Mortal Prey

court, where Ross’s wife was batting tennis balls around with a white-haired man.
    “Tennis lessons,” Ross said ruefully. “That guy costs me fifty bucks an hour.”
    “Your wife’s got a nice swing,” Lucas said.
    Ross looked at him with a tiny spark in his eye, the first sign Lucas had seen of humor. “Yes, she does. Always has had,” Ross said.
    Ross stood in the doorway and watched them go. When they were in the car, he pushed the door shut and walked to the opposite end of the house, moving silently on the thick carpet. Two men were in the billiards room, one of them looking out the window, while the other, a fiftyish man with a bald, pink scalp and a long Swedish face, was flipping playing cards down the length of a billiards table, at a tweed hat.
    Ross watched him for a moment. Johnson’s dour face reminded him of someone, but he couldn’t think who. Ross did not like Honus Johnson—nobody did—but he was sometimes afraid that he’d let that attitude leak through, and that Honus had picked it up.
    Honus was a throwback, a genuine sadist who’d found his perfect place in life as an interrogator, a punisher, with Ross’s organization. Some of the others used him from time to time, with Ross’s approval, but he was Ross’s creature…and like most people who owned creatures, Ross sometimes wondered if the beast would ever turn on him.
    Johnson, with his playthings, his hammers and saws and pliers and wire, would give a man a hard way to go.
    He stepped into the room, and both men turned to him. “They’re gone,” Ross said. “They have no idea where she is. But they pretty much said what I told you—she has to be staying with somebody she knew from before. I want you guys to get out there and start talking to people.”
    “If we find her?” asked the man from the window.
    “If you find her—if you literally find her, like walk in on her—you won’t have to worry, because she’ll kill you. But if you hear where she is, get back to me. We’ll get some guys to pick her up.”
    “I don’t know if I can be of much use,” Honus Johnson said. “I’m not a scout.”
    “I want you to go along with Troy, here, and stand in the background,” Ross said. “People have some ideas about you. That might convince them to be more forthcoming. And I have something else for you.”
    “Hmmm?” Johnson didn’t quite look eager.
    Ross looked at Troy. “You remember that woman Nancy Leighton? Used to work in fulfillment? Black hair, little mustache…Quit maybe three years ago?”
    “Drove a Camaro,” Troy said.
    “That’s the one. She used to be a good friend of Rinker’s. I think she’s got an apartment down on the south side somewhere. Get in her apartment, take her apart.”
    Johnson’s eyebrows went up. “Take her apart? Completely?”
    “Completely. Be careful—no prints, no DNA, but we want it to be noticed. We want it in the newspapers. Front page. Make it ugly.”
    “An example,” Johnson said with relish. He rubbed the edge of one hand through the palm of the other, back and forth, like a saw. Then: “Do I get Clara if we pick her up?”
    “I’d have to think about that,” Ross said. “I do like the girl—but she’s a very bad example, hitting Nanny like she did.”
    “I’d like to have her for a while,” Johnson said. His flat tongue flickered out to his thin lips, his flat pale eyes catching Ross’s. “It wouldn’t have to be long.”
    At that moment, when he caught Ross’s eyes, Ross realized who Johnson looked like: the old man in the Grant Wood painting American Gothic, the somber old man with the pitchfork standing next to his equally somber wife. “Old rivals, huh?” Ross said, and smiled at the thought. The two of them had been a powerful combination.
    Too bad about Clara.
     
    AT THE FBI BUILDING , Lucas said goodbye to Mallard and got into his car. “Gonna roll around town for a while,” he said. He dug up Micky Andreno’s phone number and dialed it. Andreno was out in the yard and snatched up the phone on the fifth ring, as Lucas was about to hang up. “Washing the car,” he said.
    “Know anybody at Heartland National?”
    “No, but one of Bender’s kids works there. Want me to call him?”
    “I think that Andy Levy’s a vice president. I did some calling around.”
    “Oh, shit…. Oh, shit.”
    “What?”
    “I’m so fuckin’ stupid. How could I be this fuckin’ stupid?” Andreno sounded shocked.
    “What?”
    “Nine, ten