John Sandford: Mortal Prey

"How about the Italian place where Rinker was shot?" Lucas asked. "Your report says it's pretty good."

"Saving that for lunch tomorrow," Mallard said.

The hotel room was a blank-faced off-white cubicle with a TV and a minibar, a too-soft double bed, and a bathroom without a tub. The place smelled faintly of bug spray and salt water, and could have been at any seaside anywhere. Lucas hung his clothes in the closet and washed his face, then walked out onto the narrow balcony and looked down at the water.

Rinker had been here, and not long ago. Had worked within a couple of blocks of the Blue Palms, had probably spent time on the beach ten stories down. She might well be in the same kind of place, somewhere else on the globe, looking for a job, trying to settle in.

Or she might have a hidey-hole in St. Louis, ready to go to war on her lover's killers. If she'd simply run, they'd never find her. But if she'd gone to St. Louis, he thought…

If she'd gone to St. Louis, they'd get her.

They had dinner together, and caught up with their separate lives. Lucas poked at Malone's new relationship with the Sheetrocker, despite Mallard's efforts to warn him away. Malone had almost nothing to say about her friend, except that he had terrific shoulders from lifting the Sheetrock.

Mallard mentioned that his office had been renamed. It was now called the Special Studies Group, and the last big case had involved the destruction of a bank robbery gang operating out of Toronto, Canada.

"They never did a thing in Canada," Mallard said. "They were completely law-abiding truck drivers and auto-parts guys. Then, about once every two months, they'd come down south and hit a bank."

"How'd you bust them?"

"Computers. They always hit the same kinds of banks at the same times of day with the same techniques, which told us that we were working with one gang. So we got all of the robberies with that signature, and plotted them with a geographical information system. The computer took a while, but one of the statistical clusters it turned up was a drive-time thing-all of the robberies were within a couple hours of border crossings. Different border crossings. Anyway, we ran the dates of the robberies against the names of people coming in, which didn't turn up anything, because they kept switching IDs. But then we ran the incoming license plates, and we found them. Two trucks, going through one after the other, the day before each of the robberies. Once we had that, we figured out who they were, and then we watched them move, watched them scout the bank, cleared out the bank a half hour before they were due to come in, and when they came in… there we were."

They talked about it for a while, and then Lucas gave them details on a case involving an art professor, on which Mallard's office had provided help. "Marcy Sherrill said your information was so generic that it made her brain hurt," he said.

"Fuck her if she can't take a joke," Mallard said.

"Louis," Lucas said, "the language."

And that was the evening.

The next morning, Lucas was a few minutes late getting down to the lobby: Mallard and Malone were both early risers, and he wasn't. He shaved, stood in the shower for five minutes, lay down on the bed for a few minutes more, dozing, then had to brush his teeth again when Malone called to ask where he was. She was annoyed: "Get going, Lucas-our contact's already here."

When he got down, Mallard and Malone were waiting in the lobby with a Mexican man who wore a gorgeous off-brown suit with a cornflower-blue shirt and buffed mahogany oxfords. Lucas was admiring the Mexican's dress when Mallard said, "Jeez, Davenport, where do you get these clothes?"

Lucas looked down at himself. He was wearing tan slacks with a gray cast, a black silk Hawaiian shirt with red-and-gold cockatoos, a medium-blue tropical-weight wool-knit jacket, and loafers that were the casual variants of the Mexican man's. He thought he looked pretty good. "What's the problem?"

"No problem…"

"You look excellent," the Mexican said, smiling.

His English was lightly accented, and Malone said, "This is Colonel Manuel Martin, Mexican National Police. He arranged the interview with the Mejia family."

Lucas and Martin shook hands. The Mexican clearly had more Indio in his ancestry than Spanish, was six inches shorter than Mallard and a little rounder. His expression was one of weary amusement. Lucas said, "Pleased to meet you," and Martin nodded and said, "I understand you've danced with Clara Rinker."

"She's a good dancer," Lucas said. They were drifting toward the dining room. "What's the story on this Mejia guy?"

Martin's eyebrows arched a bit, and he cocked his head to the side. "I was trying to think how to explain that, and finally I came up with this: He is Mexico's Joseph Kennedy. The father of your President Kennedy? Where the early money came from is not exactly known; it is now legitimate. But because of past associations, the entire Mejia family is very, very careful. And they have excellent connections with the less reputable…" He struggled for a word, and finally landed on "element."

"They'll talk to the cops?"

Martin shrugged. "Of course. Joseph Kennedy would speak to the police, would he not? So will Mejia. Especially where our interests are aligned."

The breakfast was American — eggs, milk, cereal, sausage, and coffee-though Martin stayed with fruit, bread with cheese, and olives, popping the olives one at a time with his fingertips, as though he were eating pecans. During the breakfast, he gave them a short history of Cancun, drew schematic maps on a paper napkin to explain the lay of the Yucatбn, and the cities of Cancun and Mйrida, and outlined what was known of Clara Rinker's stay in Mexico.

"She wasn't working for the Mejias before she came here, of that we are certain. They had no idea of who she was. If they had known, it is doubtful that Paul Mejia would have been allowed to continue the relationship. From what we can piece together, he met her at the hotel where she worked-purely accidentally, she was a bookkeeper and he was checking on a business question having to do with automobile parking costs at various beach hotels-and that she did not know about the Mejia family until another woman at the hotel told her, some time after they began seeing each other. She lived quite modestly in a rented apartment."

"Fingerprints?" Lucas asked.

"Nothing. The room had been methodically wiped. There were personal items left behind, but nothing that you could not buy in five minutes in another city. And, of course, nobody ever took a picture of her. There was never an occasion."

"No way to tell where she went?"

"She disappeared after an appointment at the doctor's office," Martin said. "She had recovered from the shooting-the checks… Is that right, the medical checks?"

"Checkups," Malone offered.

"Yes. The medical checkups were routine, and had become more a matter of physical rehabilitation. She had some damage to her stomach muscles, and they needed strengthening. Anyway, there is a large taxi stand not far from the doctor's office, but none of the taxi drivers we've found remembers seeing her or taking her anywhere. That's possibly because they take all kinds of Americans everywhere, and they simply can't remember, or because the Mejia connection had been rumored, and nobody wanted anything to do with her."

"So she takes a taxi and she's gone."

Martin shrugged again and said, "What else can I tell you? We have document checks, of course, for people coming and going, and since that time, we have no Cassandra or Cassie McLain, and of course, no Clara Rinker, entering or leaving Mexico."

Malone and Mallard questioned Martin through the breakfast-they weren't quite rehearsed, Lucas noticed, but they were coordinated. He began watching them more closely, and began to suspect that the coordination was personal, rather than professional. But what about the Sheetrocker, he wondered?