Mortal Prey

ordered salads and Lucas and Andreno ordered steaks, and Andreno said, “Gene Rinker is a troubled young man. I don’t think it was dope—looked like he was fucked from the git-go.”
    “And you got nothing from him,” Mallard predicted.
    “Eh,” Lucas said. “Probably nothing. We might run down to Tisdale and poke around.”
    “Tomorrow?”
    “Tonight, if nothing comes up. Get a bed in Springfield.”
    Mallard shrugged. “We talked to everybody she knew—but hell, if you want to, it’s fine with me. Maybe you’ll turn something up.”
    “She didn’t make good friends. She was too messed up,” Lucas said. “We think she might have had some friends when she was a kid. We keep thinking, she’s gotta be staying somewhere. She’s not sleeping in her car.”
    “Whatever…”
    The steaks came a few minutes later and they talked about the case a bit, and Lucas thought about the friend that Rinker must be staying with, and said, gesturing with a neatly forked square of rib eye, “You know, if you really don’t care how you get her—I mean, dead or alive—you ought to talk to all the local assholes and tell them that she’s staying with a friend. Somebody in that whole grapevine would know who her friends were. She worked for them, and somebody would know. Especially if there was some money on the table.”
    Malone nodded. “There would have been no reason for her to keep her friendships secret back then.”
    Mallard said, “Except that she’s smart. We know she’s smart, and this whole thing with this White guy makes me think she’s a little smarter than I realized. I mean, she’s messing with us. She’s gonna have a bunch of civil rights attorneys on our asses in the morning. All that makes me think—she’d know that her old pals might sell her out. She’d be ready for that.”
     
    LEVY LIVED ON a semiprivate street four blocks from the Black Lantern, a huge black-brick pile with a marble entrance and a carriage house visible in the back. One end of the street was open, but with warning signs against nonresident parking; the other end was closed with a wrought-iron fence.
    They’d decided to go in cold. The supervisor in the group covering Levy called Mallard toward the end of the meal to say that Levy had arrived home. “He’s scared. He’s got a guy traveling with him, apparently a bodyguard. He took his car straight into the carriage house, and the bodyguard ran between the carriage house and the main house. Somebody met him, and then Levy ran up to the house while the bodyguard waited at the door.”
    “Must be pretty sure that nobody’s in the carriage house, then,” Lucas said.
    “Our guys said both the house and the carriage house are wired up tight.”
    “Well, at least we know he’ll be there. Doesn’t sound like he expects to go barhopping,” Andreno said.
    They took their time walking over, looking at the houses along the side streets. There were lights everywhere, people moving around. If Rinker was in one of the houses on Levy’s street, or behind Levy’s street, she’d have a tough time getting out, Lucas thought. “As soon as we talk to him, you oughta have the net guys start going door to door, making sure that Rinker’s not holding somebody in one of these places,” Lucas said.
    “We’ll do that,” Mallard said. At the entrance to Levy’s street, they passed though a wrought-iron gate, closed it behind themselves. A man in a suit climbed out of a car and walked toward them. He was carrying a pale straw hat, and said, “Louis.”
    “David. Everybody, this is David Homburg,” Mallard said to Lucas and Andreno. To Homburg: “We’re going in—you and me and Malone, and Lucas. And, uh, Mr. Andreno, I guess.”
    “Hate to miss it,” Andreno said.
    Mallard told Homburg to leave two watchers on the front and back of Levy’s, and to have the rest of the net begin knocking on doors, two men at a time. Homburg stepped back to his car and spoke on a radio for a few moments, then rejoined them. “Done.”
    “So let’s go,” Mallard said.
     
    LEVY WAS NOT what Lucas expected—he’d expected one of the tough-faced finance guys, and instead got a round-faced beach boy, middle forties, with bleached tips on his light brown hair, a carefully revised nose, dark brown golf shirt under a soft leather lounging jacket with fawn slacks, and leather moccasins without socks.
    The bodyguard was another case altogether. He was a muscular size 48, with a buzz