Mortal Prey

Lucas got back. As Lucas sat down, Bender pushed a neat stack of paper across the table. Lucas thumbed through them: xeroxes of a police file.
    “I read some of the crime-scene reports while I was xeroxing them,” Bender said. He was pleased with himself. “Rinker killed them. Look at the pages I marked with the red pen.”
    Lucas started pulling out paper: reports from a crime-scene team, from a pathologist, from a cop who ran the case. The killer got in without breaking anything, and there were no signs of tools used around the door—the killer almost certainly had a key, which didn’t mean much. There were ways to get keys.
    The killer also knew where to find a jewelry hideout box—a concealed vertical slat on the side of a dresser in the master bedroom. The investigating cop described it as “built-in and invisible. In my opinion, the perpetrator must have had prior knowledge of its location.”
    Further along was a note that Levy had receipts and appraisals for the missing jewelry, setting its value at about sixty thousand dollars.
    “Sixty thousand on the jewelry,” Lucas told Andreno.
    “My memory’s getting bad…or maybe it’s just the inflation.”
    Some of the jewelry Levy had purchased for his wife, but most she’d inherited from her grandmother and a great-aunt. The Levys’ insurance covered only a small fraction of the valuation, no more than five thousand dollars, because they’d neglected to get a jewelry rider on their home insurance policy. There was also a later note, by a second investigator, made when the active investigation was suspended, that much of the value of the inherited jewelry was not in the stones but in the maker’s mark—early Tiffany gold and diamonds—and that value would be lost if the pieces were melted down or broken up. Though a knowledgeable thief might try to sell them intact, nothing had been recovered.
    “Typical Mafia greed-head would have been insured up to the nuts,” Bender said.
    “Maybe he thought that’d be too much of a tip-off,” Lucas said. “Like pulling the family pictures out of the house before you torch it.”
    Andreno said, “Might even consider it a nice touch—losing the jewelry.”
    The victims had been sexually engaged when they were killed. The man was shot in the back of the head. There were no exit wounds, and according to the pathologist, the .22 hollowpoints had made mush out of his brains. Because there were no exit wounds, there were no spatter marks to indicate his exact position when shot. The woman had tried to push him away, but was shot herself before she could get entirely from beneath him; she was draped over the bed onto the floor, with one leg under the man’s body.
    Lucas tapped the papers back together into a neat stack. “Somebody comes in after a lot of research, gets very close, kills with a .22 that none of the neighbors hear—maybe a silencer—provides Levy with a nice touch on the jewelry, and is long gone before the bodies are found. Very efficient.”
    “Rinker,” said Bender, finishing his coffee.
     
    BENDER OFFERED TO drop Andreno. Lucas took the Porsche back to the FBI building, went through the identification rigamarole, and found Malone sitting in the conference room by herself. She looked up from her laptop, blinked a few times to refocus, and said, “Lucas.”
    “Where is everybody?”
    “Most of them are working Levy. Louis is down talking to the AIC, and the two computer guys went to lunch. Got anything new?”
    “You get the faxes?”
    “We’re running them now. Davy Mathews, the organized-crime guy—we introduced you, the guy with the blue suit and white shirt?—thinks he remembers three of the names from references back in Washington. If he can remember three off the top of his head, then there are probably more. Levy could be a serious matter.” Her eyes drifted back to the laptop.
    “Okay. When is Mallard getting back?” Lucas pulled out a chair and sat down, dug a legal pad out of his briefcase.
    “A few minutes. He’s just trying to get straight on who’s doing what.”
    “You want to see the St. Louis file on the Levy murder?”
    Now she turned to him, one eyebrow raised. Lucas had heard that the one-eyebrow ability was genetic, like the ability to curl your tongue. “You have access?”
    “I got the file,” Lucas said. “Not the original, but a complete xerox.” He took it out and pushed it across the table, and Malone walked her office chair over and