“Where’d you get it? This might not be legal.”
He heard somebody else in the room ask, “What?”
Lucas said, “Look, I’m gonna fax these things to you. If you don’t want them, shred them. As far as legal is concerned, I’m not a lawyer. I just got them from a guy.”
He punched off and, five minutes later, started dropping the sheets into the fax machine; the machine on the other end was running, and accepted them.
BENDER AND ANDRENO were drinking coffee when Lucas got back. As Lucas sat down, Bender pushed a neat stack of paper across the table. Lucas thumbed through them: xeroxes of a police file.
“I read some of the crime-scene reports while I was xeroxing them,” Bender said. He was pleased with himself. “Rinker killed them. Look at the pages I marked with the red pen.”
Lucas started pulling out paper: reports from a crime-scene team, from a pathologist, from a cop who ran the case. The killer got in without breaking anything, and there were no signs of tools used around the door—the killer almost certainly had a key, which didn’t mean much. There were ways to get keys.
The killer also knew where to find a jewelry hideout box—a concealed vertical slat on the side of a dresser in the master bedroom. The investigating cop described it as “built-in and invisible. In my opinion, the perpetrator must have had prior knowledge of its location.”
Further along was a note that Levy had receipts and appraisals for the missing jewelry, setting its value at about sixty thousand dollars.
“Sixty thousand on the jewelry,” Lucas told Andreno.
“My memory’s getting bad . . . or maybe it’s just the inflation.”
Some of the jewelry Levy had purchased for his wife, but most she’d inherited from her grandmother and a great-aunt. The Levys’ insurance covered only a small fraction of the valuation, no more than five thousand dollars, because they’d neglected to get a jewelry rider on their home insurance policy. There was also a later note, by a second investigator, made when the active investigation was suspended, that much of the value of the inherited jewelry was not in the stones but in the maker’s mark—early Tiffany gold and diamonds—and that value would be lost if the pieces were melted down or broken up. Though a knowledgeable thief might try to sell them intact, nothing had been recovered.
“Typical Mafia greed-head would have been insured up to the nuts,” Bender said.
“Maybe he thought that’d be too much of a tip-off,” Lucas said. “Like pulling the family pictures out of the house before you torch it.”
Andreno said, “Might even consider it a nice touch—losing the jewelry.”
The victims had been sexually engaged when they were killed. The man was shot in the back of the head. There were no exit wounds, and according to the pathologist, the .22 hollowpoints had made mush out of his brains. Because there were no exit wounds, there were no spatter marks to indicate his exact position when shot. The woman had tried to push him away, but was shot herself before she could get entirely from beneath him; she was draped over the bed onto the floor, with one leg under the man’s body.
Lucas tapped the papers back together into a neat stack. “Somebody comes in after a lot of research, gets very close, kills with a .22 that none of the neighbors hear—maybe a silencer—provides Levy with a nice touch on the jewelry, and is long gone before the bodies are found. Very efficient.”
“Rinker,” said Bender, finishing his coffee.
BENDER OFFERED TO drop Andreno. Lucas took the Porsche back to the FBI building, went through the identification rigamarole, and found Malone sitting in the conference room by herself. She looked up from her laptop, blinked a few times to refocus, and said, “Lucas.”
“Where is everybody?”
“Most of them are working Levy. Louis is down talking to the AIC, and the two computer guys went to lunch. Got anything new?”
“You get the faxes?”
“We’re running them now. Davy Mathews, the organized-crime guy—we introduced you, the guy with the blue suit and white shirt?—thinks he remembers three of the names from references back in Washington. If he can remember three off the top of his head, then there are probably more. Levy could be a serious matter.” Her eyes drifted back to the laptop.
“Okay. When is Mallard getting back?” Lucas pulled out a chair and sat down, dug a legal pad out of his briefcase.
“A few minutes. He’s just trying to get straight on who’s doing what.”
“You want to see the St. Louis file on the Levy murder?”
Now she turned to him, one eyebrow raised. Lucas had heard that the one-eyebrow ability was genetic, like the ability to curl your tongue. “You have access?”
“I got the file,” Lucas said. “Not the original, but a complete xerox.” He took it out and pushed it across the table, and Malone walked her office chair over and thumbed quickly through it. “I’ll have somebody check it and cross-reference the names. Thanks.”
“Sure.”
“What are you going to do now?”
“Sit back, close my eyes, and think,” he said. He put his feet and calves on the table, tilted the chair back and closed his eyes.
After a minute, she asked, “You’re just going to sit there?”
“For a while.”
Malone watched him for a few more seconds, then shrugged and went back to the laptop. After a minute or two, his eyes still closed, he asked, “Louis make a move on you yet?”
Heavy silence, then: “No.”
“Is he going to?”
“I don’t know. He’s certainly taking his time.”
