Certain Prey (31 page)

“How much did that thing cost?” Lucas asked, impressed despite himself.

“About seventeen, used,” Marks said, meaning seventeen thousand dollars. “Got four hundred hours on her.”

“Jesus, you’re starting to talk like a shitkicker.”

“What’re you doing this evening?” Marks asked.

“Going out in the boat.”

“Why don’t you come over? I’ll check you out on this thing.” He carefully dumped the dirt back in the hole where he’d gotten it; only half of it slopped over the edge.

“Yeah? What time?”

“Half-hour?”

“See you in a half-hour.”
L
UCAS
TURNED
the pump and the water heater on, got a light spinning rod and carried it down the dock and flipped a Moss Boss into a shallow area spotted with water lilies. The

Moss Boss slid and skated froglike through the lilies and reeds, back up to the dock. He threw it out again, then again, and on the third cast, a bass hit. He fought it in, unhooked it, dropped it back in the water. A twelve-incher, and fun; but he didn’t eat bass.

He flipped the Moss Boss around the dock for twenty minutes, taking three small bass, tossing them all back, feeling his shoulders loosen up. Louise Clark was almost gone. After the last cast, he walked back up the sloping lawn to the cabin, got four cold Leinies out of the refrigerator, put them in a grocery sack and had one foot out the door when the phone rang.

He stopped, thought about it, shook his head at his own foolishness and went back.

“Yeah?”

“Sherrill. I’m down at the ME’s. They’re doing the autopsy on Louise Clark.”

“Anything yet?”

“Yeah. She’d had sex shortly before she was killed. The semen hadn’t been dissipated yet, and they got a pretty good sample. But to tell you the truth, I figure there’s only one place it could have come from.”

“Man! I don’t believe that,” Lucas said. He was shocked. “What about Allen?”

“They haven’t started on him, but I’ll let you know. If you want to know.”

“Of course I want to know . . .”

“Okay. And there’s more stuff. We found the gun, just like you said. It’s a Colt twenty-two with a silencer. Stuffed inside a boot in the closet. And we found a couple hundred bucks’ worth of cocaine in the bedside table. There’s the connection to Rolo. Crime scene found some pubic hair in Allen’s bed. In fact, they’ve got three different samples. Most of it comes from Allen, but some of it’s blond, and that’d be Carmel—but there’s a third sample that’s this
mousy brown color. We don’t have the lab work yet, but I know it came from Clark. I
know
it.”

“All right. Call me back when they get to Allen. Keep pushing the ME, don’t let them put anything off until tomorrow. We need it now . . .”

“You going fishing?”

“Actually, I was on my way out the door. A neighbor’s gonna teach me to run a backhoe.”

“Speaking of backhoes . . .” “What?”

“You never told me that Special Agent Malone of the FBI was a woman. And a woman with a sexy voice who wants to dance with you.”

“Didn’t seem relevant,” Lucas grunted. “Our relationship is purely professional.”

“She wants you to call her, inWichita. I’ve got a number.”
M
ALONE
PICKED UP
the phone on the first ring. “Hello, Lucas Davenport,” she said. “I’m told you’re off rusticating.”

“Fishing,” Lucas said.

“I wanted you to know that I’m moving up to Minneapolis-with my group, and Mallard is coming in from Washington. We’re very interested in this Louise Clark. Very interested.”

“There’s something wrong with the whole thing. Did Sherrill tell you about the semen?”

“No, nothing . . .”

Lucas summarized his conversation with Sherrill and Malone said, “If the semen checks out, if the DNA checks out . . . that’s it.”

“Makes me feel weird,” Lucas said. “It’s not right. This Clark isn’t a pro killer, not unless she was doing it for the fun of it. Because she didn’t have any goddamn money.”

“Could have had it hidden away.” “Bullshit,” Lucas said. “She kills people, but hides it
all
away? The inside of her house looked like a cut-rate motel. She had a TV set that couldn’t have been worth more than a couple hundred bucks, new. Everything in the place said she was a secretary, and struggling to keep her head above water.”

