Bunches of kids were still arriving at the party, and a couple left. From her spot in the street, Rinker could hear their music and see flickering multicolored lights. Some kind of techno shit, she thought. Better than folk music, anyway. A little after ten-thirty, a kid wandered out of the party, stood on the front lawn of the party house, and began vomiting. He continued for a minute, then walked on to his car, got in, got back out, vomited again, then got back in the car and drove away.
Happy trails,Rinker thought.
At ten-thirty-five, she began to wonder if Dichter was going to call her, or if he’d been home when Sellos called him—what if he’d been at his office, working late? She’d be sitting here and never know. There was no chance that he’d call from either his house or his business, though. The feds probably had him so tapped that they knew every time he opened the refrigerator.
At ten-forty, a Mercedes rolled out of Chirac Road, sat for a minute, then turned right, away from her, and headed down the street, slowly. Dichter always drove a Mercedes. Rinker reached for the key, then stopped. The Benz was a little obvious, don’t you think, Clara? Rolling up and stopping like that, so anybody could get a look?
She sat still as the Mercedes disappeared at a corner three blocks away. Maybe a mistake? Maybe he’d be calling in two minutes, and she’d have no idea where he was?
Then another car rolled out of Chirac, a station wagon—a Volkswagen, she thought—and turned left, toward her. This car did not hesitate at the street entrance. When it passed her, she saw two men inside; one had a hand to his head, as thought he were talking on a cell phone—probably to the driver of the Benz, Rinker thought. She let the car get two blocks down Nouvelle, over a hump and out of sight, before she followed.
She didn’t think Dichter would go far. Any phone would do, as long as it wasn’t his. She started to tighten up now. Started to feel the adrenaline, the hunting hormone, flowing into her bloodstream. She’d always liked the feel of it, the stress.
And she thought about Paulo, dead on the ground in Cancún, his blood all over her, his blue eyes vacant. Thought about her baby, the way things were going to be forever. The adrenaline was a familiar thing, but now something else flowed in, a coldness that she’d felt only once before, about her stepfather.
Hate. And it was liquid and cold, like mercury flowing through her veins. Nanny Dichter, two blocks away, still breathing, while Paulo lay rotting in his grave . . .
SHE KNEW ENOUGH not to try to get close to the Volkswagen. She stayed way back, turned off her lights once, followed the Volkswagen around a corner west onto Clayton Road, worried that she’d lose him. Clayton Road had more traffic than the side streets, and she closed up just a bit. The Volkswagen continued on, turned north off Clayton, then west again, and finally cut into a Lincoln Inn.
She continued past the hotel, down the block, to a second entrance. Kept looking back and saw the Volkswagen pull up to the reception bay, and a man who looked very like Nanny Dichter get out and go inside.
She parked as close to a side door as she could, picked up the Sony tape recorder, and turned it on. The Dixie Chicks were singing something inoffensive. She got out of the car and walked toward the hotel’s side door. The door was locked. She took a step away, looking toward the front, thinking about the second man in the Volkswagen—and saw a young guy coming down the hallway toward the side door, carrying a sleepy, red-eyed kid. The guy pushed through, and Rinker held the door, smiled, and was inside.
The telephone rang. She punched it on, held the tape recorder close to her face as she walked along the hallway, and answered. “Hello?”
“This is me,” Dichter said. “What do you want?”
“I want to know whose idea it was to go to Cancún,” she said. “Was that John? Or was that the whole goddamn bunch of you?”
“I didn’t know anything about it until the feds told me,” Dichter said. “I got with John . . .”
“Hold on,” Rinker said. “I’m gonna go outside. I can barely hear you.”
“Where are you?”
“In a bar,” she said tersely. She pulled the tape recorder away from the phone, as though she were walking away from the jukebox, and clicked it off. Then: “Wait a minute, a guy’s coming. . . . Let me get over here.”
A guy was coming. A hotel guy, with a chest tag that said “Chad.” She put her hand over the phone’s mouthpiece and asked, “Could you tell me where your pay phones are?”
“Down the hall, into the lobby, turn right, then around the corner and they’re right there.”
“Thanks.” She continued down the hallway, into the lobby, phone to her ear. Slipped the safety on the nine-millimeter. Into the lobby, not looking at the few faces passing through it.
Glanced to the left, her vision sharp as a broken mirror, picking up everything as tiny fragments of motion—the Indian woman behind the desk, the guy with the suitcase talking to her, another guy in the tiny gift shop, a sign that said, “Elevators,” and she was saying into the phone, all the time, “That fuckhead killed my guy and killed my baby, and I’m gonna take him out.” The righteous anger was surging in her voice, and was real and convincing. “You can get in or get out, whatever you want, but if you’re with John, I’ll take you right along with him.”
“Listen, listen, listen . . . ,” Dichter was saying, his voice rising.
