Twisted Prey

by John Sandford

  “Yeah, I was told about it, and I read a newspaper story.” Ritter put his jacket aside and stood up, looked around the room again, and Lucas said, “Sit back on the bed,” and he did, but asked, “Why?”

  “Because if you have a hideout gun, it’ll be harder for you to get at.” Lucas had put the PPQ on the desktop, letting his hand rest a couple of inches away.

  “You’re nervous.”

  “Shouldn’t I be?” Lucas asked.

  “Maybe, I guess. The guys you’re looking at, they’re the real thing. They’ve all been over in the sandbox both as military and as private contractors. If you get in their way, they’ll flat put a hole in your head. But I’m not one of them.”

  “That’s comforting.”

  Ritter looked down at his thighs, rubbed his nose, looked up, and said, “Look, a guy named Claxson . . . You’re looking at him?”

  “Yes.”

  “He told me you were probably the one who killed Jim, and he told me why—your wife. Said Jim was waterboarded and then executed . . . that sounded funky to me. I should tell you that after I talked to Claxson, I cornered the medical examiner, and he said there was nothing to indicate that Jim had been waterboarded or tortured in any way, that nothing like that had been put in the autopsy report. But the report Claxson showed me specifically mentioned the waterboarding. I asked myself why that would be.”

  “Claxson wanted you to come after me.”

  “That’s why I came up here empty-handed, no gun. I wanted to hear what you had to say.”

  “Then you probably know who killed him,” Lucas said. “And why.”

  “I’m not sure about the why. He wouldn’t have talked.”

  Lucas thought about it, and said, “Because he’d become a problem. If your friends at Heracles are up to date, they’d know—and you probably now know—that we found some logs out in the countryside in West Virginia. They were used to protect the side of your brother’s truck when they pushed Smalls’s Cadillac off the road and almost over a bluff. If it had worked, it would have looked like Whitehead and Smalls accidentally ran off the road, hit a bunch of trees, and landed in the river. It’s a fuckin’ miracle that Smalls didn’t die along with Whitehead. If he had, there would have been nobody to talk about a second vehicle.”

  Ritter said, “You’re saying it was a good plan, should have worked, but the targets caught a break?”

  “Yes,” Lucas said. “Their problem—your brother’s problem—was, we’d located his truck. You could see the damage where the logs had been tied to the side, and some other forensic evidence that was convincing. If we got him for murder—and we were about to do that—maybe he’d give up the other people involved in return for leniency. We’re more interested in those other people than we were in James . . . Jim . . . He was the trigger. He was paid. We want the people who hired him.”

  “He wouldn’t have given up anyone,” Ritter said. “Jim was loyal to his pals. Almost pathologically loyal. It was about all he had left, after his time in the military and with Heracles. He’d gone to jail, before he’d let a friend down. Or died.”

  “But would all of those people have known that? They are not the kind of people who think in those terms . . . Not people like Parrish or Claxson. They take care of themselves.”

  “Claxson . . . if he had to make a choice between himself and his own kids, if he had any, his kids would be dead meat,” Ritter said.

  Lucas poked a finger at him. “Exactly. Those are the guys we want. We’ll take the triggers, too, but they’re not the ones who are driving this thing, the assassination attempt.”

  “Do you know the other people involved in these . . . actions?”

  “I think I do,” Lucas said. “I think there were two more triggers, two more managers, and somebody who pulls the whole train.”

  “Would that be Senator Grant from Minnesota?”

  Lucas tipped his head. “Where are you getting this?”

  “Like I said, I know these guys, and they know me and trust me. When I was fishing around, I heard all kinds of things. You couldn’t take any of it to court; it’s all rumor, but rumors from guys who are professional intelligence operators, and their rumors are better than most. There are some hints that if things work out, Heracles could have its own office at the White House.”

  * * *

  —

  THEY LOOKED at each other, then Lucas took his hand away from the PPQ and rubbed the back of his neck, and asked, “How far can I trust you? To hear what I have to say and not spread it around? Even if it’ll help you understand what happened to Jim.”

