Mortal Prey

talk to, and also gave them two Patsy Hill candidates. Lucas ran the Patsy Hill possibilities through Sally, at the FBI war room, and she came back with negatives on both: “They’ve both got long histories, and one has a low-level arrest record for disorderly conduct. Not her.”
     
    AT TWENTY AFTER twelve, they were sitting in Andreno’s Camry, at Benton Park, eating egg-salad sandwiches. Andreno was looking at the map, and was saying, “Shit, we got ten percent of the thing done, all by ourselves….” when Lucas’s cell phone rang.
    They both froze for a second, then Lucas fumbled the phone out of his pocket. “That’s her.”
    “Could be anybody with a quarter.”
    Lucas hook his head, thumbed the talk button, said “Hello,” and Rinker was there.
    “Is it true about Gene?”
    “I’m afraid it is,” Lucas said, nodding at Andreno. “We had him on a suicide watch. They were checking him every fifteen minutes and watching him in a camera, but he…man, he did it.”
    “You assholes.” She was screaming. “I told you what would happen if you killed him, I told you…”
    Lucas said, “Clara, listen, goddamnit, Clara, listen. Listen. You wanna know what happened?” But she was crying, and Lucas thought she hadn’t heard, and he said again, “Clara, do you want to know—”
    “I heard you,” she said. “I know what happened.”
    “You know that he tried to do it before? He’s got scars on both wrists where he’d cut himself before. The kid…goddamnit, Clara, this is awful, but the kid had tried before. This time he did it.”
    “He cut his wrists?”
    “Yeah.”
    “With what? In a holding cell? What’d he cut them with? Somebody loan him a jackknife?”
    “Somebody tried to be a nice guy at lunch and gave him a can of Coke. He stole the hole punch-out thing, you know, the hole, and hid it, and that’s what he used. He covered himself up with a blanket, and by the time they figured things weren’t right…he was gone.”
    “Okay. Okay, I got a message for you for the feds….”
    “Clara, Clara, wait a minute. Listen. Get out of here. Pick up your shit and go to Spain or South America or somewhere, but stop this. You might want to get these guys, but you don’t have to get them right now. Right this minute. Stop now, come back some other time.”
    “You’re giving me friendly advice?”
    “It’s gotta stop.” Lucas was looking at Andreno, who gave him the keep-rolling sign.
    “All right, you’re holding me on the phone. Well, good luck with that,” she said. Her voice had gone cold as ice. “Here’s the message: I meant what I said. You got that? I meant what I said.”
    “Clara…” But he was talking to himself. He looked at the phone, shook his head, said, “Gone,” and punched it off.
    “We had her for a while,” Andreno said. He was on his own phone; when it was answered, he said, “Andreno and Davenport—you got her? Yeah. We’re rolling.”
    “Where?” Lucas asked when Andreno had hung up.
    “Right up on I-44. She switched cells going west. Close.”
    “So she does live around here—it’s not that Patsy works for Anheuser. She wouldn’t drive to where Patsy works to make a call. And she was pissed. She called me as soon as she thought she was okay.”
    “Sounds good to me. What do you wanna do? Run around Soulard? Doesn’t seem like much point of going out on the highway.”
    “Yeah—let’s just wander. Who knows?”
     
    FIVE MINUTES LATER , Lucas said, “I’ll tell you something—it’s one thing to cover the streets, but this is fucking ridiculous. Every single street’s got a car with two guys in it, driving at ten miles an hour. It looks like a goddamn Shrine parade.”
    Andreno snorted. “So Mallard talked to our guys, who probably talked to everybody else…. We probably got five agencies and fifty cars down here, all looking for Clara.”
    “If they find her, I hope to hell they can shoot. I don’t think she’s gonna go easy,” Lucas said.
    “She sounded pissed?” “She sounded psychotic.”
     
    POLLOCK AND RINKER turned onto Tucker Avenue, and two blocks ahead, Rinker saw two large American cars stopped in the street, the occupants apparently talking to each other. “Take the next right,” she said to Pollock.
    “But…you think those are police?”
    “Maybe. Take a right.”
    They went right at the corner, up a block, and turned left, back toward Pollock’s place. Another block, and Pollock, looking in the