Lucas took a step toward the emergency room door, then turned back. “When you take Mallard out of here, use some other door. She set up this last shooting—it just occurred to me that she could be setting up outside here.” He nodded toward the doors. “She knows we’ll all be here.”
The agent looked at the doors and then said, “I’ll get some guys to make a quiet sweep.”
“Do it.”
LUCAS WENT BACK to the hotel to wait; took off his shirt, got into some jeans, tried not to think about Malone. Couldn’t help thinking about her: wanted to get her back, but couldn’t. Finally used the hotel phone to call Weather, and told her.
“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 fiancée 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.
“O
r 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.
Unless she climbed a tree, he thought. As he stood at the garden entrance, he could see that the ground rose off to the left, and they went that way.
“Put a guy right here. Or two or three guys,” Andreno said, as they walked up the higher ground. “There’re so many trees that she’d have to get close or she couldn’t see through them to shoot. And if she got that close, and then tried to climb, she’d be easy to spot.”
They walked around for a while, looking at flowers and trees, until the humidity started to get to them. “That place over there,” Andreno said, nodding at a dome-shaped building, “is like a tropical jungle. All bamboo and palm trees and shit. Neat place in the winter.”
“This whole place is like a jungle. I didn’t know St. Louis was so hot.”
“We used to have a saying, “It’s not the heat . . .”
“. . . it’s the humidity.”
“We’d never say anything that stupid,” Andreno said. “We used to say, it’s not the heat, it’s the assholes. Goddamn hot nights, no air-conditioning, what are you gonna do? You’re gonna whack the old lady around, that’s what. You get nights like this one’s gonna be, there’ll be people smacking people all over town.”
“Maybe you oughta provide air-conditioning as a public service,” Lucas suggested.
“It’d be a plan,” Andreno said, seriously. “It’d stop more bullshit than a lot of other plans.”
ON THE WAY back to Andy’s, where Andreno had left his car, Sally called and said, “The guys on Dallaglio say that he’s leaving. He’s going into hiding. He says they can follow along, but he won’t tell anybody where he’s going until he’s started.”
“That’s a little dumb—if we knew where he was going, we could sterilize it in advance. Did you tell him that?”
“Yes. But he said there was no point in trying, and they were safer if nobody knew. They’re not leaving until the kids get home from school, they’re gonna get them packed up. They’re going out tonight.”
“Call around. You’ve got the weight. Check the major airlines, see where the tickets are. If they’re going to Italy or somewhere, there aren’t many options.”
“We’re doing that—I just wanted you to know.”
“Is Mallard back?”
“No. They finished the postmortem, and they’re flying the body out this afternoon. There’ll be a memorial service in Washington, and most of us are going.”
“You’re just shutting down here?”
“Won’t be for a couple of days, and there’ll still be a crew here. We won’t need the Dallaglio crew anymore, and most of the rest of us have just been walking in circles anyway.”
21
LUCAS WAS WATCHING AN ATLANTA game when Sally called at eight o’clock and said, “Dallaglio’s about to roll. Me and Carl and Derik are heading out, if you want to ride along.”
“It’s either that or hang myself. I’m down to watching Atlanta.”
“You got two minutes.”
Lucas got a jacket, clipped a .45 onto his hip, took a half-finished beer along, hid it from a prim-looking saleslady in the elevator, and caught up with the feds in the lobby. They were already moving, out the doors, into a heat-soaked night—Lucas dropped the beer bottle into a trash can—and across the parking lot where Malone had been shot and into the Suburban.
A block away, Lucas could see a Mazda MPV van, sitting on the street, looking into the back of the buildings where Rinker had set up with the rifle. Inside the van was a bored FBI surveillance crew, hoping against hope that she’d be back. She hadn’t been, although they had netted an attractive forty-five-ish commercial real-estate agent who’d come over later for drinks with one of the surveillance guys.
