“If I push,” Chase said. “Why do you need to talk to him?”
“I need to clarify my thinking. My thinking has been kind of clogged up on this. I haven’t been doing anything your feds couldn’t have done and probably better. I gotta get outside your box if I’m going to help.”
“You go talk to him—I’ll set it up. I’m going to stay here and I’ll monitor what happens with this Lee guy, the gun dealer.”
“Good. And listen, what I’m going to say to him . . . we’ll need a confidentiality agreement from the public defender. Is that possible?”
“Depends. If you let what you say be used in his defense, he’d probably sign one, maybe with some time limitations.”
“We want it timed to a court defense or a plea agreement, whichever comes first,” Lucas said. “He can use what I say in a trial or a plea. Not before then.”
“We can ask. But exactly what are you up to?”
“You really don’t want to know.”
“I was afraid of that.”
* * *
—
FROM THE SCHOOL TO ALEXANDRIA was twenty minutes in traffic. They were sitting at a traffic light, a minute away from the federal building, when Chase called to say that the would-be shooter, William Walton, had been conferring with his attorney when she called, and both were available at the federal lockup.
“They’re skeptical. We’re drafting an agreement but the Brick says he’s not signing anything until he hears what you have to say about it.”
“Brick?”
“The attorney, the PD. His name is Brett Abelman. We call him the Brick because . . . he’s like that. Former cop in Newark. He’s good.”
* * *
—
ABELMAN WAS A TALL, dark-haired, broad-shouldered man with a heavy brow ridge and a nose that had been broken more than once. He was not happy to see Lucas—and he told Bob and Rae that they’d have to wait outside the interview room. An assistant federal attorney was with him and she had an improvised confidentiality statement in her hand, ready to be signed.
Abelman was gruff. “What could you ask that hasn’t already been asked? Why should I let you speak to Mr. Walton?”
“Basically because what I’m going to ask him . . . actually, I’m going to tell him something he doesn’t know and that you don’t know, and I’m going to ask him what he thinks about it,” Lucas said. “You might be able to use it in your defense. I don’t see how any answer he gives could be used by the prosecution.”
“If you’re fucking with me, Marshal . . .”
“I’m not. I’m trying to catch the guy who shot this kid,” Lucas said. “We know it wasn’t Walton.”
“All right.” He turned to the assistant federal attorney and said, “Give me the paper, Denise. If this is a trick, you’ll all be sorry. I promise you.”
“I don’t even know what it’s about, except that I’ve got a ranking FBI agent breathing down my neck,” the woman said.
She gave Abelman the paper and the use of the back of her briefcase as a tabletop to sign it on.
“Let’s go,” Abelman said. “I keep saying . . . if this is a stunt . . .”
“Yeah, I know, you’ll have us all gelded,” Lucas said. To the assistant DA, he said, “It’d be best if this were me and Mr. Abelman and Mr. Walton.”
“I’m a very curious lawyer,” she said.
“You’ll have to be curious about something else,” Lucas said. “This is just the three of us.”
* * *
—
WALTON WAS BROUGHT into an interview room where he sat across a table from Abelman and Lucas. He was a short, thin man with lank brown hair, a round face, and a spade beard that tried to disguise a receding chin, but failed. His eyes and nose were red, as though he’d been crying, or possibly was allergic to the lockup.
Abelman had already told him that Lucas was coming. Abelman said to Lucas, “So ask.”
Lucas said to Walton, “I can reveal some details about the case that might help your defense. Specifically, might defeat any suggestion that you were part of a larger plot to kill a senator’s child. That might be important.”
Walton stirred in his chair, said nothing, glanced at Abelman. Abelman said, “Huh. Keep talking.”
“I have a preliminary question, though,” Lucas said. “This isn’t what I’m here for, but if you could answer it, I’d be willing to tell a courtroom that you cooperated on this point.”
“What’s the question?” Abelman asked.
Lucas looked at Walton. “Do you know or have you ever heard of a gun dealer named Lee Wilson?”
Abelman said, “Whoa,” but Walton put up a hand and said, “I can answer that question.”
Abelman: “You sure?”
Walton nodded and looked back at Lucas. “Yeah, I’m sure. To answer your question, no, I never heard of him. Never bought anything from him. That’s the honest to God truth.”
Lucas nodded. “Thanks. Now, this is what I really want your opinion on. What if I were to tell you that 1919 is a joke, set up by some hackers who were trying to troll the local neo-Nazis?”
Walton stared at him for a long moment, his face slowly going redder than it already was and then he said, softly, “What?”
Abelman said, “You’re telling us that . . .”
Walton half rose from his chair, eyes on Lucas, and he shouted, “What?” Spittle flew across the space between them. “It’s a joke? It’s a joke?” He looked at Abelman. “Is he fucking with me?”
“I don’t think so . . .”
“A teenager put it together, that’s why the site’s so crude,” Lucas said.
“What about the letter? You all got the letter? The letter says . . .”
“I know what the letter says,” Lucas said. “The letter is bullshit. Somebody was trolling you—or maybe the letter writer really thinks 1919 is real, but believe me, there’s nothing there. Nobody wants anyone to shoot any kids. It’s a joke. It’s a fraud.”
