"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 Cancъn label-it's from a Cancъn 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 said, "Nah."
Mallard: "We can't take a chance. We'll set up here all night. Pull the cops out, maybe she'll come in."
"Better get a bigger net around Dallaglio and Ross," Lucas said. "Better get some smart guys with them. After Levy… I don't know. A car bomb?"
"Don't tell me a car bomb," Mallard groaned. He looked around. "She was here this morning. This morning."
HONUS JOHNSON WAS working on a chest of drawers in American cherry. A Honus Johnson chest of drawers brought in four thousand dollars in a boutique furniture shop in Boston; they looked so much like the old ones.
In his woodworking, Johnson tended to use British tools, like his miniature Toolman hand planes, which were simply exquisite. In his sadistic pursuits, he preferred Craftsman tools from Sears. He rejected electrical equipment, because it lacked subtlety-though he always had a soldering iron handy. He'd really found his metier in hammers, pliers, and handsaws. He'd once cut off a man's foot with a hacksaw, to make a business point for his employer.
His personal inclinations pretty much ruled out any deep friendships. Even people who knew him well, and used his services, were likely to wince when they saw him coming, though he looked harmless enough: a pinkish, white-haired gentleman in his late forties or early fifties, with square, capable hands and a thin, oval face.
He wore khaki pants and striped long-sleeved shirts and European-look square-toed brown shoes, and tended to suck on his teeth, as though he was perplexed. He also had a tendency to flatulence, which resulted in some of John Ross's associates referring to him as Stinky-but only very privately. He'd worked for Ross for two dozen years, a weapon much like Rinker.
RINKER SPENT THE morning on the far west edge of the metro area, at the Spirit of St. Louis Airport, looking around, wandering among the industrial and office buildings. Later that day, now dressed as the Dark Woman, she spent an enjoyable couple of hours at the Missouri Botanical Gardens. The Gardens had an environmental dome called the Climatron, an enclosed jungle that offered much in the way of concealment and ambush possibilities. She looked at it closely for a long time.
WHEN SHE ARRIVED at Johnson's house, a little after four o'clock in the afternoon, he was working in his backyard woodshop, power-planing cherry planks for the chest of drawers. Johnson really had no fear of retaliation for his past acts of cruelty, simply because he was never the principal in the act. Like his favorite chisels and saws, he was only a tool, if an exquisite one. In all the years he'd worked for Ross, there'd been no comebacks.
And he was careful: Almost nobody knew where he lived.
Rinker knew, but Johnson didn't know that she did. She'd made it her business to find out when she was still working for Ross. If she'd ever gotten on the wrong side of Ross, she'd thought years ago, she might want to take care of Ross's other major weapon before he had a chance to take care of her.
She'd had a hard time finding him. Johnson was not in the phone books, nor was he in any of the records that Ross kept in the warehouse. He was paid off the books, like Rinker was, and she saw him so rarely that there was no real possibility of following him home.
She'd looked in the county tax statements, but he wasn't there. She'd once managed to get his auto license number, but then found out that if she tracked the car through the state, she had to make a formal request for the information and that Johnson would be notified. No good. One of the girls at the warehouse once mentioned that she'd had to send some stuff to him, for Ross, but when Rinker made some careful inquiries, she found that the stuff was sent to a downtown post office box.
She'd eventually found Johnson's house purely through luck. Johnson had built elaborate teak plant benches for John Ross, for Ross's orchids, and when the benches were delivered, she'd been at Ross's house. The two guys who drove the delivery truck had an invoice that showed both the pickup and delivery addresses. She took the address back to the courthouse and looked it up in the tax and plat records-Johnson was there all right, but his house was listed under "Estate of Estelle Johnson."
SHE PARKED IN the street and walked up the driveway. From the driveway, she could hear the planer screaming inside the workshop. She went past the garage, vaulted a chain-link fence-moving fast now, slipping the silenced Beretta from under her shirt-to the open side door of the workshop. As she came up to the door she happened to glance upward, and saw a motion detector tucked in the corner, and she stopped, peeked around the door frame. Johnson was looking right at her, a silent-alarm strobe light bouncing off his protective glasses, and he was moving to his right, quickly. She stepped through the door, following the muzzle of her pistol. He froze when he saw her, his hands empty. She glanced toward the wall that he'd been moving to: A shotgun leaned against a cabinet.
What had Jaime told her, at the ranch, about the need for handguns?
"The rifle will be leaning against a tree, and that's when they will come."
SHE SMILED, THINKING about it, and Johnson flinched. He took a step back and tried a placating smile. "Hello, Clara, I…"
No point in conversation. Rinker shot him in the nose, and he went down, twisting away, his face striking the edge of the saw table. He landed faceup in a pile of shavings. She looked at him for a moment, on the floor, judged him dead, but shot him again, carefully, between the eyes. The planer was so loud that she heard no hint of the shot, or of the gun's cycling action.
He was dead for sure now. The planer was still screaming, the plank beginning to buck. Rinker couldn't see a switch, so she pulled the plug, and the machine wound down like a depowered airplane engine.
She couldn't leave Johnson on the floor, or even in the workshop, she decided. The yard was fenced, but it wasn't the best neighborhood, and if somebody broke in, he might be found.
She looked around for a moment, then grabbed him by the collar and dragged him to a lowboy he'd used for hauling lumber. She pushed a stack of planks onto the floor-thought better of it, in case somebody looked in, and took a minute to stack them neatly near the wall-then loaded his body onto the lowboy and covered it with four transparent bags full of wood shavings and sawdust.
She pushed the whole load out the door, up the concrete walk to the back of the garage, then into the garage, past an E-Class Mercedes-Benz, and through a breezeway to the house. She couldn't actually get the lowboy into the house, because of a step. She left the body and the cart in the breezeway and let the muzzle of the Beretta lead her through the house. She was, she found, the only living thing in it.
The house was neatly kept, but had no more personality than a motel room-a few woodworking magazines, some reference works, a television set with an incongruous Nintendo console sitting on the floor next to it.
She checked it all out, then hauled Johnson's body into the house and rolled it down the basement stairs. She first thought to leave it there, at the foot of the stairs, but then noticed a chest-style freezer against the wall, and opened it. It was half-full of Healthy Choice microwave dinners, and bags of frozen peas and corn.