Certain Prey (27 page)

“What’s going on?” Lucas asked, looking at the hippie.

“Don’t touch me,” the kid said. “If anything falls on the soap, spit or anything, it’s all over.”

He was looking down at the soap through the camera, which he held no more than a foot above the bar. “He’s my kid,” a cop named Harry muttered to Lucas. “Great photographer. That there’s what you call your basic ring light, there on the end of the lens. It’s really a flash, and he’s looking right down on the prints, with half the ring light turned off so he’ll get some shadow . . .”

“Shut up,” the kid said.

Everybody shut up, and Lucas was about to open his mouth and ask if he knew what he was doing, when the flash went; then again. The kid shot twenty-four pictures in five minutes, using the ring light, then no ring light, and finally with reflected light from a sheet of tinfoil. When he was done, he looked at Lucas and said, “I could see them, pretty good. Three prints, a little smudged, but coming right up at me.”

“You think you got them?”

“If I can see them, I got them,” the kid said. “I’m gonna run this over to a one-hour slide processor by Rosedale. It’d help if you could call them and tell them to put me at the front of the line.”

“You did slides?”

“Yeah; I get a lot better resolution that way, when I scan
them . . .” Lucas must have looked puzzled. The kid added, “I assumed you wanted a digital file. We can phone it to the FBI and they can start the search.”

Lucas turned to Sloan: “Go find somebody to run this kid over to Rosedale in a squad, lights and sirens. Tell the picture people to start running the film as soon as he gets there. We want it
now.
” He turned back to the kid. “I’ll sign you up for a consultant’s fee. I’ll give the forms to your dad. If the pictures come out.”

The kid left with Sloan, and Harriet Ashler, the chief fingerprint specialist, said, “All right; back in the fridge for a minute, just to firm things up.”

She put the soap back in the fridge, and they all stood around looking at the refrigerator for three minutes—it was a small brown office model from Sears, with two lunch sacks and an aging apple on one shelf, and a bottle of cranapple 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.”

H
ARRY’S
GENIUS KID
came through. Sloan had personally taken him to the Rosedale 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.”
R
INKER
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.”
W
HEN
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.
S
HE
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 she 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 bumblebee. “That fuckin’

Davenport,” she said. “That fuckin’ Davenport.”

When she’d packed everything important to her, including her schoolbooks 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.
B
Y
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 Ward’s, 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 into a fitful sleep.

She hadn’t thought that the man in St. Louis would ever harm her; she had almost that much faith in him. But not quite that much. She’d told him she hoped to be in Wichita by the time the banks opened. If he was going to make a move against her, probably using one or the other muscleheads that always seemed to be around, the guy most likely would be waiting at her apartment, waiting for her to open the bank and then come back.

Coming from St. Louis, even by air, would put him in Wichita at least a few hours later than her. He’d have to be found, and an airplane would have to be rounded up, or he’d have to get in his car and drive . . . If he was coming, she really wouldn’t expect him before six o’clock or so.

He was better than that. He arrived at five. She thought she actually woke a minute before the alarm went. Whatever, she sat up with the strobe flashing in her face. She hit the
off
button and looked at the clock. Five minutes after five. She got to her feet, picked up both guns, cocked them, and headed for the kitchen, moving slowly, careful not to bump anything, to set off a vibration, absolutely silent in her bare feet. She was still wearing the thin rubber gloves, hot and tacky on her hands. The gloves were ivory-colored, and she could see them better than she could see her arms, like two disembodied fists floating through the dark.

Whoever was in the hall had hesitated at the door. She moved past it and stepped into a closet with sliding doors. The left door was half open, and she moved behind it, where she could still see through the open panel. Then the man outside knocked, and called her name, quietly. “Clara? Clara?” Another soft knock, then a key.

He had a key, which meant the man in St. Louis must have copied hers. Stupid. She just left her keys lying around, the keys to everything. She worried that there were more security lapses that she’d never known about. Then she pushed the worry out of her head and focused on the weight of her guns.
T
HE
DOOR OPENED,
a darkening shadow, then the man stepped inside; she was less than two feet away, and he stepped inside far enough that she could see that he was carrying something in his right hand. From the way he was carrying it, it had to be a gun. She lifted her own gun, ready to fire, when the man whispered—the softest breath— “Easy . . .”

She thought he was talking to her and almost blurted something out, when she heard more soft movement—and the man she
could
see wasn’t moving. There were two of them.

The first moved down the hall toward her bedroom, while the second moved quietly across the living room to the second bedroom, which Rinker used as a TV room and home office. After a long minute of silence, the man down the hall came back, stepped toward the second bedroom. And the second man stepped out of the second bedroom.