Twisted Prey

by John Sandford

Parrish was thirty-eight. He’d graduated from Ohio State when he was twenty-two with a B.S. in economic geography, served four years as an Army intelligence officer, and joined the Central Intelligence Agency when he finished his active military service. He spent four years with the CIA, worked for a private company called Heracles Personnel for three more years, then took a job as a researcher for the Senate Intelligence Committee and later became an aide to Taryn Grant. He was still in the military Reserve, currently with the rank of major.

  That would, Lucas thought, give him a broad range of contacts both in the Pentagon and in the wider intelligence community. The file included a list of publications, some of which were marked as classified, although the level of classification wasn’t specified.

  At the CIA, Parrish seemed to have specialized in aerial and satellite photo interpretation, and had written a number of papers on the subject; he’d also written two papers with obscure titles that seemed to be mathematical studies of where “irregular fighters” could be found.

  That all sounded like desk jobs to Lucas, but Parrish had a Bronze Star with “V” device and a Purple Heart. Lucas didn’t know what a “V” device meant, and when he looked it up, it turned out that a Bronze Star could be awarded for general meritorious service, even to a civilian—a news reporter had gotten one once—but a “V” device indicated “Valor” and was a combat award. Lucas knew the Purple Heart meant that Parrish had been wounded, but there were no details on the wound. Other military awards included ribbons for service in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

  So Parrish had been shot at and apparently hit. Nothing in the files indicated that the Army had any doubts about him.

  He’d been married and later divorced, and currently seemed to be not married. His ex-wife was named, and had a security clearance, but the level of the clearance wasn’t mentioned. Parrish got consistently high evaluations as a Senate researcher and later as an aide to Grant.

  A second file contained Parrish’s divorce decree. The divorce had been in Maryland and had apparently been by mutual consent. His wife got the house but no alimony. There was no testimony about abuse or anything else, other than their agreement that the marriage was “irretrievably broken.”

  A third file contained a list of companies that would incur economic impacts, both bad and good, under Senate bills that Carter expected to receive bipartisan support. Heaviest impacts were on businesses and communities that supported now-obsolete military bases that were facing closure.

  Smalls supported all of the closures except one on the West Coast. Carter noted that he wanted that base kept open as the possible site for an atomic power reactor, but since all of the California delegation, both Republicans and Democrats, opposed the idea of a reactor on the coast, Smalls’s opposition to the closure was seen as idiosyncratic and garnered little support. There was no reason to kill Smalls for any of his Senate activity, as far as Lucas could see.

  A fourth, even shorter file contained nothing but a list of four names, with addresses and telephone numbers, and a note from Carter that said “These people don’t like Parrish and might talk to you. Call me when you’re done with this.”

  * * *

  —

  WHEN HE’D FINISHED with the files, Lucas knew all kinds of things he hadn’t known that morning, but nothing that pointed in any particular direction. If anything, Parrish seemed like an accomplished bureaucrat, somebody who’d always been good at what he did.

  Lucas closed the laptop down and called Carter on the burner phone. She answered on the third ring, and he asked, “Can you talk?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ve read the files, and Parrish doesn’t seem like a terrible guy, but you said he was a snake. Why’s he a snake? And what’s with the list of names?”

  “He is a snake, and part of his snakiness is that he doesn’t seem like an awful guy to most people. He’s a sociopath, in my opinion, but a cautious one. He doesn’t care who gets hurt as long as it’s not him.”

  “A good match for Grant, then,” Lucas said. “I think the same thing about her, although she might be darker than a simple sociopath; she could be a full-blown psycho.”

  “Whatever—I’m not sure how much definitions help,” Carter said. “Anyway, that list of names . . . those are people who have reason to seriously dislike Parrish and who might be in a position to give you some information about him. He has made some enemies getting to where he is, and I listed them in the order that would reflect the intensity of their dislike. Joe Rose, the first guy, probably likes him the least—hates him, actually. And so on. That’s something I keep track of.”