“All right. Well, I’m coming in tomorrow. Maybe, when you get back, you can take me out for a nice little fox-trot somewhere—someplace where you won’t spend all of your time dancing with the waitress.”
L
UCAS
CARRIED
the sack of beer next door to the Markses’ place. Lucy Marks was snipping the heads off played-out coneflowers as her husband maneuvered the Kubota in and out of a shed. The shed showed splintered wood at the side of one of the doors, evidence of a recent impact.

“Role tells me you’re gonna learn how to run the tractor,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m glad I bought the quart-size bottle of peroxide.”

“Hey . . .”

“Lucas, you gotta encourage him to be careful. I’m afraid he’ll roll it over on himself. He’s like a kid.”

“He’ll be all right,” Lucas said.

“That wouldn’t be beer in that sack, would it?”

“Couple Leinies,” he said, guiltily.

“Yeah, well, I’ll take the Leinies, you go figure out the tractor. When you get back, we’ll fry some crappies and we can have the beer then.”

“Well . . .” She gave him a look and he handed her the bag.
T
HE
K
UBOTA
WAS
. . . different. Running wasn’t a problem, but maneuvering the joystick for the backhoe took a little practice. “I’ll have you buttering your bread with this thing before we’re finished,” Marks said, enthusiastically. “I figure with a few hours’ practice, I could do all the driveways for this whole area, come winter.”

“Jesus Christ, Role, you make what, a half-million dollars a year selling stock? And now you’re gonna pick up an extra two hundred dollars a month doing driveways?”
W
HEN
L
UCAS
WAS
checked out, Marks showed him where he was going to hide the key in his shed. “Anytime I’m not up here, you’re welcome to use it.”

“Maybe I could help you brush out a couple of those trails,” Lucas said; he liked the backhoe.

“Terrific.” Then, as they walked back up toward the cabin, “You gettin’ any?”

Lucas could see Lucy Marks on the lake side of the house, cleaning up the grill.

“Overtime? I don’t get overtime anymore . . .”

“Pussy,” Marks said. “Crumbcake. You know? It sorta looks like . . .”

“Yeah, yeah. As a matter of fact, I just took a call from a nice-looking forty-ish FBI lady who’s coming to Minneapolis and wants me to take her out to fox-trot.”

“Fox-trot? Fox-trot my ass. If it was me, I’d drop about nine inches of the old French-Canadian bratwurst on her,” said Marks, who talked big but was the most faithful man on earth. As they came around the corner of the house, he hollered at his wife: “Lucas is gonna jump an FBI agent.”

“A female, I hope,” Lucy Marks said. She was spraying something on the grill, turning her face away from the coals.

“She wants to fox-trot with him,” Marks said. “She called him up.”

“Sounds promising,” Lucy Marks said. “How’d this happen?”

“I was down in Wichita, and we were in this bar and she didn’t dance to rock music, so I was dancing with the owner . . .”

He trailed off, and after a few seconds, Lucy Marks said, “Lucas? You still in there?”

“Excuse me,” Lucas said, “but I gotta go. I’m sorry.” He jogged away, across the lawn toward his own place, leaving the Markses at the grill, looking puzzled. At the cabin, he fumbled out the number Sherrill had given him for Malone, and dialed it. One of the FBI agents, a man, picked it up and said, “John Shaw.” Lucas said, “Let me speak to Malone.”

“She just left . . . I could try to catch her.”

“Catch her, goddamnit . . .”

The phone on the other end clattered on a desk and Lucas hung on to the receiver, eyes closed, rubbing his forehead. Could this be right?

Two minutes later, Malone picked up the phone and said, “Malone.”

“This is Lucas. Did you get the composite of the shooter?”

“Yes. Pretty good.”

“Close your eyes, and think about the woman I danced with at that club in Wichita, whatever it was. The Rink.”

“My eyes are closed. I . . . hmm. Gotta be a coincidence.”

“Hey, I’m a great-looking guy,” Lucas said, “I know that, but just between you and me, Malone, not that many thirty-year-old women are coming on to me anymore. And with this one . . . I had the feeling she was more interested than she should have been, and maybe not in sex. I didn’t know why . . .”

“. . . Or maybe you thought it was sex . . .”

“Maybe I did, whatever. But I tell you, from talking to the people up here who saw her, and looking at that picture, something kept knocking at the back of my head,” Lucas said. “I finally figured it out: if she’s not the same chick, she’s her twin. And if she was up here, she could very well have seen me on television. And if she did, and I walked into her place in Wichita, and then just sat down for a cheeseburger and a beer . . .”

