Certain Prey

at the check-in, not more than fifteen minutes ago. She’s gotta be in the airport.”
    Lucas snapped: “Where do I find the head guy for airport security?”

    A FAT YOUNG MAN named Herter had handled the return and remembered the woman well; Lucas and Lane spent two hours trolling Herter and the manager through the airport gates, looking for Rinker’s face. Nothing. A lot of small athletic women, a few of them redheads, but no killer.
    The check-in record showed the car in, without damage and with a full tank of gas, twenty minutes before Lucas and Lane arrived at the Avis desk. Herter said the woman had headed for the main terminal but had been carrying only a small bag, like an overnight case. There were no security cameras that might have recorded her face, at least not on the immediate route into the terminal.
    “She might still be here in town,” Lucas told Lane and Tom Black, who’d come out to the help with the hunt. “The FBI thinks she drives to wherever she’s going. It would make sense for her to drop her car in the airport garage, where there are thousands of cars going in and out all day, and then rent a car to do the hit with. Then, if there’s any problem, she can ditch the car and there won’t be any record attached to it.”
    “We should know about the record anytime,” Black said. “The Nebraska cops are running down the address.”
    “If it’s her, they’re not gonna find anything,” Lucas said. “But I’ll tell you what: we’ve got to get to the MasterCard acceptance people who clear charges, and they’ve got to tell us instantly if she makes any more charges . . .” He looked at Lane. “You think you could set that up?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Then go do it; and get out of the uniform before you start talking to people.”
    “All right.” He took off, running.
    Black said, “The crime-scene guys gotta be done by now.”
    “If it’s her, there won’t be anything.” A ND THE CRIME-SCENE guy said, “I wouldn’t hold my breath on these prints. I mean, we got prints off the passenger side and outa the back seat, but we got nothing from the steering wheel, from the outside door handle, from the inside handle, from the radio knobs, from the seat . . . they’d all been wiped. Wiped clean, by somebody who worked at it.”
    “Goddamnit,” Lucas said. Five minutes later, a detective from Lincoln, Nebraska, called and said, “There’s a street like that, and there’s an address like that, and there’s even a woman with that name, but she’s forty-eight years old, she’s got nine ferrets that she never leaves, she’s got black hair and I’d say she goes about two-ten on the bathroom scales. She says she’s never been to Minneapolis and never rented a car, and she’s got a Visa and a Sears card and a gas card but no MasterCard.”
    “The shooter’s outa here,” Lucas said to Black after he got off the line with the Nebraska cop. “She might still be in the Cities, or on her way home, but we’re wasting our time out here.”
    “Except we got a decent picture of her,” Black said. “We’ve got two guys who saw her close up, and not all that long ago. We’ll have a composite photo of her in an hour.”
    “There’s that,” Lucas said. He held up his thumb and forefinger, a half-inch apart. “But goddamn: we were this close. This close. ”
    “So now what?”
    “So now we paper the town with her picture. If she’s still here, maybe we can shake her out.”

TWENTY

    Carmel called Rinker at the hotel and said, without preface or identification, “Get out of there now. Your picture’s on TV.”
    “What?” Rinker’s heart started thumping, and she looked wildly around the room, looking for clothes, looking for anything with prints, ready to sprint.
    “Davenport’s got a composite photograph of you, and it’s on TV. They’re going to show it again on Channel Three in about one minute.”
    “Hang on.”
    Rinker picked up the TV remote and brought up Channel Three. A talking head, a serious brunette who looked like a former Miss America, was saying, “. . . an Avis rental car at the airport. Two Avis personnel, whose identities are being withheld, provided police with a composite photograph, shown here. If you have seen this woman . . .”
    Rinker looked at the picture for a moment, then told Carmel, “That doesn’t look like me.”
    “To you it might not look like you, but to me it does—in a general way,” Carmel replied. “And they’ll be