25

MALLARD PULLED TOGETHER ALL THE local police forces and had them do a grid search, starting around the shopping center, checking parked cars, any car that looked unusual or out-of-the-way; looking for blood.

The ID came back on the Benz, and they went for Honus Johnson's house, and pounced on it with a full entry crew, but there was nobody home-nobody alive. They eventually found Johnson in the freezer and the California car in the garage, and they got Rinker's clothes and her guns, but no money, no passport, no paper.

Mallard, frenzied, crazy, said, "I'm not sure where we're at. It all comes down to how hard you hit her."

"I can't tell you that," Lucas said. "I knocked her down and she got right back up. I might have hit her in her left leg, because she was dragging a leg, but I'm not sure."

"Lot of blood," Sally said again. "Lot of blood."

THEY WENT AFTER Treena Ross, but when Rinker shouted "Cops!" she hadn't immediately dumped the phone. She'd used it to call her attorney, and her attorney had come down to the hospital, where Mallard's agents had picked her up. When Mallard, Lucas, and Sally showed up at the hospital, the attorney said to Mallard, "Is it true that you were eavesdropping on conversations between my client and myself?"

They had been, of course. They'd stayed on the phone from the time Rinker's call came in through the call to the attorney. Mallard had nodded and said, "Yes."

"That's a violation of-"

"Bullshit. I have a law degree, sir, and it wasn't a violation of anything. If your client doesn't wish to tell us what really happened inside that dome tonight, we'll see that's she's charged with premeditated murder and we'll recommend that the state seek the death penalty. So what do you want to do?"

"Charge her," the attorney said, "or we walk now. Either way, she says nothing."

"Then we'll charge her."

"That's certainly your privilege."

They smiled at each other, nodded, and Mallard said, "I'll go make the call."

LATER THAT NIGHT, he said to Lucas, "I don't think we'll get Treena. We were focused on Rinker and we didn't process her right. We didn't keep her under control."

"What happened?"

"Well, we got the phone, and she says the phone was her husband's, she was carrying it because he was wearing a tux and didn't have a place for it. And we took tape samples from her hands and arms looking for nitrites, and didn't find any. I think she used a plastic bag or a piece of cloth to cover her hand and sleeve when she fired the gun. She was wandering around in the hospital before we put a hold on her; she was in the ladies' room, and she might have flushed it. She had nitrites on her face, but she says that Rinker fired the pistol right past her, so they would be there. Smeared prints on the gun grip, clear ones on the barrel, and at least one of the good ones belongs to Rinker."

"Well-thought-out."

"For a long time," Mallard agreed. "For weeks. And they pulled it off. If we take her to trial, they'll have Rinker's gun, they'll have Rinker's blood on the glass, they'll have our whole investigation and chase with Rinker, and Ross'll say the phone calls went to her husband. All we've got is that last phone call, and Rinker called her, unfortunately, and I listened to the tape. All double-talk. I mean, it sounds good to me, but it won't be enough. It especially won't be enough when they get Ross's character into it, and they show that the third wife was killed in an unsolved hit-and-run."

Lucas was convinced. "So Treena's out of it."

He nodded. "Yes. And she knows it."

"If she had any little thing about Rinker, maybe we could deal with her… especially since we're not going to get her anyway."

Mallard shook his head. "She's not gonna deal. The whole thing was… I feel like a moron. That's what I feel like, Lucas. As soon as we clean up here, I'm going to Malone's funeral, and then I'm going home for a while, and just sit and think."

"What about Rinker?"

"Fuck her. I hope she dies of blood poisoning."

RINKER GOT ON I -44 and headed southwest, drove for fifteen minutes before the pain dragged her off the highway. Feeling faint, she took an exit at random, spotted a hotel, turned into its parking lot, and parked the truck. She pressed the dead man into the footwell, found an Army blanket behind the seat, and threw it over him. Then, moving ever so slowly, she did a survey of her assets.

She had money, ID, two passports, both good, a black wig, and a hole in her butt that continued to bleed. She also had a small toolbox, a battered leather briefcase, and a brown sack with a grease spot that might have contained a lunch. She had a day-old newspaper.

When the dead man rolled off the passenger seat, he'd exposed a copy of the Post-Dispatch. The news section looked unread, and Rinker had heard that unread newspaper pages were virtually sterile. She pulled out the middle section, ripped then, unbuckled her slacks, touched the wound a few times, wasn't sure she should be pleased or frightened that she couldn't feel much other than the basic pain, then, in the light of the truck's overhead lamp, made eight-inch-square pads of newsprint and pressed them onto the wound.

Digging into the toolbox for a roll of duct tape, she wrapped her leg and thigh with half the roll of tape, an awkward, unprofessional mess, but it held.

She felt sleepy, and that worried her. Even with the pain in her butt starting to come on, she felt sleepy. Struggled to stay up. Dug into the briefcase and found a cell phone. Everybody had a cell phone.

She took the man's wallet out and looked at his ID and the cards inside, a couple of notes, no pictures. She checked his left hand: no wedding band. Single, she thought. Maybe nobody to come looking right away.

Fought the sleep, kept coming back to the cell phone. Finally, she decided she had no choice: one more risk to run.

She dialed, got an interrupt, and wound up talking to an operator before she got it right. Then she dialed again, and heard it ring, and then a man's voice said, "Sн?"

She switched to Spanish: "This is Cassie McLain. May I speak to Papa?"

They talked for less than a minute, and then Rinker hung up, and after a few moments, as she reconstructed it later, she passed out. She woke again later, terribly thirsty, but there was no water in the truck, and when she moved a wave of pain tore at her.

That goddamn Davenport. He'd shot her in the back while she was running away. He'd had no call to do that, she wasn't even looking at him…

She passed out again, and only woke when a bright light hit her in the eyes. A man said, in Spanish, "Are you alive?"

"Yes."

"I have a car."

He'd had to lift her out of the truck and place her in the front seat of his Cadillac. The front seat was covered with plastic garbage bags so she wouldn't make a mess. When he'd transferred her, she'd passed out again, just for a moment, and when she came to, he was wiping his hands on paper towels. "Still alive?"

"Yes." But very weak now. "Where are we going?"

"Carbondale, Illinois. Maybe two hours, I've never been there."

"What time is it?"

"Five o'clock… The sun is just coming up."

And she passed out again.

Some time later, the man backed into a one-car garage in Carbondale, woke Rinker, who was only fuzzily aware of it, and carried her into a house and put her facedown on a firm bed. A man's voice said, "I'm going to give you a shot."

THE FEDS WOULDN 'T have found the orange pickup for a week if the hotel hadn't been feuding with a pancake house. The pancake house's parking lot was too small, so people parked in the hotel lot, and the hotel people got pissed and required guests to put parking tickets behind the windshields of their cars. If a car sat too long without a ticket, it was towed.