  “Okay. Thank you.”

  “Lucas, you scared me this morning,” she said. “The secret phones and all that. If you read those files, you can see that there’s not much detail in them—you can remember everything you need to know, about Parrish and his wife and his jobs. I’d appreciate it if you’d get rid of that thumb drive: if somebody got that drive from you, they might be able to figure out who copied the files, and, from that, who got them: me.”

  “I’ll get rid of it,” Lucas said. “I mean, really get rid of it, everything but the names.”

  He did just that when he got off the phone. He copied down the names, addresses, and phone numbers of Parrish’s supposed enemies, smashed the thumb drive with the sliding shower door, and flushed the pieces down the toilet.

  That done, he went back to the desk, looked at the notepad with Joe Rose’s phone number on it, and punched the number into his phone.

  6

  Joe Rose had a voice that sounded like gravel being shoveled from a truck—too much whiskey, cigars, or both. Lucas only told him he was a U.S. Marshal, that he was investigating an auto accident only peripherally involving Mr. Rose. He didn’t mention either Jack Parrish or Porter Smalls.

  Rose told Lucas he lived in Bethesda, Maryland, and that he’d be around all day. “I work at home now.”

  Lucas retrieved his car from the valet, followed the GPS through tangled traffic to Bethesda, which was northwest of the District. The distance couldn’t have been more than ten miles but took him almost forty minutes to drive.

  Rose lived in what was probably an expensive house, half brick, half white clapboard, of a style that Lucas thought of as confused—it had a bunch of overlapping roofs, a truncated clapboard turret, two single-car garage doors that probably fed the same double-car garage, a cobblestone driveway, and a manicured front lawn. The front door gave onto a tiny covered porch, good only for keeping the rain off visitors while they waited for a ride.

  Several black cables led from a telephone pole near the street to the house—power lines, maybe a hardwired phone, maybe cable television/Internet . . . but a couple of more as well, although Lucas didn’t know what function they might serve.

  Lucas parked in the driveway, stepped out into a humid, nearly wet heat, and rang the doorbell. As he waited, he looked up and down the street: no people, no cars, nothing moving, not even a cat.

  A bedroom community.

  * * *

  —

  THE DOOR OPENED, and a man who was probably Joe Rose stood in the doorway and asked, “Do you have some ID?”

  “I do,” Lucas said. He showed Rose his badge and ID card, and Rose stepped back and said, “Come on in. Uh . . . I can’t think of any reason that I would, but should I have a lawyer here?”

  Lucas shook his head. “No. The investigation doesn’t involve you in any way, except as a possible source of information.”

  Rose was Lucas’s height and build, but older, retirement age, gray-haired, large-nosed, with a pair of inexpensive computer glasses pushed up on his forehead. Close up, his voice sounded even harsher than it had on the phone—an injury of some kind; he hadn’t gotten it singing. He was pale, like an office worker, and freckled, wore tan slacks and a golf shirt, loafers but no socks.

  He
said, “Okay, I got the time. You know I don’t have a regular job anymore.”

  “No, I didn’t know that,” Lucas said, as he followed him into the house and down a hallway. The hallway opened into what had probably been designed as a family room but now was being used as a spacious office, with three separate computer monitors on a library table.

  “Yeah, I’m a contract researcher now. You know what’s not on the Internet now?”

  “I thought everything was.”

  “Nope. There’s tons of government stuff that isn’t—stuff that’s still important but that was recorded before 2000 or so,” Rose said. “Internet people don’t know how to do paper research, courthouse research, so I’m doing fairly well. I’m praying it keeps up, because I can use the money.”

  “Cool. You invented your own job,” Lucas said.

  “Yup. So . . . what’s up?”

  Rose pointed Lucas at a leather club chair and took an identical chair facing Lucas across a fuzzy brown-and-tan rug. Not married, Lucas thought: women generally didn’t allow big fat leather chairs or brown fuzzy rugs in their family rooms.

