Certain prey

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 football-sized guys out the hall and down a flight of stairs to get rid of them. On the other hand, if they shot her

… a couple of big guys could handle a small woman fairly easily. If you were big enough, you could hold her under your coat, and walk right out.'

'Were they wearing coats?'

'The fisher-guy says they weren't, but you get my point. They could handle her a heck of a lot easier than she could have handled them.'

'They could have walked away together,' Lucas said. 'They could have been helpers. She could have cut herself packing up her stuff.'

'Which is sort of my theory, right now,' Malone said. 'Although the other theory has some attractions. If we get this woman… We've got a half-dozen states where they've got the death penalty, and where they've got lots of evidence on one or another of her killings. The only thing they don't have is the shooter.

If we wanted to release her to those states for trial, sooner or later she'd wind up in the electric chair or the gas chamber or strapped down to a gurney.

With that kind of leverage, we could squeeze her pretty hard. We could put some pretty big holes in the St. Louis mob with her information.'

'And that's what you want.'

'Of course,' she said. 'If we get the top guy, the guy who probably ran her… he knows everything. If she was willing to pin the tail on him, we could show him the same set of electric chairs and gas chambers. If he talked, two years from now, St. Louis would be cleaner than… I don't know – Seattle.'

'Seattle has Microsoft.'

'Okay.' She showed the tiniest of smiles. 'Than Minneapolis.'

'Thanks.'

'Anyway, the mob guys in St. Louis know this as well as we do. It wouldn't be too far-fetched to think they might send a couple of shooters to fix the problem.'

'She might be too smart for that,' Lucas said. 'I got the impression of smartness from the lady. So we know the mob could send a couple of guys, and the mob knows it could send a couple of guys, and she knows it. And if everybody knows it, do they send a couple of guys?'

'I don't know,' Malone said. 'I do know one thing that's pretty unique.'

'Yeah?'

'You're the only guy I know who's literally danced with the devil.'

Lucas saw the big window the minute he walked in the apartment door.

He had an advantage over Malone and the other FBI agents – when they'd first arrived, they were looking for Rinker herself, and didn't know about the blood on the floor. One of the FBI crime-scene techs pointed him around the apartment, and finally he asked, 'Did you check the outside window ledge on that big window?'

The agent looked at the window, and thinking fast, said, 'Not yet,' as if it were next on the list.

'Would it be all right to lift it up?'

'Let me get one of the guys to do it,' the agent said.

'What're you thinking?' Malone asked.

'I think carrying any body out of this place would take a fruitcake,' Lucas said. 'But throwing them out the window, if it's night time…' He peered out: 'They'd land right behind the garbage dumpster. You could back a car right up to them.'

One of the technicians came over, looked skeptically at the window, and said,

'Let me get this.'

Lucas stepped back and the tech unlocked the inner window, and lifted it easily.

The outer window was a convertible aluminum glass-and-screen affair; the glass had been pushed up, and the screen was in place. 'Screen's a little loose,' the tech said. He was working awkwardly through surgeon's gloves. 'Let me…'

He used a small pocket knife to slip the screen up an inch, which allowed him to pull it out of the frame. He leaned it against the wall, and they all looked at the bottom end of the screen, and the brick wall outside.

'Huh.'The tech grunted and got down close to the brick, leaning out through the window.

'What?' asked Malone, glancing quickly at Lucas.

'You know any reason why a brick would wear tweed?'

Wooden Head was being interrogated by a team of specialists from Washington.

Lucas and Malone watched for a few minutes, then left. If the team missed anything, Lucas wasn't smart enough to figure out what it would be – the team was taking Wooden Head apart inch by inch, and they were good.

'I'd suggest we get a bite at the Rink, but somebody would probably spit in the hamburger,' Malone said. 'So let's get something someplace else. Then maybe I can rent a car and get back home.' 'Really? You'd drive back instead of fly?'

'Really,' Lucas said.

'We've got a car going up later today, a couple of guys from the crime-scene crew to review the work at the last two killing scenes… you could ride along. I think they're leaving around three, and plan to drive straight through.'

'Sign me up,' Lucas said.

They stopped at a downtown diner, got a tippy table, and Lucas looked at one of the legs and told Malone, sitting opposite, 'See that lever on the end of the leg? There's a lever sticking up.' 'Yeah?'

'Push the lever toward me, with your foot.'