Mortal Prey

to a golf course three days earlier.
     
    AFTER SUMMARIZING THE executions that Rinker was believed involved in, the Bureau report spent some time with her childhood. She’d grown up on a broken-down farm outside of Tisdale, Missouri, not far from Springfield. Her father had deserted the family when she was seven, and had died, unknown to the family, twelve years later, in a car accident in Raleigh, North Carolina.
    Her mother, Cammy Rinker, had divorced Rinker’s father four years after he left, and two weeks after the divorce was final, married a man named Carl Paltry. Paltry was an alcoholic and a bully, and had been arrested for beating both Cammy Rinker and Rinker’s older brother, Roy. The police had learned of Roy’s beating after a gym coach noticed that Roy was peeing blood.
    According to Rinker’s aunt—her mother’s sister—Paltry also had sexually abused his wife Cammy Rinker, Clara, and possibly Clara’s younger brother, Gene. The abuse had begun a few weeks after the marriage, when Rinker was eleven, and continued until she ran away from home when she was fourteen. Until she was eleven, she’d had a good record in school, but that went bad after Paltry arrived. The aunt also said that Rinker’s older brother, Roy, had sexually abused her.
    Paltry and Cammy Rinker had remained married for twelve years, until one day, when Clara would have been nineteen, and already working as a shooter, he’d disappeared. He hadn’t run anywhere, the local cops said—he’d gotten drunk and had beaten Cammy so badly that she’d been hospitalized, and Paltry had been arrested. He was out on bail when he disappeared. His car had been found parked, engine running, behind a Dairy Queen in Tisdale. His checkbook and wallet were on the passenger seat. He was never seen again, and the Bureau believed that Clara Rinker may have paid him a visit.
    Rinker’s mother had almost nothing useful to tell the Bureau. Her memory of Clara seemed uneven; and when she went to get family pictures, she found that all the photos of Clara were gone.
    The Bureau had tracked Roy through a series of minor crime reports, and eventually found him in Santa Barbara, California, where he was involved in a lightweight prostitution ring. Roy and a man named Charles Green ran teenaged hookers around to country clubs. The Bureau report quoted one source as saying, “You could get your shoes and your knob polished at the same place and time. It was convenient for everybody.”
    Roy was two years older than Rinker and had left home two years after she had. He had seen her twice, when she’d stopped in Santa Barbara looking for their younger brother, Gene, who was also someplace in California. Roy didn’t know anything about anything, though he said that Rinker appeared to be doing well, and drove nice cars. He had no photographs of her, and denied having sexually abused her. The interviewer thought he was lying.
    Rinker’s younger brother, Gene, had shown up on three police reports in California, all three for minor drug offenses. He was listed as “homeless” on the police reports and was apparently living on the beaches between Venice and Santa Monica. The Bureau had been unable to find him. Next to this paragraph, a female hand had scrawled, “Lucas: ask me—M.”
    Lucas reached forward and tapped Malone’s arm. “There’s a note here to ask you about Gene Rinker.”
    She turned and said, “Yes. We found him yesterday. He was working for a pool-cleaning company in Pacific Palisades—Los Angeles. We’re holding him on a drug charge.”
    “Good charge?”
    “He was in possession of marijuana.”
    “How much?”
    “Maybe a gram.”
    “A joint? Jesus, is that…?”
    “It’s more than enough, is what it is. As soon as we get done here, I’m going to L.A. to talk to him. See if he has anything interesting on Clara.”
    “Okay.” Malone turned away, and Lucas sank back into the report.
     
    RINKER HAD WORKED for a bar in St. Louis, then for Ross, who was a liquor distributor. She’d also worked off and on as a bookkeeper-secretary for a mobster named Allen Kent, whose mother’s family was closely tied to the old Giancana outfit in Chicago. Eventually, Rinker had put together enough money to buy a bar in Wichita, which had done well until she’d fled after her disastrous involvement in a series of killings in Minneapolis. Where she’d gone immediately after Minneapolis was unknown. She’d eventually popped up in