'From upstairs? Why would he take our tag number?' Rinker asked.
'I don't know. But that would explain a few things. Can you come up here?'
'Yeah. I'm in KC now. I'll be up there tomorrow.'
'Bring your… tools,' Carmel said. 'We may have to talk to somebody. And I gotta think about this. Maybe by the time you get here, I'll have some ideas.'
Chapter Seventeen
Lucas stayed in Wichita for two days, tracking 'Lopez and listening to the FBI taps. The longer he listened, the more convinced he became that Lopez was a small-time dealer, supplementing the flower shop take with a little side money.
The side money, Lucas decided, was going straight into his arm.
A woman named Nancy Holme, carried on Lopez' state tax forms as an employee, did virtually all the work, showing up early to take deliveries of fresh-cut flowers, staying late over a hot computer. Lopez would arrive sleepy, nod off at midday, and leave sleepy. The Feebs couldn't decide whether Holme was in on the game or not. She never took delivery of drugs. Lucas suggested that they look at her as the killer. They did, and rapidly concluded that she wasn't.
The night before he left for Minneapolis, Lucas, Malone and Mallard went back to the Rink. The woman he'd danced with, the owner, wasn't working, he was told.
'She's got to travel on business a couple of times a year, and this is one of those times. Too bad, she liked you,' a waitress told them, her over-active eyebrows semaphoring a tale of two ships passing in the night.
'A tragedy,' Malone said, when the waitress left with their orders. 'Davenport leaves another broken heart in a dusty western town.'
Rinker was in the Twin Cities. Carmel met her at the hotel, and at Rinker's direction, had ridden up three extra floors on the elevator, and had taken the stairs down to Rinker's floor. Rinker, when she let Carmel in, was wearing a black wig.
'How do I look? Mexican?' Rinker asked as she closed the door.
'You're too pale,' Carmel said. 'You could maybe make Italian.'
'I'll go back to the redhead, then,' Rinker said.
Carmel had been thinking about Davenport: 'Somehow, they're tracking you. And for some reason, they're pushing on me. I thought about your car, and the possibility that they're tracking it, but that doesn't seem likely. That would mean that they had to have two pieces of luck: to get onto Tennex, and to get the tag number. I don't believe it. What I'm wondering is, could they have found a connection with your St. Louis friends? Could they be squeezing somebody?'
'Only one guy in St. Louis knows exactly who I am and what I do, and there are maybe two more who suspect – a couple brothers who run a bar down there. And the brothers wouldn't know who you are. The one guy would… he knows your name.
He's the guy Rolo called.'
'My contact in the PD says that another detective, a woman named Sherrill, went down to St. Louis for a couple of days last week, and the word around the department is that she was talking to the St. Louis organized- crime guys,'
Carmel said.
'I don't know why my guy would be dealing me,' Rinker said, thinking about it for a moment. 'He takes a lot of power off me: you know, he's the guy who knows the finger of God, as you put it. The guy who can hook you up. And if I go down, he goes down.'
Carmel took a short turn around the hotel room, checked herself in a bureau mirror, turned back and said, 'Let me tell you something I learned as a lawyer: everybody will deal. Everybody. Have you ever heard of this new federal lockup in the Rockies?'
'No…'
'You gotta cement cell about half the size of this hotel room. It has a concrete bed platform and stainless steel sink and toilet fixtures in concrete stands. No bars, just a steel door and an unbreakable window that shows nothing but a rectangle of sky -you can't even see the sun. There's a black-and-white TV bolted in a corner. That's it. You're in there twenty-two to twenty-three hours a day, and you're monitored every minute. I've had a couple of clients try to commit suicide in there, and neither one made it -although one made it when they put him in a hospital after his second try. He tried to kill himself by standing against one wall and running full speed into the wall across the room, with his head down. He cracked his skull. He finally managed to kill himself in the hospital – this was his third try – rather than go back. You hear what I'm saying?'
'I'm not sure,' Rinker said.
'What I'm saying is, torture is alive and well in the United States of America,'
Carmel said. 'It just doesn't involve physical pain. It involves isolation, year after year of solitary… They could take your Mafia friend out there, show him through the place, let him talk to a couple of inmates, and he'd give you up.'
'But he hasn't,' Rinker said. 'Because if he had, they'd be on me like a hot sweat. But they're not. I swear to God, Davenport didn't have any idea who I was, and neither did the other cops. We danced, for God's sake.'
'That wasn't too great a move,' Carmel said.
'I had to find out if they were there for me – I couldn't stand it,' Rinker said. 'To tell you the truth…'
'What?'
'What if he's fated to find me? That's what scares me. I've got this guy I can't shake because it's my time.'
'Jesus, Pam, you gotta take a couple aspirins or something,' Carmel said. 'Lay down for a while. 'Cause, believe me, it's nothing like that.'
Rinker sighed, and let her shoulders slump. Carmel actually did make her feel better. She was so sure of herself. 'Okay.'
'So we still have the question, What do we do?' Carmel said. 'Davenport knows something. He's working off something. What could they have given him atTennex that put him in Wichita? Why is he pushing on me?'
'I don't know how he got to Wichita. I was a fanatic about being careful.'
'What about your Mafia friend? Even if he's not deliberately giving you up, is there any way he could have pointed them at Wichita?'
'Hmph.' Rinker had to think about it for a minute. 'I didn't let him call me there. He always came out to deliver the messages. But he's always on the telephone. If somehow they managed to sort out his calls while he was there…
I don't know. It sounds weak. I mean, he goes everywhere. Why would they focus on Wichita?'
'They've got all kinds of ways of doing those things – statistics,' Carmel said.
'I'd be willing to bet it's something like that, especially if Davenport didn't know who you were.'
'He didn't. I'm sure of that.'
They went over it several times, and finally Carmel said, 'You know, we're coming to the crunch, here. If Davenport's mining some kind of line of information, it might lead to you, or it might lead to me, or it might not. It's hard to put a case together. I'd say it's about fifty-fifty whether we should sit tight, or move somehow.'
'What move?'
'One possibility is, we could go talk to the kid, and the kid's mother. We could find out what they told the cops. Then we'd know about that angle.'
'What if it's a trap?'
'I don't think it is. I don't think any cop would put a kid in play, not when you're talking about professional killers,' Carmel said. 'If any cop would, it'd be Davenport – but I don't think even he would.'
'And you're saying that after we talk to them, we kill them? The kid and her mom?'
Carmel shrugged: 'If we have to.'
'We'd have to find some other way to do it. I'm not going to kill the kid – I've been thinking about it,' Rinker
