Twisted Prey

by John Sandford

  * * *

  —

  GRANT ASKED, “What happened?” as she dropped into her chair.

  Parrish took one of the wooden chairs. “The FBI hit Heracles this morning.”

  “Ah, shit.”

  “They detained Claxson. Claxson didn’t say anything, asked to speak privately to his lawyer. They said he could, from his SCIF. He did that, and he called me, all of it on our burners, but we ran his burner through a shredder, so we should be clear there,” Parrish said. “He could talk only for a couple of minutes, but what I get is, the feds found Ritter’s safe-deposit box and took out a bunch of documents about some . . . irregular weapons deliveries. Nothing to do with us, not directly. Since it was Ritter, I expect your friend Davenport is out there stirring up trouble.”

  Grant pointed a finger at Parrish. “But . . . But what if it’s Davenport trying to turn Claxson on the Smalls thing?”

  “That was the second thing that occurred to me.”

  “The first thing was worse?”

  “Well . . . I’ve been involved in some of Claxson’s sales. It was a while back, but I was either already working for you or about to start working for you.”

  “Ahhh . . .”

  “Wait, wait—I don’t know that any of the documents involve those transactions. They might, but that would be purely unlucky. Still, I thought you should know about it. And that Claxson’s been arrested. If Davenport’s trying to turn him . . .”

  “Would McCoy or Moore be willing to solve that problem? The Claxson problem?”

  Parrish was shaking his head. “I can’t find either of them. I asked Claxson, and he said Moore dropped out of sight yesterday or the day before. He may be on the run. McCoy is still around, or was yesterday afternoon, but nobody’s been in touch with him since then. I cruised by his town house, didn’t see anything unusual, but I didn’t see his car, either. He may have been picked up, or, like I said, he may be running.”

  “Coming apart,” Grant said. “The whole deal’s coming apart. How much do Moore and McCoy know about me?”

  “Nothing more than your name,” Parrish said. “Basically, they know I work for you, and that I’m friends with Claxson. And I don’t care what Davenport suspects. As long as Claxson keeps his mouth shut, they can’t get me. And if they can’t get me, you’re fine, too.”

  “I’m not fine,” she said. “I’m in trouble here. I mean, if the FBI has Claxson on illegal weapons deals, it’s possible that they could even get him on murder charges, depending on where those guns went. If they went to Boko Haram, God help us. Especially if they can get some of his operators to testify against him. Claxson might desperately need someone to deal. That would be you and me. Actually, it’d be me. I’m the big fish.”

  They stared at each other, and Parrish said, “So . . . ?”

  “Your sources may decide you’re toxic. Before that happens, you have to find out what’s happening with Claxson. Specifically, what the feds have got on him, if he’s in jail or going to jail—all of that.”

  Parrish said, “I already made some calls. I’m friendly with Claxson’s PA. I’ll catch her somewhere this afternoon and find out what she knows. And she usually knows everything that goes on in that company.”

  “Careful,” Grant said. “She’s an obvious source for the FBI as well. You might be talking to her and find out she’s wearing a wire or something . . . maybe under surveillance.”

  “I can handle it,” Parrish said.

  Another ten seconds of silence, then Grant asked, “If Claxson has to go away, could you handle it?”

  “I was afraid you’d ask that,” Parrish said. “I’ll do some research. I’ve been over to his place—it’s over in McLean—any number of times. There’s woods behind his house, and he likes to barbecue on his back porch. And he likes to sit out there and drink. If the worst happens . . .”

  “Are you good enough for that?”

  “The shooting wouldn’t be a problem, the getaway might be. Like I said, I’d have to do some research.”

  “You’d better do the research,” Grant said. “Don’t move without signaling me. But do the research.”

  * * *

  —

  WHEN PARRISH WAS GONE, Grant worked through it and realized that if Claxson was going down, Parrish probably would as well. Parrish had worked with Claxson on several deals involving Army procurement and major weapons deliveries. Like Claxson, Parrish would be looking for somebody to deal, and he only had one choice likely to clear him out of a prison term: Senator Taryn Grant.