  “I wouldn’t tell a soul,” Ritter said. “I mean that: nobody would hear a word from me, of what was said in this room.”

  Lucas looked at him for a couple of beats, and Ritter added, “Look, I went to the Academy. I’ll be a general someday, if I don’t screw up, and so far I haven’t. Jim didn’t finish college, joined the Army, took an entirely different path. He wound up with Delta. He was over there way too long, maybe killed too many people, including, you know, civilians. Women. Kids. His circle got too tight; he’d die for the people in the circle, but, outside it, he didn’t give a shit about anything. That pushed him out of the Army. He killed one too many people who didn’t actually need it. The Army gets fussy about stuff like that.”

  “So he signed up with Heracles?”

  “Yes. And he went right back to killing. I guess he was a bad guy, in the end, but he was my brother. And he was close with the Heracles operators—the operators, the guys around him, not the managers. If you told them to kill him, they were like Jim: they wouldn’t do it. They might kill the guy who asked.”

  Lucas shifted in the chair. “That’s interesting.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yes. I need to find somebody who knows what happened, or has a good idea about what happened, but would be loyal to Jim.”

  Ritter nodded. “Now, tell me the truth: did Senator Grant buy these hits?”

  Lucas said, “I can’t prove it, but I believe so. I believe she worked through Parrish, who is one of her aides and works with the Senate Intelligence Committee.”

  Ritter shook his head in disgust. “Parrish is tight with Claxson. I can give you names of people who can tell you that, if they decide to, people who work with Heracles but were close to Jim.”

  “That would be a great help, if we ever get to to a trial,” Lucas said.

  “Are you going to get Grant?”

  “If somebody gives her up.”

  “That’s the only way?”

  “That’s it,” Lucas said.

  “Well, shit.” Ritter grunted, slapped his thighs, and said, “I’m going to stand up now. I don’t have a hideout gun—or whatever you cops call them. I’m leaving.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m in a BOQ over in Arlington, but I’m moving to a motel tomorrow. My parents got here from Nebraska this afternoon . . . They’re falling apart . . . My mother is . . . My father’s mostly taking care of my mother. I’m trying to take care of both of them.”

  “I understand. Let me give you an email,” Lucas said. “I need a secure email from you, if you have one.”

  “Of course I have one,” Ritter said. “Not even the Army knows about it.”

  * * *

  —

  WHEN THEY’D EXCHANGED emails and cell phone numbers, Lucas asked, “When will you be talking with your friends again? Over at Heracles?”

  “I’m going out to lunch with a couple of them tomorrow,” Ritter said. “We’re all talking about what happened to Jim. People are worried about Heracles and what’s going on there. They’re worried that if there’s trouble, some of it will stick to them. Word is, some of them have already split. Left the country.”

  “Will you call me if you hear something?” Lucas asked. “I don’t
know what your situation is over there. I don’t want you to get hurt.”

  “I’m not ready to sign up as a spy—and I really don’t want to talk to the FBI. I’m talking to you because in the stuff I read, those newspaper stories from Minnesota, you sounded like a guy I could deal with. If the FBI gets involved, if they detain me on suspicion of anything, I’m not going to get my stars. I’m not going to make colonel. My career will be over. So I’ve got to be careful.”

  Lucas nodded, observing Ritter’s escalating intensity. “If these guys go after Smalls again, how would they do it?”

