During the discussion, it seemed that Sally Epaulets-Bryce was her real last name-stepped into a coordinating role, and the rest of the FBI group accepted that, at least until Mallard or somebody else in authority showed up.

Lucas spent the morning reading through the FBI paper, reading everything, until he was sick of it. Somewhere, in that mass of names and numbers, Rinker was hiding; but he couldn't find her.

Was she gone?

ANDRENO CALLED AT ELEVEN, and they agreed to meet at Andy's for lunch. Lucas arrived a little after noon. Loftus was there, and they walked to the back and ordered cheeseburgers and Andreno said, "Jesus Christ. I couldn't believe it. I got up late and turned on the TV and that's all they were talking about. It was like when Reagan got shot or something. So bizarre. Like something in a novel."

"She called me, Clara did," Lucas said. He told them about the call, and then about the shooting itself, and they were both shaking their heads.

"Got more than one screw loose, that girl," Loftus said.

"She's toast," Andreno said. "She better stay in the States. If she goes to Bolivia, the feds'll find her, talk to one of their little helpers down there, and they'll put her in a basement with an electric outlet and connect some wires to her tits and there won't be any habeas fuckin' corpus."

Lucas asked them about the botanical gardens. "John Ross is going over there for an orchestra fundraiser."

"Probably not a good idea. Lots of trees and bushes," Loftus said. "Hedges and shit."

"It's about two minutes from here," Andreno said. "We could drive over."

Lucas nodded. "It's not like I'm doing anything else."

The gardens, Lucas thought, were pretty neat. If Minneapolis had an arboretum that close to downtown, he'd probably go once a week just to look at the flowers.

To get into the place, a visitor would park in a blacktopped parking lot, walk into a ticket desk on the bottom level of a two-story building, then climb a set of stairs and walk out the back into the gardens. That was ideal from a security point of view. Anybody coming in had to climb the stairs, or take an elevator, which made handy choke-points.

"Or she could come over the fence. The place is huge, and there are trees all the way around," Andreno said.

"Maybe get some guys looking down the fence line?"

"If you had enough of them. It's pretty big. It's like trying to protect a farm. Or a forest."

Andreno ran into a food-service supervisor that he knew, and asked about the chamber orchestra event. The food guy pointed them at the Rose Garden, and they went that way. The Rose Garden was laid out in a square, surrounded by a hedge, with a long rectangular building at the entrance and a reflecting pool at the exit. Lucas strolled up and down between the flowers, looking for shooting lanes, and decided that as long as Ross stayed inside the garden, the hedge would protect him from any long-range rifle shots.

Unless she climbed a tree, he thought. As he stood at the garden entrance, he could see that the ground rose off to the left, and they went that way.

"Put a guy right here. Or two or three guys," Andreno said, as they walked up the higher ground. "There're so many trees that she'd have to get close or she couldn't see through them to shoot. And if she got that close, and then tried to climb, she'd be easy to spot."

They walked around for a while, looking at flowers and trees, until the humidity started to get to them. "That place over there," Andreno said, nodding at a dome-shaped building, "is like a tropical jungle. All bamboo and palm trees and shit. Neat place in the winter."

"This whole place is like a jungle. I didn't know St. Louis was so hot."

"We used to have a saying, "It's not the heat…"

"… it's the humidity."

"We'd never say anything that stupid," Andreno said. "We used to say, it's not the heat, it's the assholes. Goddamn hot nights, no air-conditioning, what are you gonna do? You're gonna whack the old lady around, that's what. You get nights like this one's gonna be, there'll be people smacking people all over town."

"Maybe you oughta provide air-conditioning as a public service," Lucas suggested.

"It'd be a plan," Andreno said, seriously. "It'd stop more bullshit than a lot of other plans."

ON THE WAY back to Andy's, where Andreno had left his car, Sally called and said, "The guys on Dallaglio say that he's leaving. He's going into hiding. He says they can follow along, but he won't tell anybody where he's going until he's started."

"That's a little dumb-if we knew where he was going, we could sterilize it in advance. Did you tell him that?"

"Yes. But he said there was no point in trying, and they were safer if nobody knew. They're not leaving until the kids get home from school, they're gonna get them packed up. They're going out tonight."

"Call around. You've got the weight. Check the major airlines, see where the tickets are. If they're going to Italy or somewhere, there aren't many options."

"We're doing that-I just wanted you to know."

"Is Mallard back?"

"No. They finished the postmortem, and they're flying the body out this afternoon. There'll be a memorial service in Washington, and most of us are going."

"You're just shutting down here?"

"Won't be for a couple of days, and there'll still be a crew here. We won't need the Dallaglio crew anymore, and most of the rest of us have just been walking in circles anyway."

21

LUCAS WAS WATCHING AN ATLANTA game when Sally called at eight o'clock and said, "Dallaglio's about to roll. Me and Carl and Derik are heading out, if you want to ride along."

"It's either that or hang myself. I'm down to watching Atlanta."

"You got two minutes."

Lucas got a jacket, clipped a. 45 onto his hip, took a half-finished beer along, hid it from a prim-looking saleslady in the elevator, and caught up with the feds in the lobby. They were already moving, out the doors, into a heat-soaked night-Lucas dropped the beer bottle into a trash can-and across the parking lot where Malone had been shot and into the Suburban.

A block away, Lucas could see a Mazda MPV van, sitting on the street, looking into the back of the buildings where Rinker had set up with the rifle. Inside the van was a bored FBI surveillance crew, hoping against hope that she'd be back. She hadn't been, although they had netted an attractive forty-five-ish commercial real-estate agent who'd come over later for drinks with one of the surveillance guys.

"Glad I'm not in that van," Sally said, picking up on Lucas's thought. "I've done that. Down in Baltimore, working with Jack Hand?"

The red-haired agent was driving again. He nodded and said, "Onions."

"You better believe it. He ate them like apples. He said they prevented prostate cancer. His father died from it."

"Onions, or prostate?" Lucas asked.

"I almost died from the onions once," the red-haired man said.

He put them on an interstate heading west, and Lucas frowned. "Where're we going?"

Sally looked at him and then said, "Oh-we're not going to Lambert. There's another airport out west. Called, um, Spirit of St. Louis. Dallaglio's signed up for a private jet, a place called Executive Air. He's flying out of there to Newark, and then from Newark to Rome to Naples on commercial flights. First class, of course. The whole family."

"Napoli," said the nearly silent Derik. Derik had a buzz cut and high, dry cheekbones and looked like a member of the Wehrmacht. "Roma."

Sally was looking at a map now and said to the red-haired agent, "We're on Sixty-four, right? Because if we're on Forty-four, we'll wind up down in Bumfuck, Missouri, and there's no way back."

"The language," Lucas said.