Mortal Prey

Ross said, looking after his wife. Mallard and Lucas followed him back into the office.
    Ross looked like what he was: a hood. The smart, hard kind of hoodlum, the borderline psychopath, the kind who might have run the docks in New York in another era. He weighed maybe two-twenty, Lucas thought, and had wide sloping shoulders. He was square, with heavy lids over dark eyes, a dark, saturnine face, and fingers like fat stubby cigars.
    The office around them was attractive, just as old man Mejia’s library had been: all good wood and well-coordinated, the furniture sitting on a blue-and-beige oriental carpet that glowed at them from the floor. Two orchids sat on his desk, and another on a side table. One of the orchid blooms was the exact color of green that Lucas remembered from a huge Luna moth that had once visited his Wisconsin cabin.
    “Beautiful flowers,” Mallard said, as they settled around Ross’s desk.
    “My principal hobby,” Ross said. “I have two thousand of them.”
    “You take care of them yourself?”
    Ross nodded. “Mostly.” He wasn’t interested in talking about his flowers. “What can I do for you folks?”
    “You’ve probably got a pretty good idea,” Mallard said. “You once employed Clara Rinker. She just killed Nanny Dichter, and we think she is probably going after you. She blames you for the killing of Paulo Mejia.”
    Ross made a hand gesture, a what can you do gesture, and said, “I never had anything but the best relationship with her. I was amazed when I found out that she’d been killing people. But her career started way before I met her—at least, if what the papers say is correct.”
    “Look, you know as well as I do that the Bureau has a major file on you,” Mallard said. “I think that some of the…surmises…made in those files are correct. But I don’t care about that. I don’t care if you’re a big-time mobster, because my job right now is to find and stop Clara Rinker. What I want from you is any ideas you may have of where she’s staying, who she may be working with. Old friends, people she could force to take her in—anything like that.”
    Ross was shaking his head. “I’d have no idea. I will go around and ask, though. When she worked for me, she mostly worked in the warehouse, and there must be twenty or thirty people out there who knew her. I’ll have one of my guys talk to everyone.”
    “How about if we talk to them?”
    “I’ve got no problem with that,” Ross said. He leaned forward, opened a small drawer, and took out a sheet of paper and a yellow pencil. He scribbled on it and pushed it at Mallard. “This is the manager’s name and phone number. I’ll call him as soon as you leave, and tell him to expect a call from you.”
    Mallard nodded. “Thank you…. You personally have no idea….”
    Ross shook his head again. “None. I’ll tell you, I’m really not sure that she’s coming after me. I’m not sure exactly why she went after Nanny Dichter—I mean, you hear these rumors that Nanny played by his own rules, sometimes, but I didn’t know they had any prior…relationship. Maybe that’ll be the end of it. Nanny.”
    “That’s a possibility, but she has at least one more man on her list for sure—not you. And we know that she made a series of phone calls from Mexico, to Missouri, after the shooting, and that you were the main topic of conversation. So we think there are at least two more people on the list, and you are one of them.”
    “Who’s the other guy?” Ross’s dark eyebrows went up.
    “Sorry,” Mallard said. “I can’t…”
    “Paul Dellaglio?”
    Mallard shook his head. “…really give you that information. Why would you think Dellaglio?”
    “Because anything Nanny Dichter did, Paul was part and parcel of. Unless the Rinker thing involves sex.”
    “Don’t think so.”
    “Neither do I. Nanny didn’t get around so much. So I would guess that Paul’s the other guy on your list.”
    Mallard shook his head and said, “I’ll have a couple of our agents around to your warehouse this afternoon.”
    “Anything I can do,” Ross said.
     
    THAT WAS THE INTERVIEW . After a few more unpleasantries, Ross took them out. On the way, they stopped in a room whose leaded-glass wall overlooked the back lawn. To the left, a greenhouse stood facing the south. A resort-sized rectangular swimming pool was straight ahead, and with its black-painted bottom, acted as a reflecting pond. To the right was a tennis