Lucas asked, “If we walk up through those trees . . . how close can we get to the house?”
The man scratched his head, but the woman said, “If you go back there . . .” She pointed. “If you go back there and along that bob-wire fence, you come up behind that garage and they couldn’t see you from the house. If you stay on this side of the fence, you gonna have to walk through some blackberries, but there’s a hole in the fence, you go through that, and you can walk around them. Then the fence ends, but toward the garage.”
Bob said to Rae, “Load up,” and the two of them turned toward the truck.
Chase said to the couple in the doorway, “If we walk over there, you’re not going to call them and warn them, are you?”
The woman said, “We got no phone anymore.”
* * *
—
BOB, RAE, AND LUCAS pulled on bulletproof vests, and Bob and Rae got their rifles and a lot of ammunition. Lucas was good with his Walther. Lucas said to Chase, quietly, “You stay with the truck: you’re like the headquarters. Talk with the SWAT and call the local cops, whoever they are—maybe the sheriff, out here, you know, whoever, and tell them that we have an operation going on. We don’t want some patrol cop spotting us and thinking we’re Arab terrorists and taking a shot before he finds out who we are.”
“I think I’d rather go.”
“You’ve already been shot once and we don’t have a vest for you. Soon as we know what the situation is, we’ll call you. In the meantime, get on the phone.”
She relented and climbed in the truck, and the couple came out to watch as Lucas, Bob, and Rae walked down the line of the driveway, past a crumpled outbuilding that Bob said had once been a chicken coop, and down the fence line. They went through the hole in the fence before they got to an expansive blackberry patch, and, as the woman said, when they broke out of the cover of the woods, they had a detached garage between themselves and the house.
They took turns peeking at the house and the car parked beside it. When Lucas peeked, he turned to the other two and said, “You see that door? It’s open.”
Bob and Rae took turns peeking again, and Rae said, “You’re right. There’s no screen, and there’re bugs out here. I think we got us a problem.”
Lucas said, “Okay. Bob, you go around the other side of the garage, Rae, you stay here. I’m going to walk up to the door like I’m the mailman . . .” He was wearing a sport coat over the vest and he turned the lapels inward, buttoned up the coat to cover it.
“You look like a preacher,” Rae said. “Except for the Walther.”
“If I get in trouble, hose the place,” Lucas said.
“This is where I say, ‘Maybe we should wait for the SWAT team,’” Bob said.
Lucas: “Really?”
“Oh, fuck no. You go, we hose. If there’s serious trouble, get down on your belly real quick.”
“And get to that door real quick,” Rae said. “They can’t have seen us yet. If you get to the door in one second, they won’t have time to react, if they’re in there at all.”
* * *
—
WHEN THEY WERE SET, Lucas said, “I’m going,” and he walked fast to the back door, the Walther held down along his leg. There was a one-step back stoop outside the door, and Lucas stepped up and pushed the door with one finger of his free hand and shouted, “Hello?”
Then he smelled them.
* * *
—
RAE SHOUTED, “Lucas. Lucas.”
“Somebody’s dead,” Lucas shouted back.
“Wait there,” Bob shouted.
He waited and Bob and Rae jogged across the yard, and Rae sniffed and said, “Oh, yeah.” She and Bob led the way through the door, their rifles up and tracking.
The light inside was dim, because all the blinds and curtains were closed, and when Bob stepped into the kitchen with Rae at his shoulder, Lucas said, “Stop,” and reached past Rae’s hip to grope for, and find, a light switch. He flipped it on and a dark shape on the floor became a body.
“Clear it, or wait for SWAT?” Bob asked.
“I think we wait for crime scene,” Lucas said. “There’s nobody here. Not alive. I’d feel them.”
“So . . .”
“Keep your muzzles up, I’m going to walk past you . . .” Lucas brought the Walther up to chest height, stepped carefully past the body and peeked into what he thought was a living room. He saw another shape on the floor. Groped for lights again, found the switch and flicked it on. “Got another one in here . . . Let’s back out.”
“Stink would gag a maggot,” Rae said.
“Of which I’m sure we have some,” Bob said. “These people been dead a while.”