  She walked back through the Capitol to her official office, brooding about it. She had twenty staffers in Washington, twenty more in Minnesota, and one of her Minnesota people was in town to brief her about a series of polls taken in the past two weeks on rural issues. She wanted to think, but she didn’t want to break her schedule, either, didn’t want to appear in any way disturbed.

  She took the meeting: numbers and more numbers, and all the numbers said that she was still strong in Minnesota despite Smalls’s efforts to screw her. They’d come to the question-and-answer segment when her chief of staff stepped into the room, leaned over her, and whispered, “Jack needs just a moment. He’s in your office.”

  “Let’s take a break,” she told the polling group. “Five minutes.”

  In Grant’s office, Parrish handed her a piece of notebook paper on which he’d written “Claxson will be held overnight but will ask for bail tomorrow, and he’s expected to get it.”

  She nodded, and wrote a note back: “We need a way to get face-to-face at a secure site and work this out. Not my SCIF, I don’t want him near my house. Someplace the cops won’t have bugged.” When he’d read the note, she took both pieces of paper and pushed them into her shredder.

  26

  Claxson’s phones held only one gift.

  The iPhone, basically, was a long list of phone contacts, but with nothing recorded from recent calls—the phone was apparently wiped clean after each call, other than the list. Chase pointed out the one-button app for that.

  “Lots of politicians have that app,” she said.

  The phone wasn’t in Claxson’s name; it was registered to a Gerald D. Wilson.

  The second phone, an off-brand burner, didn’t have that app. On the day after Claxson admitted flying to Omaha, he made two calls, and received two calls, all on the same anonymous T-Mobile burner phone.

  With the phone numbers in hand, Chase jacked up the FBI phone experts. A half hour after they’d opened the phones, she told Lucas that one of the calls was to Clear Lake, Iowa, two more were from and to St. Paul, and the final one went through a tower west of Des Moines.

  “That’s when they hit Weather and Last,” Lucas said. “Clear Lake is on the Iowa border, right off I-35, on the fastest route to the Twin Cities from Omaha. The last one was on I-80, on the way back to Omaha. That ties him directly to a murder.”

  “But doesn’t prove it, unfortunately,” Chase said.

  “Oakes made four lunch boxes for the flight out,” Bob said. “That’s Claxson, Ritter, McCoy, and Moore.”

  “Unless one of them was Suzie or Carol Ruiz,” Lucas said. He turned to Chase. “We need to ask McCoy who Suzie is. Or Carol Ruiz. And if they’re the same person.”

  “We don’t have a deal yet, but he’s been giving up that kind of information—filling in the employee list.”

  “She might not be an employee,” Rae said.

  “We’ll ask,” Chase said. “I’ll make a call.”

  “Let me in to talk with him,” Lucas said.

  * * *

  —

  MCCOY WAS DELIVERED to an interview room in the Hoover Building from an Arlington lockup at the insistence of both Chase and Bunch, McCoy’s lawyer, a happy confluence of requirements. He was escorted by two marshals. One of them recognized Rae from
a training program, and asked, “You guys are running an investigation? How’d that happen?”

  She nodded at Lucas, and said, “Political pull. It’s corrupt, but we fly Business Class.”

  “Are you shittin’ me?”

  * * *

  —

  BUNCH AND MCCOY were locked up to talk privately for a few minutes, and, when they were done, Lucas, Chase, and a Department of Justice prosecutor named Steve Lapham went in, along with the two marshals. Lapham told Bunch, “We have a number of questions for both you and Mr. McCoy regarding arrangements for testimony. But before that, Marshal Davenport has a question for Mr. McCoy that has no potential legal liability for Mr. McCoy, as far as we know.”

  Bunch said, “Ask. We’ll decide whether he should answer.”

  Lucas asked McCoy, “Do you know, or have you seen, a woman known either as Suzie or Carol Ruiz?” He described her, and McCoy said, “I’ve seen a woman who George called Carol who looks like that, but I don’t think that’s her real name. I think it’s fake, and somebody told me she’s a NOC, a chick with a non-official cover working for the CIA or somebody else, I don’t know who.”

