Stapler said, “Hey, Darrell . . . U.S. Marshals asking about 1919.”
“What? The year?”
“The group, the website.”
Darrell, who was wearing a photographer’s vest, said, “Never heard of it. Are they like us?”
“No . . .”
Bob asked, “Sir, are you carrying a firearm?”
“Sure, isn’t everybody? I’m all licensed.”
* * *
—
LUCAS FOUND HIMSELF CONVINCED. Forlorn Hope was a bunch of sad sacks with guns. He wouldn’t be totally surprised if one of the men went off some day and shot up a store or a newspaper or a school, or was busted for rape, but they probably knew nothing about 1919.
Rae pushed a few more questions out—why the “Woke Café” she asked, and Stapler said that woke people were aware of the various kinds of tyrannies inflicted on individuals by the American culture, including the tyrannies inflicted by women on helpless men.
“I’m not suggesting you do this,” Rae said, “but . . . you know, you want sex, you go to certain parts of town . . .”
“Hookers?” Darrell blurted. “We could go to hookers. Some do. But that’s not what we’re looking out for. We want women who want us. We’re entitled to women who want us. Everyone’s entitled to somebody who wants them.”
“Okay,” Rae said. “I don’t see how you solve that problem.”
Darrell was getting angrier. “You think I like being like this? You think any woman gonna want me like this? You think—”
“Whoa, Darrell, save it for the meetings,” Stapler said.
“Fuck it,” Darrell said, and he disappeared back into the café.
Lucas called it off: “Mr. Stapler, I’m sorry we had to bother you, but you see our problem, I hope. If you hear anything at all, please call me; we’d be grateful.”
He left his card. If his card had had a GPS transmitter on it, he wouldn’t have been surprised if it landed in the nearest dumpster about two minutes after they left the café.
* * *
—
AT THE TRUCK, Rae said, “Five perfectly good hours we’ll never get back.”
“You think they’re clear?” Lucas asked.
“If they had a website, it’d probably be as dumb as 1919, I gotta give you that. But, I didn’t get a guilty vibe from them; nothing there,” Rae said. “I kinda feel sorry for them. But, you know, as a woman, they were distinctly creepy.”
“I didn’t feel anything,” Bob said. “Though, I gotta say, I’d like to hear that rape theory. That’s gotta be some interesting theory, right there. Some guy out there is like the Isaac Newton of rape? I bet . . .”
“Shut up,” Rae said.
Lucas said to Bob, “Why don’t you ride up front?”
“Well, you’re the big boss. Why would you want to ride in the back of the bus?”
“Careful,” Rae said.
“Because I want to think,” Lucas said. “I can think better in the back when I don’t have Rae to talk to.”
“What are you thinking about?” Rae asked.
“About what Stapler said.”
Lucas sat in the back and thought. Bob and Rae chatted about the landscape, about boats they saw from the bridge going back into Annapolis, about the traffic and weather and tourism possibilities within walking distance of the Watergate that they hadn’t seen on their previous trip to Washington, and when they got back to the hotel, Bob turned and asked Lucas, “Where’d all that heavy thinking get you?”
“Not where I wanted to go,” Lucas said. “I need to go see a rich kid.”
* * *
—
LUCAS WENT UP TO HIS ROOM, washed his face, and called Mary Ellen Winston. “I need to talk with Blake. Is he around?”
“He will be,” she said. “Is something wrong?”
“Something worries me. I would best explain it face-to-face. When will he be home?”
“He usually gets home around four, unless he stops with friends . . . you don’t think he’s done something?”
“No, I don’t. Actually, I need his help,” Lucas said.
“I’ll call him and tell him to come home.”
“Great. Listen, ask him not to say anything to any of his friends. Any of them. Not even Audrey.”
“I’ll tell him.”
* * *
—
LUCAS GOT A QUICK SANDWICH and a Diet Coke, collected the Cadillac, and went back across the Potomac to McLean and the Winston home. Mary Ellen Winston’s assistant was nowhere to be seen and Mary Ellen came to the door herself, said, “Blake’s on the way, he should be here . . . here he is.”