“You guys cover the doors, just in case,” Lucas said. Out in the yard, he called Chase: “We entered the house. We’ve got two dead on the floor, we didn’t look in any rooms except the kitchen and the living room. There could be more. They’ve been dead for a while. Maybe a week. If the SWAT team is coming, they can clear the house, but I don’t think there’s anyone inside, not alive. We need a crime scene unit and some local cops to control the road.”
“Locals are on the way, I’m coming with the car,” she said. “SWAT will be here in fifteen minutes or so. I’m coming.”
* * *
—
IN AN HOUR, there were thirty people on the scene, mostly local cops and FBI. The two victims were tentatively identified as Randy Stokes and his sister Rachel Stokes, from a wallet in the man’s pocket and a wallet from a woman’s purse that had been sitting on a sideboard.
One gun was found in the house, an old Smith and Wesson .357, but no long guns. They did find a box of .223 shells scattered on the floor, so guns were apparently missing.
Then came the preliminary paperwork: statements about the discovery and the processing of the scene, that sucked up the rest of the morning and early afternoon, and done in the back of one of the SWAT trucks.
“What’s happening with this Linc guy, the guy that Cop mentioned on Gibson’s tape?” Lucas asked Chase. “We know he was lining up to shoot someone.”
She was shaking her head.
“I checked while I was waiting in your truck,” she said. “We’ve been working it hard, but so far, we’ve come up empty. I mean, there are several dozen possibilities nationwide, six in Maryland and Virginia. We’ve checked all of the local people out, but didn’t get much. Like, two of them are dead—these were old guys, going way back. Two guys are still around, but one of them is black, so he’s not a good possibility, even if we could find him, which we haven’t. The other one was convicted of embezzlement and did fifteen months in a state prison, but, you know, a white-collar crime, no violence involved. Now he works for a private custodial service in Petersburg, Virginia. He works nights, nine at night to six in the morning, and his work crew agrees that he was there all night when the kid was shot. People who know him say he’s got no politics at all. His probation officer agrees with that. Given where he lives, it seems unlikely that he’d be hanging around White Fist. We’re still looking at him, but . . .”
“He’s not the right Linc.”
“We’re pretty sure he’s not,” she said. “We’re starting to throw a wider net, but so far . . . nothing.”
“What about these Stokeses? We need to interview everyone who knew these two, see if Linc turns up.”
“Already underway,” she said. She had a smear of grease under her nose, Vicks, because the odor in the house made her gag. “We’re not seeing anything yet.”
“Okay. Look, we’re gonna take off.” Lucas nodded at the army of cops surrounding and infiltrating the house. “You’ve got more than enough people here. Goddamnit, I thought we had something solid.”
“We do—this will lead to something,” Chase said. “Where are you going?”
“Ou
t to look around,” Lucas said.
“Looking for Linc?”
“Or whatever we can find.”
“Lucas . . . the kid who was killed . . . I didn’t like your face back there, at the cemetery. If you find Linc, we need to put him on trial and make an example of him.”
“Sure.”
“We don’t need him pushed into a confrontation and shot,” she said.
“Sure.”
“We don’t need him executed.”
“You got it, boss lady,” Lucas said. He tried a smile.
“You’ve got a mean smile sometimes,” Jane Chase said.
CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN
Bob drove while Lucas worked his phone, heading north to Maryland and Charles Lang, who might or might not be a Nazi, but did know names. He was home, he said, mourning for Gibson. They arrived at three o’clock, after a quick stop at a Burger King for fat and carbohydrates.
“If I was the king of Burger King, I’d make the French fries taste like McDonald’s French fries,” Rae said, as they left the Burger King parking lot. “I mean, how hard can it be?”
“Harder than you’d think,” Bob said. “I read someplace, probably not the New York Times, that McDonald’s fries used to be cooked in beef fat, but they can’t do that anymore, so what they came up with was a bunch of chemicals that they put in regular cooking oil so it smells like beef fat. Burger King would have to figure out what the chemicals are.”
“Your mind is a fucking garbage dump,” Rae said.
Lucas just ate. Truth be told, the repartee was annoying him, but he didn’t want to pull rank to shut them up. They were Bob and Rae, his friends. Rae picked up on his attitude.
“What are you thinking about, big guy?”
“Linc.”