And she turned the corner and heard the last “listen” both through the phone and in person: Dichter was there, his back to her, talking into the pay phone. He felt the movement behind him and turned, his face going slack when he saw her face and the gun leveled at his forehead. He had just time to say, “No,” and Rinker shot him.
The first shot went in between his eyes. The second and third went into the side of his head as he slumped down the wall, leaving blood lines down the yellow wallpaper.
The shots, even with the silencer, were loud, enough to attract attention. Rinker shoved the gun into her jacket pocket, screamed, and ran into the lobby. “Man’s got a gun,” she screamed. “Man’s got agun. . .”
She was looking over her shoulder at the hallway, and somebody else screamed and the man with the suitcase ducked but didn’t run. He was looking at the hallway where Dichter had fallen. She turned down the hall where she’d come in, out of sight from the lobby, now running, banged through the side exit, heard shouting behind her, forced herself to a walk, went to her car, was in, was rolling . . .
Was gone.
8
THERE WAS NO EASY WAY TO DRIVE TO St. Louis from the Twin Cities. The easiest was to head east into Wisconsin, then south through Illinois on the interstate highways.
The interstates were full of Highway Patrol cops, though, so Lucas took the Porsche straight south through Iowa, along secondary highways and country roads, spending a couple of extra hours at it but having a much better time. He eventually cut I-70 west of St. Louis and took it into town, arriving just after sunset on a gorgeous, warm August evening.
Dichter had been shot the night before, and Malone had called at midnight. As they spoke, Mallard was on his way to St. Louis with his Special Studies Group, with Malone to follow in the morning.
“No question it was her,” Malone said. A late-night caffeinated excitement was riding in her voice. “Two people got a pretty good look at her, but nobody knew who she was. They thought the shooting was coming from somewhere else—she must have used a silencer—and they were all running around like chickens with their heads cut off. She got out of the place clean. Nobody saw her car or where she went.”
“How’d she know Dichter was in the hotel?”
“She’s got a stolen cell phone. Dichter was killed on a pay phone, and we traced the number he’d called to a phone owned by a guy from Clayton—that’s just outside of St. Louis, to the west. The Clayton cops went to the guy’s apartment and talked to the manager, who said the guy was in Europe. So they checked the apartment and found the place had been broken into, ransacked. We called the guy in Europe
and asked about the cell phone, and he said it should have been home on the dresser in the bedroom. No phone. It’d been taken.”
“How’d Rinker know Dichter’d be calling from that pay phone? Did she know him that well? Or was she watching him?”
“We don’t know.”
“If she’s watching her targets, you could set up a surveillance net around anybody else she might go after. See if she comes in on them,” Lucas said.
“We’ve talked about doing that. Take a lot of guys—maybe twenty at a time, three shifts. Sixty guys. That’s a lot.”
“How bad do you want her?”
“That bad,” Malone admitted. “But we have to get the budget.”
“St. Louis must have a few stolen-phone dealers. The cops should have some lines on who might be selling them.”
“You don’t think Rinker stole it?”
Lucas said, “Jesus Christ, no. She’s not a burglar. She just knew about the guy who deals them, that’s all. Probably a bar guy—she was a dancer, remember?—or a barbershop in the barrio, if they’ve got a barrio. Get somebody to look in the Latino community, or the African community—I’ll bet there’s a dealer who wholesales them to a couple of guys who retail them out to people who want to call Colombia or Somalia, like that. That’s pretty common. A couple of dozen overseas calls will pay for a pretty expensive phone. Ask the St. Louis cops.”
“I’ll do that. Can you get down?”
“I’ll drive down tomorrow,” Lucas said.
“No problem with Weather?”
“Nope. She’s pretty interested in the whole project, and she’s far enough out on the pregnancy that she doesn’t really need me here.”
“See you then. I’m flying the first thing in the morning.”
THE FBI CONTINGENT was housed in a block of rooms at the Embassy Suites Hotel, a couple of blocks off the waterfront. There was no garage, but Lucas found a spot within direct eyeshot of the front door, parked, and carried his bag inside to the reception desk.
“FBI?” asked the woman behind the desk, looking him over.
“No,” Lucas said. So everybody knew the feds were in town. He pushed his American Express card at her. “I’d really appreciate something comfortable.”
“That’s not a problem,” she said pleasantly. Her accent came from farther down the river. She was looking at a computer screen as they talked, and said, “I see you have a message.”
She stepped to the left, looked through a file, produced an envelope, and passed it to him.
“Are there a lot of FBI people in the hotel?” Lucas asked.
“Mmm,” she said. Then: “They think that lady killer is here—Clara Rinker.”
“Here in the hotel?” She was nice-looking, a fair-skinned black woman, and Lucas thought a little moonshine couldn’t hurt, especially with a southerner.
She picked up on it and smiled at him. “Not in the hotel, silly. In St. Louis.”
“I’ll look out for her.”