  Lucas: “I’m told you don’t much care for a man named Jack Parrish. I need to know more about Mr. Parrish. About his character.”

  Rose responded with a grunt, then asked, “What does that have to do with an auto accident?”

  “I don’t want to talk about that,” Lucas said. He softened things with a smile. “I know it’s horseshit, but . . . I can’t right now tie two things together with somebody I don’t know.”

  “Got it,” Rose said. He sighed, and said, “Parrish is . . . I mean, calling him an asshole or a sonofabitch doesn’t do the man justice. Even in Washington, he’s something special. And, believe me, we’ve got a glut of assholes around here.”

  Rose had worked for the CIA at the same time Parrish had, both as middle managers in “parallel departments,” as Rose put it. “I can’t tell you what we were doing, but it was technical.”

  “I saw a file that said Parrish did something with photo interpretation.”

  “He did, but . . . let’s just leave it there. If you got that information by seeing a list of his so-called publications, he stole most of those things from his subordinates,” Rose said. “Anyway, he was there for five or six years—I overlapped him on both ends, in terms of employment. During that time, I watched him undermine anyone he thought might someday challenge him—bad personnel reports, that kind of thing. He was an attention junkie and an ass-kisser. What I’m saying is, he stepped on a lot of good people and tried to crawl up the org chart over their bodies. Eventually, people began to catch on, it caught up with him . . . and he got out. Moved over to the Senate as a staff member.”

  “Leaving you . . . where?”

  “Where I was. I had an obscure job, important but not flashy. At least, I thought it was important, and I was good at it. Then, we had a situation come up . . . uh . . . that I don’t want to talk about yet. Parrish advocated one kind of response, we advocated another. My boss and I went over to SIC—the Senate Intelligence Committee—with some, mmm, documents that suggested that Parrish was bullshitting them on behalf of a faction over at the Pentagon. He and the Pentagon got their way, and what happened later was a goddamn disaster. Too big even for an effective cover-up.”

  He looked up at the ceiling, both hands in the air, grinned at Lucas, but leaned forward and whispered, “People died. People who shouldn’t have. Lots of them.”

  Lucas: “Who got blamed?”

  Rose tapped his chest. “I did. Not for the disaster but for the fact that some of it got out to the press. One of the senators brought the deputy director over for a closed-door meeting, and, the next thing I knew, I was talking to our security people about leaks. Shit, I didn’t even know a reporter. I said so. But they kept after me—this went on for a year—and I got what they called a lateral transfer to a nonsensitive position, pending resolution of the leaking case. I had thirty-three years in, and I said fuck it and retired. When I was going out the door, a pal of mine, higher up the line, took me aside and said that be believed the whole thing was a dirty trick engineered by Parrish, who’d been telling people that I’d been leaking and that me leaking might even have caused the problem—that I’d been leaking before the action, somebody overheard me, and word had been passed to the Syrians . . . Damn lie, every bit of it. I found out later he’d gone to work for the senator who’d been asking the questions.”

  “Taryn Grant,” Lucas said.

  Rose nodded, and asked, “You want a Pepsi or a beer?” After asking the question, he nodded vigorously, a pantomime nod.

  Lucas said, “Yeah, I could use a Pepsi. I haven’t had anything to drink since I left the hotel . . .”

  “C’mon, I’ll get you one,” Rose said.

  In the kitchen, he opened the refrigerator, took out two Pepsis, handed one to Lucas, and said, “Let’s go out and sit by the pool. I got an umbrella out there.”

  Outside, he led the way past the pool to the end of the backyard. “I’m probably overcooking things a little, but I worry about surveillance. Especially since I know what can be done, if they want to do it,” he said. “I doubt anyone’s actually watching me . . . If they are, they wouldn’t be bugging us out here.”

  Lucas said, “Okay . . .”

