"Paulo," she said aloud. "That's another one for you."

22

SALLY AND LUCAS GOT BACK TO THE FBI conference room at midnight. "Washington's gonna call tomorrow. They'll want to pull the team," she said. "The perception is, we've screwed this to the wall. Even before Malone."

"Can you stall for a few days?" Lucas asked, as Derik wandered in, carrying a six-pack of Diet Coke in plastic bottles. "I think we can bag her."

Derik dropped them on the table and gestured, and Lucas took one. Derik said, "Sally said we're working tonight. And you think we can get her."

"Yeah… where's that red-haired guy?"

"He's with Patrick-they're old pals."

"Patrick's the guy who got it in both legs. Broken bones," Sally said.

"Gonna be tough," Derik said. To Lucas: "Lay it out. How do we get her?"

"OKAY,"LUCAS SAID."First: Rinker knew exactly where the Dallaglios were gonna be, and when. She knew- she knew exactly which jet company, and it seems to me that she knew that there wouldn't be a security sweep of the place ahead of time."

"Which means somebody is talking to her," Sally said thoughtfully.

"That's right. Somebody tipped her, and the person is close to the Dallaglios. Second: I keep thinking that there had to be a reason for the order that she killed these guys in. She took Dichter first, because he was going to be the hardest, except maybe for Ross. So she tricked him, lured him out before he really knew what was going on, when he might have thought he could still talk his way out of it. And she set him up so he felt safe, and bang! Then she took Levy, because she had another trick figured out, the cell phone. Then Dallaglio, because she had a source of information that could set him up, and she knew ahead of time-weeks ago-that she could do that. It's all very logical. We really didn't have a chance to step on any of it."

"How about Ross?" Sally asked.

"We don't even know that she's going after Ross. That's kinda my point: Ross doesn't seem to be all that worried. He's like Ferignetti-careful, but maybe not as worried as he should be."

"Maybe he's in on it," Sally said. "Maybe this whole thing is a way to eliminate competition."

"It feels that way," Lucas said. "But the whole thing was touched off by Paulo Mejia's killing. How does that fit? Did the other guys go after her, and Ross try to help her out? Our problem is, we don't really have Rinker's story, or Paulo Mejia's. We don't know what they expected or felt. I mean, Mejia had a guy with him who was carrying a goddamn Mac-10. Why was that? Did they know something?"

"Maybe-"

"Wait a minute," Lucas said. "Hang on-one thing at a time. So we know something: Rinker was tipped by somebody close to the Dallaglios. So if we get with Jesse Dallaglio as soon as she can think again, she should be able to figure out exactly when they knew what time they were leaving for the airport. Probably sometime this morning. That's the first we knew that they were moving. So somebody was tipped after that, and she should be able to point us at every single person who knew. They were all penned up inside the house."

"We should be able to get the phone records of every person in the house, and all the house phones. See where they went," Sally said. "That's good. We could have all of that in a couple of hours."

"What we'll have is a few names, and most of them we should be able to eliminate immediately. So by tomorrow morning we should have the name of somebody who can get in touch with Rinker. Or who Rinker gets in touch with. And they won't know that we know. If Rinker calls whoever tipped her off, she won't be running, she'll talk for a while."

"We can move on her in five minutes," Sally said. "Have the choppers scattered around."

"We can do all that," Derik said.

"So we've got to talk to Jesse Dallaglio. Tonight," Lucas said. As an afterthought: "Does Ross know what happened at the airport?"

"Yes. I called the team leader out at Ross's and had him go in and tell him. They know."

"Maybe…" Lucas rubbed his nose, thinking. "You know what I'd do? I'd check to see if the Dallaglios used a travel agent or somebody outside the family to set up the trip. They almost had to-you can't just call up one of these jet services and drive out and go. They want to see the money, or they want a guarantee."

"You think a travel agent?"

"Well, when we first got onto Rinker, up in Minnesota, we were never able to track Rinker when she was traveling-it was like she was invisible. I wouldn't be surprised if all these Mafia guys like to keep their travel private. Maybe it's somebody Rinker knew from when she was traveling to kill people. Maybe there's a connection."

"If it is something like a travel agent, and we can figure it out, we could maybe get Ross to book a trip," Sally said. "You know, have him be sneaky about it, tell the agent to book him out of someplace like Springfield, and then just saturate the airport before he comes in. She'd have no way to know that we were onto her."

"That could work," Lucas said.

Derik said, "At least we're being… whatever that word is."

Lucas said, "What word?"

"You know…"

"Proactive," Sally said.

"So let's proact our asses over to Dallaglio's place and talk to Jesse Dallaglio," Lucas said.

A DOCTOR WAS leaving the Dallaglios' when they arrived, a tall slender woman in what would have been a tweedy dress if it hadn't been ninety-eight degrees outside; and it still looked like tweed, even if it was some kind of light knotted cotton. Sally identified herself and said, "Did you put them asleep?"

"The children were exhausted. I gave them sleep aids, they're with their mother," the doctor said. "I left some sleep aids for Mrs. Dallaglio, but I don't know if she'll use them. She was resistant."

INSIDE THE HOUSE, one of the bodyguards, still wearing bloody pants, said, "Mrs. Dallaglio's back with the kids in the bedroom."

"We'll wait," Lucas said. And, "There are ten guns around the house now. You've probably got time to get cleaned up if you want."

The bodyguard looked down at his pants. "Gonna burn these sons of bitches," he said. He looked around. "I'm gonna do that, get cleaned up. I'll be back in ten minutes." As he was going out the door, he added, "What a night."

A SECOND BODYGUARD came padding down a hall as they stood around the living room, saw them, and said, "The kids are asleep. Jesse'll be with you in a minute."

More like five minutes, but when Jesse Dallaglio came out of the back, she'd managed to pull herself together. Her eyes were still puffy and red from crying, but the first wave of the shock had passed.

Lucas had seen it before: Women recovered faster than men from the death of a spouse. Lucas believed that both men and women expected the wife to live longer, so that women were somewhat braced for the departure of a husband, while a husband, in most police cases, was absolutely unprepared-unless, of course, he'd done the killing himself.

When that was a possibility, most homicide cops liked to take a quick, hard look at the husband, to see if he was either too pulled together or too demonstrative. Most innocent husbands simply dropped into dumb shock and stayed there for a while. It was an attitude not easily faked.

"I'm better," Dallaglio was telling Sally. "The girls are sick, and they're terrified. But they'll be okay. The doctor gave them some sleeping pills. What did you…?"

"Chief Davenport had an idea that we felt we had to look into," Sally said. "Could you tell us when you decided, for sure, to go with Executive Air? And when you decided what time you'd be leaving?"

She looked from Sally to Lucas to Derik, then back to Lucas as her hand came up to her mouth. "Oh my God. How did she know we'd be there?"