Wichita, whatever it was. The Rink.'
'My eyes are closed. I… hmm. Gotta be a coincidence.'
'Hey, I'm a great-looking guy,' Lucas said, 'I know that, but just between you and me, Malone, not that many thirty-year-old women are coming onto me anymore.
And with this one… I had the feeling she was more interested than she should have been, and maybe not in sex. I didn't know why…'
'… Or maybe you thought it was sex…'
'Maybe I did, whatever. But I tell you, from talking to the people up here who saw her, and looking at that picture, something kept knocking at the back of my head,' Lucas said. 'I finally figured it out: if she's not the same chick, she's her twin. And if she was up here, she could very well have seen me on television. And if she did, and I walked into her place in
Wichita, and then just sat down for a cheeseburger and a beer.. .'
'All right,' Malone said, reluctantly. 'Sounds like a loser, but give me a couple of hours. I'll check it out. You'll be up at your cabin?'
'I don't know,' Lucas said. Out through the screen, he could see the lake, flat, quiet, a perfect North Woods evening coming on. And he'd just gotten there. 'I think I'm gonna head back to the Cities. I'm telling you, I think she's the shooter.'
He was out on 1-35, driving way too fast, and still a long way north of the
Cities, when the cell phone burped. He picked it up, and heard the first two words, then lost the signal. He punched it off; three minutes later, it rang again, and he answered it: Sherrill, breaking up, but audible.
'Your FBI friend called; she's all cranked up. That woman you danced with has disappeared – cleaned out her apartment, quit her job at the bar. ..'
'… I thought she owned it.'
'… So did everybody, but she was really just the manager. It's really owned by a guy named James Larimore, who is also known as Wooden Head
Larimore, who is really connected, really connected, in guess-where?'
'St. Louis.'
'Yup.' The cell connection was getting cleaner. 'So your FBI friend freaked, and got a crime-scene crew into the apartment, and guess-what again?'
'It'd been wiped.'
'Top to bottom.'
'Got her, goddamnit,' Lucas crowed. 'We got her. What's her name?'
'Clara Rinker.'
'Rinker. Fuck those FBI pussies, Marcy. We broke this fuckin' thing right over their heads.'
'Yeah, well… want to know where Wooden Head got the name Wooden Head?'
'Sure.' The adrenalin was pumping; he'd listen to anything.
'He was once in a bar when people started shooting, and he caught a ricochet, and the slug stuck in his skull bone, in his forehead above his nose. Made a dent, and stuck, but didn't go through. They say everybody was laughing so hard, the gunfight stopped. Even Wooden Head was laughing.'
'So he's a tough guy.'
'Very tough. And they ain't gonna get much out of him. He says he don't know nothin' about nothin'.'
Chapter Twenty-Four
M alone met him at the airport: 'You look kinda green,' Malone said. 'Tough flight down?'
'Naw, it was all right,' Lucas mumbled. He looked back through the terminal window at the plane, and Malone caught the look and said, 'You can't be one of those… you're not afraid to fly?'
'It's not my preferred method of travel,' Lucas said, walking away. She scrambled to catch up, and he turned his head to ask, 'What'd you get from the bar? Prints? Photos. We need to get a photo out now.'
'Airplanes are about fifty times safer than cars,' Malone said. 'I thought everybody knew that. Not only that, most people are distracted when they're driving, because they fall into routines, while pilots are trained
…'
'Yeah, yeah, enough,' Lucas said. 'I don't like to fly because I've got problems dealing with control issues because I've got an unconsciously macho self-image, okay? That make you happy? Now what about Rinker?'
'We can't find a photograph,' Malone said. 'And there's no reason for you to be defensive about a fear of flying…'
'There's gotta be a photograph…'
She gave up. 'There are no photographs in the apartment, and none in the bar.
Either she didn't have any, or she took them with her. We checked with people who were more-or-less friends…'
'More-or-less?'
'She didn't have many real friends,' Malone said. 'She was friendly, without friends. Nobody who worked at the bar had ever seen the inside of her apartment.'
'A loner.'
'Psychologically, anyway.'
'Driver's license?'
'We checked her driver's license and she was wearing a red wig and glasses the size of dinner plates, and she had her head tilted down… what I'm saying, is, that composite you had was better. Wichita State also had a copy of her student ID, and that's as bad or worse than the driver's license. She was careful. What we are doing, though, is we're refining the composite. It'll be as good as a photograph by this evening.'
They walked out of the terminal into the already-warm Kansas air; the sun had still been low on the horizon when they landed, and Lucas had expected a little more cool. Malone led him to an unmarked Ford parked in a no-parking zone with a local cop watching over it. 'Thanks, Ted,' Malone said to the cop, who nodded and gave her his best front-line, band-of-brothers cop grin. Saved her parking place; next week, he might be saving her ass someplace, in a savage fire-fight out on the burning plains of Kansas.
Then again, maybe not…
'And there's another thing,' Malone said, as they pulled away from the curb.
'Uh-oh,' Lucas said.
'The crime-scene guys found a couple of small smears of fresh blood on the floor of her apartment. A man who lives down the street, was getting up early to go fishing…'
'In Kansas?'
'Yeah, I guess they do, somewhere. Anyway, he gets up and sees a couple of guys going into her apartment building. They looked out-of-place, he thought – they looked like football players, big guys, and they both wore suits. But they had a key and he just thought they were a couple of apartment people coming home after a night out. So he went fishing and didn't think about it until one of our guys went around knocking on doors.'
'Two guys in suits, middle of the night.'
'Just about dawn.'
'And blood on the floor.'
'There is no apartment in the building with two guys in it, and we can't find any two guys who were out late. It's not a big apartment. Eighteen units -we've talked to everybody.'
'There was no disturbance.'
'No. She had a motion detector in the hallway, which would have been invisible if you didn't know what you were looking for. If she was in there, she should have known they were coming. Of course, she might have expected them.
There was no sign of a struggle…'
'So she shot them?'
'That's a possibility, other than the fact that there're no bodies in the place, and she'd have to carry two
