Twisted Prey

by John Sandford

  Lucas said, “Give me Claxson’s address.”

  * * *

  —

  CLAXSON LIVED off the heavily wooded Kurtz Road in McLean, Virginia. The house was a stark, red-brick three-story structure that sat back on a large lot, ten or fifteen feet above street level. There was a two-door double-car garage at the end of the blacktopped driveway, and two stone pillars at the front door. Four SUVs crowded the driveway, and a man with the air of a junior FBI agent leaned against one of them, smoking a cigarette.

  “‘Mistah Kurtz, he dead,’” Lucas quoted as he rolled by, looking for a place to park.

  “I know that,” Rae said. “Heart of Darkness. I’m surprised you know it, being, you know, a hockey puck.”

  “Actually, it’s from ‘The Hollow Men’ by T. S. Eliot,” Lucas said. “‘This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.’”

  “Bullshit,” said Rae. “Heart of Darkness.”

  “Nope, ‘Hollow Men.’”

  “Jesus, now I got to look it up,” Bob said. He took his phone out and started typing with his thumbs. There wasn’t enough space to park in the driveway, so Lucas found a place a couple of hundred feet down the street where he could pull all four wheels off the pavement. As they got out of the truck, Bob said, “Ah, got it.”

  “Who wins?” Rae asked.

  “I do,” Lucas said. “I know the whole poem.”

  “And I know the whole Joseph Conrad novel practically by heart,” Rae said.

  Bob said, “You’re both right. Conrad wrote it, Eliot quoted it as the first line of his poem.”

  “I was right first,” Rae said.

  “Eliot’s poem is far better known,” Lucas said.

  Bob said, “Shut the fuck up, both of you. We’re cops, not some literary, you know, fairies.”

  “Well, I’m not anyway,” Rae said. “Lucas is the one who quoted the fruity poem.”

  * * *

  —

  THE CIGARETTE SMOKER was fieldstripping his Marlboro, as they walked up the driveway, and he snapped the filter into a hydrangea bush. “This is an FBI undertaking,” he said, carefully checking them out. “I suspect you know that.”

  “U.S. Marshals,” Lucas said. “Jane Chase should have cleared us through.”

  “If you’re Davenport, Matees, and Givens, she did.” He looked at his watch. “She should be here in the next few minutes.”

  * * *

  —

  THE IMPRESSION Lucas had of Claxson’s house was rugs and cigars. A thin odor of smoke hung in the entry hall like a signal of masculinity, a dozen oriental carpets in a variety of sizes spotted the russet-colored plank floors like high-dollar islands. The place had been done by a decorator apparently told to make it into a British men’s club, with everything but spittoons.

  “Wooden boxes,” Bob said, and when Lucas looked around, he noticed lots of antique boxes.

  “And mirrors,” Rae said.

  There were a dozen FBI agents inside the house, slowly taking it apart. They were mostly looking for documents but hadn’t had much luck. A Bureau locksmith had failed to open a wall safe in the study—the house, naturally, had a study, two walls of bookcases, an oil portrait of a woman on a third wall, and the requisite cut-stone fireplace on the fourth. The safe was hidden in one side of the fireplace.

  A tech bypassed the password on a Dell computer, but except for routine business docs—more bank statements—all documents were encrypted, everything else cleaned out by the same Win/DeXX program that they’d found on Ritter’s desktop.

  They’d taken Claxson’s iPhone when they arrested him, and now they found a second phone in one of the many wooden boxes. The same tech said, “The phones are locked. No can go there. Six digits, four chances, a million possibilities.”

  One of the agents told Lucas, “He’s like the Ritter guy—he’s got a safe-deposit box somewhere, under a false identity, with all the good stuff.”

  Bob said, “We found Ritter’s safe-deposit keys in the sink trap in the bathroom.”

  “Already looked there,” the agent said.

  An agent clumped up the basement stairs, holding four black rifles by their slings. Rae asked, “Full-auto?”

  “These are,” the agent said. “He’s got seven gun safes down there, thirty-five rifles of various kinds, twenty-two pistols.”