Blake Winston rolled into the driveway in a black-and-white Mini Cooper. He left it in front of the garage doors and climbed out, hustling, looking concerned. “What happened?” he asked.
Lucas said, “Why don’t we go sit?”
* * *
—
THEY WENT BACK TO THE ROOM overlooking the tennis court and Lucas took a long look at Blake Winston and finally said, “I want to ask if you could do something for me, something really tough, that you might not like, at all, but could be a huge help.”
The Winstons looked at each other and then Mary Ellen said, “I imagine that would depend on what it is.”
Lucas rubbed his hands up his face, thinking about how to begin. “Okay,” he said. “We’ve been investigating extremist groups that we thought might be connected to 1919. We’ve talked to some strange people, but we haven’t come up with anything. One of those people said to me today, that the only person who seemed to be getting anything out of this is Audrey Coil. She has been booked into several different TV shows.”
“She’s booked on more of them tomorrow,” Blake Winston said. “This has gone total Hollywood.”
Mary Ellen Winston, no dummy, jumped out in front of Lucas. She asked her son, “Blake . . . is it possible that Audrey invented the 1919 site? That’s what Marshal Davenport is trying to lead up to, I expect.”
Lucas nodded. “Yes, that’s right. I can’t find anyone else who might profit from this website, who might have a reason to put it up. Audrey is smart, everyone agrees on that. She knows a lot about websites. Her photograph on the site is the only one that wasn’t taken specifically for the site—and if she took the other photographs, she obviously couldn’t take her own. So I’ve been thinking . . . Could she have anticipated this kind of public reaction? Could she have done this to drive attention to her website, to get herself on television?”
Blake Winston’s mouth dropped open. “Holy shit.”
Mary Ellen: “Blake . . .”
Blake ignored his mother: “Holy shit, you think? I mean, she is way smart. I know a lot about cameras and all, but she knows everything about social media. Way more than I do.”
Lucas said, “If you’re still shooting videos for her . . .”
“I’m doing one Monday afternoon, after school. We’re shooting in the gym with some jock-o. I know for sure that Audrey’s going out of town for the weekend, so I can’t do it any sooner than that.”
“You’ll have access to her computer? You told me that she has a laptop that you use when you’re filming.”
“When we’re filming at her house. When we’re on a location, like Monday, I usually bring mine,” Blake Winston said. “I could ask her to bring hers, tell her that mine has a problem. They’re the same machine, MacBook Pros. You want me to search hers, see if something comes up?”
“That’s what I would ask,” Lucas said. “Figure out a bunch of search terms. I’m sure you’re better at that kind of thing than I am.”
“There’s something of a betrayal involved here,” Mary Ellen Winston said. “A betrayal of a friend.”
Lucas nodded and said to Blake, “Yes, there is. That’s why . . . mmm . .
. I’d understand if you said no. I can’t go and get her computer—I have no grounds for a search warrant. You don’t need grounds, because you’re not a cop, and you’d be using her computer with her permission.”
Mary Ellen Winston said, “That still doesn’t address the ethical problem.”
“I think it does,” Lucas said, turning to her. “We have a lot of people struggling with what seems to be a terrible threat. Scared kids, Secret Service agents trying to protect them. If she created this problem, a fake problem, to sell lipstick, then . . . and frankly, if she actually inspired some crazy idiot to shoot a kid . . .”
Mary Ellen said to her son, “It’s your call, Blake.”
Blake grinned: “I got no problem with it. If there’s nothing there, we don’t tell her I looked, right?”
Lucas said, “Right. If you do find something, I’ll try to keep you out of it. Make up some excuse to confront Audrey. Maybe nothing would ever go public. We’d wrap it up and go home.”
“Audrey wouldn’t be punished?” Mary Ellen asked.
“She’s a juvenile . . . so it could all be handled quietly,” Lucas said. “Nobody would want to make a big deal out of it.”
