He was out on 1-35, driving way too fast, and still a long way north of the

Cities, when the cell phone burped. He picked it up, and heard the first two words, then lost the signal. He punched it off; three minutes later, it rang again, and he answered it: Sherrill, breaking up, but audible.

'Your FBI friend called; she's all cranked up. That woman you danced with has disappeared – cleaned out her apartment, quit her job at the bar. ..'

'… I thought she owned it.'

'… So did everybody, but she was really just the manager. It's really owned by a guy named James Larimore, who is also known as Wooden Head

Larimore, who is really connected, really connected, in guess-where?'

'St. Louis.'

'Yup.' The cell connection was getting cleaner. 'So your FBI friend freaked, and got a crime-scene crew into the apartment, and guess-what again?'

'It'd been wiped.'

'Top to bottom.'

'Got her, goddamnit,' Lucas crowed. 'We got her. What's her name?'

'Clara Rinker.'

'Rinker. Fuck those FBI pussies, Marcy. We broke this fuckin' thing right over their heads.'

'Yeah, well… want to know where Wooden Head got the name Wooden Head?'

'Sure.' The adrenalin was pumping; he'd listen to anything.

'He was once in a bar when people started shooting, and he caught a ricochet, and the slug stuck in his skull bone, in his forehead above his nose. Made a dent, and stuck, but didn't go through. They say everybody was laughing so hard, the gunfight stopped. Even Wooden Head was laughing.'

'So he's a tough guy.'

'Very tough. And they ain't gonna get much out of him. He says he don't know nothin' about nothin'.'

M alone met him at the airport: 'You look kinda green,' Malone said. 'Tough flight down?'

'Naw, it was all right,' Lucas mumbled. He looked back through the terminal window at the plane, and Malone caught the look and said, 'You can't be one of those… you're not afraid to fly?'

'It's not my preferred method of travel,' Lucas said, walking away. She scrambled to catch up, and he turned his head to ask, 'What'd you get from the bar? Prints? Photos. We need to get a photo out now.'

'Airplanes are about fifty times safer than cars,' Malone said. 'I thought everybody knew that. Not only that, most people are distracted when they're driving, because they fall into routines, while pilots are trained

…'

'Yeah, yeah, enough,' Lucas said. 'I don't like to fly because I've got problems dealing with control issues because I've got an unconsciously macho self-image, okay? That make you happy? Now what about Rinker?'

'We can't find a photograph,' Malone said. 'And there's no reason for you to be defensive about a fear of flying…'

'There's gotta be a photograph…'

She gave up. 'There are no photographs in the apartment, and none in the bar.

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.'