"I'll try to get him cut loose. But I'm not a fed," Lucas said. One of the feds behind him said, "She's not on her cell," and Lucas thought, Ah, shit.

"You'd lie to me anyway," Rinker said.

"Hey, Clara-I'd put your butt under the jail if I got my hands on you, but I'm not fuckin' with Gene. I think Gene is a bad idea, and I'll try to get him cut loose. I'm just not sure how much clout I've got."

"Okay. I gotta go now. They're probably pretty close to busting this line. Give me your cell phone number."

"I don't have-"

"Goodbye."

"Wait, wait, wait-I was just trying to stall you." He recited the number. There was a pause, and he added, "You can call that anytime."

But she was gone. "Holy shit," Lucas said. He turned to the room. "She's gone. We got the line?"

Malone was on the phone, waving him off. Then the man who'd dashed out of the room hurried back in and said, "We're jacked directly into the highway patrol. When we get the line-"

"We got the line," Malone blurted. "It's in Illinois."

"Damnit," said the man who'd contacted the highway patrol. "We've got Missouri Highway Patrol on line one. They must have a quick way to get to the Illinois cops."

Malone punched up line 1 and, after identifying herself, told the Missouri cop that "she was calling from Illinois. How quick can you get to them? How long? Go, then. Here's the location…"

A truck stop. Lucas said, "When the cops get there, don't let anybody leave the truck stop. Isolate the phone she was on. We need to see if we can get more prints, see if we can get some people who saw her who can tell us what she looks like now."

Malone nodded, and started repeating what Lucas said. Mallard said, "I've got a car. Let's go."

"If it's just you, let's take my Porsche. I'll get us there in a hurry."

Mallard said to Malone, "I'll be on the cell phone. Call me in two minutes and vector us in on the truck stop."

"It's right off I-64. Get on I-64 and go east, and I'll call you and get you there."

"I've got a flasher for my car," Lucas said over his shoulder, as he and Mallard headed for the door. "Tell the patrol that we're coming through."

THE DISTANCE WAS a little better than thirty miles. Once on the interstate, they flew, with Mallard hunched over his cell phone, listening to directions and updates from Malone, talking over the rush of the wind, sheltering the face of the phone away from the red flasher behind the windshield. Between calls, Lucas filled him in on what Rinker had said: the warnings about her brother.

"We've dealt with people a hell of a lot more dangerous than she is," Mallard said.

"Maybe not-maybe not as personally dangerous," Lucas said. "Most assholes aren't focused on a particular group of agents. That makes them easier to nail down. She's not nuts. Not in that way."

"The warning just tells us that the brother ploy is effective-it's working on her," Mallard said.

"Hope it doesn't bite you in the ass," Lucas said.

Mallard went back to the phone and filled in Malone on the warning from Rinker. When he got off, he said, "Malone's routing out a crime-scene guy to print the phone and another guy with a laptop ID kit. She talked to the manager of the truck stop and told him to keep people off the phones. If we can find one guy who got a good look at her, it'll be worth the trip."

Lucas looked out the window. "You know, if Rinker's staying here in town, and if she went out there just to make the call, the chances are we're driving right past her. Over in the other lane."

Mallard looked over into the westbound lane and said, "So close."

THE TRUCK STOP looked like all truck stops-a yellow steel building with blackout windows in the middle of an oversized, oil-stained concrete fuel pad with a double line of gas pumps and a couple of diesel sheds. Inside, a convenience store was hip-joined to a macaroni-and-cheese restaurant, with a set of rest rooms in the middle and a locked suite of drivers-only showers. A half-dozen cop cars were parked around the place when Lucas gunned the Porsche up the ramp and into a narrow slot between two highway patrol cruisers.

An Illinois highway patrolman had just stepped up to the door, going in, when Lucas pulled up, and he shook his head and then stepped toward them when Lucas killed the engine. Mallard was out first with his ID. "FBI," he said.

The cop looked at Mallard, then at Lucas, then at the Porsche, and said to Mallard, "You guys're getting pretty fat rides these days."

"Hey, the income taxes are pouring in-you can't believe it," Lucas said. "We figure, might as well enjoy life."

Mallard said, "He owns it personally. He's rich, he's an asshole, he works for the city of Minneapolis. The federal government drives low-end Chrysler products that would make your mother cry with shame." And: "Who's running things?"

"I don't know, I just got here myself," the cop said.

THE FIRST COP on the scene had been a highway patrol sergeant named Eakins who hadn't known exactly what was required, and as an old hand, adept at covering his ass, had done exactly the right thing: He'd frozen the scene. Nobody out until the feds said so, nobody near a phone.

"Don't make much difference anyhow-everybody's got a cell phone," he said.

"Anybody see her?"

"Two guys think they might have-they're in the restaurant eating pie," Eakins said.

"All right," Mallard said. "Just keep doing what you're doing."

"Can we let people out?"

"Yeah. If you're pretty sure they're okay. But get IDs, truck tag numbers, just in case. Check the trucks, make sure nobody's hiding behind the seats. Anybody coming in, we should warn off-if they can move along, let them go. If they've got to stop here for some reason, tell them there could be a delay before they can leave."

"We can do that," Eakins said. "Let me show you the pie guys and then I'll get organized outside."

THE PIE GUYS looked remarkably alike, big square-faced over-the-road drivers in checked shirts with guts hanging over their tooled-leather belts. The woman they saw was probably Rinker. They'd both had a chance to look her over: nice-looking blonde, they said, trim, short hair. Classy, but looked like a pretty good time. "She was in a hurry," Blueberry Pie said. "I was kind of watchin' her out of the corner of my eye. She made a couple of calls, but she was real quick with them-like a businesswoman. That's what I figured she was. A real-estate lady, checking on calls or something."

Apple Pie added that she had a nice ass and thought she might have been heading toward a Ford Explorer when she went out the door. "I didn't see her get in it, but there weren't a hell of a lot of cars down there, and when the cops come running in the door, I noticed that the Explorer was gone."

"What color?"

"Umm, dark red. Liver-colored, sorta."

"You didn't…?"

"Naw. Never looked at the plates. I was too busy looking at her ass."

Both pies agreed that Rinker had used the second phone from the end in a bank of phones on the back wall of the convenience store.

As Lucas and Mallard finished the interview, a black Tahoe pulled up and a half-dozen feds climbed out. Then another Tahoe, and more of them, all in suits. "Looks like a podiatry convention," Lucas said to Mallard.

They looked at the phones, which looked like a lot of other phones, and talked to other people who hadn't seen Rinker, and to people who hadn't seen her car, and to one guy who was fairly sure that he'd seen "a black feller" getting into the maroon Explorer.

"That's good," Lucas said to Mallard. "Now we're not sure about the Explorer."

Malone arrived, with another batch of feds. They all went to look at the phones again, and a fingerprint technician said, "I'm pretty sure those pie guys were right about the phone. This was the phone she used."