“What about me?” Walton brayed. “Do I look like a fuckin’ joke?”
“Easy,” said Abelman.
“Don’t tell me easy, you fuckin’ kike.”
Lucas ignored the slur. “I think you’re a victim of one, a joke . . .”
“Can’t be! Can’t be!” Walton shouted. “I’m going to prison because some goddamn nerd decided to have a little fun? Can’t be! You’re lying to me, you piece of shit.”
A guard came in the back door and they all turned their heads, and he said, “We could hear some shouting outside. Everything okay here?”
“Do I look like I’m okay?” Walton shouted at him. “Get me out of here.”
The guard came up to take him by the arm and Walton shouted at Lucas, “You lying motherfucker . . . I know you’re lying . . .”
“Easy,” Abelman said.
“Fuck you, Jew. You fuck. You can’t . . .”
The guard took him out and the door closed.
* * *
—
“NICE GUY,” LUCAS SAID, when he was gone. They could still hear him shouting, through the steel door.
Abelman said, “I’d like to meet one innocent nice guy in here, but so far, I haven’t. I was hoping I’d get something out of this, but I don’t see what it could be.”
“I would think if you could argue that there was no big plot, it was nothing but a deranged man who snapped and so on . . . the court might give him some kind of a break.”
“If he hadn’t been targeting a senator’s kid, maybe. But he was. He’s going away for a long time,” Abelman said. “They got movies of him setting up the rifle. Movies like in a movie theater. I got nothing. I asked an ADA if we could talk and you know what she said?”
Lucas shook his head.
“She said, ‘No.’ Usually, they put the ‘no�
�� in a complete sentence, which makes you think there’s some wiggle room. Something between an adjective and a verb. Not this time. It was ‘No,’ and she said it with a smile and I could see her fang teeth. They’re gonna nail him to the wall and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
* * *
—
LUCAS PICKED UP BOB and Rae and they went out the door, talking about next moves, when Chase called and said, “I’m told you’re all done. You get what you wanted?”
“Yes. I did,” Lucas said. “What happened with the gun dealer?”
“He’s got a shop outside of Richmond and the building owner has a key and the code to the alarm system. He’s got an unlocked file with his sales receipts in it and the building owner is going to let us in with this guy’s permission. He said he thought he remembered the sale of the gun. He thinks he sold it to a woman.”
“That’d be a little unusual. Woman shooter.”
“Yes. Anyway, I’m on the way there, to the shop. We could meet there.”
“Got nothing else to do,” Lucas said. “See you there.”
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
Wilson’s Outdoors was located between a pharmacy and a sandwich shop in a low-rent strip mall outside the town of Glen Allen, an hour-and-a-half drive south of Alexandria on I-95, and a few miles north of Richmond.
On the way down, Bob and Rae listened to Lucas’s account of his interview with William Walton, then amused each other by speculating on what Lucas might possibly have gotten out of the interview.
“Actually, we do know what he got,” Bob said, as they closed in on Richmond. “He got a guy really, really pissed off at him. So when the guy gets out of prison, lo, these many years in the future, he’ll probably buy another gun and go to Minneapolis and shoot Davenport.”
“Damn hard time finding me in Minneapolis,” Lucas said. “I live in Saint Paul.”
“Well, pardon me for fuckin’ breathing,” Bob said.
“Did you really get something from him?” Rae asked.
“Yes. I’m actually pleased with myself. I’m like a genius.”
“We all say that,” Rae said. She turned to Bob. “Don’t we? You were saying that last night.”
“No, I said he was a penis, not a genius.”
Rae snapped her fingers. “That’s right. Penis, not genius.”
* * *
—
THEY ARRIVED AT THE STRIP mall and Rae said, “That’s a federal Ford pulling in there, or I’ve gone blind, one or the other.” She pointed to a dark blue Ford Excursion, and Lucas, who was driving, turned that way, and Rae pointed again and said, “Gun shop.”
The gun shop was dark, a narrow space, two barred windows with a barred door between them, and a “Closed” sign in the window. They parked and got out as the Ford pulled to a curb. Two suited men got out, followed by Chase, from the backseat, talking, as ever, into her cell phone.
Lucas, Bob, and Rae walked over, and Chase said, “You got here quick. The mall owner’s on his way over.”
Five minutes later, a tall bearded-and-turbaned Sikh showed up, carrying a wad of keys. He introduced himself as Mandeep Kaur. “I hated to hear what Lee had to say, that the gun might have come from here,” he said. “Lee’s a good man and this has upset him. I know he tries to weed undesirables from his clientele.”
“How would he go about doing that?” Chase asked.
“He interviews them, if he has any doubts,” Kaur said, as he found a key and unlocked the front door. “He says he can pick up on it, if a potential buyer has mental problems. Maybe he looks for anger? Pushes them, to see if he can get them riled up.”
They stepped inside the shop to the sound of a beeping alarm. Kaur flipped on the lights, found another key, walked a half dozen steps down the main entry aisle, then stepped between two racks of camo shirts to the side wall, used the key to open a steel box mounted next to a showcase, and punched in a code that killed the alarm.