  “I don’t know.” Ritter threw up his hands. “They could do it a million different ways. I know a SEAL who specialized in snatching Arab terrorists off their tea stools, hurting them bad enough that they couldn’t resist, or trigger a bomb hidden in a vest, while the rest of his team covered him. He could put a man on the floor, with broken bones, in two seconds—literally. Two seconds. I saw him do that. There are all kinds of techniques—they could run Smalls off the road again; they could break his neck and throw him down the stairs in his home; they could kill him with alcohol poisoning or an overdose—and never leave a mark on him. They all have some level of sniper training. Jim wasn’t the best at it because, basically, he wasn’t a sniper, but he could put a .338 through your chest at a thousand meters, if he had time to think about distances and angles and it wasn’t too windy. There are guys at Heracles who are snipers, and they work at it all the time. They like sniping way better than sex . . . If you were sitting at a desk by a window, they could hit you from a mile out.”

  “Okay. But be careful. If you hear anything operational, call me right away. I’ve got some hard-core guys here myself, and I can get more if I need them.” He thought for a moment, and added, “If you hear any more about Jack Parrish, he could be key. Or John McCoy. Or Kerry Moore. And Claxson, of course.”

  “I know those names, McCoy and Moore, from asking around. They’re the ones, huh?”

  “Yup, I think so.” He almost told Ritter that four Heracles operators, including McCoy, had been arrested, but he didn’t trust the man quite that much. Instead, he said, “One more thing. Jim apparently had a girlfriend—or a girl he was friendly with anyway—slender, very good shape. She knows how to get a rare concealable submachine gun, and knows how to use it and isn’t afraid to. Looks, to me, like a pro.”

  “What’d she do?” Ritter asked.

  Lucas told him about the shooting in the hallway, and Ritter said, “Oh, jeez, that was her? It’s all over the news . . . They say nobody was hurt, though.”

  “No, but she scared the shit out of quite a few people, including me.”

  “I can’t tell you much about her. I’ve met her, once, and she didn’t want to talk to me. I think she and Jim were in bed together, but she didn’t want people to know it.”

  “What’s her name?”

  Ritter shook his head. “She was introduced to me as ‘just Suzie.’ Jim seemed to like her—a lot. Like marriage a lot. Made me happy, made me think we were getting him back, so I pried. I can’t swear to any of this, but I believe she’s covert CIA, the division called SAD/SOG. Special Activities Division/Special Operations Group, which is their paramilitary wing.”

  “They have women working with them? Combat types?”

  “My understanding is, they do. I know Suzie spoke fluent Arabic. You know how cool that would be, a small woman speaking perfect Arabic, dressed in a niqab, with a gun in her underpants? She could go anywhere, and nobody would pay any attention to her. I suspect that’s what she did, and maybe still does.”

  “Tried hard to kill me,” Lucas said.

  “Then you are a lucky man,” Ritter said. “Those folks don’t miss much.”

  “She had some bad intelligence,” Lucas said, “but it was goddamn close.”

  * * *

  —

  WHEN RITTER WAS GONE, Lucas got out his laptop and wrote a long report to Russell Forte about the interview, saved it but didn’t send it. Forte might be worried about possible illegalities being sheltered by the Marshals Service, and Lucas didn’t want to get involved in that argument.

  Not yet.

  * * *

  —

  WITH THE REPORT SAVED, he settled back on the bed, dimmed the lights, and closed his eyes. There were several tangled thoughts stalking around his mind, and he needed to get straight with them.

  Tom Ritter had emphasized how dangerous the Heracles operators could be. He’d also talked about how loyal they were to each other—not so much to the managers but to fellow operators.

  Yet, something was going on—Jim Ritter had been killed, and Kerry Moore had disappeared. Either Claxson—the guy with two loaded pistols on his desk—or Parrish could have killed them. Or—a new thought—so could have Taryn Grant.

  Grant might be unlikely, he thought after some consideration. Whoever killed Ritter picked him up and threw him in a dumpster, and Ritter, a muscular man, had probably weighed a hundred and eighty pounds. Grant would have wanted to move him quickly, out of a car and into the dumpster, but he was too heavy for one woman alone. Lucas doubted Grant would have exposed herself legally to direct involvement in a murder. And even if she had commissioned the killing, somebody else had probably carried it out.