“He wants to. But he’s too shy. I tried to get him to grab you in Mexico, and he got in a heavy sweat. He’s sorta that way. You may have to help him along.”
“Ah, jeez,” she said. And after a while: “I’m not one hundred percent sure I want to. He’s not the most . . . I don’t know.”
“Not a paperhanger?”
“Sheetrocker. The Sheetrocker is like a fantasy. Big arms, big legs, little butt. Dumb as a bowl of mice. He’ll never finish his novel. He only has a novel because he’s just barely smart enough to understand that women aren’t impressed by Sheetrocking. I doubt that he’s faithful; jeez, I know he’s not. I mean, I haven’t caught him running around or anything, but it just isn’t his nature.”
Lucas cracked his eyelids and looked at her. She was sitting in her chair facing him, shoulders hunched, hands in her lap. She looked lonely. “You guys . . . Look, try him out. Mallard. Really. Take him out for a cup of coffee, and just . . . take a meeting, for Christ’s sake. You both know how to do that.”
“Thank you for your concern, Chief Davenport.”
“Fuck it. I’m going back to sleep.”
AFTER A WHILE ,he dropped the chair back down, scratched his head, and asked, “I guess you’re monitoring Clara’s cell phone, in case she calls anyone?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you think about asking her brother to call her on that number?”
“Why’d you have to mention Louis?” Malone asked.
“I thought somebody ought to. Put the poor bastard out of his misery, if nothing else.” She sniffed, and Lucas said, “No, no no . . . you know the rule: no crying.”
She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand, and he went back to his question. “Anyway, did you think about having her brother call Rinker? Like, early in the morning? If he did, and she answered, and he kept her on for a few minutes, maybe we could zero in on the neighborhood where she’s staying. She’s gotta be ditched with a friend.”
“We’re talking about that,” Malone said. “We don’t have the street contacts here, but we’ve got the brains. We’ve talked through most of the possibilities, based on what we’ve got.”
“You gonna do it?”
“Probably—if she doesn’t move on Levy. Or one of the others. We’re doing a full-court press.”
“You got the budget?”
“Yes, we did. . . .” S
he sniffed again and said, “You know, I always thought I was going to grow up and be pretty glamorous, an FBI agent, high up, with a gun and a computer and fly in jets. And all I wind up doing is marrying stupid guys and I get to be a joke. I’m too tall and I’m too thin and I always dress too conservatively. I’m flinty. This isn’t the way it was supposed to be.”
“Jesus, Malone, you married them. I can’t tell you about that.”
“It always seemed like such a good idea at the time. You know, one of the guys, the actor, we got married at the courthouse by a judge and we went outside and he asked me if I had enough money for a cab, and I thought, This isn’t going to work. We’d been married exactly seven minutes.”
“Talk to Louis, for Christ’s sake. . . . I’m going back to sleep.”
LUCAS LEANED BACK again. He could hear an occasional flurry of keystrokes from the laptop, as Malone pushed through a file somewhere out in electronic FBI-land.
His basic personal asset in the investigation was a bunch of guys who knew the town—but that didn’t mean much at the moment, because there was no way to leverage that into more information. If they had even a rough idea of where she was, then some of the FBI data, combined with street information, might get them close. Until then . . . He’d read in an informational brochure at the hotel that there were more than two and a half million people in the St. Louis metro area. Too many.
Another thought popped up. “Say, did you check Levy’s past account records, to see if Clara’s in there? If we could tell where she’s moved her money, that’d be good. Or maybe Levy would know.”
“Workin’ on it,” Malone said. “If we can figure out these other accounts, we may have something to squeeze him with.”
“Huh.”
TWO MINUTES OF silence, then another thought: “She probably crossed the border illegally. I mean, you know, wetbacked it across. She can’t know the level of surveillance at the border, she wouldn’t want to take a chance of a random check on faked or stolen documents.”
“So?”
“So, if she crossed the border illegally, that means she probably crossed in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, or California.”
“Yeah?”
“I drove out to California last year, and there aren’t that many ways to get from those places to the Midwest, in a hurry. She could fly, but she never flew much when you guys were tracking her before, because there’s always a record and they want ID to get on the planes. . . . I bet she crossed out of Mexico and bought a car. She’d need one when she got here. And I think she’d stick to interstate highways, because there’s more volume of traffic and she’d be less conspicuous. And she’d probably pay cash for everything. . . .”
“Where’s this going?”
“You’d only have to backtrack down a couple of interstates . . . Seventy, Forty-four.”
“Maybe Fifty-five,” Malone said, getting interested now.
“Ever since gas theft became a deal, most of the interstate stations have surveillance cameras snapping photos of the cars as they gas up. What if you gave the ID photos to all the local sheriff’s departments and had them paper the gas stations along the interstates? If somebody recognizes her . . .”
