything else."

The gardens, Lucas thought, were pretty neat. If Minneapolis had an arboretum that close to downtown, he'd probably go once a week just to look at the flowers.

To get into the place, a visitor would park in a blacktopped parking lot, walk into a ticket desk on the bottom level of a two-story building, then climb a set of stairs and walk out the back into the gardens. That was ideal from a security point of view. Anybody coming in had to climb the stairs, or take an elevator, which made handy choke-points.

"Or she could come over the fence. The place is huge, and there are trees all the way around," Andreno said.

"Maybe get some guys looking down the fence line?"

"If you had enough of them. It's pretty big. It's like trying to protect a farm. Or a forest."

Andreno ran into a food-service supervisor that he knew, and asked about the chamber orchestra event. The food guy pointed them at the Rose Garden, and they went that way. The Rose Garden was laid out in a square, surrounded by a hedge, with a long rectangular building at the entrance and a reflecting pool at the exit. Lucas strolled up and down between the flowers, looking for shooting lanes, and decided that as long as Ross stayed inside the garden, the hedge would protect him from any long-range rifle shots.