Mortal Prey

telephone, and tucked them into a handbag, got undressed except for her underpants and a man’s T-shirt that she used as a nightie, then hit the bed and fell into a shallow, restless sleep. The dreams came in little shattered fragments of her life with Paulo, shards of the bar in Wichita, little wicked pieces of jobs she’d done for John Ross.
    Her eyes popped open when she heard the key in the door. She felt stunned, her mouth tasted bad, but she was coming back in a hurry, rolling across the mattress. Something wrong. She hadn’t been asleep long enough. She looked at the clock: just after noon. Pollock wasn’t due back until three o’clock. She pulled one of the nines from the handbag and crouched behind the bed, watching the door as the intruder clumped across the floor and it sounded like…
    “Clara?”
    Pollock. Rinker exhaled, slipped the pistol back into the bag, and stood up. “Yeah.” She stepped over to the door and pulled it open.
    “Hey,” she said. She was smiling. “What’re you doing home?”
    Pollock’s face was congealed gloom. “Been watching TV?”
    “No.”
    “Oh, God, Clara…” Tears started down Pollock’s face. “Gene is…Gene died.”
    “What?” The smiled stuck on Rinker’s face for a few seconds, as though she were waiting for a punch line. There was no punch line.
    “I heard it on TV in the lunchroom,” Pollock said.
    “He died?”
    “That’s what they say on TV.”
    “I can’t…” Rinker forgot what she was about to say, and brushed past Pollock to the television and fumbled the remote and finally managed to click it on, her hand shaking as though she were being electrocuted. “I don’t think…” and she couldn’t remember what she didn’t think; words weren’t making connections for the moment.
    They could find nothing at all on television. They looked at all the local channels and clicked around to all the cable channels and found nothing at all.
    “Clara, I promise you, I heard it. I went over to watch—they said he was found dead in his cell.”
    “Ah, God…” Rinker headed back to her room and began pulling on yesterday’s clothes.
    “Where are you going?”
    “I gotta make a phone call,” she said. She got her bag with the guns and the booby-trapped phone from the bedroom. “I’ll be back…. Can I borrow your car? I just…”
    “I’ll drive,” Pollock said. “You’re not in shape to drive.”
    “Thanks.”
     
    LUCAS, ANDRENO, BENDER , and Carter worked down a list of names that the three St. Louis ex-cops cobbled together as they sat around in a deli drinking cream sodas. The names included personal friends and known community activists and local politicians. “It’s been a while, and people move around down here,” Carter said. “Some of them won’t be there—but most of them will.”
    “The idea is, we spread out geographically,” Lucas told them. “We ask all these people about their friends and neighbors, who we know are safe, and then about people who fit Patsy Hill’s profile. Tall woman, late thirties. Probably living alone. If she’d remarried or had a family, Rinker probably wouldn’t stay with her. We make a list of both kinds of people, and check off their houses.”
    “Take forever,” Bender said.
    “Three or four days at the most,” Lucas said. “We could get lucky and hit her on the first day. We go to the politicians and the community people first. They’ll be able to rule out a heck of a lot of people. Then we extend the contacts to other people they know.”
    “If we think we’ve found her, then what?”
    “Then we bring in the feds. We don’t go in ourselves. I think she could be on a suicide run, especially after this Gene thing, and if we just jump her, she’s gonna shoot until she’s dead. And she’s good.”
    Bender nodded. “Okay. Let’s go.”
     
    LUCAS STUCK WITH Andreno for the first few interviews, because he didn’t know the people they were looking for. They talked to an elderly Democratic Party voter registration woman at her home, crossed off twenty houses, and got eight more names for interviews. A woman who was a member of a city zoning advisory board eliminated a dozen more, and gave them a half-dozen more names for interviews. A real-estate agent spotted houses that he thought were unregistered apartments, and gave them even more names. A mail carrier they encountered on the street crossed off forty houses, suggested two more mail carriers that they should