Mortal Prey

half-mile back, to cover the hundred and forty-eight yards between the best shooting spot and the church’s porch, where the wedding party had posed. Lucas was churning, both excited and sick, a strange dread that had settled over him when he first walked out on the church steps.
    When they arrived at the road above the creek, a half-dozen St. Paul cops were clustered along the barrier, with two Minneapolis cops, including an Iowa kid who’d become the department’s designated hitter. He was carrying a rifle over his shoulder, a personally modified Remington 7mm Magnum. He was a gun freak, the Iowa boy. Lucas might have worried about that peculiar interest if he wasn’t a little bit that way himself.
    They climbed out of the Tahoe, still tucking and buttoning, and Lucas walked toward the form of the redheaded woman on the ground, a small body in a Patagonia jacket and jeans, now absolutely still, a purple stain on the jacket between the shoulder blades. She looked very small and very quiet, he thought, like a poisoned chipmunk. The Iowa kid said, “I had to take her. She was moving too fast. If I’d waited one more second, she would have shot one of you guys.”
    “Okay,” Lucas said. He squatted next to Rinker’s face and took a good look.
    “That’s her,” he said. He stood up. “That’s her.”
     
    MORE PEOPLE WERE arriving, to take a look. Black stuck out his hand, but Lucas pretended not to see it and moved away. Rose Marie clutched his upper arm, then let go. Del said, “Goddamn. Goddamn.”
     
    A FEW MINUTES after the shooting, Lucas’s cell phone rang, and he plucked it out of his pocket and heard Mallard’s voice: “She didn’t show, did she?”
    “Yeah, she did,” Lucas said, looking back at the growing cluster around the body. “She’s dead.”
    A long silence at the other end. Then Mallard, his voice hushed, asked, “You aren’t joking?”
    “No. She showed, right in the slot. We had no time to take her. Our sniper nailed her from up on the ridge. Single shot, center-of-mass, looks like it clipped her spine and heart.”
    More silence, then: “Oh, fuck.” Silence, then: “Are you okay?”
    “I’m fine. She never got a shot off.”
    “That’s not what I meant.”
    “Yeah, yeah. Listen, let me get back to you. We’re still standing here, we got stuff…
     
    LUCAS WAS WATCHING the crime-scene team when Marcy came up. Marcy liked to fight, but never looked happy around a body. She was shaking her head, but then she looked up, a questioning look crossing her face, and then she said, “Jesus, Lucas—you’re all teared up. Are you okay?”
    “Ah, it’s just the fuckin’ allergies or something,” he said. He wiped his eyes with the heels of his hands. “Man. Clara Rinker, huh? Clara Rinker.”

28
    RINKER WAS BURIED IN ST . LOUIS . Treena Ross, who was out on bail and who would probably never go to trial, took charge of the funeral. “No way she’s gonna be buried in Flyspeck, or whatever it’s called,” she told Lucas in a phone call. “She hated that place. We’ll bury her here, and the people from the warehouse can come and say goodbye.”
    Lucas was of two minds about going, but finally, on the morning of the funeral, flew into Lambert and was picked up by Andreno, who insisted on carrying Lucas’s bag out to the car and said, “This is the most amazing thing I ever heard of, Davenport. I couldn’t believe it when you called.”
     
    THE FUNERAL WAS done from a funeral home chapel, with Treena Ross’s Unitarian minister presiding. Mallard was walking across the parking lot when they pulled in, and he waited for them.
    “End of a part of my life,” Mallard said. “I looked for her for ten years. This will be the first time I’ve ever seen her, when I knew it was her. I didn’t know, that time in Wichita.”
    He and Andreno stepped toward the chapel, but Lucas hung back. “I’ll wait for you guys here. I don’t want to see her, and I don’t want to hear what the minister says.”
    “You’re just gonna stand here?” Andreno asked.
    “I’ll go to the cemetery,” Lucas said.
    “I gotta go in,” Mallard said. He sounded glum. “So I can see for myself.”
    “You okay?” Andreno asked.
    “Yeah. But different. I keep thinking it was worth the trade, Malone for all the people who won’t be killed. Who might not be killed. But I don’t feel that way.”
    “Malone was Malone—all those other anonymous people are just police reports,”