He paused for dramatic effect and Lucas said, 'What›'

'It had an Avis sticker on it. It was a rental car.'

'Sonofabitch,' Lucas said.

He took Lane with him to the airport, tracked down the Avis manager, who was out at the return area, and brought him back to the main office. The manager didn't need a search warrant. He said, 'Let me run a list for you. But I can tell you right now, it's gonna be eighty to ninety percent guys. Probably won't be more than ten or fifteen women.'

'Mid-sized green car, athletic-looking woman, small,' Lane said. 'Maybe a redhead.'

The manager's hands were hovering over the computer keyboard, but he stopped, turned to Lane and frowned. 'Small and athletic redhead? Nice, uh, figure?'

'That's what we understand,' Lucas said.

'Could it have been a champagne Dodge? Instead of green? Because I swear to God, a woman who looks like that returned a champagne Dodge up at the check-in, not more than fifteen minutes ago. She's gotta be in the airport.'

Lucas snapped: 'Where do I find the head guy for airport security?'

A fat young man named Herter had handled the return and remembered the woman well; Lucas and Lane spent two hours trolling Herter and the manager through the airport gates, looking for Rinker's face. Nothing. A lot of small athletic women, a few of them redheads, but no killer.

The check-in record showed the car in, without damage and a full tank of gas, twenty minutes before Lucas and Lane arrived at the Avis desk. Herter said the woman had headed for the main terminal, but had been carrying only a small bag, like an overnight case. There were no security cameras that might have recorded her face, at least, not on the immediate route into the terminal.

'She might still be here in town,' Lucas told Lane and Tom Black, who'd come out to help with the hunt. 'The FBI thinks she drives to wherever she's going. It would make sense for her to drop her car in the airport garage, where there are thousands of cars going in and out all day, and then renting a car to do the hit with. Then, if there's any problem, she can ditch the car and there won't be any record attached to it.'

'We should know about the record any time,' Black said. 'The Nebraska cops are running down the address.'

'If it's her, they're not gonna find anything,' Lucas said. 'But I'll tell you what: we've got to get to the Mastercard acceptance people who clear charges, and they've got to tell us instantly if she makes any more charges…' He looked at Lane: 'You think you could set that up?'

'Yeah.'

'Then go do it; and get out of the uniform before you start talking to people.'

'All right.' He took off, running.

Black said, 'The crime-scene guys gotta be done by now…'

'If it's her, there won't be anything.'

And the crime-scene guy said; 'I wouldn't hold my breath on these prints. I mean, we got prints off the passenger side and outa the back seat, but we got nothing from the steering wheel, from the outside door handle, from the inside handle, from the radio knobs, from the seat… they'd all been wiped. Wiped clean, by somebody who worked at it.'

'Goddamnit,' Lucas said. Five minutes later, a detective from Lincoln, Nebraska, called and said, 'There's a street like that, and there's an address like that, and there's even a woman with that name, but she's forty-eight years old, she's got nine ferrets that she never leaves, she's got black hair and I'd say she goes about two-ten on the bathroom scales. She says she's never been to

Minneapolis and never rented a car, and she's got a Visa and a Sears card and a gas card but no Mastercard.'

'The shooter's outa here,' Lucas said to Black, after he got off the line with the Nebraska cop. 'She might still be in the Cities, or on her way home, but we're wasting our time out here.'

'Except we got a decent picture of her,' Black said. 'We've got two guys who saw her close up, and not all that long ago. We'll have a composite photo of her in an hour.'

'There's that,' Lucas said. He held up his thumb and forefinger, a half-inch apart. 'But goddamn: we were this close. This close.'

'So now what?'

'So now we paper the town with her picture. If she's still here, maybe we can shake her out.'

Carmel called Rinker at the hotel, and said, without preface or identification,

'Get out of there now. Your picture's on TV.'

'What?' Rinker's heart started thumping, and she looked wildly around the room, looking for clothes, looking for anything with prints, ready to sprint.

'Davenport's got a composite photograph of you, and it's on TV. They're going to show it again on Channel Three in about one minute.'

'Hang on'.

Rinker picked up the TV remote and brought up Channel Three. A talking head, a serious brunette who looked like a former Miss America, was saying, '… an

Avis rental car at the airport. Two Avis personnel, whose identities are being withheld, provided police with a composite photograph, shown here. If you have seen this woman…'

Rinker looked at the picture for a moment, then told Carmel. 'That doesn't look like me.'

'To you it might not look like you, but to me it does – in a general way,'

Carmel replied. 'And they'll be taking it around to hotels and motels and every thing else, asking for anybody who fits the general description.'

Rinker nodded at the phone. 'All right, I'm outa here in fifteen minutes.'

'Go on down to Iowa,' Carmel said. 'Des Moines. They don't get the Cities TV stations there, and you can be back here in three hours, if you need to be. Give me a call on this phone when you get there, give me a number.'

'What're we going to do?'

'We have to go to Plan B. Somehow, he's onto us. I don't know how, but he's working something.'

'Ah, man, can you handle it?'

'I can handle it,' Carmel said grimly. 'Now get out of there.'

'I'm gone.'

Two detectives, Swanson and Franklin, responded to a tip from a bellhop at the

Regency-White, and took the composite photograph to the manager, who shook his head. 'I don't know the lady, but I only see a fraction of the people who come through.'

'Could we find out how many single woman are in the hotel, and go from there?'

Franklin suggested. 'Then maybe we could talk to the room maids.'

'Most've them have gone home already,' the manager said. He had a small mustache but otherwise, Franklin thought, looked a lot like PeeWee in PeeWee's Big

Adventure. 'I can get the room service people, and the bellhops.'

Between the available desk people, they narrowed it to four women: two who more or less fit the composite, and two who nobody could remember seeing. The bellhop, who everybody called Louis, didn't know what room she was in, but swore she fit the picture. 'That's her,' he told Swanson. Swanson called Lucas and told him they had a possible ID.

'Wait for me,' Lucas said.

They waited, working through people on the restaurant staff: two of them had seen the woman, they thought, but then maybe not. The picture wasn't that good, was it?

Lucas arrived on the run, left the Porsche at the curb and said, 'If a cop comes along, tell him it belongs to Chief Davenport,' he told the doorman.

'Right, chief,' the doorman said, and saluted. Just like New York, or something.

Franklin met him in the lobby and said, 'We're ready to go up.'

'Any more IDs on her?' Lucas asked.

'Couple of possibles – but they say they can't quite tell from the photo.'

'Yeah, but it's the best we've got,' Lucas said. He studied the picture for a few seconds with the same strange feeling of deja vu that he'd experienced when he'd first seen it. He felt that he knew the woman, because, he thought, she was a perfect type: a cheerleader. Cute, busty, athletic. He knew a hundred women just like her: hell, there were twenty just like her on the police force.