Twisted Prey

by John Sandford

  He picked out Lucas as the main fed, demanded, “What the hell is going on?”

  Lucas said, “We believe you may be involved in the attempted assassination of Senator Porter Smalls that resulted in the murder of Mrs. Cecily Whitehead. We’re looking for evidence in that case.”

  Ritter nearly did a movie double take. “What the fuck you been smoking, man?”

  “Don’t smoke,” Lucas said. “We have a lot of questions for you.”

  Ritter reached down to one of his cargo pockets, and it was Lucas who reacted, moving a hand toward his side. Ritter froze, then said, “Wallet.”

  Lucas nodded, and Ritter extracted a trifold wallet from his pocket, took a card out, and handed it to Lucas. “I might ask a question or two myself, but I’m not going to answer any, not without an okay from my lawyer. That’s my lawyer’s name, address, and direct phone number. I’m going to call him now, unless I’m under arrest.”

  “Not yet,” Lucas said, “but you will be. Go make your call.”

  “Can I leave the apartment to make the call?”

  “Yes. You’re free to go, but our search warrant covers your vehicles, so you can’t take those until we’re done with them. If we find any evidence pertinent to the case, the cars will be impounded.”

  “Goddamnit, that’s not right,” Ritter said. “Do I get reimbursed for the cost of a rental car?”

  “I wouldn’t hold your breath,” Lucas said.

  Ritter said, “There are two pistols in the safe with suppressors. Both are registered with the ATF.”

  “We know,” Lucas said. “That was a disappointment.”

  Ritter held Lucas’s eye momentarily, and said, “I’ll remember you.”

  “I think you already met my wife,” Lucas said. And Ritter blinked.

  * * *

  —

  RITTER TURNED AND LEFT.

  Ritter had committed at least one murder, and probably two, but he wasn’t a professional or career criminal—he was essentially a soldier, a guy who killed people under orders, or even of his own volition, but who didn’t have to worry about prosecution.

  Stupid crooks would have reacted to Lucas’s comment about Weather, but a professional would have allowed a puzzled wrinkle to appear on his forehead. Ritter had blinked; it was called a tell by poker players, and, as far as Lucas was concerned, it was as good as an admission of guilt.

  Couldn’t take it to a jury, but it was there.

  Rae eased up, and said, “Decided to go with Mr. Subtle, huh?”

  “I wasn’t going to get anything from being Mr. Nice, and we don’t have enough to bust him yet, so . . . a push never hurt.”

  * * *

  —

  AS THE SEARCH wound down, Lucas walked around the building and found Armstrong wrapping up his inspection of the truck. Kerr was working on Ritter’s other vehicle, a fire-engine-red Mazda MX-5 Miata. A very nice car, Lucas thought; a driver’s car, probably even more than a Porsche, at about one-fourth the price.

  The interior of the truck hadn’t produced anything. It did have a GPS, but all the history had been wiped clean. That was evidence of a kind but not useful.

  “We got enough threads to braid a string,” Armstrong said, “but only from the right side. I think we’ll be able to produce some hard evidence that the fabric is identical to the fabric that was used to pad the logs.”

  “How soon will we know?”

  “I’ll squeeze the lab guy. I’ll know something tomorrow, but we can go after DNA to nail it down, and that’ll take a few days . . . or even a couple of weeks.”

  “Would it speed things up if a U.S. senator called and asked about it?”

  “For sure,” Armstrong said.

  * * *

  —

  THERE WAS NOTHING IN THE MAZDA.

  Bob had come along with Lucas, and said, “I gotta believe that the guy has a laptop. Everybody has a laptop, including Ritter. Nothing in his hands when he got out of the Miata, nothing in the car. I wonder where he ditched it?”

  Lucas looked around the parking lot. The lot, behind the apartment house, wasn’t visible from the street. Ritter hadn’t pulled in and pulled back out because somebody would have noticed a bright red sports car coming and going without stopping.

  “Wouldn’t have had a chance to throw it out the window,” Lucas said. “Wonder if somebody tipped him off that we were here?”

