Mortal Prey

the table, not in their business, not when they know we’re watching.”
    “Maybe we’ll eventually put a net around him,” Malone said. She and Mallard were double-teaming the briefing. They were good at it, practiced, coordinated without awkwardness or deference. “Right now, though, we want to put some light tags on the other people. Keep track of them. Maybe somebody will run, and we’ll want to know that.”
    “Do we have anybody on the street?” asked a woman in a square-shouldered, khaki-colored dress that made her look like a tomboy or an archaeologist. “She’s not in any hotel within two hundred miles, she’s not staying with anybody we’ve got in our history, her face is all over the place on TV and in the newspapers, but nobody sees her. Where is she? If we can figure that out…What do people do when they come to St. Louis but the cops are looking for them? They still got boardinghouses or something?”
    They all thought about that for a few moments, then started making noises like a bunch of ducks quacking, Lucas thought—no reflection on Mallard.
    “Lucas…what do you think?” Malone asked finally.
    Lucas shrugged. “You guys are always putting up rewards like a million dollars for some Arab terrorist. If she’s ditched underground with an old crooked friend…why not offer a hundred thousand and see if you get a phone call?”
    “Rewards cause all kinds of subsidiary problems,” a gray-shirted agent said. “You get multiple claims…”
    “You guys got lawyers coming out of your ears, to be polite,” Lucas said. “Fuck a bunch of multiple claims. Bust her first, litigate later. Once you have her chained in the basement, you can work out the small stuff.”
    “It’s an idea,” Malone said, without much enthusiasm. “We’d have to get the budget.”
    A guy in a white shirt said, “We know every place she ever worked here in St. Louis. What if we ran the Social Security records on every place she worked, and got a list of all her coworkers, and cross-matched them.”
    That idea turned their crank. Mallard made notes, and Lucas looked at his watch. When they sorted it out, one of the agents asked, “Is Gene Rinker going to be a genuine resource?”
    Mallard looked at Malone, who said, “Two possibilities on that. First, we use him to talk her in. He’s resisting. The second is, at some critical point, we throw him out there as a chip. Come in, we guarantee no death sentence, and your brother walks on the dope charge.”
    Lucas was twiddling a pencil, anxious to get going, but asked, “Where is he? Gene?”
    “We’re moving him here.”
    “How’re you going to face him off to Clara? How is she even going to find out about him?”
    Malone shrugged. “The press. They’ve been all over the Dichter thing. This is a large story here. There’ll be a story on tonight’s news that we’re bringing Gene here to assist with the investigation, and we’ve let it be known that we’ve got him by the short hairs. Rinker’ll hear about it. Unless she’s in Greenland or Borneo.”
    Lucas blinked, and twiddled, and Malone finally asked, “What?”
    “I like blackmail as much as the next guy, when you’re dealing with small-timers,” Lucas said. “Clara isn’t. I don’t see her turning herself in. If you hang her kid brother out to dry—he’s the only person we’ve been able to find who she cares about—she could do something unpredictable.”
    “Like what?”
    “I don’t know. If I did, it wouldn’t be unpredictable.”
    “Well, God, Lucas, what do you want us to do?”
    “He’s a resource,” said another guy. “We don’t have to use him.”
    “I think we’d be remiss if we didn’t keep him available,” said a third. A woman chipped in, “He’s a violator. I say to heck with him.”
     
    THE MEETING BROKE up a little after nine. When Lucas went by the guard desk, Loftus, the guard he’d talked to, wasn’t there. The guard who was there said, “You’ve got a note from Dan. He’s hung up for a while,” and passed Lucas a piece of typing paper. Outside the door, Lucas opened the paper and found a map drawn with a ballpoint, and next to that, the words “11 o’clock.”
    Lucas went back to the hotel, got a corned-beef sandwich from room service, unpacked his suitcase, talked to Weather for fifteen minutes, watched the news, and headed out the door a few minutes after eleven o’clock. St. Louis was easy enough to get around, and Lucas found the