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right away, but both of the calls went into the general number, so we don’t know who she was talking to, or what she did. There aren’t any records of large sums of money being moved on the days she called, that can’t be accounted for. No big accounts closed or switched that can’t be accounted for. With both the Mexican cops and this Mejia guy, this gang guy, taking an interest, we’re pretty sure the banks are telling us the truth.”
    “Maybe safe-deposit boxes,” Lucas suggested.
    “We’re trying to run that down. We thought maybe an off-the-books box. So far, nothing’s panned out,” Malone said.
    “She’s good,” Lucas said. “But we knew that. How about the Missouri calls?”
    “All six guys are connected—all six guys admit that she called and all six say she was asking about John Ross, who we think was her main employer,” Mallard said. “All six say they told her nothing, that they didn’t have anything to tell her.”
    “Ross runs things around the river in St. Louis, the port, trucks, some drug connections over in East St. Louis,” Malone added. “He has a liquor distributorship. You remember Wooden Head from Wichita?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Wooden Head worked for Ross.”
    “You believe the six guys? That they didn’t have anything to say?”
    “She talked to four of them for about five minutes, and the other two for about two minutes. We don’t know what was said, but apparently not too much.”
    “You can say a lot in five minutes,” Lucas said. “Does Ross have the six names?”
    “Not as far as we know—we haven’t talked with him yet,” Mallard said.
    “Okay. So Clara’s boyfriend gets killed and she’s wounded and loses the baby, and they think the shooter is from St. Louis and she makes calls to St. Louis asking about this Ross guy, but she doesn’t call Ross himself, as far as you know. So. You think Ross sent the shooter? That she’s on a revenge trip? A kamikaze deal?”
    Mallard shook his head again. “Don’t know. We’re guessing that’s it. Whatever, Rinker’s broken out now, she’s in the open. I really want her. Really want her. She’s run her score up to maybe thirty-five people: This woman is the devil.”
    “She’s maybe more inflected than that,” Malone objected. To Lucas: “We have a good biography on her now. You can read it on the way down to Cancún. She had quite the little backwoods childhood.”
     
    THEIR CONNECTION WAS TIGHT : An hour after Lucas’s Northwest flight put down at Houston, the Continental flight to Cancún lifted off. Mallard and Malone sat together, with Lucas behind them, next to an elderly woman who plugged her sound-killing Bose headphones into a Sony discman, looked at him once, with something that might have been skepticism, and pulled a sleeping mask over her eyes. When they were off the ground, Malone took a bound report out of her briefcase and handed it back to Lucas. “Rinker,” she said.
     
    LUCAS HAD NEVER been able to read on airplanes: The Clara Rinker file was a first. When Malone handed him the file, he’d wondered at its heft, and turned to the last page: page 308. He flipped through and found a dense, single-spaced narrative. Not the usual cop report.
    The first page began: “There are only four known photographs of Clara Rinker—three from driver’s licenses and one from an identification card issued by Wichita State University. None of the people who knew Rinker were able to immediately pick her photograph from a spread of similar photographs prepared by the Bureau—in each of the four photos, she had obscured her appearance with eyeglasses and elaborate hair arrangements. This is typical of what we know of Clara Rinker: She is obsessively cautious in her contacts with others, and she apparently has, from the beginning of her career, prepared herself to run.”
    The author of the report—a Lanny Brown, whom Lucas hadn’t heard of—had a nice style that would have worked in a true-crime book.