  “Mrs. Snyder?” Snyder, the apartment manager.

  “We warned her. And she struck me as a woman who knew when to stay warned.”

  “Well . . . look at all those windows,” Bob said, and they both looked up at the back of the apartment complex. “We know Ritter’s got a girlfriend, and if she lives up there, she might have given him a ring.”

  “Probably what happened,” Lucas agreed. “I’ll ask Snyder; maybe she’d know something about a relationship.”

  “Be nice if we could find a laptop,” Bob said. “The computer guys might be able to find out if it was used in either Omaha or Minneapolis even if the messages were erased.”

  * * *

  —

  RAE CAME AROUND, and asked, “What’s next, boss?”

  “We get the truck towed to the Arlington impound lot. We have the names of four people probably involved in hitting Weather, and those four are also probably involved in the Smalls attack,” Lucas said. “Tomorrow, we’ll track them down. Keep the pressure up.”

  16

  Ten o’clock was a good time for a raid, even if this wasn’t exactly a raid. At ten o’clock, the employees who were running late should be at the office, but it was too early for lunch.

  Rae had filled out the return on the James Ritter search warrant the night before, and Forte would file it. There wasn’t much to report, although the hotel key card was seized as documentary evidence in the case.

  Lucas, Bob, and Rae walked out into a bright blue day and hit the greasy spoon at nine o’clock, talked about what they would do that morning, and a few minutes after ten rolled into the parking lot at Heracles’s Virginia headquarters, in an area called Crystal City. Airliners were landing nearby, and Lucas thought they might be close to Reagan National Airport.

  Heracles was only one of a half dozen tenants of a nondescript fifteen-story, green-glass cube that just as easily could have been a parking structure as an office building. The parking lot, landscaped with relentlessly green, unidentifiable bushes as nondescript as the building itself, was two-thirds full. An overweight guard in a dull-gray uniform was patrolling the parking lot, and when they pulled into visitor’s slots, he walked over and asked Lucas, “Do you have an appointment here?”

  “No, but we do have business here,” Lucas said, holding up his ID. “We’ll be speaking to some of the tenants.”

  “No problem, bub,” the guard said. “I’d make sure nobody stole your hubcaps, if you had hubcaps.”

  “Keep an eye on the wheels, then,” Rae said.

  “I’ll do that,” the guard said.

  As they walked up to the building’s entrance, Bob said, “Gonna be hot.”

  “You mean, talking to Heracles or walking around outside?” Lucas asked.

  “Outside,” Bob said, wiping his forehead with his fingertips.

  * * *

  —

  A RECEPTION COUNTER faced the building’s front door, with a steel fence extending from the counter to the walls on either side. The fence was penetrated on the left by three steel turnstiles. A receptionist, wearing a kelly green dress, and a matching pillbox hat, sat behind the counter, while a guard, this one with a gun on his hip, stood between two of the turnstiles.

  They again showed their IDs, signed in, and got badges from the receptionist that allowed them through the turnstiles. Lucas said to her, “You don’t have to announce us,” and she nodded but looked perplexed,
since announcing was her job, so he clarified: “Don’t announce us.”

  The guard asked, “You here to arrest somebody?”

  Lucas said, “Don’t know.”

  Heracles was on the second floor. Lucas and Rae took the elevator up, since the fire door on the stairway was one-way—out—and locked. Bob waited for the next elevator to keep an eye on the door, the guard, and the receptionist. Lucas always preferred showing up unannounced, to see the unpracticed reaction of the person he was interviewing. In this case, though, the search of Ritter’s apartment might have served as its own notice.

  The entrance to the Heracles office was a double glass door that faced the elevator. Lucas could see no other glass doors, or greeting signs, along the hallway that stretched in both directions to the end of the building. Heracles apparently had the whole floor, he thought. A young woman sat at an expansive desk on the wall opposite the glass doors; there were four red-orange visitor’s chairs, two on each side of the reception lobby, none occupied. When Lucas pulled the door, it didn’t move.