“All right,” Malone said, reluctantly. “Sounds like a loser, but give me a couple of hours. I’ll check it out. You’ll be up at your cabin?”

“I don’t know,” Lucas said. Out through the screen, he could see the lake, flat, quiet, a perfect North Woods evening coming on. And he’d just gotten there. “I think I’m gonna head back to the Cities. I’m telling you, I think she’s the shooter.”
H
E
WAS OUT
on I-35, driving way too fast, and still a long way north of the Cities, when the cell phone burped. He picked it up, and heard the first two words, then lost the signal. He punched it off; three minutes later, it rang again, and he answered it: Sherrill, breaking up, but audible.

“Your FBI friend called; she’s all cranked up. That woman you danced with has disappeared—cleaned out her apartment, quit her job at the bar . . .”

“I thought she owned it.”

“So did everybody, but she was really just the manager. It’s really owned by a guy named James Larimore, who is also known as Wooden Head Larimore, who is
really
connected, really
connected,
in guess-where?”

“St. Louis.”

“Yup.” The cell connection was getting cleaner. “So your FBI friend freaked, and got a crime-scene crew into the apartment, and guess-what again?”

“It’d been wiped.”

“Top to bottom.”

“Got her, goddamnit,” Lucas crowed. “We got her. What’s her name?”

“Clara Rinker.”

“Rinker. Fuck those FBI pussies, Marcy. We broke this fuckin’ thing right over their heads.”

“Yeah, well . . . want to know where Wooden Head got the name Wooden Head?”

“Sure.” The adrenaline was pumping; he’d listen to anything.

“He was once in a bar when people started shooting, and he caught a ricochet, and the slug stuck in his skull bone, in his forehead above his nose. Made a dent, and stuck, but didn’t go through. They say everybody was laughing so hard, the gunfight stopped. EvenWooden Head was laughing.”

“So he’s a tough guy.”

“Very tough. And they ain’t gonna get much out of him. He says he don’t know nothin’ about nothin’.”

TWENTY-FOUR

Malone met him at the airport. “You look kinda green,” Malone said. “Tough flight down?”

“Naw, it was all right,” Lucas mumbled. He looked back through the terminal window at the plane, and Malone caught the look and said, “You can’t be one of those . . . you’re not afraid to fly?”

“It’s not my preferred method of travel,” Lucas said, walking away. She scrambled to catch up, and he turned his head to ask, “What’d you get from the bar? Prints? Photos? We need to get a photo out
now.
”

“Airplanes are about fifty times safer than cars,” Malone said. “I thought everybody knew that. Not only that, most people are distracted when they’re driving, because they fall into routines, while pilots are trained . . .”

“Yeah, yeah, enough,” Lucas said. “I don’t like to fly because I’ve got problems dealing with control issues because I’ve got an unconsciously macho self-image, okay? That make you happy? Now what about Rinker?”

“We can’t find a photograph,” Malone said. “And there’s no reason for you to be defensive about a fear of flying.”

“There’s gotta be a photograph . . .” She gave up. “There are no photographs in the apartment, and none in the bar. Either she didn’t have any, or she took them with her. We checked with people who were more or less friends . . .”

“More or less?”

“She didn’t have many real friends,” Malone said. “She was friendly, without friends. Nobody who worked at the bar had ever seen the inside of her apartment.”

“A loner.”

“Psychologically, anyway.”

“Driver’s license . . .”

“We checked her driver’s license and she was wearing a red wig and glasses the size of dinner plates, and she had her head tilted down . . . what I’msaying, is, that composite you had was better. Wichita State also had a copy of her student ID, and that’s as bad or worse than the driver’s license. She was careful. What we are doing, though, is we’re refining the composite. It’ll be as good as a photograph by this evening.”

They walked out of the terminal into the already-warm Kansas air; the sun had still been low on the horizon when they landed, and Lucas had expected a little more cool. Malone led him to an unmarked Ford parked in a no-parking zone with a local cop watching over it. “Thanks, Ted,” Malone said to the cop, who nodded and gave her his best front-line, band-of-brothers cop grin. Saved her parking place; next week, he might be saving her ass someplace, in a savage firefight out on the burning plains of Kansas.