  “He’s an arms dealer,” Lucas said. “He’ll have got permits for everything.”

  * * *

  —

  CHASE SHOWED UP a few minutes later, got a quick briefing from the agent heading up the search. To Lucas, she said, “Not much at his business, either. They were careful about documents. I suspect that the stuff we got from Ritter was emailed to him as encrypted documents, but after decrypting, Ritter broke security and printed it, instead of wiping it clean, and hid it as insurance.”

  Lucas said, “We talked to Claxson’s PA when we went to his office the first time . . . older woman, maybe ready to retire. Any chance of getting her here?”

  “What for?”

  “So Bob, Rae, and I can intimidate her. Bet she knows his phone code.”

  Chase gazed at Lucas, said, “We have her. Haven’t arrested her, but we’ve detained her. I could bring her here . . . to answer questions about his lifestyle and so on. She’s already intimidated.”

  “Park her in the parlor, let her sweat, and then we’ll drop in on her.”

  “I’ll make the call,” Chase said.

  * * *

  —

  THE PA’S NAME was Helen Oakes. Lucas, standing at a front window, watched her walking up the driveway two steps ahead of her FBI escort. She was wearing a conservative gray suit, and he remembered that she was wearing gray the first time they’d seen her: not a woman given to flamboyance.

  Bob and Rae were watching an FBI search team guy rolling up rugs, and Lucas called to them: “She’s here. Let’s get out of sight.”

  They hurried into the study, and Chase met Oakes at the front door and took her to the living room.

  Rae told Lucas what she’d learned about Claxson’s rugs: “They’re okay, not great. Most of them made in India. The rug guy told me they look better than they actually are.”

  They were still talking about the rugs, and the guns and the mirrors, and the antique boxes, and the two Japanese swords racked near the door, when, ten minutes later, Chase poked her head in the room, and said, “I worry about this, so . . . go easy as you can.”

  Lucas nodded. “Sure.”

  * * *

  —

  WHEN LUCAS, BOB, AND RAE walked into the parlor, Oakes was seated on a beige, Italian-looking couch, knees tight together, elbows tight to the ribs, purse in her lap, held with both hands. She was frightened.

  Rae dropped on the couch beside her, a few inches too close. “Ouch!” she exclaimed, reaching under her jacket and pulling out her Glock. She leaned across Oakes and, with noisy clatter, dropped it on the end table, its muzzle pointing toward Oakes. To Oakes she said, “Shit gets up my back, know what I’m sayin’?”

  It wasn’t a real question, and Oakes didn’t answer. Lucas took a chair facing her, and Bob dragged over another chair, its legs scraping across the plank floor with a tooth-rattling screech, until he was also too close to her.

  Lucas said, “Miz Oakes . . .”

  Bob: “Jesus, Lucas, call her Helen—we’re all friends here. That is your name, right? Helen?”

  Oakes nodded, flinching away from Bob.

  Lucas said, “Okay, Helen. Look, we don’t want to frighten you, and you’re not required to tell us anything. We won’t arrest you at this point, but you are in serious jeopardy.”

  “That’s the fucking truth,” Rae said. “He ain’t bullshitting you, babe . . . Excuse the la
nguage.”

  “Everybody, shut up,” Lucas said. “I’m talking.”

  “Yez, boss. I always do what white people tell me,” Rae said.

  “Shut the fuck up, both of you, and let Helen talk,” Bob said.

  Lucas continued. “Helen, your boss is going to prison for a very long time. Probably for a couple of decades or more, if we get him for these murders. I’ll be honest and tell you we aren’t all that interested in you. You’re small fry. We’re interested in Claxson and some of his military operators. If you stonewall us and we give up on you . . . we could easily throw you in the same bag. We know you must have had intimate knowledge of what was going on in there, since you’re so close to Claxson—”

  “I was his PA!” Oakes wailed, opening her mouth for the first time. “I handled his schedule and travel reservations, but I didn’t do any of the business stuff.”

