Twisted Prey

by John Sandford

  Bob said, “Well, it looked like one. The design.”

  The woman said, “I don’t think I’ve ever looked at a drainpipe.”

  “Probably not a do-it-yourselfer,” Bob said. “I’ve looked at quite a few of them. They’re kind of interesting, if you really get your head around them.”

  The woman said, “Huh.”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS EXPLAINED that they hadn’t had time to go over the documents from the bank, “But it looks like Ritter was accumulating material that would give him some protection if Heracles, for whatever reason, ever decided to sell him out,” Lucas said. “There’s a lot of stuff about arms sales, including antiaircraft missiles, and the implication seems to be that the sales were illegal. Or at least irregular.”

  “What are you planning to do with it?” Chase asked.

  “I was planning to give it to you,” Lucas said, “all of it,” and Chase showed a tiny smile of satisfaction. “We have a particular focus: the assassination attempt on Senator Smalls. If you could have your legal people process this stuff—quickly—and give us an idea of the ramifications, we’ll use it to confront a couple of the guys who were involved in the deliveries. We need to turn them. It’ll have to be swift: they know we’re coming, right now, and they’ve already lined up attorneys for the main suspects. We’ve talked to two of them, and they told us to go . . . You know.”

  “Go fuck yourselves?” Chase said crisply.

  “Exactly,” Lucas said. “We didn’t have a lever.”

  “Who do you want to go after?” Chase asked. “Specifically?”

  “Four names,” Lucas said. “You have them all: Claxson, Parrish, Moore, and McCoy. We think we could bust Moore right now, with a good chance that it would stand up. If you looked at that map in the encrypted documents . . .”

  “Yes, I did,” Chase said. “That was the ambush at Smalls’s cabin.”

  “Exactly.”

  “You might get him with that, and with the other circumstantial stuff, but it’s thin,” she said.

  “Which is why we need somebody else to turn on him. To turn on all of them. You might find that somebody in these documents.” He patted the pile of paper in front of Forte. “If we don’t, we’ll have to talk about the possibility of giving a break to somebody who has probably actively participated in at least two murders, and, depending on who killed Ritter, possibly three murders.”

  Chase winced: “I’d hate to have to do that.”

  “So would I.”

  * * *

  —

  CHASE FLIPPED THROUGH the documents, pulled a cell phone out of her attaché case, punched a couple of buttons, and said, “Can you come down here?”

  She clicked off, and said to O’Conner and Forte, “I’m going to have my assistant count the money and the gold and give you a receipt that you can file with your warrant return.” She turned to Lucas. “I will have him copy all the documents so that you can have them to read. Don’t lose them. We’ll talk again tomorrow, after I’ve had a chance to digest their content.”

  To the other suits she said, “You all should get in touch with anyone expecting you this evening. We’re going to be here for a while.”

  They all nodded without protest.

  Chase’s assistant poked his head around the door; he looked like what Lucas thought a Dartmouth grad should look like. “Yes, ma’am?”

  * * *

  —

  COPYING THE DOCUMENTS took half an hour, with a couple of extra clerks working on it. Lucas collected the copies, and he and Bob and Rae got ready to leave. Documenting the money would take longer; it was not only being counted, it was also being xeroxed, bill by bill, so that the Marshals Service would have full paper documentation of each and its amount. Forte would wait for that. O’Conner had already left, saying, “Great work, guys.”

  Lucas and Forte agreed to talk in the morning, and as Lucas, Bob, and Rae were leaving, Chase’s assistant poked in again, and said, “The amount, with today’s exchange and sales rates, would be one million thirty-five thousand six hundred and twenty dollars. And fifty-two cents.”

  “There’s a vacation home for you,” Bob said.

  Chase, who’d gone back to her office while the clerical work was done, caught them in the hallway.

  “I wanted to tell you that I appreciate what you people have done,” she said. “This is very useful. We’ve tried to monitor this kind of activity in the past, but so much of it is done secretly, and is classified, and so many documents are encrypted, or simply burned, that we’ve had a hard time finding a wedge in. This could be it. This really is something.”

