Mortal Prey

close to busting this line. Give me your cell phone number.”
    “I don’t have—”
    “Goodbye.”
    “Wait, wait, wait—I was just trying to stall you.” He recited the number. There was a pause, and he added, “You can call that anytime.”
    But she was gone. “Holy shit,” Lucas said. He turned to the room. “She’s gone. We got the line?”
    Malone was on the phone, waving him off. Then the man who’d dashed out of the room hurried back in and said, “We’re jacked directly into the highway patrol. When we get the line—”
    “We got the line,” Malone blurted. “It’s in Illinois.”
    “Damnit,” said the man who’d contacted the highway patrol. “We’ve got Missouri Highway Patrol on line one. They must have a quick way to get to the Illinois cops.”
    Malone punched up line 1 and, after identifying herself, told the Missouri cop that “she was calling from Illinois. How quick can you get to them? How long? Go, then. Here’s the location….”
    A truck stop. Lucas said, “When the cops get there, don’t let anybody leave the truck stop. Isolate the phone she was on. We need to see if we can get more prints, see if we can get some people who saw her who can tell us what she looks like now.”
    Malone nodded, and started repeating what Lucas said. Mallard said, “I’ve got a car. Let’s go.”
    “If it’s just you, let’s take my Porsche. I’ll get us there in a hurry.”
    Mallard said to Malone, “I’ll be on the cell phone. Call me in two minutes and vector us in on the truck stop.”
    “It’s right off I-64. Get on I-64 and go east, and I’ll call you and get you there.”
    “I’ve got a flasher for my car,” Lucas said over his shoulder, as he and Mallard headed for the door. “Tell the patrol that we’re coming through.”
     
    THE DISTANCE WAS a little better than thirty miles. Once on the interstate, they flew, with Mallard hunched over his cell phone, listening to directions and updates from Malone, talking over the rush of the wind, sheltering the face of the phone away from the red flasher behind the windshield. Between calls, Lucas filled him in on what Rinker had said: the warnings about her brother.
    “We’ve dealt with people a hell of a lot more dangerous than she is,” Mallard said.
    “Maybe not—maybe not as personally dangerous,” Lucas said. “Most assholes aren’t focused on a particular group of agents. That makes them easier to nail down. She’s not nuts. Not in that way.”
    “The warning just tells us that the brother ploy is effective—it’s working on her,” Mallard said.
    “Hope it doesn’t bite you in the ass,” Lucas said.
    Mallard went back to the phone and filled in Malone on the warning from Rinker. When he got off, he said, “Malone’s routing out a crime-scene guy to print the phone and another guy with a laptop ID kit. She talked to the manager of the truck stop and told him to keep people off the phones. If we can find one guy who got a good look at her, it’ll be worth the trip.”
    Lucas looked out the window. “You know, if Rinker’s staying here in town, and if she went out there just to make the call, the chances are we’re driving right past her. Over in the other lane.”
    Mallard looked over into the westbound lane and said, “So close.”
     
    THE TRUCK STOP looked like all truck stops—a yellow steel building with blackout windows in the middle of an oversized, oil-stained concrete fuel pad with a double line of gas pumps and a couple of diesel sheds. Inside, a convenience store was hip-joined to a macaroni-and-cheese restaurant, with a set of rest rooms in the middle and a locked suite of drivers-only showers. A half-dozen cop cars were parked around the place when Lucas gunned the Porsche up the ramp and into a narrow slot between two highway patrol cruisers.
    An Illinois highway patrolman had just stepped up to the door, going in, when Lucas pulled up, and he shook his head and then stepped toward them when Lucas killed the engine. Mallard was out first with his ID. “FBI,” he said.
    The cop looked at Mallard, then at Lucas, then at the Porsche, and said to Mallard, “You guys’re getting pretty fat rides these days.”
    “Hey, the income taxes are pouring in—you can’t believe it,” Lucas said. “We figure, might as well enjoy life.”
    Mallard said, “He owns it personally. He’s rich, he’s an asshole, he works for the city of Minneapolis. The federal government drives low-end