“If we could even find out what day or even week that she was at a particular place, we could run all of the plates and check the anomalies.”
“Long shot,” Lucas said.
“But it’s a shot,” she said.
THEY WERE STILL talking about it when Mallard arrived, looking harassed. Lucas’s eyes met Malone’s across the table, and she gave a tiny negative shake of her head: not now. Lucas turned to Mallard and asked, “You all meetinged out yet?”
“Meetings are the water we swim in,” Mallard said. He fussed with some paper. “But now we all agree who’s running this particular investigation.” He paused. “Me.”
“What about the net on Levy?”
“We’re all over him. He’s in his office, and if he walks down the hall to the rest room, we’ll know.” He looked at Malone. “When I was listening to all that bullshit from Lewis, I was thinking about Levy. I want to contact him now. This afternoon. Get everything we can on him, go over there, tell him he’s on Rinker’s list, and ask him why. Find out if he knows her, or knows where her money is. At least get him cooperating with the net.”
“What if he runs?” Malone asked.
“What if she kills him?” Mallard said.
They all thought about that for a moment, then Malone asked, “If you make the call, I can put it together in an hour.”
Mallard looked at Lucas. “What do you think?”
Lucas shrugged. “If he decides to run, can you stop him? Running would be the safest thing for him—and he wouldn’t even have to talk to you. If you have something—anything—that would keep him from leaving, I’d put it on him. Because if he has money ditched offshore somewhere, and he splits, it could be a long time before any of us see him again.”
Mallard nodded. “We’ll find something. You can’t live in this country for two days without breaking some law, somewhere.”
“You want me to put it together?” Malone asked.
Mallard nodded. “Yes. Do it.”
10
RINKER HAD SPENT THE EARLY MORNING watching the outside of Andy Levy’s mansion —mansionwas the only word she had for the place. She was parked a block and a half away, across a busy street, waiting for any kind of movement. She needed to know that he was home, and not hiding out somewhere else. She’d been waiting for an hour when the front door opened, and Levy, in a robe and slippers, stepped out on the stoop and picked up the newspaper, opening and turning it in his hands as he stepped back inside. He was reading the follow-up on the Dichter killing, she thought. If the story was anything like what she’d been watching on television, it should spook him even further. Before he closed the door, he looked carefully up and down the street. Even from a block away, he looked worried.
She grinned as she tossed the glasses on the passenger seat and put the car in gear. She needed him worried. She needed him eager to make a deal, eager to explain, eager to talk.
• • •
WHEN SHE GOT back to Pollock’s, she found a copy of the Post-Dispatch on the kitchen table with a piece of typing paper on it; Dorothy had scrawled, “READ THIS.” Rinker picked up the paper, didn’t take in the headline at all, but saw the man in the orange suit and the chains, and there was a click of recognition but she couldn’t place him, and then she thought, No, no . . .
They had Gene, and they were dragging him.
RINKER READ THE story through. An FBI agent, a woman named Malone—Rinker recognized the name from Minneapolis—was dragging Gene. Gene, she said, might provide clues to Clara Rinker’s whereabouts, and was inclined to be cooperative because he’d been arrested for possession of drugs. This was his fourth arrest on drug charges, and this time, Malone said, he could be going away for a long time.
Rinker put the paper down, sprawled on the couch, and stared at the ceiling and thought about it. She thought for ten minutes, then rolled off the couch, still uncertain, walked out to the car, climbed inside. She needed someplace reasonably far away, like in Illinois. . . .
She drove north, crossed the river, drove across East St. Louis without looking down, and on the outskirts found a truck stop with a half-dozen pay-phone booths designed for truckers. She got five dollars in quarters, checked the phone book, called 612 information, got the number, and called the Minneapolis police department and asked for Lucas Davenport.
The phone rang once, and a woman answered: “Marcy Sherrill.”
“Is this Chief Davenport’s office?” she asked.
“Yes, it is, how can I help you?”
“Can I speak to Chief Davenport, please?”
“I’m afraid he’s not here right now. . . . I’m not exactly sure when he’ll be back. Could I help you, or have him call you?”
Rinker thought again, then frowned and asked, “Is he still in St. Louis
?”
“Yes, I think so. Who is this, please?”
“Um . . . Charlotte. Could you tell him Charlotte called?”
Now the woman on the other end of the line sounded pissed. “Charlotte? Charlotte who?”
“Just . . . Charlotte. Thanks a lot.” She hung up, then grinned to herself. Sounded like she had gotten Davenport in trouble.
She thought about crossing back to St. Louis, since Davenport was there. But the pile of quarters was right in front of her, with a couple of phone books, so she turned to the yellow pages, found “Hotels,” and started calling those with the biggest advertisements. She found him on the fifth call. Nobody in his room. Thought another minute, looked around, found a white pages for St. Louis, looked up the FBI.