  “Don’t forget about the assassination attempt,” Lucas said. “The other stuff may be good, but that’s what’s going to wind up on the Post’s front page.”

  “We’re aware of that. I will be talking to you tomorrow about putting a headlock on some of the Heracles employees,” Chase said. “Don’t expect it at the crack of dawn, though. We’ve got some fairly tedious procedures to go through over here. I’m going to try to shortcut them by talking to your friend Deputy Director Mallard, but I don’t know if he’ll buy in.”

  “Tell Louis if he doesn’t, I’ll kick his flabby ass,” Lucas said.

  “Yes. I’ll be sure to tell him that,” Chase said, with a second rare smile.

  21

  As Lucas and the marshals were meeting with the FBI, Claxson pulled John McCoy and Kerry Moore into a back conference room, shut the door, and said, “We’ve got a problem. Maybe all three of us, but you two in particular.”

  McCoy and Moore glanced at each other, and Moore asked, “What’s the problem?”

  The two younger men looked alike and, at the same time, not alike: both were an inch short of six feet and stocky, athletic, with tanned, nut-hard faces and hands. While McCoy was a strawberry blond, Moore had dark hair. The way they moved made them look like big-league second basemen.

  Claxson took a deep breath and exhaled in phony exasperation. “It’s Davenport. He’s back here . . .”

  “He ditched his wife?” McCoy asked. “Nice guy.”

  “His wife is home and recovering. There was a newspaper story in the St. Paul paper; a columnist named Soucheray says he was talking to a cop and the cop told him that they’re now treating Last’s death as a homicide, not a suicide.”

  Moore said, “Shit. How . . . ?”

  “The Soucheray column says Last had a heart problem. He couldn’t run half a block. Whoever hit Davenport’s wife’s car ran a couple of blocks—and fast. You know how Jim could run.”

  “Goddamnit,” McCoy said. He stood up, walked around his chair, brushing a hand through his hair, and sat down again. “Nobody told us. That’s the kind of shit we had to know. Bad intel can kill us.”

  “Yeah, well, Davenport’s back, and you know what happened next. Jim Ritter gets killed. We got an autopsy report off the Medical Examiner’s files . . .”

  Claxson had that report in his hand and pushed it across the table they were sitting at to McCoy. “Looks like Jim was waterboarded and then shot up close, in the heart. Executed. He was looking right down the barrel when they pulled the trigger.”

  Moore was incredulous. “You think Davenport and the marshals did that?”

  “There’s no proof. All we know is, Jim disappeared and turned up in a landfill. But he was tortured first, and Davenport was here and he’s a killer. He’s killed eight or nine guys as a cop, and some of the killings were seriously questionable. He’s always done the hard-core stuff, which explains some of it . . . The point is, killing isn’t something that worries him.”

  “We made a mistake when we went after his wife,” Moore said to McCoy. “When I was married, if somebody had gotten rough with Jeannie, I would have killed him.”

  McCoy flashed a grin, and said, “F
ortunately for that guy, he was only fuckin’ her.”

  “Bite me,” Moore said, but he laughed. He then stopped laughing, and said to Claxson, “Maybe it’s time to get a job somewhere else. Like Niger. Go up the river for a couple of years.”

  Claxson said, “That’s one option. The other option is, get rid of Davenport. We didn’t want to do it because it’d attract attention, but Davenport is the only one who’s got the personal . . . animus . . . to keep pushing this thing.”

  Moore was skeptical. “So we put a .338 through his heart from six blocks away? That’d get some attention—and since they’re looking at us anyway . . .”

  Claxson shook his head. “Can’t look like a pro killed him. Has to look like something else. An accident, a mugging, anything. We’re still thinking pushing him downstream a couple of months would probably get us out of it.”

  McCoy and Moore looked at each other again, and McCoy said, “So if he just got sick—I mean, like really sick . . .”

  “You got something that’ll make him sick?” Claxson asked.

