"How long to do it?"

"Couple hours. I could have it tonight," he said. He was getting excited. Aroused. "I mean, it's real easy. 'Bout everything you need is already built into the phone. You need one chip and the plastic."

"It'd be a favor, Wayne," Rinker said. She gave him her number-three smile. "The quicker the better."

SHE DROVE BACK to Anniston, leaving after he did, taking a different route, checking her back trail. At the motel, she slept the rest of the afternoon, and spent the early evening watching television. At eight o'clock, she drove out to an interstate gas station and a telephone. McCallum picked up on the first ring.

"We going out, or what?" she asked.

"I'm ready, honey-bun. Tell me where."

"How about Boots?" Boots was an Army bar. She'd been there once before, in the parking lot.

"See you there."

Again, she was there before he was. That was part of the deal. Though she had little faith in the idea that she could spot cops, she was virtually certain that McCallum wouldn't turn her in. He'd helped her too many times, and Alabama had primitive ideas about the proper punishment for murder.

When the Caddy rolled in, she watched for five minutes, then decided she'd buy it; she'd seen nothing that worried her. She rolled down the hill into the parking lot, up close to the Cadillac, and dropped the passenger-side window. Neon lightning rolled off the Caddy's hood, reflecting the on-and-off "Boots" sign overhead. McCallum saw her, got out of his car, stepped over, climbed into the passenger seat, and fumbled the cell phone out of his jacket pocket.

"Here's the phone," he said. He sounded eager to get rid of it, or to please her-like a child giving a gift to a teacher. "If you was to take it apart, and knew a lot about phones, you might find the plastic. If you didn't, and if you just looked into it, you'd never see it."

"What happens if I call out?"

"Nothing. It's still a perfectly good phone. But I'll tell you what, you don't want to call out to 6-6-6. 'Cause if you do, the beast'll blow your ass off."

"You're sure."

"I'm sure." He nodded in the dark. "Same thing when you're calling into it. You call, you make sure you got your guy, and you punch 666. Then you won't have your guy anymore."

"How powerful is it?" Rinker asked. "I mean, would it blow up this car?"

"Oh, hell no." McCallum shook his head. "I got a chunk of plastic in there not much bigger'n a. 22 slug. No, the damage would all be to the head, but it'll flat knock a hole in that. If you were to put it in the backseat, and it went off, you probably wouldn't hear much for a few days, and there'd be a hell of a hole in the upholstery, but it wouldn't kill you. It's 'bout like a charge in a, say, a. 338 mag."

Rinker looked at the phone, then back up at the soldier. "Wayne, if you'd gone into this business fifteen years ago, I wouldn't have had a job."

"Weren't no cell phones fifteen years ago," McCallum said. "And you know what? Puttin' this thing together made me kind of horny. I'd like to see it go. I mean, I could do this."

"You're a freak, Wayne," Rinker said.

"Of course I am, sweetheart." McCallum beamed at her, his fat sweaty jowls trembling with excitement. " 'Course I am."

SHE CHECKED OUT that night; told the woman working behind the counter that things just hadn't worked out. Going past the 'Bama border, she looked for the country station that had featured LeAnn Rimes, but it was an AM station and she lost it in the static of the thunderstorms closing in from the west.

She caught the rain at Nashville, lightning bolts pounding through the inky dark night, radio stations coming and going, the jocks talking of tornado warnings and multiple touchdowns near Clarksville. She came out the other side of the squall line before dawn, and rolled on into St. Louis on dry pavement.

Kept thinking about the telephone.

This wasn't like her. Should work-and could flush a couple of more quail.

14

ANDRENO WAS A LITTLE BASHFUL ABOUT accepting the neck-tag ID, but Lucas shooed him through the FBI's entrance check, and a guard led them to a new room-"They outgrew the old one," the guard told them on the way. "They call it the command center now."

The command center had twice the space of the old conference room, and windows. A dozen men and three women were sitting around the main table, the men in shirtsleeves, coats draped over their chairs, a litter of paper spread across the tables and between the laptops, the phones, and the PowerPoint projector. Mallard had his place at the far end of the table, with Malone at his side. Malone was listening at a telephone when they walked in.

Mallard was still in a suit, harried but happy. He called, "Rifles?"

"Bet on it," Lucas said. He'd talked to Sally, with the epaulets, from the car, and told her about Baker and the rifles.

"That's not good news," Mallard said now, about the rifle theft. "We've got a team on the way to completely debrief Mr. Baker."

"So what else is happening?" Lucas asked. Behind him, Andreno popped a piece of Dentyne and snapped it a couple of times with his teeth. He looked like a schnauzer in a pen full of greyhounds.

"Working Levy," Mallard said. "Nothing moving at this point. Waiting her out…"

"We may know who she's staying with," Lucas said.

There was a pause in the work around them, and Malone said, "Hang on a minute" and took the phone down. Mallard frowned and said, "Staying with? Who?"

"A woman named Patricia Hill," Lucas said. "But there's a teeny problem."

Mallard said, "What?"

"Patricia Hill killed her husband ten years ago and disappeared. We think she came here. She'd be living under an assumed name."

"How did you…"

Lucas explained it, with Andreno chipping in on parts of the argument. "The good news is," Andreno said, and he snapped the gum for emphasis, "we think she might call her mom. If you could check the Hills' phone records, you might find a few calls from St. Louis and then we'd know where she's at, and we'd get a twofer: two killers for the price of Rinker."

Malone shrugged. "The records are a piece of cake-the rest of it sounds like moonshine, though."

"We gotta check," Mallard said. "I kinda like it."

THE RECORDS WERE a piece of cake. The Memphis cops pulled the Patricia Hill file, scanned it, and shipped it in an hour. Patsy Hill, ten years earlier, had been a tall, thin blonde with a large nose and bony shoulders. A high-res color version of the digital photo was sent to an ink-jet printer somewhere else in the building, and fifteen minutes later came back as a finished paper photograph.

"Doesn't look like anybody in particular," Andreno said, as the photo went up on the bulletin board.

"Better than what we've got on Rinker," Lucas said.

Malone said, "Her husband was sent to jail twice for abusing her."

"So what?" Andreno asked.

"So maybe there's a little more here than a simple murder," Malone snapped.

"So what?" Andreno asked again.

Malone put her hands on her hips. "What's this 'so what' attitude?"

"Do you give a shit about Hill?" Andreno asked. Malone opened her mouth to reply, but Andreno kept going. "I don't give a shit about Hill. I'm chasing Rinker. If Hill gets in the way, I'd pick her up and send her back to Memphis to stand trial, but otherwise, I wouldn't drive around the block to find her."

Malone looked at Lucas, who shrugged: "I'm with him."

TWO AGENTS WERE assigned to dig up the phone records. They made calls to technicians, talked to lawyers for both the phone company and the FBI, and two hours after Lucas and Andreno walked in the door, a list of phone calls had been downloaded to the task-force computers in Washington and bounced out to the St. Louis laptops.