  “Oh, horseshit,” Rae said.

  Lucas snapped: “Rae, I don’t want to have to warn you again.”

  “You ain’t warned me the first time, cracker,” Rae said. To Oakes she said, “I can tell you from personal experience, honey, that you don’t want to fuck with the FBI. Those coldhearted motherfuckers drop you in a hole without thinking about it twice, and not even remember you’re there after they throw you in. Claxson’s going down for thirty. You don’t want to be in that bag.”

  “C’mon, Rae,” Bob said, “don’t be trying to scare her.” To Oakes he said, “Even if they put you in prison, well, federal prison, especially for women, isn’t that bad. You get three hots and a cot and good medical attention.”

  “Not the only kinda attention she’d get,” Rae said, lifting her eyebrows. “Some of them rug munchers can get right up in your lap.”

  “C’mon, Rae, goddamnit,” Bob said.

  Lucas raised his voice. “Again, everybody shut up.” To Oakes: “Claxson’s computers are all encrypted. Do you know his private key?”

  “No, I . . . I don’t. Nobody knows that but him. It’s long; I’ve seen him entering it on his computer, moving his lips when he’s doing it. It’s like he’s typing in whole words. And he’s not referring to anything—he’s got it memorized.”

  “That’s bad,” Rae said. “Is everything in code?”

  “Most everything,” Oakes said. “That’s why I don’t know anything . . . It all goes back and forth in code because it’s mostly classified. I know they ship armaments from one place to another, but all these details are in code. That’s not what I do.”

  “You do his travel,” Lucas said. “Did you arrange his airplane flight to Omaha?”

  She hesitated, then said, “I knew he was flying.”

  “Do you know who was with him?”

  The hesitation again. “No, but I got four box lunches. I have no idea who they were for, but one of them could have been Carol.”

  Lucas, Bob, and Rae all glanced at one another. “Who’s Carol?” Lucas asked. “Is that a woman?”

  She nodded. “Carol Ruiz. I don’t know that she went, but she was buzzing around that day, before George—Mr. Claxson—left. We don’t see her very often—she doesn’t work for us—so . . . I don’t know that much about her.”

  “Are they intimate?” Bob asked. “George and Carol?”

  Oakes frowned, repeated, “Intimate?”

  “You know,” Rae said, “is George slipping her the pink piccolo? The ol’ skin flute?”

  “Oh . . . no. No! Carol mostly talks to the guys. I think she’s an OGA.”

  Lucas: “She’s a spook?”

  “Careful where you go with that,” Rae said to Lucas, “I don’t like that spook shit.” She glared at Oakes, leaned into her. “You don’t never say ‘spook,’ do you?”

  “I never . . .”

  Lucas said, “Hmph, Carol Ruiz. We’ll take a look at her.”

  “Don’t mention my name, please. She’s . . . scary.”

  “We’ll try not to,” Lucas said. He took his notebook and a pen from his jacket pocket, flipped the notebook open, wrote “Carol Ruiz.” “Can you tell me what she looks like?”

  Oakes said, “She’s shorter than I am and I’m five-six. She’s thin, like a marathon runner or something, that’s what she looks like. Black hair, dark eyes. Doesn’t laugh much. In my opinion, she’s . . . not quite right. She looks at you funny . . . Please don’t tell her I gave you her name.”

  “If we have to use your name, we’ll make sure Ruiz knows you’re protected by the FBI,” Lucas said. “To get back to Claxson, I understand that his encryption code is a long one, but his phone code wouldn’t be. Either four or six numbers, right? You must know what that is.”

  “I . . .” She began to cry.

  Lucas let her go for fifteen seconds, then said, “Helen? Don’t lie to me. You can tell me that you refuse to answer, but you can’t lie to me. That’s a crime, and I’m not lying when I say that.”

  “He does lie a lot, but not about this stuff,” Rae said.

  “Please don’t tell him,” she said, and sobbed again.

  “We’ll do the best we can to keep it private . . .”

  “It’s 312415 . . .” Lucas wrote it in his notebook as she recited it.