Then again, maybe not.

“And there’s another thing,” Malone said as they pulled away from the curb.

“Uh-oh,” Lucas said. “The crime-scene guys found a couple of small smears of fresh blood on the floor of her apartment. A man who lives down the street was getting up early to go fishing . . .”

“In Kansas?”

“Yeah, I guess they do, somewhere. Anyway, he gets up and sees a couple of guys going into her apartment building. They looked out of place, he thought—they looked like football players, big guys, and they both wore suits. But they had a key and he just thought they were a couple of apartment people coming home after a night out. So he went fishing and didn’t think about it until one of our guys went around knocking on doors.”

“Two guys in suits, middle of the night.”

“Just about dawn.”

“And blood on the floor.”

“There is no apartment in the building with two guys in it, and we can’t find any two guys who were out late. It’s not a big apartment—eighteen units, we’ve talked to everybody.”

“There was no disturbance.”

“No. She had a motion detector in the hallway, which would have been invisible if you didn’t know what you were looking for. If she was in there, she should have known they were coming. Of course, she might have expected them. There was no sign of a struggle.”

“So she shot them?”

“That’s a possibility, other than the fact that there’re no bodies in the place, and she’d have to carry two football-player-sized guys out the hall and down a flight of stairs to get rid of them. On the other hand, if they shot
her
. . . a couple of big guys could handle a small woman fairly easily. If you were big enough, you could hold her under your coat, and walk right out.”

“Were they wearing coats?”

“The fisher-guy says they weren’t, but you get my point. They could handle her a heck of a lot easier than she could have handled them.”

“They could have walked away together,” Lucas said.
“They could have been helpers. She
could
have cut herself packing up her stuff.”

“Which is sort of my theory, right now,” Malone said. “Although the other theory has some attractions. If we get this woman . . . We’ve got a half-dozen states where they’ve got the death penalty, and where they’ve got lots of evidence on one or another of her killings. The only thing they don’t have is the shooter. If we wanted to release her to those states for trial, sooner or later she’d wind up in the electric chair or the gas chamber or strapped down to a gurney. With that kind of leverage, we could squeeze her pretty hard. We could put some pretty big holes in the St. Louis mob with her information.”

“And that’s what you want.”

“Of course,” she said. “If we get this Guy, the guy who probably ran her . . . he knows
everything.
If she was willing to pin the tail on him, we could show him the same set of electric chairs and gas chambers. If he talked, two years from now, St. Louis would be cleaner than . . . I don’t know—Seattle.”

“Seattle has Microsoft.”

“Okay.” She showed the tiniest of smiles. “Than Minneapolis.”

“Thanks.”

“Anyway, the mob guys in St. Louis know this as well as we do. It wouldn’t be too farfetched to think they might send a couple of shooters to fix the problem.”

“She might be too smart for that,” Lucas said. “I got the impression of smartness from the lady. So we know the mob could send a couple of guys, and the mob knows it could send a couple of guys, and she knows it. And if everybody knows it, do they send a couple of guys?”

“I don’t know,” Malone said. “I do know one thing that’s pretty unique.”

“Yeah?”

“You’re the only guy I know who’s literally danced with the devil.”
L
UCAS
SAW
the big window the minute he walked in the apartment door.

He had an advantage over Malone and the other FBI agents—when they’d first arrived, they were looking for Rinker herself, and didn’t know about the blood on the floor. One of the FBI crime-scene techs pointed him around the apartment, and finally he asked, “Did you check the outside window ledge on that big window?”

The agent looked at the window, and thinking fast, said, “Not yet,” as if it were next on the list.

“Would it be all right to lift it up?”

“Let me get one of the guys to do it,” the agent said.

“What’re you thinking?” Malone asked.

“I think carrying
any
body out of this place would take a fruitcake,” Lucas said. “But throwing them out the window, if it’s nighttime . . .” He peered out: “They’d land right behind the garbage Dumpster. You could back a car right up to them.”

One of the technicians came over, looked skeptically at the window, and said, “Let me get this.”