  “No, but somebody might,” McCoy said.

  Moore was shaking his head. “That’s bullshit. We don’t know how to do that. The thing is, we got that lady on the books, the one riding with Smalls. If we get caught, if we get identified, we’re looking at the needle. If we’re gonna kill him, we do it when we got an exit plan. I’m not sneaking into some fuckin’ hotel without good intel, not knowing where the cameras are, and try some goofy idea like gassing him or giving him chicken pox or something.”

  McCoy said, “You’re right.”

  Moore said to McCoy: “I’m sayin’ Niger.” He looked at Claxson. “Unless you got something good in Syria, or with the Kurds.”

  Claxson said, “We’re talking about the White House. We put this chick in there, knowing what we know, we can get anything we want. Anything. You want ten million bucks? No problem. Twenty million bucks? No problem.”

  “Unless she knows a couple of more guys like us to remove that problem,” Moore said.

  Claxson shook his head. “Never’ll happen. Money is easy. Killing all of us would be way too hard. And dangerous.”

  They sat and looked at one another for a while.

  Claxson stood, picked up the autopsy report, and said, “Think of something. And I’ll try to come up with something. Worse comes to worse, we give you a jar of malaria pills and you go on up that river.”

  Claxson headed for the door, but before he got there, McCoy said, “Hey. Jim’s got a twin brother. Heavy hitter, right? He’s like a major or a lieutenant colonel, did some work with Delta? I think they were tight, the brothers . . .”

  “Lieutenant colonel,” Claxson said.

  “What if we sicced him on Davenport? He gets caught . . . no skin off our asses.”

  Claxson raked his lower lip with his upper teeth, thinking, and said, “That could be it. He wouldn’t even have to kill him, if he beat the shit out of him or something. Anything that’d slow things down, take the heat off, get people to move on.”

  “How do we find out when he gets here? The colonel?”

  Claxson shrugged. “We’ll check and see if Jim’s parents were notified. I’m sure they were, so we’ll call them up and offer to fly them here. Jim’s will says he wanted cremation, and burial at Arlington, and it’ll take some time to set that up. We’ll offer to take care of the Arlington paperwork, but the cremation can take place as soon as the medical examiner releases the body. Anyway, his folks should know when the colonel gets here and where he’ll be. We’ll brief him . . . point him at Davenport. If nothing happens, nothing happens.”

  “Hard to believe that nothing would,” McCoy said.

  “He’s not one of us,” Moore said. “He doesn’t think like us. You can’t predict.”

  “What if one of us . . . did something, but made it look like the colonel?” Claxson asked.

  McCoy shook his head. “Wouldn’t do that. If he takes out Davenport, he takes his chances. But I won’t frame some innocent guy who spent years over in the sand.”

  Moore held up a hand, and McCoy slapped it.

  Claxson shook his head and left—from the hallway beyond the door, he called back, “I’ll talk to the colonel.”

  * * *

  —

  WHEN HE WAS GONE, Moore stood up and went to the door, looked down the hall to make sure Claxson was gone, closed the door and sat down again. He leaned across the table to McCoy, and said, “Man, we gotta get out of here. This ain’t gonna work out, no way, no how.”

  “I think we got some time . . .”

  Moore shook his head. “No we don’t. If we kill that cop, everything is gonna get worse. If the colonel kills the cop, we’ll still get blamed. We’re tied up in the biggest clusterfuck in the world.”

  “If we can make it through, though, the reward—the White House . . .” McCoy began.

  Moore interrupted: “If we disappear, and she makes president, we can come back for the reward. With what we know—”

  “You’d try blackmailing the fuckin’ President, and fuckin’ Heracles, and the fuckin’ guy who was Army and CIA and would have an office in the White House? Are you fuckin’ nuts?” McCoy asked.

  “We could. We’d have time to figure out how to make it work.” Moore leaned forward across the table, got right in McCoy’s face, dropped his voice to a barely discernible whisper, and asked, “You want to know the worst of it? What I think I figured out?”

  “Do I want to know?” McCoy asked quietly.