Blake delivered another blindingly white grin: “I’ll call you. Hot damn, this is like spy stuff. Gives me a little woody.”
“Blake!”
* * *
—
LUCAS WENT BACK TO THE WATERGATE, annoyed that Blake Winston couldn’t get at Audrey Coil’s computer over the weekend—Coil was doing something with a group of teenagers who were all the sons and daughters of politicians, and it involved an overnight stay at Camp David.
So he had to wait. Over the next two days, Lucas, Bob, and Rae tracked down the leaders of Lethal Edge and Pillars of Liberty, and the editor of the White Gazette. None of the probes revealed anything relevant to the 1919 investigation. Each man seemed stranger than the next and the three marshals marveled at the number of guns that seemed to float by.
“Everybody’s got a gun,” Rae said. “Most of them got lots of guns. That Brooks guy looked like a librarian and he had a Kimber .45 in his jacket pocket. You could kill a wild pig with that thing. A mountain lion.”
“How many guns you got?” Bob asked. “Fifteen?”
“No. Not fifteen. Besides, I’m a law enforcement officer. I need the familiarization,” Rae said.
“So do I, but I get by with five guns,” Bob said. “Not counting the job guns, of course.”
“Lucas: How many personal guns?” Rae asked.
“Several,” Lucas said. “I don’t want to talk about it. It’s too depressing.”
* * *
—
THERE WAS ONLY ONE moment of tension over the weekend, but the tension wasn’t between the marshals and the subjects, but between the White Gazette’s publisher, Jackson Wheatley, and his wife, Constance.
The Wheatleys had apparently been fighting when the marshals arrived at their house in the suburban Maryland town of University Park. Constance Wheatley answered the knock on the door, a tall, dignified, fiftyish white-haired woman carrying a little too much weight. She looked at the badges, turned away from the door and screamed, “Okay, shithead, this is it! Now we got marshals breaking down our door. I want a divorce! I’m going to Nancy’s and I want a divorce. You’ll hear from my lawyer on Monday and I’m taking the Benz.”
Jackson Wheatley came steaming out of a hallway, a short, stocky red-faced man in a white shirt and green slacks, wearing white socks with sandals, who shouted, “You’re not taking any of my cars, you cunt! You try to take one of those cars and I’ll . . .”
He saw the marshals on the other side of the screen door and his voice trailed off, but then Constance came out of the kitchen, where she’d gone after turning away from the door, and she had a claw hammer in her hands. “What are you going to do, mister? What? Call me a cunt, I’ll stick this hammer so deep in your brains all the squirrels will get out.”
And she went after him with the hammer, Jackson Wheatley shouting at the marshals, “You’re witnesses, you’re witnesses,” and he ran around a sofa and then behind a leather easy chair and grabbed a hardbacked copy of Good Poems: American Places by Garrison Keillor, off a built-in bookshelf, and fumbled it open. A pistol fell on the floor and then Bob, Rae, and Lucas were all inside, and Jackson Wheatley stooped to pick up the diminutive gun and Bob kicked it and Lucas stepped behind Jackson Wheatley and scooped it up, while Rae faced off with Constance and said, “If you swing that hammer at me, you’ll get badly injured.”
Wheatley stopped with the hammer in the air and Rae said, “We might even shoot you.”
Wheatley pointed a finger at her husband and said, “That sonofabitch is keeping me here by force so he can satisfy his perverted appetites.”
Jackson shouted, “What? You haven’t fucked me in ten years! I called you a cunt? I apologize: I don’t think you got one.” He shouted at Lucas, “You saw that, she tried to kill me with a hammer . . .”
Bob held up a hand. “I have a solution for this. Everybody be quiet for one moment while I go outside. I promise, this will settle things down.”
He went out the door and Lucas, with the small gun in his hand, said to Jackson Wheatley, “This gun is a piece of junk. What century did it come from?”
“That was my father’s personal sidearm . . .”