They chatted as she checked him in, the kind of light southern flirting that established a mutual pleasure in the present company, with no implications whatever. The room was decent: The space was okay, with a small sitting room, the bed was solid, and if he pressed his forehead to the window, he could see the towboats working up the river. One was working up the river the first time he looked, maybe one of the same tows he’d see from his place in St. Paul. Not bad.
He dumped his bag on the bed, powdered his nose, splashed water on his face, and opened the envelope. The note said, “We’re at the local FBI office. Easy to get to, too far to walk. Ask at the desk.”
Though it was warm, he got a jacket, a crinkled cotton summerweight, before he headed out. Downstairs, the southerner was working the desk and he asked, “Can you tell me where the FBI office is?”
She looked at him, a little warily—was he hustling her, trying to extend the FBI comment?—and he said, “Really. I have a meeting.”
“Big fibber,” she said. “You said you weren’t—”
“No, no, I’m not FBI. I just have a meeting.”
“Well . . . if you’re really not fibbing . . .”
“Really.”
“Okay. If you were, it’s only ninety-nine dollars federal rate for your room. You save fifty dollars.”
She paused, but he shook his head. “Okay, the FBI building. It’s about, ummm, twenty blocks from here. You want to go out this way to Market. . . .” She pointed him out the door. He retrieved the Porsche, found Market, took a right, and five minutes later was easing into a parking space outside the FBI building. He’d expected a high-rise office with security. He got a low, flat fifties-look two- or three-story building that must have covered a couple of acres, with big green windows, a well-trimmed lawn, and a steel security fence on the perimeter. Lights were burning all through the building.
Inside the front door, a guard checked him off a list. Lucas declared no weapon, and the guard said, “We have a weapon pass for you, Mr. Davenport.”
Lucas shrugged. “I thought it’d be better to leave it for now.”
“Fine. I’ll show you the conference room. Mr. Mallard is there now with the rest of the Special Studies Group.” He handed Lucas a plastic card with a metal clip. “Put this on.”
The guard led him to an elevator, while another guard took the desk. The first guy was older, mid-fifties, Lucas thought, with a mildly unfashionable haircut and a nose that might have been broken twice. “You ever a cop?” Lucas asked, as they got in the elevator.
The guard glanced at him. “Twenty-two years, City of St. Louis.”
“You let these FBI weenies get on top of you?”
The guard smiled pleasantly, showing his eyeteeth. “That doesn’t happen. You a cop, or a consultant, or what?”
“Deputy chief from Minneapolis. I’ve bumped into Rinker a couple of times, and Mallard thinks I can help.”
“Can you?”
“I don’t know,” Lucas said. “She’s a problem. You think these guys’ll get her?”
The guard considered for a minute, and the elevator bumped to a stop one floor up. “Ah, these guys . . . aren’t bad, for what they do,” the guard said, as the door opened. They took a left down the hall. “We used to think, downtown, that they were all a bunch of yuppie assholes, but I seen some pretty good busts come out of here. What they do usually has a lot of intelligence, lot of surveillance. Patience, is what they got. They might have trouble with a street chick. . . . Here’s your room.”
The conference room was unmarked. Lucas stopped and said, “You ever have a beer when you get off? Bite to eat?”
“Usually,” the guard said. “There’s a late-night place up on the Hill—get together with some of my old pals.”
“I don’t know St. Louis.”
“If you’re out of here by eleven, stop at the desk. I’ll give you a map. You driving?”
“Yeah.”
“No problem, then.”
“What’s your name?” Lucas asked.
“Dan Loftus.”
“Lucas Davenport.” They shook hands. “See you later.”
• • •
THE GUARD HEADED back to his station, and Lucas knocked once on the conference room door and stepped inside. A dozen people—seven or eight men in ties and long-sleeved shirts with the sleeves rolled up, and four or five women in slacks and jackets—were sitting around two long tables, with Mallard at the front. A white board covered the front wall, and somebody had drawn a flow chart on it with three colors of ink. Five or six laptop computers were scattered down the conference table. Malone sat in a corner, wearing a skirted suit: She lifted a hand.
“Lucas,” Mallard said. He stepped over to shake hands and pointed Lucas at a chair. “This is Chief Davenport,” Mallard said to the group. “Treat him well.” A few of the agents nodded. Most looked him over, then turned back to Mallard.
Like that,Lucas thought. Not a member of the tribe. On the other hand, he had his own tribe. He
thought of the guard and leaned back in the chair to listen.
MALLARD HAD SIX names on the whiteboard: six local crime figures who might have been tied into Rinker. They included Nanny Dichter, now dead; Paul Dallaglio, a business partner of Dichter’s in the import and dope businesses; Gene Giancati, involved in sex and loan-sharking; Donny O’Brien, improbably a trustee of a half-dozen different union pension funds; Randall Ferignetti, who ran the biggest local sports books; and John Ross, who ran a liquor-distribution business, a trucking company, several lines of vending machines, and an ATM-servicing company.