  Bob asked, “You think she’d know where to get a silenced submachine gun?”

  McCoy shook his head. “I don’t know, I might be able to, but I’d have to dig around for a while, and I’m not sure I could. I was more of a meat-and-potatoes, M16 kinda guy.”

  Rae asked, “Would this chick have been hanging out with Jim Ritter?”

  McCoy thought for a minute, said, “Yes, she did. I think they were—what do you call it?—an item? For a long time. Jim said she was a girl he could trust. I saw them once over at the Last Minute Grill, by the airport. I didn’t interrupt. I figured Jim was flying out, they were saying good-bye, but I was wrong. She was the one flying out . . . and they might have been worried, the way they were holding on to each other.”

  Lucas said, “Huh.”

  “I’ll tell you one other thing,” McCoy began, but Bunch put a hand on his arm, and asked, “You’re sure?”

  “Shouldn’t be a problem,” McCoy said. “Maybe get a few more brownie points. I speak some Arabic. She speaks perfect Arabic. The one time I saw her at Heracles, she was talking to this Syrian guy like they were old friends, and, I’m telling you, I thought she was Syrian.”

  Lucas had nothing more to ask, but he said to McCoy, “We’ve tracked the phone that Claxson used to call you boys on your way into the Twin Cities to hit my wife and murder Last. If I were you, I would sign anything that Mr. Lapham gives you, because, if you don’t, you’re looking at thirty years in Stillwater Penitentiary after the feds get done with you.”

  McCoy gave him a sullen look, shuffled his feet, and said, “You ain’t from the Chamber of Commerce, huh?”

  * * *

  —

  THEY WERE GETTING toward dinnertime, and Lucas, Bob, and Rae went back to the hotel, agreed to work out for a while and go to dinner together. When he was back in his room, Lucas called the number that Tom Ritter had given him.

  “Marshal Davenport . . . I’ve only got a minute. We’re filling out papers to get Jim buried at Arlington. Lots of paperwork. It takes forever.”

  “I’m calling about Jim’s girlfriend . . . Suzie. I’m now told that she might also go under the name of Carol Ruiz, and she might work for the CIA or some other agency and speaks perfect Arabic. Does that still sound like her?”

  “Maybe,” Ritter said after a bit. “I only saw her that one time. We were at a party, all military or ex-military people who worked in the Middle East. Jim invited me to come along. I didn’t hear Suzie speak Arabic, but there was a minute where a couple of guys were speaking Arabic, and she suddenly looked at them, and I got the impression she knew what they were talking about.”

  “Know where I could find her?” Lucas asked. “I need to talk.”

  “No, I don’t,” Ritter said. “I could ask around.”

  “I’d appreciate it. She’s been seen at Heracles, so people there know her.”

  “All right, I’ll ask. Should I give her your phone number?”

  “Yes. I was on the wrong end of that submachine gun, so she probably wouldn’t want to meet me at McDonald’s.”

  “Why do you want to talk?”

  “I want to find out if she was hired to shoot me up or if she did it because she bought Claxson’s line of bullshit about me torturing and shooting Jim, if she tried to kill me because she loved Jim.”

  “I’d like to know that answer myself,” Ritter said. “I’ll start making some calls.”

  * * *

  —

  AFTER DINNER, Bob needed to catch up with people on the Internet, and Lucas and Rae got Lucas’s car and drove across the river to a Barnes & Noble bookstore they’d seen while driving around Arlington.

  “I’m getting tired of the ’Net,” Lucas said, as they crossed the river. “You can’t separate the facts from the bullshit anymore. The constant carping drives me nuts . . . Did I ever tell you that I supervised the construction of our house?”

  “Never did,” Rae said.

  “Well, I did, and it was interesting,” Lucas said. “Sometimes I wish I’d become an architect. I used to go out on the ’Net for tips, on this one particular building site. I still check it sometimes. The last time I looked, there was this flame war about politics. At a construction site. I mean, why? Is there a difference between a left-wing and right-wing two-by-four?”