  If you bought Tom Ritter’s feelings about personal loyalty, the killer wouldn’t have been McCoy or Moore. If it were neither of them, it would have been Parrish or Claxson, or perhaps some third party Lucas didn’t know about yet.

  And here was the big problem: whoever it had been, Lucas could see no clear route to implicate Taryn Grant. None of the major actors would see any benefit in selling her out. To do so, they would have to admit they had been conspirators in murder. Even that might not be enough to get her.

  Further, Grant’s money would be available to fund the best possible legal defenses for her associates. If she had a real shot at the presidency, there was a possible pardon downstream for those associates, if worse came to worse.

  If what he feared came to pass, getting Taryn Grant might not be possible.

  Not in the ordinary way.

  24

  Jane Chase called the next morning as Lucas was shaving.

  “We’re going to arrest Claxson this morning. Between the documents and what we’ll get from McCoy, we can arrest him on several counts of illegal trading of restricted weaponry. That will take care of the statute of limitations problem. We’ve got search warrants for both his businesses and his home.”

  Lucas: “What’d you give McCoy?”

  “Nothing, at this point. Bunch showed up early this morning—”

  “It’s early this morning right now,” Lucas objected.

  Chase said, “Lucas, it’s ten o’clock. I’ve been here since six. Anyway, Bunch spent an hour talking with McCoy. When he was done, Bunch suggested to one of our attorneys, a DOJ guy, that McCoy could provide detailed information about various weapons shipments and that he got specific, and possibly illegal, delivery instructions from Claxson himself.”

  “Then what are you going to give him?”

  Chase hesitated, said, “Bunch is looking for immunity for any possible crimes deriving from involvement with employment with Heracles, Flamma, or Inter-Core Ballistics.”

  “Well, Jesus, Jane, that could mean involvement in the attack on Senator Smalls and all the subsequent murders,” Lucas said. “You know how Smalls is going to take that? He’ll go on the Senate floor, and he’ll have a crucifix and nails with him, and you’ll be the one nailed to the cross.”

  “Well, McCoy denies any involvement with the murders. Bunch says those can be attributed to Ritter and persons unknown. Frankly, Lucas, with what you’ve developed so far, no prosecutor I know would try McCoy for murder. Claxson won’t admit to knowing anything about the murders; Ritter’s dead; and Moore—we don’t know, he may be dead as
well.”

  “So McCoy walks?”

  “He won’t walk. We’ve got him on the weapons stuff with or without any additional testimony. He’ll do time—we’re going to tell Bunch that we want between ten and fifteen years on the weapons charges. He won’t take that, but he’ll take five. McCoy’ll only get that if he hangs Claxson. Otherwise, we take him to trial and ask for fifteen.”

  Lucas said, “Then you’ve got to go after Claxson hard. You’ve got to talk about a deal to implicate Parrish and Grant.”

  “He won’t take a deal,” Chase said. “He’ll go to trial and hope to beat it. If he doesn’t, and can’t win on appeal, he’ll try to deal on the sentence. You’ve said it yourself—the only way he could implicate Grant would be to admit that he set up at least two murders, and maybe three. He won’t do that. It will be hard enough to get him on the weapons. He’ll try to drag in CIA and military operators for the defense, and they’ll resist on grounds of national security.”

  “Ah, shit,” Lucas said. Chase waited him out, and Lucas finally asked, “What are you doing today? Other than arresting him.”

  “The searches. You and your team are welcome to observe,” Chase said. “We’ll be at McCoy’s town house, and Heracles and Claxson’s office, grabbing files, and Claxson’s house. The warrants are in hand; we’ve got teams on the way. I’ll probably go to Claxson’s house to get a feel for what he’s like.”

  “I’ll tell you what he’s like: he keeps two loaded automatic pistols on his office desk.”

  “Doesn’t surprise me.”

  “Remember what I said about Smalls and the crucifix.”

  “It won’t be me that he goes after—it’s the attorney general who’ll be fronting this, and I doubt that Smalls would take her on.”