Mortal Prey

that said, “Elevators,” and she was saying into the phone, all the time, “That fuckhead killed my guy and killed my baby, and I’m gonna take him out.” The righteous anger was surging in her voice, and was real and convincing. “You can get in or get out, whatever you want, but if you’re with John, I’ll take you right along with him.”
    “Listen, listen, listen…,” Dichter was saying, his voice rising.
    And she turned the corner and heard the last “listen” both through the phone and in person: Dichter was there, his back to her, talking into the pay phone. He felt the movement behind him and turned, his face going slack when he saw her face and the gun leveled at his forehead. He had just time to say, “No,” and Rinker shot him.
    The first shot went in between his eyes. The second and third went into the side of his head as he slumped down the wall, leaving blood lines down the yellow wallpaper.
    The shots, even with the silencer, were loud, enough to attract attention. Rinker shoved the gun into her jacket pocket, screamed, and ran into the lobby. “Man’s got a gun,” she screamed. “Man’s got a gun…”
    She was looking over her shoulder at the hallway, and somebody else screamed and the man with the suitcase ducked but didn’t run. He was looking at the hallway where Dichter had fallen. She turned down the hall where she’d come in, out of sight from the lobby, now running, banged through the side exit, heard shouting behind her, forced herself to a walk, went to her car, was in, was rolling…
    Was gone.

8
    THERE WAS NO EASY WAY TO DRIVE TO St. Louis from the Twin Cities. The easiest was to head east into Wisconsin, then south through Illinois on the interstate highways.
    The interstates were full of Highway Patrol cops, though, so Lucas took the Porsche straight south through Iowa, along secondary highways and country roads, spending a couple of extra hours at it but having a much better time. He eventually cut I-70 west of St. Louis and took it into town, arriving just after sunset on a gorgeous, warm August evening.
    Dichter had been shot the night before, and Malone had called at midnight. As they spoke, Mallard was on his way to St. Louis with his Special Studies Group, with Malone to follow in the morning.
    “No question it was her,” Malone said. A late-night caffeinated excitement was riding in her voice. “Two people got a pretty good look at her, but nobody knew who she was. They thought the shooting was coming from somewhere else—she must have used a silencer—and they were all running around like chickens with their heads cut off. She got out of the place clean. Nobody saw her car or where she went.”
    “How’d she know Dichter was in the hotel?”
    “She’s got a stolen cell phone. Dichter was killed on a pay phone, and we traced the number he’d called to a phone owned by a guy from Clayton—that’s just outside of St. Louis, to the west. The Clayton cops went to the guy’s apartment and talked to the manager, who said the guy was in Europe. So they checked the apartment and found the place had been broken into, ransacked. We called the guy in Europe and asked about the cell phone, and he said it should have been home on the dresser in the bedroom. No phone. It’d been taken.”
    “How’d Rinker know Dichter’d be calling from that pay phone? Did she know him that well? Or was she watching him?”
    “We don’t know.”
    “If she’s watching her targets, you could set up a surveillance net around anybody else she might go after. See if she comes in on them,” Lucas said.
    “We’ve talked about doing that. Take a lot of guys—maybe twenty at a time, three shifts. Sixty guys. That’s a lot.”
    “How bad do you want her?”
    “That bad,” Malone admitted. “But we have to get the budget.”
    “St. Louis must have a few stolen-phone dealers. The cops should have some lines on who might be selling them.”
    “You don’t think Rinker stole it?”
    Lucas said, “Jesus Christ, no. She’s not a burglar. She just knew about the guy who deals them, that’s all. Probably a bar guy—she was a dancer, remember?—or a barbershop in the barrio, if they’ve got a barrio. Get somebody to look in the Latino community, or the African community—I’ll bet there’s a dealer who wholesales them to a couple of guys who retail them out to people who want to call Colombia or Somalia, like that. That’s pretty common. A couple of dozen overseas