Read Mortal Prey for Free Online Page A

Rinker had been killing people for almost fifteen years. The first reports had been of various organized-crime figures, both minor and major, taken off by a killer whose trademark was extreme close-range shootings, many of them with .22-caliber silenced pistols.
    Because of the circumstances of the shootings—two of them had taken place in women’s rest rooms, although both the victims were men—the Bureau began to suspect that the shooter was a woman who lured the victims into private places with a promise of sex. A friend of one victim, in Shreveport, Louisiana, said that he’d spoken briefly at a bar with a pretty young woman who had a Southern accent, and later had caught a glimpse of the young woman and the victim leaving the club, in the victim’s Continental. The car and the man were later found on a lover’s lane. The man—who was married—had been shot three times in the head with a .40-caliber Smith.
    No fewer than nine people had been executed in stairwells or between cars in parking structures. The Bureau believed that the choices of execution locale indicated that the shooter had carefully scouted the victims, knew where they parked their cars, and favored parking structures because they offered good access and egress, large numbers of strangers interacting with each other—a strange woman wouldn’t be noticed—and sudden privacy: Bodies had apparently gone unnoticed for as much as four hours when rolled under a car.
    She was also believed to have posed as either a Mormon missionary or a Jehovah’s Witness: One quiet evening in suburban Chicago, a “straight-looking” young woman carrying what a neighbor said appeared to be a Bible or a Book of Mormon had knocked on the door of a recently divorced hood in Oak Park, Illinois. Neighbors who’d been sitting in a porch swing in the restored Victorian across the street said she’d spoken to whoever answered the door, then turned away and left.
    Three days later, after they’d been unable to get in touch with the bad boy, friends looked in a window and saw him sprawled on the floor by the front door. He’d taken two in the heart and one in the head, and died in a pair of flowered boxer shorts with a tight grip on a can of Coors Light. The time of death was estimated from the fact that he’d apparently just taken off a pair of Greg Norman golf slacks and a midnight-blue and white-hibiscus aloha shirt, which other friends said he’d worn to a golf course three days earlier.
     
    AFTER SUMMARIZING THE executions that Rinker was believed involved in, the Bureau report spent some time with her childhood. She’d grown up on a broken-down farm outside of Tisdale, Missouri, not far from Springfield. Her father had deserted the family when she was seven, and had died, unknown to the family, twelve years later, in a car accident in Raleigh, North Carolina.
    Her mother, Cammy Rinker, had divorced Rinker’s father four years after he left, and two weeks after the divorce was final, married a man named Carl Paltry. Paltry was an alcoholic and a bully, and had been arrested for beating both Cammy Rinker and Rinker’s older brother, Roy. The police had learned of Roy’s beating after a gym coach noticed that Roy was peeing blood.
    According to Rinker’s aunt—her mother’s sister—Paltry also had sexually abused his wife Cammy Rinker, Clara, and possibly Clara’s younger brother, Gene. The abuse had begun a few weeks after the marriage, when Rinker was eleven, and continued until she ran away from home when she was fourteen. Until she was eleven, she’d had a good record in school, but that went bad after Paltry arrived. The aunt also said that Rinker’s older brother, Roy, had sexually abused her.
    Paltry and Cammy Rinker had remained married for twelve years, until one day, when Clara would have been nineteen, and already working as a shooter, he’d disappeared. He hadn’t run anywhere, the local cops said—he’d gotten drunk and had beaten Cammy