“Your father was an animal,” Constance Wheatley shouted. “A criminal. Your mother should have cut his nuts off before they had you, but she didn’t have the brains to do it! Now you got the marshals coming to get you. Well, good riddance.” To Lucas: “Take this racist asshole away. Put him in prison!”
Bob came back: “Okay, folks, I called nine-one-one. The cops will be here in a couple of minutes, they’ll be talking to both of you.”
Constance Wheatley took a step back, then asked, “What are you talking about? I didn’t do anything.” She dropped the hammer on the floor, as if they might not notice.
Lucas looked at the Keillor book. The center had been cut out, the edges of the pages glued together so the gun could be concealed in the hollowed-out portion. With the covers closed, it looked intact.
“That was a damned good book,” Lucas said. “Put together by one of my neighbors. You guys ruined it.”
“I thought it overreached itself,” Jackson Wheatley said.
The cops arrived three minutes later, and after a brief seminar on domestic violence, Lucas, Bob, and Rae went on their way.
“And another useless few hours dribble into history,” Rae said, as they got in the Tahoe.
“She looked so dignified when she opened the door,” Bob marveled.
“But they had a gun,” Lucas said. “Like everybody else.”
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
Dunn was at work with his crew before the sun poked over the horizon on Monday, hustled all morning, pushed the crew through lunch, and quit at one o’clock, a full day’s work done. By three he was at his cabin and by five o’clock had satisfied himself that one of Stokes’s rifles, a Colt LE6920 in .223 with a variable power scope, would do the job.
The smaller rifle was more comfortable to shoot than his .308, with a much crisper trigger, and also had a snap-down bipod as a shooting support. Altogether, he was significantly more accurate with it. By the end of the shooting session, he was keeping all of his shots on the twelve-by-eighteen-inch paper, many grouping around the bull. He kept in mind that he didn’t actually have to kill the kid, he only had to hit him or come close.
Stokes’s second rifle, also a .223, had a more radical, skeletonized look, but didn’t have a scope, and Dunn didn’t want to learn how to mount one, or take the time to do it.
When he finished with the shooting, he sat in the cabin and cleaned the rifle, scrubbing out the bore, putting a light coat of lubricant on the mechanical parts, then wiping those d
own. As he worked, he continually flashed on the plan, and on his place in history, even if that place, with good luck, turned out to be anonymous.
Probably wouldn’t be admired. He would be shooting a kid. The effect, though, would be critical: the planners of 1919 would change history, dragging the nation away from catastrophe . . .
Maybe, he thought, he could leave a will that disclosed his part in the program. Or a letter locked in a safe, so that his name would be known.
* * *
—
THAT NIGHT, LATE, he drove to the cemetery overlooking the Stillwater School, parked a half block away. He snuck down the narrow road at the bottom of the cemetery slope, climbed the slope when he thought he was about halfway down the length of the graveyard. At the crest of the slope, he sat and listened, then walked as quietly as he could through the weeds to the old tool shed. He found the loose supporting brick, pulled it free, and pushed the rifle through the hole. He listened again, heard only a distant rumble of cars, and slid the block back in place.
He sat and listened for a few minutes more, heard not much but the usual trucks and airplanes, and then snuck back out to his car. He picked up a dog walker in his headlights, three or four blocks away from the cemetery. Not a problem. The man paid no attention to Dunn and his truck, but it made him think: dog walkers. People also walked dogs in the morning. He’d seen them on his way to work. The old cemetery would be a nice spot to take a dog . . .
The next morning, before going to work, he cruised the cemetery, saw no dog walkers. The school’s schedule, available online, showed classes beginning at 8:30, with a fifth-grade recess at ten o’clock. Lunch was at 12:30, with a fifth-grade gym class at two o’clock. Watching from the top of the hill, but well away from the cemetery, he found a hefty percentage of the arriving kids didn’t go directly into the school, but walked around to the playing areas and hung out there until a preliminary bell rang at 8:25.
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