Mortal Prey

Hill file, scanned it, and shipped it in an hour. Patsy Hill, ten years earlier, had been a tall, thin blonde with a large nose and bony shoulders. A high-res color version of the digital photo was sent to an ink-jet printer somewhere else in the building, and fifteen minutes later came back as a finished paper photograph.
    “Doesn’t look like anybody in particular,” Andreno said, as the photo went up on the bulletin board.
    “Better than what we’ve got on Rinker,” Lucas said.
    Malone said, “Her husband was sent to jail twice for abusing her.”
    “So what?” Andreno asked.
    “So maybe there’s a little more here than a simple murder,” Malone snapped.
    “So what?” Andreno asked again.
    Malone put her hands on her hips. “What’s this ‘so what’ attitude?”
    “Do you give a shit about Hill?” Andreno asked. Malone opened her mouth to reply, but Andreno kept going. “I don’t give a shit about Hill. I’m chasing Rinker. If Hill gets in the way, I’d pick her up and send her back to Memphis to stand trial, but otherwise, I wouldn’t drive around the block to find her.”
    Malone looked at Lucas, who shrugged: “I’m with him.”
     
    TWO AGENTS WERE assigned to dig up the phone records. They made calls to technicians, talked to lawyers for both the phone company and the FBI, and two hours after Lucas and Andreno walked in the door, a list of phone calls had been downloaded to the task-force computers in Washington and bounced out to the St. Louis laptops.
    With the lists running simultaneously on four different screens, they determined that the Hills did not get a lot of incoming long-distance phone calls—but that at least two and usually three times a year, they’d get a long-distance call from the St. Louis metro area. One call always came Christmas morning. Another always came August 14. After checking with the Missouri driver’s license division, they determined that August 14 was Diane Hill’s birthday.
    “Are we good, or what? Patsy’s calling Mom,” Andreno said to Lucas.
    One of the agents nailed down the addresses of the telephone numbers and found that all but one came from convenience stores or gas stations—the odd one, from the first year that Patsy Hill was on the run, came from a Greyhound station. The agent put the addresses on a computer map, each one represented with a red dot, and projected it with PowerPoint.
    “Goddamn,” Mallard said, peering at the map. “What is that?”
    “It’s called Soulard,” Andreno said. He circled an area of southeast St. Louis with a finger. “It’s not that big a place. I mean, hell, a few thousand people, maybe, as residents. But the brewery’s down there, and a whole bunch of factories and truck places, so she could be working there, and living somewhere else.”
    Mallard looked at Malone. “What do you think?”
    “We’d have to coordinate if we want to sweep the area—we don’t have the manpower to do it on our own, if we want to keep Levy and everybody else covered.”
    “You get a bunch of flatfeet pounding on doors, they’ll either get out ahead of the sweep, or, if we manage to surprise them, you’ll have a couple of dead cops,” Lucas said.
    Mallard spread his arms and said, “Well?”
    “Well, we were once looking for a black kid, this gang-banger, hiding out in Minneapolis, and figured if we went door to door with a bunch of white cops, everybody would see them coming. So we got our black guys and they went around and talked to friends, who hooked them up with other friends and asked everybody about who was where. We covered the whole goddamn area in four days, with four guys, we knew who was where in every single house—we got six leads, and one of them paid off.”
    “We could do that,” Andreno said to Lucas. “Just, you know—our guys. I must know five or six people down there myself.”
    Lucas looked at Mallard. “We’re not doing much anyway.”
    Mallard: “Sounds good to me. Especially if it works.”
    “And it’s cheap. It’s cost-effective,” Malone said. “Heck, it’s almost free.”
    “ THINK SHE’LL STAY PUT ?” Andreno asked Lucas, as they headed down the hall.
    Lucas said, “No reason for her to run, not until she’s done here.”
    “Want to go cruise Soulard?”
    “Sure, if we can do it in your car. She’s seen mine.”
     
    ANDRENO DROVE A two-year-old silver Camry, the perfect spy car, comfortable and inconspicuous and foreign and underpowered, unlike cop