Lucas stepped back and the tech unlocked the inner window, and lifted it easily. The outer window was a convertible aluminum glass-and-screen affair; the glass had been pushed up, and the screen was in place. “Screen’s a little loose,” the tech said. He was working awkwardly through surgeon’s gloves. “Let me.”

He used a small pocketknife to slip the screen up an inch, which allowed him to pull it out of the frame. He leaned it against the wall, and they all looked at the bottom end of the screen, and the brick wall outside.

“Huh.” The tech grunted and got down close to the brick, leaning out through the window.

“What?” asked Malone, glancing quickly at Lucas.

“You know any reason why a brick would wear tweed?”
W
OODEN
H
EAD
was being interrogated by a team of specialists from Washington. Lucas and Malone watched for a few minutes, then left. If the team missed anything, Lucas wasn’t smart enough to figure out what it would be—the team was taking Wooden Head apart inch by inch, and they were good.

“I’d suggest we get a bite at the Rink, but somebody would probably spit in the hamburger,” Malone said.

“So let’s get something someplace else. Then maybe I can rent a car and get back home.”

“Really? You’d drive back instead of fly?”

“Really,” Lucas said.

“We’ve got a car going up later today, a couple of guys from the crime-scene crew to review the work at the last two killing scenes . . . you could ride along. I think they’re leaving around three, and plan to drive straight through.”

“Sign me up,” Lucas said.
T
HEY
STOPPED
at a downtown diner, got a tippy table, and Lucas looked at one of the legs and told Malone, sitting opposite, “See that lever on the end of the leg? There’s a lever sticking up.”

“Yeah?”

“Push the lever toward me, with your foot.”

“What’s that for?”

“It levels the table,” Lucas said.

Malone pushed the lever with her foot, and the table stopped tipping. “Where’d you learn that?” she asked.

“I used to be a waitress,” he said. “Before the operation.”

Over coffee and grilled-cheese sandwiches, Malone filled Lucas in on everything the FBI had figured out about Clara Rinker—they had her biography from childhood, but still no good pictures. “She was in trouble a few times when
she was a teenager, but nothing serious. Never got mug-shot or printed. She was a runaway, and she might have had reason to be. We think she was probably raped a few times by her stepfather, who disappeared, by the way. And maybe by one of her brothers.”

“Did he disappear, too?” “No, he’s still around, but he doesn’t talk much about her. He claimed he couldn’t remember her.”

“That’s helpful.”

“The picture sort of fills out, though. She’s a sociopath, I think, but not a psychopath. She never showed that much enthusiasm for her work, she just did it, very effectively. She had to take SAT tests to get into Wichita State, and she did okay: quite well on verbal skills, less good on math. About seven hundred five-fifty, which is pretty exceptional when you understand that she ran away from home in the ninth grade.”

“I knew she was smart,” Lucas said. “She got out of here so cleanly that I expect she’s got a hidey-hole somewhere. Digging her out could be tough, especially with those horse-shit photos we’ve got so far. Say: I think I know from somewhere that the SAT people require photo IDs for their tests.”

“I don’t know,” Malone said. “But we’ll check.”

“If that’s blood you found on the ground behind the Dumpster, and it comes from more than one person, then she’s still out there. Otherwise, I don’t know. It’s hard to think that she’s dead and gone. Outa reach.”

“Worse things have happened,” Malone said. “At least the killing would stop, until they find somebody else. But I know what you mean; it’d be good to have her.”

“She got any foreign languages?” Lucas asked.

“Spanish,” Malone confirmed. “She’s in her fourth year of college Spanish, got A’s all the way through. One of our guys talked to her Spanish instructor, who said that if she goes south, across the border, she’ll be speaking it like a
native in six months. Said she was already pretty good, and had a good ear for the accent.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s already down there,” Lucas said. “Goddamnit: we were an inch short about five times in a row.”

“W
HAT
ABOUT
the woman in Minneapolis—Carmel Loan?” Malone asked. She ate her cheese sandwich in small, tidy bites, pausing every second or third bite to dab her mouth with a napkin; she looked like a history professor, Lucas thought, but an oddly sexy one. Maybe that somehow explained how she’d been married four times, but none of the marriages lasted. Maybe her husbands-to-be expected a nice, reserved history professor, and got an animal instead; or, maybe, it was the other way around.