was a small brown office model from Sears, with two lunch sacks and an aging apple on one shelf, and a bottle of cran-apple juice in the door – and then she took it back out and touched an unmarked piece of it. 'Still nice and hard,' she said. 'Let's try it.'
The technique, which they agreed upon with the FBI, was to blow a light dry graphite dust across the prints, then try to softly pick up the dust with a piece of Magic Mending Tape. Ashler sprayed dust on the smallest, least- clear print, then squatted next to the bar of soap. 'Tape.'
Somebody handed her the roll of Magic Mending tape. She gently lowered a loop of the tape across the first print, let it rest on the carbon particles for a moment, then lifted it.
'Shoot,' she said, squinting at the tape. She picked up a magnifying glass and looked again.
'What happened?'
'No print,' she said. She looked back at the soap. 'It just sorta pulled little tiny pieces of the soap away… it's totally wrecked.'
'All right, stop,' Lucas said. 'Let's get it back in the fridge, and talk to the
Feebs again. Maybe we ought to do some experiments on another bar of soap with our own fingerprints before we try again.'
Ashler nodded. 'That'd be best – but I thought we needed it in a hurry.'
'Maybe not, if Harry's genius kid came through-'
Harry's genius kid came through. Sloan had personally taken him to the Roseville store, because Sloan liked to drive fast in city cars with lights and sirens, and they were back in less than an hour. 'Four of them are pretty good,' the kid said. 'If Mr. Sloan can take me back to my place, I'll scan them in and we can ship them over to the FBI.'
Lucas was looking at the slides, holding them up to a fluorescent light. They didn't look like much, but they looked better than other prints he'd seen. They looked better than what he'd been able to see with the naked eye. 'Harry,' he said to the kid's father, 'Your kid is a fuckin' genius.'
Rinker got to Des Moines a little after five o'clock in the afternoon, checked into a Holiday Inn, and called Carmel on the cell phone.
'More bad news,' Carmel said. 'My guy in the police department says they've got your fingerprints.' 'I wiped everything,' Rinker said, but she could feel the uncertainty in her own voice.
'He says they took them off a bar of soap they found in a room at the Regency White,' Carmel said. 'Davenport's guys.' 'A bar of soap?'
'Yeah. He said they were sending them to the FBI.' 'I'll call you back,' Rinker said. She remembered picking up the soap. She hadn't thought to wipe it. She rang off before Carmel could protest, and sat quietly on the bed, pulling herself together for a moment. Despite her self-control, a tear trickled down her cheek: that fuckin' Davenport. She took three deep breaths, exhaled, then punched nine numbers into the phone. 'This is Rinker,' she said, when the man answered. 'I gotta pull the plug.'
After a long silence, the man said, 'You're sure?' 'It's the Minneapolis deal.
They've been to my place, even if they don't know it; but they're sniffing around Wichita. They've got a bad picture of me, but it's a picture, one of those computer deals. Now I think they might have my fingerprints.'
'How could this happen?' Disbelief in his voice. 'You wouldn't believe it. But you tell Wooden Head to get out to Wichita with the money. I'm gonna clean out the bank there, go to my bottom-line ID – I'm shredding everything else – and
I'll leave him the papers. He can take the bar and find a new manager; but my prints'll be all over the place. He should try to wipe everything he can, but I don't think he'll get everything.'
'What about your apartment?'
'I'm gonna try to get in and out, quick,' she said. 'I'll check the place first.'
'I didn't think anybody had your prints.'
'They don't. I've never been printed. That's the good news. But they've been getting too close, and sooner or later, they just might put things together. I can't take the chance.'
'All right. Jeez, Clara…'
'Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll get back in touch, when I can.'
'Where are you now?'
'Minneapolis. I'll be leaving here in a couple of hours, I've got some cleaning up to do. But if I drive straight through the night, I ought to be in Wichita by the time the banks open.'
When she finished, she called Carmel back: 'I'm closing down my life,' she said.
'I'll just be a figment of your imagination by this time tomorrow'
'You mean you're… giving up the bar?'
'Everything,' Rinker said: 'Now listen: do you still think we go for Plan B?'
'Well, if you got caught, or if there's something more on me… I mean, that'd settle things.'
'All right. I've got to run to Wichita. I'll see you tomorrow night, probably.'
She made two calls to the airport, then called a cab. She left her car and luggage at the Holiday Inn, but took her guns. The cab dropped her at Shack
Direct Air, where a laconic pilot who looked far too young to be allowed in airplanes was waiting in the pilot's lounge, reading the Wall Street Journal.
'You Miss Maxwell?'
'Yes.'
'I was supposed to get some money.'
She took two thousand dollars out of her purse and handed it to him. 'We're outa here,' he said.
She arrived in Wichita a few minutes before midnight, took a cab straight to the bar, said, 'Hey, Johnny,' to the bartender who said, 'You're back?' and she said, 'Yeah, but I'm running. See you tomorrow.'
'Heavy date?'
'Something like that. I'm taking the van, so don't worry about it.'
'Okay.'
From the back room she got a dozen liquor boxes and the keys for the bar's van, a big practical Dodge. On the way back to her apartment, she stopped at a convenience store, bought a package of plastic garbage bags, and hauled them with the liquor boxes back to her apartment. She lived on the second floor, and carried the boxes up in three trips, four at a time, and tossed them into the kitchen. After the third trip, she shut the door behind her, and started packing.
Tried not to think about it: just packed. She packed a sock bunny that her mother had made her, when her mother was still functioning as a human being, before her step-dad had beaten the liveliness out of her.
She'd gotten the bunny for Christmas when she was six; it was the single oldest thing she possessed. She packed the photographs taken with other dancers at two or three bars around St. Louis, with people at the booze warehouse, where she'd worked after the dancing ended. She packed the first two-dollar bill that the bar had taken in – they'd saved the first two-dollar bill because they'd forgotten to save the first dollar.
She packed: she'd lived in the place for six years, and it had been as much a home to her as anything she'd ever had, and it took a while. She hummed while she packed. Hummed like an angry bumble bee. 'That fuckin' Davenport,' she said.
'That fuckin' Davenport.'
When she'd packed everything important to her, including her school books and papers, she realized that she couldn't pack everything that was important to her. She couldn't pack the place. She sat on the bed and smoothed the sheet, and went once more through the chest of drawers, where even the tired cotton underwear suddenly seemed important…
'That fuckin' Davenport…' And this time, she cried. Let it go, couldn't stop it.
Ten minutes later, eyes red, she was wiping the place with Lysol.
By three-thirty in the morning, she was finished. If the cops really took the place apart, they might find a print or two, but it'd take weeks. She took the last of the boxes down to the van, moved the van down the street, then went back to the apartment. Her apartment was at the end of a hall, and when she'd first moved in, she'd made a small change: she'd placed a wireless movement alarm, which she bought at Wards, just above the window at the end of the hall. The alarm, when tripped, set off a buzzer or a strobe on a small console next to her bed. She chose strobe, put the console next to her face, placed her guns on the floor next to her bed, and let herself slip
