Mortal Prey

deal?”
    Mallard shook his head again. “Don’t know. We’re guessing that’s it. Whatever, Rinker’s broken out now, she’s in the open. I really want her. Really want her. She’s run her score up to maybe thirty-five people: This woman is the devil.”
    “She’s maybe more inflected than that,” Malone objected. To Lucas: “We have a good biography on her now. You can read it on the way down to Cancún. She had quite the little backwoods childhood.”
     
    THEIR CONNECTION WAS TIGHT : An hour after Lucas’s Northwest flight put down at Houston, the Continental flight to Cancún lifted off. Mallard and Malone sat together, with Lucas behind them, next to an elderly woman who plugged her sound-killing Bose headphones into a Sony discman, looked at him once, with something that might have been skepticism, and pulled a sleeping mask over her eyes. When they were off the ground, Malone took a bound report out of her briefcase and handed it back to Lucas. “Rinker,” she said.
     
    LUCAS HAD NEVER been able to read on airplanes: The Clara Rinker file was a first. When Malone handed him the file, he’d wondered at its heft, and turned to the last page: page 308. He flipped through and found a dense, single-spaced narrative. Not the usual cop report.
    The first page began: “There are only four known photographs of Clara Rinker—three from driver’s licenses and one from an identification card issued by Wichita State University. None of the people who knew Rinker were able to immediately pick her photograph from a spread of similar photographs prepared by the Bureau—in each of the four photos, she had obscured her appearance with eyeglasses and elaborate hair arrangements. This is typical of what we know of Clara Rinker: She is obsessively cautious in her contacts with others, and she apparently has, from the beginning of her career, prepared herself to run.”
    The author of the report—a Lanny Brown, whom Lucas hadn’t heard of—had a nice style that would have worked in a true-crime book. Rinker had been killing people for almost fifteen years. The first reports had been of various organized-crime figures, both minor and major, taken off by a killer whose trademark was extreme close-range shootings, many of them with .22-caliber silenced pistols.
    Because of the circumstances of the shootings—two of them had taken place in women’s rest rooms, although both the victims were men—the Bureau began to suspect that the shooter was a woman who lured the victims into private places with a promise of sex. A friend of one victim, in Shreveport, Louisiana, said that he’d spoken briefly at a bar with a pretty young woman who had a Southern accent, and later had caught a glimpse of the young woman and the victim leaving the club, in the victim’s Continental. The car and the man were later found on a lover’s lane. The man—who was married—had been shot three times in the head with a .40-caliber Smith.
    No fewer than nine people had been executed in stairwells or between cars in parking structures. The Bureau believed that the choices of execution locale indicated that the shooter had carefully scouted the victims, knew where they parked their cars, and favored parking structures because they offered good access and egress, large numbers of strangers interacting with each other—a strange woman wouldn’t be noticed—and sudden privacy: Bodies had apparently gone unnoticed for as much as four hours when rolled under a car.
    She was also believed to have posed as either a Mormon missionary or a Jehovah’s Witness: One quiet evening in suburban Chicago, a “straight-looking” young woman carrying what a neighbor said appeared to be a Bible or a Book of Mormon had knocked on the door of a recently divorced hood in Oak Park, Illinois. Neighbors who’d been sitting in a porch swing in the restored Victorian across the street said she’d spoken to whoever answered the door, then turned away and left.
    Three days later, after they’d been unable to get in touch with the bad boy, friends looked in a window and saw him sprawled on the floor by the front door. He’d taken two in the heart and one in the head, and died in a pair of flowered boxer shorts with a tight grip on a can of Coors Light. The time of death was estimated from the fact that he’d apparently just taken off a pair of Greg Norman golf slacks and a midnight-blue and white-hibiscus aloha shirt, which other friends said he’d worn