Mortal Prey

head.
    Baker said, “Great fuckin’ police work, huh? All you runnin’ around like maniacs and you haven’t heard of Patsy Hill?”
    “Well, who is she?” Lucas asked.
    “Patsy lived over by Clendenon, over toward Springfield. That’s where Carl Paltry came from.”
    Andreno said, “Who?”
    Lucas remembered the FBI report. “Rinker’s stepfather.”
    Baker nodded. “That’s right. I think he was fuckin’ her, too. Clara. Anyway, he come from over there, and I think maybe they even lived there for a little while, or off and on, if you know what I mean. That’s where Rinker met Patsy Hill.”
    “So who in the fuck is Patsy Hill?” McCoy asked.
    “Another goddamned killer,” Baker said, with a wide green smile. “I always thought it was amazin’. Two small-town girls, get to be best friends, and they both grow up to be killers. Cops was all over the place here, about ten years ago, must be, maybe longer, because Patsy was living down in Memphis with her husband, and she killed him with an ax or something like that. Maybe it was a hammer. Whacked the shit out of him. Then she ran, and they never caught her.”
    “Never?” Lucas asked.
    “Not as far as I know, and I think I’d probably hear about it. I know some people who growed up over there. It ain’t that far.”
    “Cross the county line, near to Springfield,” McCoy said. He was plainly relieved: not his jurisdiction.
    “Clara and Patsy didn’t go to the same school?” Lucas asked.
    “Not here,” Baker said. “I don’t know where Patsy went to school, maybe Springfield. But there was a time when Patsy and Clara was like this.” He crossed two fingers. “They both grew up to be killers.”
    “She got any family around? Patsy?” Lucas asked.
    “Yeah, over in Clendenon. Right there on Tree Street.”
     
    THEY TALKED A while longer, got a list of the stolen guns, and headed back into Hopewell. Lucas thanked McCoy for his help, then he and Andreno drove back toward the interstate in the Porsche.
    “We going to Clendenon?” Andreno asked.
    “We might be onto something,” Lucas said. “The feds don’t know about this—I read the whole file. If this Patsy Hill killed somebody years ago, and ran, and Rinker hid her, and if she’s somehow living and working around St. Louis…”
    “Then Hill could be paying Rinker back. Letting her stay over.”
    “And Hill couldn’t turn Rinker in, no matter how big the reward was. Even more, I’ll bet none of Clara’s Mafia friends knew about Hill. Why would Clara tell them? One of them might have been tempted to use Hill as a get-out-of-jail card,” Lucas said. He looked over at Andreno. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll bet five United States dollars right now that Rinker is staying with Hill. I don’t know where Hill is, but if we can find her, we’ll find Rinker.”
    Andreno thought about it for two minutes, then said, “No bet.” He said it with a tone: Like Lucas, he could smell the trail.
    A little farther down the road, Lucas said, “Let’s not forget about that list of guns, huh? She’s always been a pistol queen, but now she’s got a carload of rifles. We gotta let Mallard know. We need to spread the net around Levy.”
     
    ON THE WAY to Clendenon, Lucas got the address for a Hill family on Tree Street, Chuck and Diane, and the phone number. He tried to call ahead, but there was no answer and no answering machine. “We could be here for a while,” he said to Andreno.
    Clendenon was a small town, not quite a suburb of Springfield, with a block-long downtown and a BP station at the end of that block. They asked the gas station attendant about Tree Street, and got detailed instructions. “You might want to keep your speed down in that Porsche,” the attendant said, as they turned to go. “The town cop figures out speeds based on his best estimate, and your car looks like it’s going forty when it’s sitting at the gas pump.”
    “Thanks,” Lucas said.
    “No problem. You’ll find the cop just about a block down that way…sitting behind that blue house. Take ’er easy.”
    They crept by the blue house at twenty miles an hour, and if there was a cop in the black Mustang parked at the curb behind the house, he made no move to come after them. They took a left two blocks farther on, and found Tree Street two more blocks down. Lucas took a left, found the house numbers going the wrong way, made a U-turn, drove two blocks down, and parked in front of the Hill