“Glad I’m not in that van,” Sally said, picking up on Lucas’s thought. “I’ve done that. Down in Baltimore, working with Jack Hand?”
The red-haired agent was driving again. He nodded and said, “Onions.”
“You better believe it. He ate them like apples. He said they prevented prostate cancer. His father died from it.”
“Onions, or prostate?” Lucas asked.
“I almost died from the onions once,” the red-haired man said.
He put them on an interstate heading west, and Lucas frowned. “Where’re we going?”
Sally looked at him and then said, “Oh—we’re not going to Lambert. There’s another airport out west. Called, um, Spirit of St. Louis. Dallaglio’s signed up for a private jet, a place called Executive Air. He’s flying out of there to Newark, and then from Newark to Rome to Naples on commercial flights. First class, of course. The whole family.”
“Napoli,” said the nearly silent Derik. Derik had a buzz cut and high, dry cheekbones and looked like a member of the Wehrmacht. “Roma.”
Sally was looking at a map now and said to the red-haired agent, “We’re on Sixty-four, right? Because if we’re on Forty-four, we’ll wind up down in Bumfuck, Missouri, and there’s no way back.”
“The language,” Lucas said.
“We’re on Sixty-four,” the red-haired guy said. “There’s a sign.”
Sally checked the sign and then turned to Lucas. “Malone was, like, ten years in service before I signed up. She was appointed to mentor some of the younger women agents, and one time she told me that I should carefully use a few words. You know, nothing really nasty, none of the gynecological stuff, but the occasional fuck or shit, just to let them know that you weren’t a sissy. She said getting treated ladylike or if you were expected to be ladylike, it was the end of you. She said you had to be a lady, but not ladylike.”
“A point,” Lucas said.
“Back then, it was,” Sally said. “Ten years ago. I don’t think it matters so much anymore.”
“Yeah, you’ve pretty well taken over now,” the red-haired man said.
“Better believe,” Sally said. Derik said nothing, just bobbed his skinhead to some unseen music with a jerky beat. Sally got on a radio and talked to the crew with Dallaglio. “They’re just getting out to the cars,” she said. “We ought to get there about the same time.”
RINKER HAD AN unfamiliar weight on her shoulders, the weight of death. Not the killing of Dichter, or Levy, or Malone, or even of all of them together, but rather the killing of Honus Johnson. She’d thought about it, as she waited for Johnson to come lurching out of the basement like a frozen Frankenstein, to stand over the couch while she was half asleep . . . waited for the sound of the freezer lid opening, was sure she’d heard it a half-dozen times.
One of the few literary experiences of her young life had come with a Stephen King novel, Carrie, which had scared the shit out of her, as she sprawled across the bed in her apartment, alone, reading. The feeling now was the same, but even more intense: There really was a frozen dead man in the basement, and he really had been a torturer, who would come back from hell with a bloody machete. . . .
She analyzed it, as she’d been taught in her college psych classes back in Wichita—and she decided that her problem was not so much the dead man in the basement as the fact that she hadn’t left him behind. In all her other killings, she’d almost instantly walked away from the bodies. In a couple of cases, she’d had to move them, but she’d been done with them in a few
hours at most. She’d been able to escape what she’d done, put it behind her and out of mind.
This one, she was stuck with, at least for a few more days. He was riding on her shoulders as she drove west into the setting sun.
She looked a little like a fashionable female Johnny Cash, she thought—thin black long-sleeve shirt, black jeans, dark blue running shoes from which she’d carefully torn the reflective patches. In the backseat she had a black silk scarf and a black baseball cap. When she had it all on, she thought, she’d be invisible in the dark.
THEY ’D BEEN IN the car for fifteen minutes when Sally took a radio call, then looked at her map. “They’re ahead of us, about three miles,” she said, after a minute. “Four vehicles—two of ours and two of theirs. They’re staying on the speed limit, so if we can step on it a bit, we’ll catch them.”