Her eyes popped open when she heard the key in the door. She felt stunned, her mouth tasted bad, but she was coming back in a hurry, rolling across the mattress. Something wrong. She hadn't been asleep long enough. She looked at the clock: just after noon. Pollock wasn't due back until three o'clock. She pulled one of the nines from the handbag and crouched behind the bed, watching the door as the intruder clumped across the floor and it sounded like…
"Clara?"
Pollock. Rinker exhaled, slipped the pistol back into the bag, and stood up. "Yeah." She stepped over to the door and pulled it open.
"Hey," she said. She was smiling. "What're you doing home?"
Pollock's face was congealed gloom. "Been watching TV?"
"No."
"Oh, God, Clara…" Tears started down Pollock's face. "Gene is… Gene died."
"What?" The smiled stuck on Rinker's face for a few seconds, as though she were waiting for a punch line. There was no punch line.
"I heard it on TV in the lunchroom," Pollock said.
"He died?"
"That's what they say on TV."
"I can't…" Rinker forgot what she was about to say, and brushed past Pollock to the television and fumbled the remote and finally managed to click it on, her hand shaking as though she were being electrocuted. "I don't think…" and she couldn't remember what she didn't think; words weren't making connections for the moment.
They could find nothing at all on television. They looked at all the local channels and clicked around to all the cable channels and found nothing at all.
"Clara, I promise you, I heard it. I went over to watch-they said he was found dead in his cell."
"Ah, God…" Rinker headed back to her room and began pulling on yesterday's clothes.
"Where are you going?"
"I gotta make a phone call," she said. She got her bag with the guns and the booby-trapped phone from the bedroom. "I'll be back… Can I borrow your car? I just…"
"I'll drive," Pollock said. "You're not in shape to drive."
"Thanks."
Lucas, Andreno, Bender, and Carter worked down a list of names that the three St. Louis ex-cops cobbled together as they sat around in a deli drinking cream sodas. The names included personal friends and known community activists and local politicians. "It's been a while, and people move around down here," Carter said. "Some of them won't be there-but most of them will."
"The idea is, we spread out geographically," Lucas told them. "We ask all these people about their friends and neighbors, who we know are safe, and then about people who fit Patsy Hill's profile. Tall woman, late thirties. Probably living alone. If she'd remarried or had a family, Rinker probably wouldn't stay with her. We make a list of both kinds of people, and check off their houses."
"Take forever," Bender said.
"Three or four days at the most," Lucas said. "We could get lucky and hit her on the first day. We go to the politicians and the community people first. They'll be able to rule out a heck of a lot of people. Then we extend the contacts to other people they know."
"If we think we've found her, then what?"
"Then we bring in the feds. We don't go in ourselves. I think she could be on a suicide run, especially after this Gene thing, and if we just jump her, she's gonna shoot until she's dead. And she's good."
Bender nodded. "Okay. Let's go."
Lucas stuck with Andreno for the first few interviews, because he didn't know the people they were looking for. They talked to an elderly Democratic Party voter registration woman at her home, crossed off twenty houses, and got eight more names for interviews. A woman who was a member of a city zoning advisory board eliminated a dozen more, and gave them a half-dozen more names for interviews. A real-estate agent spotted houses that he thought were unregistered apartments, and gave them even more names. A mail carrier they encountered on the street crossed off forty houses, suggested two more mail carriers that they should talk to, and also gave them two Patsy Hill candidates. Lucas ran the Patsy Hill possibilities through Sally, at the FBI war room, and she came back with negatives on both: "They've both got long histories, and one has a low-level arrest record for disorderly conduct. Not her."
At twenty after twelve, they were sitting in Andreno's Camry, at Benton Park, eating egg-salad sandwiches. Andreno was looking at the map, and was saying, "Shit, we got ten percent of the thing done, all by ourselves…" when Lucas's cell phone rang.
They both froze for a second, then Lucas fumbled the phone out of his pocket. "That's her."
"Could be anybody with a quarter."
Lucas hook his head, thumbed the talk button, said "Hello," and Rinker was there.
"Is it true about Gene?"
"I'm afraid it is," Lucas said, nodding at Andreno. "We had him on a suicide watch. They were checking him every fifteen minutes and watching him in a camera, but he… man, he did it."
"You assholes." She was screaming. "I told you what would happen if you killed him, I told you…"
Lucas said, "Clara, listen, goddamnit, Clara, listen. Listen. You wanna know what happened?" But she was crying, and Lucas thought she hadn't heard, and he said again, "Clara, do you want to know-"
"I heard you," she said. "I know what happened."
"You know that he tried to do it before? He's got scars on both wrists where he'd cut himself before. The kid… goddamnit, Clara, this is awful, but the kid had tried before. This time he did it."
"He cut his wrists?"
"Yeah."
"With what? In a holding cell? What'd he cut them with? Somebody loan him a jackknife?"
"Somebody tried to be a nice guy at lunch and gave him a can of Coke. He stole the hole punch-out thing, you know, the hole, and hid it, and that's what he used. He covered himself up with a blanket, and by the time they figured things weren't right… he was gone."
"Okay. Okay, I got a message for you for the feds…"
"Clara, Clara, wait a minute. Listen. Get out of here. Pick up your shit and go to Spain or South America or somewhere, but stop this. You might want to get these guys, but you don't have to get them right now. Right this minute. Stop now, come back some other time."
"You're giving me friendly advice?"
"It's gotta stop." Lucas was looking at Andreno, who gave him the keep-rolling sign.
"All right, you're holding me on the phone. Well, good luck with that," she said. Her voice had gone cold as ice. "Here's the message: I meant what I said. You got that? I meant what I said."
"Clara…" But he was talking to himself. He looked at the phone, shook his head, said, "Gone," and punched it off.
"We had her for a while," Andreno said. He was on his own phone; when it was answered, he said, "Andreno and Davenport-you got her? Yeah. We're rolling."
"Where?" Lucas asked when Andreno had hung up.
"Right up on I-44. She switched cells going west. Close."
"So she does live around here-it's not that Patsy works for Anheuser. She wouldn't drive to where Patsy works to make a call. And she was pissed. She called me as soon as she thought she was okay."
"Sounds good to me. What do you wanna do? Run around Soulard? Doesn't seem like much point of going out on the highway."
"Yeah-let's just wander. Who knows?"
Five minutes later, Lucas said, "I'll tell you something-it's one thing to cover the streets, but this is fucking ridiculous. Every single street's got a car with two guys in it, driving at ten miles an hour. It looks like a goddamn Shrine parade."
Andreno snorted. "So Mallard talked to our guys, who probably talked to everybody else… We probably got five agencies and fifty cars down here, all looking for Clara."
"If they find her, I hope to hell they can shoot. I don't think she's gonna go easy," Lucas said.
"She sounded pissed?"
"She sounded psychotic."