  The woman spoke into what must have been a microphone embedded in the desk: “Can I help you?”

  Speakers were set into the walls on either side of the door. Lucas said, “U.S. Marshals. Open up, please,” and held up his badge. The woman hesitated, and Lucas said, “Open up now, please.”

  She reached out to a black object on her desk, and the doors unlocked with a quiet clank. Lucas pulled the door open, went through, trailed by Rae, and said, “We want to speak to Mr. George Claxson, Mr. John McCoy, and Mr. Kerry Moore.”

  The receptionist looked frightened. “Can I tell them what this is about?”

  Lucas said, “No. I’ll tell them. Just tell them we’re here.”

  “Mr. . . .”

  “Marshal Lucas Davenport and Marshal Rae Givens. Marshal Bob Matees will be here in a minute.”

  The woman nodded, picked up her phone, pressed a button, and said in a hushed voice, “There are three U.S. Marshals here to speak to Mr. Claxson, John McCoy, and Kerry Moore . . .” followed a few seconds later by, “They won’t say . . .”

  Bob stepped out of the elevator, and the woman unlocked the door for him. Bob said, “You guys got a lot of security.”

  The receptionist said, a nervous shimmer in her voice, “We have a lot of defense contracts.”

  * * *

  —

  THE RECEPTION LOBBY had two doors into the back, one on each side of the receptionist’s desk. The one on the left popped open, and a middle-aged woman in a gray dress said, “Marshals . . . you wanted to see Mr. Claxson? Follow me, please.”

  They followed her through what might have been an insurance office, but not a heavily staffed one: a warren of perhaps fifty waist- and shoulder-high cubicles in a room the size of a basketball court. Each cubicle housed a computer, with perhaps a third of them occupied by either a man or a woman looking at the screen. A couple of the occupants looked up as the woman led Lucas, Bob, and Rae through the cubicle farm, but most paid no attention.

  The woman half turned, as they were walking, and said, “I’m Mr. Claxson’s personal assistant. Mr. McCoy isn’t here today; he’s at Camp Peary. Mr. Moore is here somewhere, maybe in Planning—I’ll go find him. Mr. Claxson is waiting in his office.”

  The receptionist might have been surprised to see them, but this woman wasn’t, Lucas thought. Their visit wasn’t unexpected.

  * * *

  —

  CLAXSON’S OFFICE was a two-room corner suite with views of the airport. The outer room had three secretarial-style desks with computers, two of them occupied by older women who watched the marshals with curiosity but said nothing. The third desk, a large one, probably belonged to Claxson’s PA, who was escorting them.

  In the inner office was a wide swath of thick blue carpet, the walls decorated with plaques, photographs, one wildlife painting on each wall, and two mounted deer heads. A wide walnut desk sat diagonally in the corner.

  Claxson himself was seated at a computer that perched on its own stand to the side of his desk. He looked up as they entered, waved them toward a half circle of chairs facing the desk. There were two pistols lying on the desk, one a Model 1911 .45, the other a Browning Hi Power, with a foot-long Marine Ka-Bar fighting knife sitting between them. The knife had the initials “GC” stamped on its well-oiled leather sheath.

  Claxson was a fast touch typist. He rattled through a paragraph of text while Lucas, Bob, and Rae were settling into their chairs. He checked the screen, touching it with the tip of an index finger, then hit two keys, and the text vanished. He turned, crossed his hands on his desk, and said, “Marshals, what can I do for you?”

  Claxson resembled a character actor that Lucas had seen in any number of movies: thin, balding, with quarter-sized freckles spotting his shiny scalp, but with a soft face rather than one with athletic contours. He wore rimless glasses, a gray suit, white shirt, and a light blue tie with stars on it.

  Lucas: “Did you fly your personal plane to Omaha two weeks ago, with James Ritter, John McCoy, and Kerry Moore on board?”