  “Anyway, what I don’t understand is, why did Senator Grant jump into this with both feet? Stick a bullshit investigation on me and on my boss? She didn’t have to do that. What would she get out of it?”

  Lucas had an answer to that question, but he didn’t say what he thought: that Grant was buying Parrish’s loyalty. Instead, he said, “I need to know the dimension of this . . . disaster. I won’t talk about it to anyone, but I need to know. I will tell you that the matter I’m investigating is extremely serious . . . more so than you can probably imagine.”

  Rose looked around the yard, took a hit on his Pepsi, and said, “I don’t even know if you’re really a marshal. You could be spoofing me.”

  “You could look me up on the Internet. There’s a lot of stuff there, going back years.”

  “I’ll do that,” Rose said. “In the meantime . . . I’m not going to say anything more. We’re talking about federal prison.”

  “I don’t think so,” Lucas said. “If all this works out the way I suspect it will, they’d be afraid to go after you.”

  “You don’t know,” Rose said. “I don’t believe that they’re afraid of anybody.”

  “You’d be wrong about that,” Lucas said.

  “Give me your email,” Rose said. “Maybe I’ll get back to you.”

  “Tell me one more thing—I’m sure it isn’t classified, but it’s something you’d know,” Lucas said. “Parrish was an active duty military officer, stayed in the Reserve, and is now a major, and he’s moving up to lieutenant colonel sometime soon. Would his service with the Army and the CIA, and now with the Senate, give him access to, you know, people with an ability to do violence?”

  Rose squinted at him, licked his lips: “Who’d he get shot?”

  “Nobody. But if he wanted to get somebody shot, would he have the connections? I’m not talking about a military shooting, a terrorist shooting, but a civilian shooting here in the U.S. Could he get a couple of names?”

  Another hit on the bottle, and a quick nod. “Oh, yeah. In about five minutes. And now I am done.”

  Rose refused to say anything more. Lucas left him standing by the pool and walked around the house and out to the street.

  * * *

  —

  THE SECOND, third, and fourth entries on Carter’s list all lived in Virginia, on the other side of the District. He’d get them later in the afternoon, he thought, and could stop at the hotel on the way.

  The first time Lucas had encountered Grant, she’d worked through two ex-military security men, whom she’d paid to ki
ll for her—and one of them she’d bound to herself with the pretense of loving him. Grant would do what was necessary to recruit people she thought she needed—political favors, money, sex—whatever she thought it would take.

  If she needed Parrish’s particular kind of expertise, she’d probably bought his loyalty by protecting him from criticism; maybe even saved his job. There was also the prospect of the White House . . .

  * * *

  —

  BACK AT THE HOTEL, Lucas washed his face and went to the laptop, clicked on his email, expecting a note from Weather, and maybe from his daughter Letty, who was in her third year at Stanford. There was nothing from Letty, but he did have a brief note from Weather, with school news, and another email from Rose, hiding behind the name Donald R. Ligny, with a subject line that identified him: “Looked you up on the Internet.”

  Scrolling down, Lucas found a Washington Post story about the bombing of a Syrian nerve gas warehouse that turned out to be a souk, or marketplace, instead, with a small school for girls at one end. The Syrians claimed that ninety-four people had been killed, most of them women or children, a claim verified by a religious charity and with photographs. The school had been wiped out.

  Under the story, there were six added words:

  “We told them. They didn’t listen.”

  * * *

  —

  YEARS BEFORE, Lucas had seen a Tom Clancy movie—he couldn’t remember the name of it, but Harrison Ford was in it. He remembered one scene in particular, in which a British SAS team had wiped out a terrorist training camp someplace in North Africa. The scene had stuck in Lucas’s head because he’d spent his life working murders, murders which had often horrified him. In the Clancy movie, the SAS attack had been monitored by satellite, and a group of CIA suits had casually watched the attack and conducted a running commentary. “There’s a kill,” one had said while leisurely drinking a cup of coffee.