Mortal Prey

Rinker’s mother’s house, a mile out in the country, and saw nothing moving. The house was short, a story and a half, with peeled-paint clapboard siding and drawn curtains. A neglected driveway projected into a single-car garage. The door was open and the garage was empty. A small brown-and-white dog sat under the rusted rural mailbox at the end of the drive, and looked lost and thirsty. In the back, an ancient Ford tractor sat abandoned and rusting in a crappy, brush-choked woodlot.
    “What if we busted in with our guns out, and Clara was sitting at the kitchen table eating oatmeal?” Andreno asked.
    “She’d probably shoot us both and throw our bodies in the septic tank,” Lucas said.
    “So, let’s go see the sheriff.”
     
    MELLAN COUNTY SHERIFF Errol Lamp was not an impulsive man, and when Lucas and Andreno showed up at the county courthouse in Hopewell, he questioned their credentials and had a deputy check with the feds in St. Louis. Eventually, he got to Mallard, who told him exactly where his bread was buttered, and who buttered it. As they were talking, a woman stuck her head in the office and said, “Errol, you know that Porsche out by the Rinkers’? It’s these guys.”
    The sheriff looked at them with his slow eyes and said, “You went by the Rinkers’, huh?”
    “Yeah. How’d you know?”
    “Neighborhood crime watch,” the sheriff said. “They report anything suspicious. Like a Porsche. Lot of drug runners drive Porsches.”
    Seconds before Lucas would have lost both his patience and his temper, Lamp assigned a deputy to take them around the county and, Lucas thought, to fill him in later.
     
    “ BEEN TEN FEDERAL people here to see Rinker’s mother, and none of them went in believing what we said, but they all came out believing,” said the deputy, whose name was Tony McCoy. McCoy was a heavy, sweating man in khakis, with a straw Stetson, a rodeo belt-buckle, and deep-blue cowboy boots. They were in his Jeep Grand Cherokee.
    “What’s that?” Andreno asked.
    “That’s she’s crazier’n a goddamn cuckoo clock. She won’t have no idea what you’re talking about.”
    “So let’s not go there,” Lucas said. “Let’s go to the school.”
    “The school?”
    “Yeah, you know—brick building full of kids.”
    McCoy gave him a hard look, and Lucas smiled into it. Lucas had kindly blue eyes, but his smile often came off as a threat, and McCoy flinched away. “Wanna go to the school, the school it is,” he muttered.
    The Mellan Consolidated School was larger than Lucas expected, with two academic wings built around a gymnasium. The principal was a thin, youngish woman with carefully colored hair, a single eyebrow that extended straight across her brow ridge, and glasses that sat a quarter-inch too far down her narrow nose. She had the habit of pushing them back up with her middle finger, and as Andreno said later, “Every time I looked at her, she was flippin’ me off.”
    “We have cooperated with a number of FBI requests and interviews, and frankly, we just don’t have much,” she said. “There was an agent here named Josh Franklin. If you were to talk to him…”
    “We’re looking for different angles,” Lucas said. “If you know anybody who knew Clara Rinker, or any of the Rinkers—”
    “I’m sorry, but I’m about the same age as Clara, so when she left here, I was in ninth or tenth grade in Weston, Oklahoma,” she said. “We only have two teachers here who remember her, and so far, nobody’s found them helpful.”
    “If we could just get a couple of minutes with them….”
    “Of course. We’re happy to cooperate,” she said unhappily.
    The two teachers, both women, both in their late fifties or early sixties, remembered only one new thing. The older of the two said, “It might not mean anything at all, but one thing I do remember about Clara, and never told anybody else because it hadn’t happened yet—and it’s not exactly about Clara—is that Ted Baker got all his guns stolen last month and his guard dogs were shot. This was before Clara showed up in St. Louis. Ted was only two or three years older than Clara. And he used to run with Clara’s older brother, Roy.”
    “Huh,” Lucas said. “All his guns?”
    He looked at the deputy, who scratched his head and said, “That’s right. We handled the break-in. I figured it was one of those gun nuts that Baker hangs out with, if he didn’t do it himself, for the insurance. I didn’t