  Claxson lifted his hands. “I might as well lay out the rules right now. I’m aware that you went after one of our employees, Jim Ritter, yesterday afternoon, some ridiculous accusation that he was involved in an attempted assassination of Senator Porter Smalls. I spoke to our company lawyer. We take care of our personnel, and he will be representing Jim if you have any more questions. Our attorney has also advised me simply not to answer any questions that might . . . feed your conspiracy theories. Yes, I flew to Omaha. I was there for a week of business, more or less. I fly my own plane, and there was nobody else on board. I won’t reveal the nature of the business because that’s a private matter that would possibly reveal classified military information. So, I don’t believe we have anything more to talk about.”

  “We understand that John McCoy is not here in the building, but Kerry Moore may be. We need to talk to Mr. Moore,” Lucas said.

  “He’s here, you can speak to him, but he’s taken advice from the same attorney that I have. He won’t have anything to say,” Claxson said. He looked out the door of his office, and said, “Here’s Kerry now.”

  Kerry Moore, probably thirty-five years old, was a muscular man with short-cropped hair in what seemed to be a favored Washington paramilitary uniform: tan cargo pants, light-colored boots, and a light-colored long-sleeved pullover shirt. He nodded at Claxson, and said, “You rang?”

  Claxson waved in the direction of the marshals. “These are the marshals Jim told us about.”

  Moore nodded at them, and said, “Well, Rick Brown told me that talking about anything might bring trouble, so I guess I don’t want to talk with you. Unless there’s an attorney in the room.”

  “Rick is our attorney,” Claxson said to Lucas.

  Speaking to Moore, Rae began, “You don’t have anything to worry about—”

  “Honey, you gotta know that’s bullshit,” Moore said. “You guys go on one of these snipe hunts and it winds up on CNN, where they’re pulling apart every word looking for every possible meaning. The next thing you know, you got a noose around your neck and cameras chasing you down the street. If you want me to talk, we’re gonna need a lawyer in the room.”

  “So you’re not unwilling to talk,” Bob said.

  Moore considered, and said, “Not entirely unwilling, but you gotta know Rick Brown. He’s going to say no as soon as you open your mouth.”

  Lucas looked at the two of them, and said, “Okay. Dead end, then. But I’ll tell you guys, this isn’t the end of it. You tried to kill a U.S. senator, and you murdered two people—”

  “No! No! Did not!” Claxson said, slapping his desk. “I absolutely reject any such notion. You say one word about it in public, we will sue everybody in sight. Our livelihood depends on our reputation, and if you begin slandering us with that . .
. We did not have anything to do with any of that.”

  Lucas said, “We’ll see. In the meantime, I’ll tell you that we haven’t made any ‘ridiculous accusations’ against Ritter—those were the words you used. I will tell you that we have substantial evidence that he was involved in the assassination attempt. We believe we know why; we believe we know the others involved. We have a bit of lab evidence we’re waiting to get back and then we’ll be here with an arrest warrant.”

  “Fuck you,” Claxson said.

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS, RAE, AND BOB stood up to go. Bob nodded at the pistols on the desk, and asked Claxson, “Are those weapons loaded?”

  Claxson snarled at him: “Of course they are. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t be weapons, they’d be paperweights.”

  They took the elevator down, and Rae said to Lucas, “That was embarrassing. They did everything but kick us in the ass. But you don’t look all that unhappy.”

  “I’m not. All we’ve got is evidence against Ritter and he’s not the guy we want,” Lucas said. “We want to go up from there, and now we’ve put a skunk in with the chickens. One way or another, they’ll react. Oh—we need to put a hold on their passports, in case one of them decides to run for it.”

  “Your man Forte should be able to handle that,” Bob said.

  “We wait for lab results? What do we do while we’re waiting?” Rae asked, as they got out of the elevator. “Play pinochle?”

  Lucas said, “Bob’s a camera freak, and you like art, so Bob can go take pictures, and you can go over to the National Gallery and look at art. But keep your phone handy.”

  “We did most of that while you were gone,” Rae said. “What are you going to do?”