Mortal Prey

be, and she’d prefer that nobody got the idea that Clara Rinker had long guns. As she was leaving, she thought again about the shotgun, and thought about burning the house down. Decided against it, looking at the lumps of dead dog in the front yard. Pretty even, she thought, though her ears were still ringing.
    She left Tisdale an hour after dark, headed northeast, toward St. Louis. In the dark she crossed a river, stopped, and threw the three loose rifles into the dark water. She spent the night halfway up the state, in a cash motel in the town of Diffley. There was an abandoned quarry outside Diffley, where the locals sighted-in their guns. Not many people went, and in her gunning days, she’d often driven down from St. Louis to work with new pistols.
    The next morning she got an egg-and-sausage McMuffin at McDonald’s, then drove out to the quarry. She was alone, and spent an hour sighting the rifles, leaving the AR-15 for last. The AR-15 looked a lot like Jaime’s M-16, and even had a selector switch. She fired off a couple of single rounds, landing them just where she’d expected. Then she flipped the selector switch, aimed it, and squeezed off a burst.
    Whoa. It was full-auto. She looked around, a little self-consciously—if anyone had heard that, she could be in trouble.
    All the guns were right on, as she expected. After the burst of automatic fire, she decided she’d better get out of town. She quickly but carefully repacked the guns, got out of the quarry, and drove the familiar, homey roads into St. Louis.
     
    SHE’D ALWAYS LIKED the place. Neat town, lots of things to do. Good bars, and she was a student of good bars. Rolled down along Forest Park, stopped in Central West End and got a sandwich, picked up a book, and walked around in the afternoon, getting back into the feel of the place. She did a little shopping, and then, at four o’clock, went down to the southeast corner of the city, to Soulard, along the Mississippi. She sat in the car and drew more triangles and squares on her yellow legal pad as she watched the people come and go on the sidewalk. She thought about the vision she’d had of the dark-haired girl, closed her eyes, and let the feeling come back. But now all she had was a memory. The vision was gone.
    Outside the car, a woman walked by, carrying a string bag with what looked like a green glass lamp inside. She was a large woman, and Rinker sat up when she saw her coming. Then she thought, after a minute, Too old.
    The woman she was looking for was three years older than Rinker. Her name—now—was Dorothy Pollock.

6
    BEFORE THEY LEFT CANCÚN, LUCAS asked Malone if she could either lend him a copy of the Rinker file he’d scanned in the plane coming down, or make a copy and send it to him in Minneapolis. She shook her head: “A lot of that stuff is speculation. We’re not even supposed to show it to you the first time.”
    “You mean it’s classified or something?”
    “Like that.”
    “Like if it got out, Rinker could sue you?”
    “Like if it got out, there are about a hundred people who could sue us. They wouldn’t, but they’d be calling up their friends in Congress, who’d be pissing and moaning about violations of privacy and human rights and the way we spend our budget.”
    “If I can’t copy it, could I read it overnight? Spend some time with it?”
    “Sure.” She said it without thinking, because she didn’t actually know him very well. “Give it back to me in the morning.”
     
    THE BLUE PALMS didn’t have a business center, but the Hilton did.
    In the evening, after dinner, Lucas told Mallard he felt like a walk. The heavy food and all. He strolled six blocks down to the Hilton and talked to the concierge about the business center. He was a writer from Los Angeles, he said, and he needed access to a xerox machine very late in the evening, as soon as he finished compiling his research. Would it be possible to rent one of the Hilton’s machines for a couple of hours?
    That courtesy was not usually extended outside the hotel, the concierge said. He would have to think about it—and after thinking about it, he decided that it would be a generous thing to do, and would help the Hilton’s image with traveling businessmen. At one in the morning, Lucas walked back with the file, met the concierge, and took care of the rental and courtesy fees. By two-thirty, he’d finished copying the file, and by three o’clock, was safely back in bed, the copy