  “How’d you figure it out?” Rae asked.

  “I sit beside him when we’re in a car. I’ve seen him do it a hundred times and I . . . just remember it. He didn’t try to hide it because . . . it’s like I’m not there . . . most of the time.”

  Lucas stood up. “We’ll need you to wait here,” Lucas said. “Your escort will come pick you up.”

  “Please don’t tell George I told that to you. I’m . . . afraid of him.”

  “Like Carol Ruiz?” Bob said.

  “Well, Carol’s different. Carol’s crazy. George is only mean. You can deal with mean. You can’t deal with crazy.”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS STEPPED OUT of the parlor and into the hallway, and Chase, who was standing there, listening, out of sight, said, “Mr. Claxson isn’t the only one who can be mean.”

  Lucas said, “There are three people dead that we know of, and maybe four if Moore was killed. We weren’t even mean enough to give her bad dreams. Let’s go try the phones.”

  The FBI tech had bagged the iPhone in transparent plastic. He left it in the bag when he turned it on. Chase read the number from Lucas’s notebook, the tech punched it in, and the phone opened up.

  “We need printouts of everything,” she said to the tech. “Like, now.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “What about the other phone?”

  “Maybe he only has one code to remember,” Chase said.

  The tech shrugged, got the bag with the second phone, and tried the code. The second phone opened up.

  Chase said to Lucas, “It was still mean, but I forgive you.”

  * * *

  —

  SHE WALKED AWAY to talk to somebody else, and Lucas said to Bob and Rae, “Carol Ruiz sounds a lot like Suzie, who shot up the hotel.”

  “She does,” Bob said. “But is it Carol or Suzie?”

  25

  Grant was walking a California venture capitalist through the Senate Office Building when Parrish called her. The VC was wearing an antique Black Sabbath T-shirt, black jeans, and a black linen jacket, and, at the back of his scalp, a small but prescient pink spot; Grant expected that the next time she saw him, he’d have a shaved head. He had the rattlesnake charm of the typical VC, plus money and connections. The connections were the important thing—she was building her network, and if the presidential primaries came down to California, she needed them.

  The call from Parrish was an irritant. She told the VC, “One second—I have to take this,” and stepped away from him. “What?” she snapped into the phone.

  “We’ve got a problem with the subcommittee,” Parrish sa
id. “We need to talk in a secure facility.”

  Emergency code: the subcommittee was Heracles and Claxson and the operators.

  “I can do it at noon,” she said. “Meet me at my hideaway.”

  “Sooner would be better.”

  “How long will the meeting be?” she asked.

  “Fifteen minutes?”

  “I can give you fifteen at ten-thirty,” she said. “I’m scheduled at eleven.”

  “See you then,” Parrish said, and hung up.

  Grant reached out and put her hand on the VC’s arm, turned him back toward her office, leaving her hand on his arm as they walked. She would fuck him, if necessary. “You know the problem with the Senate? It’s like being nibbled to death by ducks. There’s never a second during the whole darn day that somebody doesn’t want to talk to you—and, most of the time, doesn’t need to. People want to talk to you, so they can say, ‘I was talking to Senator Grant yesterday,’ and then they start lying.”

  The VC nodded. “I get the same thing. Some guy running a two-bit start-up wants to say he talked to you so he can spread the word that there might be some interest in whatever he’s peddling. ‘Nibbled to death by ducks’—I’ll remember that.”

  * * *

  —

  U.S. SENATORS are each assigned hideaways in the Capitol, unseen by the public or the press. Only the senator has a key to his or her retreat, which are routinely checked for electronic surveillance. Not as secure as Grant’s SCIF, but close.

  Since Grant was a junior senator, her hideaway was in the Capitol basement, a windowless room barely large enough for a desk with a computer on it, an office chair, two wooden visitor’s chairs, a worktable, and a small office refrigerator. If she lasted for another term and got lucky with senatorial turnover, she might actually get a place with a window. Of course, if everything worked out right, she’d have a big oval-shaped office before that happened.