Mortal Prey

thinking about it? What if Rinker’s out there with one of those rifles?”
    Mallard pulled at a lip. Then: “Goddamnit.” He looked at the entry team leader. “We’re gonna go in, but we’re gonna get every cop in St. Louis down here first. You get set up in your vans across the street, and back behind the neighbor’s, where you can see the door and windows, but don’t get out yet. We’ll get the cops down here and jam up every street for six blocks around. If she’s waiting for us, there won’t be any way out.”
     
    THE COPS CAME in a wave, running with lights but no sirens. Agents in blue nylon jackets met them on the streets, routed them out to the perimeters. Nobody in or out without the cars being checked, two cops on each car check. The screen was set two blocks out from the McCombs house. A car with a Texas license plate was found at the edge of the perimeter, and cops started going door to door, looking for the owner. Another hour slipped away.
    “Ain’t gonna help if she’s on a suicide run,” Lucas told Malone. “She could be up in an attic somewhere, the people in the house already dead, looking at the front of McCombs’s house through a scope. She got a seven-millimeter mag off that peckerwood down in Tisdale. If she’s any good with it, if she’s got a shooting rest, she could poke a hole in a pie plate at three hundred yards.”
    Malone shook her head. “She won’t. She’s not on a suicide run. Not yet.”
    “You know that for sure.”
    “Yeah. She’s not done with Dallaglio or Ross. Her brother killing himself pissed her off, but her brother’s not the same as losing her fiancé and her baby. She doesn’t want to die yet.”
    “Hope you’re right. But something’s hinky here.”
     
    THE HOUSE SEEMED so lifeless that they had little hope that Rinker was inside. She could be asleep, Mallard argued. They might not hear her, he said, because the bedroom didn’t share a wall with anything they could reach with the sound equipment.
    With the sun almost on the horizon, and long dark shadows striping across the lawns, everything was finally set and Mallard gave a go to the entry team. The team’s vans moved, rolling back from their surveillance sites, and the team piled out. One man set up to watch the windows, while the others came in from the front of the house, crept under one window, reached the back door.
    Lucas watched, feeling the pressure. Then the door man moved, then another guy, then the door man stepped back with a monster wedge, normally used for splitting wood, ready to swing. Two guys on the sides of the house, coordinated by radio, pitched flash-bangs through the windows, and as they went off, sounding to Lucas like distant cannon fire, the guy with the monster wedge hit the doorknob. The team was inside in a second, and in five seconds, had secured the place.
    “Empty,” Mallard groaned. “Okay. Get some guys out in the garage, close the door. We’ll set up for surveillance.”
     
    WHEN THEY WERE SET , and nothing was moving, Mallard, Malone, Lucas, and Andreno crossed the street and walked up to the house, Lucas nervously watching the windows in the houses up and down the street. Nothing happened. Inside, the surveillance team leader said, “Nothing.”
    They walked through the apartment, looked in the chest of drawers, looked at the walls, checked the medicine cabinet.
    “Bullshit,” Lucas said. “They cleared out before Hill ever went to Memphis. There’s nothing left here but junk. Nothing sentimental. She wasn’t running from Rinker, ’cause if she was, when did she have time to pack up?”
    “When were they here?”
    Lucas was still poking around, and came up with a newspaper. “This morning’s paper,” he said, showing them the Levy headline. “They brought it in this morning.”
    “And she might be hurt,” Andreno said. “Look at this.” They went to the bathroom, where Andreno pointed into a wastebasket. Inside, they could see a white shirt with a thumb-sized bloodstain. “Wonder what that came from?”
    “Not that much blood,” Malone said. “We don’t even know it’s hers.”
    “Got a Cancún label—it’s from a Cancún hotel, and it’s a medium, which wouldn’t fit Patsy Hill,” Andreno said.
     
    “ SO WHERE IS SHE ?” Mallard asked.
    “Running? I don’t know,” Lucas said. “Maybe she’s got a backup spot. But maybe we’ve just broken her out.”
    “Or maybe she’s coming back,” Malone said.
    Lucas