  Moore stayed with the whisper. “I don’t think that marshal killed Jim. I think somebody here did. Maybe Claxson. Maybe Parrish. You know how they’re always talking about guns, how they did something here, did something there? When they don’t have any more use for us . . .”

  “Ah, man.”

  “I’ll tell you something else. I spent the morning packing up,” Moore whispered. “I got couple of good passports and bought a ticket to Bogotá. From there, I’m flying to Rio, and from there to South Africa, and I’m gonna grow a beard along the way, and then I’m going north. Niger, Nigeria, Libya—there’s a couple of mining companies up in the Congo would take us on . . . there’s a shipping company outta Perth that hires security guys to ride their ships up the east coast of Africa, to protect them from pirates. The money’s okay, you don’t spend a nickel aboard the ships, and you don’t walk through any passport controls with facial recog.”

  “Ricky did that, the ship thing. He said it bored his brains out,” McCoy said.

  “Ricky didn’t have our problem,” Moore said.

  McCoy tilted his head back, looked at the ceiling. “Let me think about it.”

  “I’m leaving tonight,” Moore said. “I’m inviting you to go along. There are some empty seats on the plane; I looked. We could get your ticket on the way. I got a long drive, and you could help out on that.”

  “Where you driving to?”

  “Won’t tell you that until you’re in the car,” Moore said.

  McCoy got pissed, and he snapped, “You think I’d turn on you?”

  Moore said, “Keep your voice down. Man, you’re not diggin’ what I’m saying. I’m sayin’ that if things go wrong—and they’ve been doing that since we took the run at Smalls—we could go down for murder. That’s bullshit. With everything that happened, it could be a federal case, and the feds got the needle. I’ve trusted you with my life, but if they said, ‘Tell us about Moore or we’re gonna strap you to the table and give you the shot,’ I’m not one hundred percent sure what you’d do.”

  “Thanks a lot, good buddy,” McCoy said.

  Moore exhaled in exasperation, and said, “I’ll trust you with one important fact. I’m rolling out of my driveway at eight o’clock tonight. I can’t wait any longer than that if I’m gonna make the drive. I’m leaving all the furniture and ev
erything else I can’t get in my safe-deposit box. If you don’t want to come, set up a new Gmail address, and when I land where I’m going, I’ll drop you a note—if you’re still walking around free.”

  “Let me think about it,” McCoy said.

  22

  Lucas, Bob, and Rae spent the evening in Bob’s room, plowing through the Xerox copies of the documents found in Ritter’s safe-deposit box, as well as the encrypted documents found on his laptop. The docs mostly consisted of bills of lading, along with handwritten notes by McCoy about the contents of the shipments and their recipients. There were also photographs of these people, men in military dress, or partial military dress, which appeared to have been taken surreptitiously with cell phones.

  They quit at ten o’clock, and Lucas hadn’t been back in his room for more than the time needed to pee, take off his shoes, and turn on the television, when he heard a knock, but across the stub hall, the room he’d had the first night.

  He picked up the PPQ on his way across the room, eased up to the door, plucked the spitball out of the peephole, and peeked out. A dark-haired woman was facing the other door. He couldn’t see much of her because she was short, no more than five-four.

  He popped open the door with his left hand; he kept the PPQ in his right, turned away from the door—he didn’t want to frighten her if she was a hotel employee. Startled, she turned quickly, and he realized that she had no mouth or nose, only black eyes and eyebrows. About the time he realized she was wearing a military desert camo face mask, he also saw her long-barreled pistol coming up, a pistol with a wicked-looking silencer, and he slammed the door, and fell on his back, as the first slugs smashed through it.

  He rolled to his right, toward the bathroom door, and fired off a single shot, and three fast shots smashed back at him through the hall door, but now he was in the bathroom and he fired another shot through the door. The incoming shots were loud, silencers reducing the sound of the blasts but not eliminating it. His outgoing shots, on the other hand, were deafening. The incoming shots stopped, and a door slammed, and he thought she was probably running.