Mortal Prey

place.
    As with the Rinker and Baker houses, the Hills’ was an older place, small, with a detached garage; but all of it was neatly kept, with a front window-box full of yellow- and wine-colored pansies and a strip of variegated marigolds along the driveway. When they got out of the car, Lucas could smell freshly cut grass. They knocked, got no answer, tried the neighbors. A woman in a housecoat told them that Chuck Hill worked at the grain elevator and Diane went grocery shopping in the morning and should be back at any moment: “Saw her leave an hour ago, so she oughta be…Here she comes.”
     
    DIANE HILL ARRIVED in an aging Taurus station wagon, bumped up the drive, and got out with a plastic grocery sack. She saw them coming, and waited in the driveway. Lucas identified them, and she said sullenly, “What do you want?”
    “When your daughter disappeared, she had to go somewhere. We think she might have gone to Clara Rinker, and we think Clara might be with her now.”
    A transient look of—What? Pleasure? Lucas thought so—crossed Hill’s face and then vanished as quickly as it had come.
    “We don’t have any idea where Patricia might be. We just hope to God that everything is all right with her, after the hell that her husband put her through.”
    “She never got in touch, just to tell you that she’s all right?”
    “Yes, she’s called from time to time, and I told the police that. She calls sometimes, and she cries because she can’t come home and she can’t tell us where she is, because she’s afraid that somebody will find out and the police will come get us. She’s protecting us by not telling.”
    Andreno tried: “Mrs. Hill, honest to God, we don’t care about Patsy—Patricia—she’s somebody else’s problem. But Clara is killing people—”
    “Mafia hoodlums,” Hill snapped.
    “She’s killed a lot of innocent people,” Lucas put in. “She’s going to kill more.”
    “That’s not my problem,” Hill said, clutching at her groceries. “All I know is, she was kind to my daughter when my daughter needed some kindness, and couldn’t come here to get it. And I know what happened to poor Clara when she was just a girl, and it doesn’t seem strange to me at all that she’s grown up to kill people. Where were the police when her stepdaddy was working his perversions on her, and her not even fourteen? Where were they when Patricia’s husband was burning her back with a clothes iron?”
    “Mrs. Hill…”
    “You tell me where the police were then.”
    “Mrs. Hill…”
    “And if I were you, I wouldn’t go talking to Chuck—that’s my husband—because he’s gonna be a damn sight less cordial than I’ve been. We don’t approve of any kind of criminality, but if the police really took care of crime, there wouldn’t be any Clara Rinker and our Patsy would still be with us. Excuse me.” She marched up the driveway and into the house, and slammed the door.
    After a moment, Andreno said, “I think we handled that pretty well.”
    “We oughta get a warrant and tear the house down.”
    “Really?”
    Lucas shook his head. “No. Shit.”
    “Want to try Chuck?”
    “I’ll drop you off, if you want to.”
    “No, thanks. Back to St. Louis, then?”
    Lucas sighed, looked up at the Hill house. “I guess.”
     
    TEN MILES OUT of town he said, “The Hills didn’t mention any other children.”
    Andreno shook his head. “No. I sorta got the impression that Patsy might be the only one.”
    “Huh. How many long-distance phone calls you think come pouring into the Hills’ house?”
    “Mmm.”
    “I bet she calls on Christmas,” Lucas said. “Or New Year’s, or right around then.”
    “I bet the feds can get a warrant for their phone records.”
    “Bet they can, too.” He picked up his cell phone.
    “Gonna tell them?”
    “About the rifles, so they can spread the net around Levy. I want to tell them in person about the Hill idea—I don’t want them pissing on it when I can’t defend it. They’ve sat around that conference table and pissed on every idea I’ve had, even when they paid off.”
    “They’re feds. That’s what they do.”

13
    THERE’S NO GOOD WAY TO GET FROM St. Louis to Anniston, Alabama, in a hurry, any more than there’s a good way to get from Minneapolis to St. Louis. Rinker couldn’t hurry anyway, because she couldn’t risk a traffic stop. She took I-64 east to I-24, and I-24 down to Nashville, where she picked up I-65, and I-65