Mortal Prey

A BAD NIGHT. SHE WAS comfortable enough, sleeping on couch pillows, wrapped in clean sheets, but the body in the basement freezer still gave her the creeps, and she thought several times that the basement door was creaking open. She found herself staring through the dark, looking for shapes in the living room, her hand near the Beretta on the floor beside her. Not that the gun would help with a ghost.
    In the very darkest pit of the night, she sat up. She’d had something close to a dream, and in the dream came an idea. She crawled over to a lamp, groped up its stem, turned it on, then went out to the kitchen and dug up a yellow pages. She found what she was looking for under “Investigations.” There were several listings for private detectives specializing in “spousal inquiries”—had to be divorce work—and two of them had women’s names attached.
    She left the kitchen light on, turned the lamp off, and went back to her couch pillows to think about it. Dream about it. And listen for noises from the basement.
     
    SHE WAS OUT of the house by ten o’clock, as the Dark Woman, with dark brown eyebrows and dark brown hair. She wore a loose, green, long-sleeved cotton shirt to cover her arms, the fine blond hair and too-fair skin. She’d moved her own car into Honus Johnson’s garage, and took his Mercedes.
    She scouted Nina Bennett’s address and found that it was a house with a business sign on it, and a black cat sitting in the porch window. A home office for a not-very-prosperous business, Rinker thought.
    Could work, she thought. She rolled away from Bennett’s and went looking for a place to meet. Someplace downtown. She found it at the Happy Dragon, a dark, upscale Chinese place that seemed to be designed for St. Louis’s lunchtime assignations, with shoulder-high booths and bad sight-lines.
    She stopped at Union Station, found a phone and called Bennett, who picked up on the second ring. “Bennett Legal Services.”
    Rinker tried to sound tentative. “I saw your ad in the phone book. Do you check on husbands? I mean, watch them?”
    “We do spousal surveillance, yes. We usually require a reference from an attorney.” The “usually” was not stressed; was made to sound inviting.
    “Oh.” Disappointment. Hesitation. “I can’t hire an attorney. Not yet. I don’t want a divorce, I don’t want to make him angry. I just want to find out.”
    “Ma’am, if we’re going to court…”
    “I wouldn’t want that,” Rinker said quickly. “I just want to…know.”
    “Maybe you should come by. We can talk.”
    “Oh…I don’t…Please wait a minute.” Rinker clapped her hand over the mouthpiece, waited for what she thought might be a minute, then came back on. “Could you talk this afternoon? I’m very busy, I’m getting ready to fly down to Miami this evening.”
    “Yes, I could talk to you this afternoon,” Bennett offered.
    “Could you come here? Downtown?”
    “Yes, I could.”
    “Oh, that’s great. There’s a place down the block, the Happy Dragon, if you could meet me there. Wait a minute, let me look at my calendar.” She clapped her hand over the mouthpiece again, waited a few seconds, then said, “Three o’clock?”
    “That’d be fine. The Happy Dragon at three, Mrs….?”
    “Dallaglio,” Rinker said. “Jesse Dallaglio.”
     
    LUCAS HAD SPENT most of the day at FBI headquarters, going through paper—all the paper that the feds had put together—looking for anything that might indicate whom Rinker might talk to, anything about the way she preferred to live. Andreno called to say that he’d stopped by John Sellos’s bar and apartment, and Sellos was still missing. “He’s not dead. The bartender got a call from him last night, said he sounded really worried about what was happening to the place. He told the bartender that he was still traveling and playing golf, but wouldn’t say where he was.”
    “He called at the bar?”
    “On the bar’s public phone, right around nine o’clock.”
    “We’ll see where that goes back to,” Lucas said. “Though I’m not sure what he could tell us.” He gave a note to Sally Epaulets, and asked her to find out where the call had come from. Twenty minutes later, she told him that it had come from a gas station near Nashville.
    “Does that help?” she asked.
    “No.”
    “Don’t have to be snippy about it.”
     
    MALONE HAD BEEN in and out all afternoon. She was driving the local cops to find Rinker’s car,