Mortal Prey

a paper napkin to explain the lay of the Yucatán, and the cities of Cancún and Mérida, and outlined what was known of Clara Rinker’s stay in Mexico.
    “She wasn’t working for the Mejias before she came here, of that we are certain. They had no idea of who she was. If they had known, it is doubtful that Paul Mejia would have been allowed to continue the relationship. From what we can piece together, he met her at the hotel where she worked—purely accidentally, she was a bookkeeper and he was checking on a business question having to do with automobile parking costs at various beach hotels—and that she did not know about the Mejia family until another woman at the hotel told her, some time after they began seeing each other. She lived quite modestly in a rented apartment.”
    “Fingerprints?” Lucas asked.
    “Nothing. The room had been methodically wiped. There were personal items left behind, but nothing that you could not buy in five minutes in another city. And, of course, nobody ever took a picture of her. There was never an occasion.”
    “No way to tell where she went?”
    “She disappeared after an appointment at the doctor’s office,” Martin said. “She had recovered from the shooting—the checks…. Is that right, the medical checks?”
    “Checkups,” Malone offered.
    “Yes. The medical checkups were routine, and had become more a matter of physical rehabilitation. She had some damage to her stomach muscles, and they needed strengthening. Anyway, there is a large taxi stand not far from the doctor’s office, but none of the taxi drivers we’ve found remembers seeing her or taking her anywhere. That’s possibly because they take all kinds of Americans everywhere, and they simply can’t remember, or because the Mejia connection had been rumored, and nobody wanted anything to do with her.”
    “So she takes a taxi and she’s gone.”
    Martin shrugged again and said, “What else can I tell you? We have document checks, of course, for people coming and going, and since that time, we have no Cassandra or Cassie McLain, and of course, no Clara Rinker, entering or leaving Mexico.”
     
    MALONE AND MALLARD questioned Martin through the breakfast—they weren’t quite rehearsed, Lucas noticed, but they were coordinated. He began watching them more closely, and began to suspect that the coordination was personal, rather than professional. But what about the Sheetrocker, he wondered?
    Then, in the government GMC Suburban that Martin himself drove to Mérida, Mallard scrambled into the back with Malone, and Lucas noticed that their shoulders touched during much of the ride, and he thought, Hmmm. The two FBI agents pushed the questions even when it was obvious that they were running in circles, as though they were playing a ranking game with each other….
    Martin was unfailingly polite through it all. Halfway to Mérida, the FBI questions ran out, and they rode in silence for a while.
    Martin eventually turned to Lucas. “If I might ask…where did you get your jacket? It’s very nice. Also the shirt, although it’s not my style.”
    “Got it in San Francisco. One of the gay men’s boutiques—my fiancée would know the store,” Lucas said. He opened the front lapel and read it. “It’s a Gianfranco Ferre. I liked the fabric for hot weather, although it does get some pulls in it.”
    “Hmm.” Martin nodded, pursing his lips. “Large people like yourself look authoritative even in casual clothing. I’m afraid my body was made for suits.”
    “But that’s a great suit,” Lucas said. “I saw one like it, I think, a friend of mine had one. Ralph Lauren, the Purple Label? Though it was in blue.”
    “Exactly, this is what it is,” Martin said, looking pleased, touching his necktie knot and lapel. “Some people in America think brown suits look bad, but I think, with brown people, they look not-so-bad.” And a moment later: “Have you ever looked at a suit by Kiton?”
    Lucas said, “I saw some, at a show…”
    They talked about suits for a while, then about shoes. Martin told Lucas that he’d paid $1,100 for a pair of semicustom oxblood loafers by an English cobbler named Barkley, only to find that every time he went through an airport metal detector, the steel shanks in the shoes set off the alarm. “So, when I go to the States, my beautiful shoes stay at home. It is the only way I can assure myself of the sanctity of my…” He searched again for the word, came up