“Lee’s office is in the back.”
He led the way around a showcase full of pistols to a door that led to the back of the store, then into a small side room that held a desk and a dozen hip-high black filing cabinets.
“He’s old school, there should be some three-ring binders . . .”
They found four fat three-ring binders, two with sales documents listed by the buyer’s name, and two listed by serial numbers on the gun. They found the sale in the second numbers binder, near the end of the file.
“Rachel Stokes,” Chase said. “Sale was last December. It’s all here, address, she lives in a place called The Plains.” She looked up, her glasses sliding down her nose. “I’m cranking the SWAT again.”
“We’ll lead off,” Lucas said. He tipped his head at Bob and Rae: “This is what we do.”
“Reconnaissance only, until I get the SWAT team there,” Chase said.
Lucas said, “Of course” and she gave them the address. Rae poked it into an iPhone app that said they were an hour and a half away from the address, back up I-95. They jogged to the truck, Chase shouting behind them, “Wait for me, wait for me.” She spent a minute talking to the two agents she’d arrived with and then all four of them were in the truck and rolling.
Rae said, “Oh-boy oh-boy oh-boy oh-boyo. Gotta drive fast, Lucas. Faster, faster, if we want to be first.”
* * *
—
THEY DROVE UP I-95 with lights and siren and ignored a shortcut on state highways to stay on I-95 as long as possible, until they cut cross-country through the town of Manassas to I-66, out I-66 and off at the small town of The Plains and then back out in the country, down a narrow blacktopped road. As they went along, Jane Chase was on the phone, gathering information about the target house: “Stokes, not much on her,” she reported. “No criminal record. Nothing—not even a traffic ticket.”
“Fake name?” Rae wondered.
“Lot of docs on her,” Chase said. “Driver’s licenses going back fifteen years . . .”
“She bought that gun,” Lucas said. “She might be laying low, but she bought that gun.”
* * *
—
AND THEY GOT there first.
As they cruised the target, Rae said, “Tough-looking place.”
Bob: “Nothing moving.”
Chase: “Car in the back.”
Lucas: “If we stop down by the next house, we could circle around and come in through those trees.” The next house down had a large woodlot littered with rusted farm machinery, extending along the road toward the target. “Get within fifty yards anyway.”
Chase: “The SWAT squad is mobilizing and on the way.”
Bob: “I’m mobilizing.”
Rae: “We’re mo-bile, ag-ile, and hos-tile.”
Chase: “We should wait for the SWAT.”
Lucas: “Let’s go around and take a look before it gets dark. That can’t hurt.”
“Yeah, bullshit, it can hurt,” Bob said. “However, I fully support the idea.”
* * *
—
THE NEXT HOUSE down the road was like the Leaning Tower of The Plains, tall, narrow, paint-peeling clapboard, and leaning, with a dent in the roof line that promised big trouble, sooner rather than later.
Lucas pulled the truck into the driveway and continued to the end of the gravel, so they had the leaning tower between them and the target house. As they rolled to a stop, Rae said, “You know what this house smells like? Like tomato soup and peanut butter.”
“You got it,” Bob said.
“Why tomato soup and peanut butter?” Jane Chase asked.
Lucas pulled the latch on the Tahoe’s door and turned to her: “Because if you go into a Burger King, you can collect enough packets of ketchup to make tomato soup. Peanut butter because it gets you the most calories for a buck. And sometimes, you can
get it free from the government.”
* * *
—
AS THEY GOT OUT, a white man came to the screen door wearing a formerly white T-shirt, gray sweatpants, and flip-flops. He was tall, radically thin, and unshaven. A dog moved up beside him, a pit bull, to look them over; the two of them collectively smelled like tomato soup with a whiff of dog shit from the yard. The dog looked better fed than the man. “He’p you?”
Lucas held up his badge. “We’re U.S. Marshals. We’re interested in the house up the road. Miz Stokes, is it?”
“Something’s wrong, ain’t there?”
Lucas frowned: “Wrong how?”
“Rachel’s always walking up and down the road, looking at stuff, every day, rain or shine. Haven’t seen her in the best part of a week. Randy’s car been sitting there for a week, hasn’t moved. We was gonna call the cops to check, but . . . we didn’t. Us’n and the cops . . . don’t get along.”
Rae said, “Oh, boy.”
Lucas: “Who’s Randy?”
“Her brother.”
A black woman came up behind the man, put her arm around his waist and said, “Rachel’s nice. Randy’s not. He don’t like black folks.”
Rae: “He’s not a shooter, is he?”
The woman asked, with a hint of skepticism, “You a marshal, too, black lady?”
Rae said, “Yes, me’n these two guys are marshals, this white lady is FBI.”
The man said, “Randy’s sure enough a shooter. That’s all he does, besides drink.”
“How about Rachel?” Chase asked. “We have her down for buying a gun, a rifle.”
The man said, “I don’t think she’d know which end of a gun is which. She probably bought it for Randy. Randy has some felonies. You know. Dope, mostly. Ran over somebody once, when he was drinking. He can’t buy his own guns. But he’s a shooter: give him half a chance, he’ll talk your ear off about it.”
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