Mortal Prey

thumbed quickly through it. “I’ll have somebody check it and cross-reference the names. Thanks.”
    “Sure.”
    “What are you going to do now?”
    “Sit back, close my eyes, and think,” he said. He put his feet and calves on the table, tilted the chair back and closed his eyes.
    After a minute, she asked, “You’re just going to sit there?”
    “For a while.”
    Malone watched him for a few more seconds, then shrugged and went back to the laptop. After a minute or two, his eyes still closed, he asked, “Louis make a move on you yet?”
    Heavy silence, then: “No.”
    “Is he going to?”
    “I don’t know. He’s certainly taking his time.”
    “He wants to. But he’s too shy. I tried to get him to grab you in Mexico, and he got in a heavy sweat. He’s sorta that way. You may have to help him along.”
    “Ah, jeez,” she said. And after a while: “I’m not one hundred percent sure I want to. He’s not the most…I don’t know.”
    “Not a paperhanger?”
    “Sheetrocker. The Sheetrocker is like a fantasy. Big arms, big legs, little butt. Dumb as a bowl of mice. He’ll never finish his novel. He only has a novel because he’s just barely smart enough to understand that women aren’t impressed by Sheetrocking. I doubt that he’s faithful; jeez, I know he’s not. I mean, I haven’t caught him running around or anything, but it just isn’t his nature.”
    Lucas cracked his eyelids and looked at her. She was sitting in her chair facing him, shoulders hunched, hands in her lap. She looked lonely. “You guys…Look, try him out. Mallard. Really. Take him out for a cup of coffee, and just…take a meeting, for Christ’s sake. You both know how to do that.”
    “Thank you for your concern, Chief Davenport.”
    “Fuck it. I’m going back to sleep.”
     
    AFTER A WHILE , he dropped the chair back down, scratched his head, and asked, “I guess you’re monitoring Clara’s cell phone, in case she calls anyone?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Did you think about asking her brother to call her on that number?”
    “Why’d you have to mention Louis?” Malone asked.
    “I thought somebody ought to. Put the poor bastard out of his misery, if nothing else.” She sniffed, and Lucas said, “No, no no…you know the rule: no crying.”
    She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand, and he went back to his question. “Anyway, did you think about having her brother call Rinker? Like, early in the morning? If he did, and she answered, and he kept her on for a few minutes, maybe we could zero in on the neighborhood where she’s staying. She’s gotta be ditched with a friend.”
    “We’re talking about that,” Malone said. “We don’t have the street contacts here, but we’ve got the brains. We’ve talked through most of the possibilities, based on what we’ve got.”
    “You gonna do it?”
    “Probably—if she doesn’t move on Levy. Or one of the others. We’re doing a full-court press.”
    “You got the budget?”
    “Yes, we did….” She sniffed again and said, “You know, I always thought I was going to grow up and be pretty glamorous, an FBI agent, high up, with a gun and a computer and fly in jets. And all I wind up doing is marrying stupid guys and I get to be a joke. I’m too tall and I’m too thin and I always dress too conservatively. I’m flinty. This isn’t the way it was supposed to be.”
    “Jesus, Malone, you married them. I can’t tell you about that.”
    “It always seemed like such a good idea at the time. You know, one of the guys, the actor, we got married at the courthouse by a judge and we went outside and he asked me if I had enough money for a cab, and I thought, This isn’t going to work. We’d been married exactly seven minutes.”
    “Talk to Louis, for Christ’s sake…. I’m going back to sleep.”
     
    LUCAS LEANED BACK again. He could hear an occasional flurry of keystrokes from the laptop, as Malone pushed through a file somewhere out in electronic FBI-land.
    His basic personal asset in the investigation was a bunch of guys who knew the town—but that didn’t mean much at the moment, because there was no way to leverage that into more information. If they had even a rough idea of where she was, then some of the FBI data, combined with street information, might get them close. Until then…He’d read in an informational brochure at the hotel that there were more than two and a half million people in the St. Louis metro area.
    Too many.
    Another