Mortal Prey

three o’clock from Los Angeles, from a BP station. There was another three o’clock call from Sacramento, then another from someplace in Wyoming, a longer one, another from Kansas, three more from St. Louis. All at three o’clock in the afternoon, all from gas stations.
    Rinker was calling Ross. Lucas would bet on it. There was one good way to confirm it: He pulled the Hill list, to see if he could find a duplication, a call to Hill from the same time and place as a call to Ross.
    But there were none.
    He took a turn around the office. Was he on the wrong trail? The line of calls coming across the country was so good, and at exactly the right time. But then, Ross was in the trucking business, and was also in the organized-crime business. He would get calls from phone booths at interstate gas stations.
    He walked around the room a couple of times, trying to figure a way to confirm the calls, and began to worry that he was “locking in,” a problem he saw with other cops, all the time, the sure sense that something was just so, when it wasn’t. Something that felt so good that it had to be. You could build a great logical case out of pure bullshit, and it happened too frequently.
    He circled the question, and couldn’t make it work. Ross and Rinker were into something he couldn’t quite figure. He felt stupid, and that made him angry.
    “Fuck it,” he said, and he walked out of the room, down the hall, had the guard call him a cab, and ten minutes later—the cab arrived at the FBI building with unnatural celerity—walked into the hotel.
    He could get three hours of sleep if he was lucky. He expected to wake up pissed off and tired, and he did. At seven-forty-five, he called Sally in her room. When she answered, with a song in her eyes—he assumed that, from her chipper voice—he snarled, “I’ll be way late,” and was asleep again when his head hit the pillow.
    Ross & Rinker, Rinker & Ross.
    Had to be.

23
    LUCAS SLEPT UNTIL ONE O’CLOCK. HE’D never had trouble sleeping late, and into the afternoon, even, though he often had trouble getting to sleep at midnight. He felt decent when he got up. He took his time shaving and in the shower, lingered over a sandwich and the newspaper, and at two o’clock walked into the FBI conference room, thinking, Rinker & Ross, Ross & Rinker.
    Sally was there, and said, “Mallard called—he’s on his way back. Washington is going to pull us in a couple of days, he thinks, but we’re okay if we can come up with something. Anything. They’re not going to do anything public, especially after Malone went down. But it doesn’t look good for the hometown kids.”
    “Rinker and Ross,” Lucas said. “Let me tell you about the phone calls.”
    He told her, but pointed out so many shortcomings with the concept that she said, “I’d have believed it was Rinker if you hadn’t talked me out of it.”
    “Still think it was,” he grunted. “Feels too good.”
    “If it was Ross, then she’s gone. She’s done everybody.”
    “Maybe we ought to brace Ross about it, see what happens,” Lucas said.
    “He’s a smart man. He’ll tell us to go have sexual intercourse with ourselves.”
    “He’s going to this orchestra thing at botanical gardens this evening. I’m gonna crash the party. Take Andreno along, if he’ll go. Watch him. See if we can make him nervous.”
    “Maybe we ought to take a few people along.”
    “You coming?”
    “If I have time,” she said. “I did bring a nice little red party dress, just in case.” Then she clouded up. “I wish Malone were here. She was really good at this.”
     
    WITH SALLY , the red-haired guy, Derik, and a half-dozen others, Lucas argued the question of the phone calls from the coast, and found the group divided almost fifty-fifty, with a one-man majority in favor of the calls coming from Rinker. They all went back to the paper, looking for more ties.
    One guy said, suddenly, “We ought to have a few people there tonight. You know, like a crew.”
    “We’ve got a crew escorting Ross,” Sally said.
    “More than that, we need more than that,” the guy said, excited by an idea. “Think about this. If nothing happens to Ross, we’d be suspicious. But what if he’s shot at and missed? What if he’s rescued before he can be killed—by his security guys?”
    “You mean…a faked hit?”
    “Yeah…”
    “Oh, God. ” Somebody’s head hit the table with a hollow thump, followed by a groan. Everybody was