Mortal Prey

Everybody was…but they’d had it set up for long time.”
    “And the call that Dallaglio made to Ross, before the airport ambush…”
    “Yeah. Either he actually talked to Treena, leaving a message, or he talked to Ross, and Ross told Treena…and Treena tipped Rinker. Treena probably even knew that they used Executive Air when they were going out of town, so Rinker could have scouted the place way ahead of time.”
    “Jesus. And you think they’ll talk now. Treena and Rinker.”
    “Bet on it—and I got the number of the cell phone in Treena’s purse. I’ll bet you anything that the phone was stolen and that Rinker’ll be calling to make sure everything is okay, or Treena will call her. If we’re in the choppers…”
    “Go,” Mallard said. “Let’s go.”
    As they ran toward the exit, and Sally started working her phone to call the choppers, she asked, “How’d you know?”
    “Ross was shot in the back of the head—if you know the situation inside the Climatron, that’s not right, unless he walked in backwards. But the main thing was the blood on the window,” Lucas said.
    “What about it?”
    “It was bone-dry.”
    “Dry.”
    “It’d been there for a while—a hell of a lot longer than five minutes. Rinker hasn’t been here for two hours.”

24
    AS SALLY SAID, THE RUN TO LAMBERT with flashers, and an occasional burst of siren for the recalcitrant, took a little more than fifteen minutes, plus another two or three to make it down the frontage road to the helicopter facility. They had three choppers, none of them turning a blade yet. Mallard climbed out of the lead truck and ran inside the chopper hut, and they could hear him screaming. Nine men, pilots, copilots and technicians, hurried out the side, heading toward their aircraft, pulling on helmets. “Two people per chopper,” Mallard yelled. “Who wants to go with who?”
    Sally said, “I’ll ride with Lucas. He’s lucky.”
    “Go, go…”
    They were airborne over St. Louis twenty-five minutes after they left the botanical gardens, and spread themselves, under instructions from Mallard, along I-64. Mallard himself hovered over downtown with Andreno, while Lucas and Sally waited west of Forest Park, where they could see the lights of the inner belt, Highway 170, and the third chopper waited out beyond the outer belt, way west.
    “We’re good east-west, but if she goes north-south, it’ll take a while to get there,” Lucas shouted at Sally.
    “Not long,” Sally said, shaking her head. “And if she’s along the main stem, here, we’ll be on her in a minute. One of us will—” Her phone rang, and she put it to her ear, listened, shouted a few words, clicked it off, and said, “Treena’s phone is listed to some guy from a place called Crestwood. The phone doesn’t answer, just an answering machine, and the cops are on the way. If the place has been broken into, we’re good.”
    “We’re good,” Lucas said. “Believe it.”
    The technician riding behind the pilots was looking at a computer screen that seemed to combine a local map and a radio receiver. He spoke occasionally into a radio.
    And that’s the way it was for thirty minutes. Sitting up in the sky, watching the cars below, not talking much because of the noise. Sally said once, “It’s pretty, when you can see everything from the Missouri back to the arch.”
    “Where’s the Missouri?”
    “The line out there to the north, and over to the west, you can see the curve—looks like it really should have come into the Mississippi way to the south, but made this big jog at the last minute.”
    “Makes a peninsula out of St. Louis, almost.”
    “Yeah…You seem pretty calm for a guy who’s famous for hating airplanes.”
    Lucas said, “Helicopters don’t bother me, for some reason. None of it has anything to do with logic, it’s…”
    Then the phone rang and the computer screen lit up, and the technician started talking fast to the pilots and the chopper dove for speed and took off east, Lucas shouting, “What? What?”
    “Somebody’s talking cell phone to cell phone. Mrs. Ross’s phone is downtown, but the second one is just east of us, it’s moving, we’ve got the cell, I’m tuning her in, I’m tuning her…Got her.”
    “Where is she?”
    “She’s moving, she’s moving….” Then he was talking to the pilotson a mouthpiece, and the pilots were talking back, and the chopper made a big cut left, coming around, coming around,