John Sandford: Mortal Prey

She looked at Mallard, who said hastily, "I didn't exactly say that."

"Mmmm," Malone said. To Lucas: "It's somewhat true."

"Somebody conservative, well-placed in government," Lucas suggested. "Maybe a little money of his own." Malone was a four-time loser with a taste for artists and muscle workers.

"No," she said. "He's a Sheetrocker."

"A Sheetrocker." He waited for a smile, and when he didn't get one-he got instead a defensive brow-beetling-he said, "Well, that's good. Always jobs out there for a good Sheetrocker."

Before Lucas sank completely out of sight, Mallard jumped in. "He's also a writer. He's almost done with his novel."

"Okay, well, good," Lucas said.

"You gotta get some clothes?" Mallard asked, trying to keep the anti-Sheetrocker momentum going. "There's a place…"

"Nah, I'm okay. I had time to get home." He looked around. "So where're we going? We leave out of here?"

"We catch a ride to another terminal," Mallard said. "The ride's outside."

They rode to the next terminal in a dark-blue government car, driven by a man whom Mallard never introduced. A junior agent from the Houston office, Lucas thought, who looked a little sour about the chauffeur duties. Malone rode in the front with the agent, while Lucas and Mallard rode in the back.

During the walk to the car and the two-minute ride, Mallard quietly sketched the series of circumstances that had led to the identification of Rinker as the woman who was shot, and to the belief by the Mexican cops that a shooter from St. Louis was involved. The shooter was now dead, probably killed by a Mexican man who was still on the run. "She was pregnant," Malone said. "They killed her lover, and when she was wounded, she lost the baby."

Lucas winced, and Weather's face popped into his head. "You think she's headed back here? Back across the border?"

Mallard shook his head. "We don't know. We've put sketches of her everywhere. Every port of entry. The problem is, she doesn't look all that special. Mid-thirties, middle height, athletic, pretty, that's about it. The other thing is, Rinker just got out of the hospital, so it's possible that she's lost some weight, and might not look like she used to."

Malone turned and said, over the seat, "It's also possible that she's just running, that she's already in Majorca or someplace. The Mexican police have been tracing the phone calls she made from this ranch where she was recovering-there were six calls up to Missouri and two went out to banks in Mexico. We got on top of the banks right away, but both of the calls went into the general number, so we don't know who she was talking to, or what she did. There aren't any records of large sums of money being moved on the days she called, that can't be accounted for. No big accounts closed or switched that can't be accounted for. With both the Mexican cops and this Mejia guy, this gang guy, taking an interest, we're pretty sure the banks are telling us the truth."

"Maybe safe-deposit boxes," Lucas suggested.

"We're trying to run that down. We thought maybe an off-the-books box. So far, nothing's panned out," Malone said.

"She's good," Lucas said. "But we knew that. How about the Missouri calls?"

"All six guys are connected-all six guys admit that she called and all six say she was asking about John Ross, who we think was her main employer," Mallard said. "All six say they told her nothing, that they didn't have anything to tell her."

"Ross runs things around the river in St. Louis, the port, trucks, some drug connections over in East St. Louis," Malone added. "He has a liquor distributorship. You remember Wooden Head from Wichita?"

"Yeah."

"Wooden Head worked for Ross."

"You believe the six guys? That they didn't have anything to say?"

"She talked to four of them for about five minutes, and the other two for about two minutes. We don't know what was said, but apparently not too much."

"You can say a lot in five minutes," Lucas said. "Does Ross have the six names?"

"Not as far as we know-we haven't talked with him yet," Mallard said.

"Okay. So Clara's boyfriend gets killed and she's wounded and loses the baby, and they think the shooter is from St. Louis and she makes calls to St. Louis asking about this Ross guy, but she doesn't call Ross himself, as far as you know. So. You think Ross sent the shooter? That she's on a revenge trip? A kamikaze deal?"

Mallard shook his head again. "Don't know. We're guessing that's it. Whatever, Rinker's broken out now, she's in the open. I really want her. Really want her. She's run her score up to maybe thirty-five people: This woman is the devil."

"She's maybe more inflected than that," Malone objected. To Lucas: "We have a good biography on her now. You can read it on the way down to Cancun. She had quite the little backwoods childhood."

Their connection was tight: An hour after Lucas's Northwest flight put down at Houston, the Continental flight to Cancun lifted off. Mallard and Malone sat together, with Lucas behind them, next to an elderly woman who plugged her sound-killing Bose headphones into a Sony discman, looked at him once, with something that might have been skepticism, and pulled a sleeping mask over her eyes. When they were off the ground, Malone took a bound report out of her briefcase and handed it back to Lucas. "Rinker," she said.

LUCAS HAD NEVER been able to read on airplanes: The Clara Rinker file was a first. When Malone handed him the file, he'd wondered at its heft, and turned to the last page: page 308. He flipped through and found a dense, single-spaced narrative. Not the usual cop report.

The first page began: "There are only four known photographs of Clara Rinker-three from driver's licenses and one from an identification card issued by Wichita State University. None of the people who knew Rinker were able to immediately pick her photograph from a spread of similar photographs prepared by the Bureau-in each of the four photos, she had obscured her appearance with eyeglasses and elaborate hair arrangements. This is typical of what we know of Clara Rinker: She is obsessively cautious in her contacts with others, and she apparently has, from the beginning of her career, prepared herself to run."

The author of the report-a Lanny Brown, whom Lucas hadn't heard of-had a nice style that would have worked in a true-crime book. Rinker had been killing people for almost fifteen years. The first reports had been of various organized-crime figures, both minor and major, taken off by a killer whose trademark was extreme close-range shootings, many of them with. 22-caliber silenced pistols.

Because of the circumstances of the shootings-two of them had taken place in women's rest rooms, although both the victims were men-the Bureau began to suspect that the shooter was a woman who lured the victims into private places with a promise of sex. A friend of one victim, in Shreveport, Louisiana, said that he'd spoken briefly at a bar with a pretty young woman who had a Southern accent, and later had caught a glimpse of the young woman and the victim leaving the club, in the victim's Continental. The car and the man were later found on a lover's lane. The man-who was married-had been shot three times in the head with a. 40-caliber Smith.

No fewer than nine people had been executed in stairwells or between cars in parking structures. The Bureau believed that the choices of execution locale indicated that the shooter had carefully scouted the victims, knew where they parked their cars, and favored parking structures because they offered good access and egress, large numbers of strangers interacting with each other-a strange woman wouldn't be noticed-and sudden privacy: Bodies had apparently gone unnoticed for as much as four hours when rolled under a car.

She was also believed to have posed as either a Mormon missionary or a Jehovah's Witness: One quiet evening in suburban Chicago, a "straight-looking" young woman carrying what a neighbor said appeared to be a Bible or a Book of Mormon had knocked on the door of a recently divorced hood in Oak Park, Illinois. Neighbors who'd been sitting in a porch swing in the restored Victorian across the street said she'd spoken to whoever answered the door, then turned away and left.