  “I made the mistake, commenting on a story on the Wall Street Journal’s site, of mentioning that I’m black,” Rae said. “I started getting that ‘you people’ shit. Can’t avoid it.”

  The bookstore was located in a California-style outdoor shopping center. After they parked, they got cups of coffee at Starbucks and split up to look at books. Since he was living in Washington temporarily, Lucas browsed the politics section and wound up with Dark Money by Jane Mayer, then hit the magazine rack, while he waited for Rae to finish browsing.

  They were back at the Watergate by nine o’clock. Lucas had finished the Hiaasen book, and set it aside to ship home, and had started the Mayer, when the call came in from an unknown number.

  A woman with a light soprano voice: “This is Wendy.”

  “Wendy who?”

  “Suzie . . . Carol. What do you want?”

  “I didn’t shoot Jim Ritter,” Lucas said.

  “Then who did?” The question was as much a confession that she was the hotel shooter as he was likely to get, Lucas thought. She continued. “Don’t bother scrambling your tech guys—I’m talking to you on an old burner. I’ll throw it in the garbage as soon as I take the battery out.”

  “I understand that you’re one of the people who knows all about that kind of thing—burners and taking out batteries,” Lucas said.

  She didn’t reply to that. Instead, she repeated, “Who shot Jim? Specifically?”

  “I have several suspects,” he said. “And, by the way, I don’t have any techs looking for your phone.”

  “I forgot, you’re a marshal, you don’t do tech. Anyway, if you think Jim was shot by Moore or McCoy, you’re wrong.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “Absolutely. Put it this way: those guys risked their own lives to keep Jim alive, and he did the same for them. After that, they’re not going to shoot him in cold blood.”

  “Tom told me the same thing,” Lucas said. “Did Tom tell you that Claxson bullshitted him on the waterboarding thing?”

  “Yes. Claxson lied to me, too. If it’s a lie,” she said.

  “It is.”

  “You think he did it?”

  “No. We don’t think it was Claxson himself. Although I think Claxson could have set it up.”

  “Parrish, then.”

  “I’m not sure. Do you know Parrish?”

  “Ye
s. If he did it, it was because he was told to do it. Parrish is a bullshit artist, a fixer. He might be able to do it, if you squeezed him hard enough, but he wouldn’t like it. He wouldn’t want to. Not because he’d be killing somebody, but because he might get caught. Or might fuck it up and get shot himself.”

  “Okay.”

  “That leaves Senator Taryn Grant.” Lucas didn’t say anything, and after six or eight seconds Wendy said, “You’re a U.S. Marshal, so you don’t want to say that.”

  “It’s complicated,” Lucas said. “Did you look her up?”

  “Yes, and I looked you up, too. You think she was involved in some murders in Minneapolis, but you weren’t able to get her on that. Senator Smalls thinks she tried to assassinate him. You think Jim was one of the people in on that silly fuckin’ stunt.”

  “Jim was involved, for sure,” Lucas said. “He was one of the triggers, but he wasn’t doing it for himself. His orders came from someone else, and since he worked for Claxson . . . But what would Claxson get from killing Smalls? Nothing that I can figure out. We need to find somebody who needed to get rid of Smalls.”

  “You say that but you won’t say her name,” Wendy said.

  “Like I said, it’s complicated. I don’t really know who I’m talking to.”

  “Let me give you a hypothetical,” Wendy said. “Do you think a person like Grant, with her personality, could pull the trigger?”

  “I don’t want to get involved in hypotheticals,” Lucas said. “I do know that a lot of people have died around her, people who might have obstructed her ambitions.”

  “Huh. Then you think she could. Okay. From what I’ve read about the Minneapolis situation, you obviously think she was the one giving the orders in those killings.” Again, Lucas didn’t reply, and she asked, “Are you going to get her?”

  “I’m beginning to doubt it,” Lucas admitted. “To do that, we’d have to jump through a lot of evidentiary hoops, and she’s got an ocean of money for lawyers. Our only hope is to get Claxson or Parrish to talk to us. But if they do talk to us, they’d be implicating themselves in multiple murders.”