“That gonna do any good? Thinking about it?”
“What else we got? You oughta try it,” Lucas snapped. Then, “Sorry.”
The repartee stopped and they drove mostly without talking to Lang’s house.
* * *
—
WHEN THEY PULLED into Lang’s driveway, the man himself walked out on the front porch to meet them. “I can’t talk about Stephen without weeping and it’s embarrassing,” he said. He actually had a black mourning armband pinned to his jacket sleeve, and Lucas wondered if it might not have once had a swastika on it. “His family is asking about when they can get the body . . .”
“That’ll be up to the medical examiner and the FBI,” Lucas told him. “I suspect it’ll be a few more days. They gotta do chemistry.”
“I’m trying to stay in touch, but there are so many bureaucrats, and nobody wants to tell you anything.” Lang ushered them through the house to his office, slumped behind his desk, and asked, “How can I help?”
“We’re looking for a man named Linc, who Stephen saw at White Fist,” Lucas said. “I don’t know if it’s L-i-n-c or L-i-n-k, but I’ve been assuming it’s short for ‘Lincoln.’ He may be a shooter for one of your alt-right groups, and he’s probably way out there. Have you seen the name?”
Lang sighed and said, “I’ve been fumbling my way through Stephen’s database.” He patted a laptop sitting on his desk. “I don’t know my way around, but I could do a search. I don’t know that name myself. If it’s L-i-n-k, it could be a nickname . . .”
“Well, let’s look,” Rae said.
* * *
—
LANG WAS RIGHT ABOUT FUMBLING: he poked tentatively at the laptop’s keys, but after a couple of minutes, he threw up his hands and said, “There’s no Linc, Link, or Lincoln in this computer, and this is everything we have. I mean, not in the computer, but up in a cloud somewhere, but it looks at the cloud, too, and there’s no sequence of those letters. Anywhere.”
Lucas said, “Damnit.”
“Ask the ANM,” Lang said. “They organize politically, so they’ve got lists. Probably the best lists that exist. A lot of their members would be considered alt-right.”
“There’s a problem with that,” Lucas said. He told Lang that John Oxford had cut himself off from ANM.
Lang said, “Look. He may have taken himself out, but he knows names. A lot of ANM, from what little I know about it, involves face-to-face relationships, and Old John will still know those names. He hasn’t erased his memory. He could find a way to get to one of them, and put out the word, and have somebody call you.”
“Worth a try, I guess,” Lucas said. He wasn’t sure that it was, but he didn’t have much else.
Bob said, “Why don’t we go jack up Toby Boone’s brother? Collect a few names there, jack up some more people.”
“Threaten them,” Rae said. “Make them sweat.”
Lucas was staring at Bob, who asked, “What?”
Lucas scratched his nose, said, “You were almost onto something there, Bob—you just got it exactly backwards.”
“Way to go,” Rae said to Bob.
* * *
—
OUT IN THE DRIVEWAY, away from Lang, Lucas called Jane Chase. “I need you to send me the names and addresses of the White Fist members you found, but we only want the names of the married ones, or the ones living with a woman. And preferably those with kids.”
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“Investigate,” Lucas said.
He explained, and Bob, standing behind him, listening in, said, “Holy cow—a ray of hope. That could work.”
Chase said, “I’ll get on it. And we’ve got something here. There might have been a shootout or something, because we’ve got a smudge of blood on the front door that couldn’t have come from the victims. We’re going to get DNA on a third person. Everybody here thinks he’s probably the killer. And if he was here to get the rifle . . .”
“Excellent,” Lucas said. “You push the DNA. We’ll talk to the women.”
* * *
—
WHILE THEY WAITED for Chase to come through, Lucas called John Oxford and told him what they wanted, and Lucas added the part about Oxford still knowing names, without mentioning that Lang had suggested it. He also tried a little flattery, about the strength of Oxford’s organizing. The flattery didn’t work. Oxford was notably cranky, but finally said, “I’ll make some calls, but I can’t tell you that anything will happen. I am fuckin’ well out of it now, thanks to you, fuckhead.”
“Yeah, well, if you save a little kid’s life, I’ll send you a fuckin’ sticky gold star for your fuckin’ diary,” Lucas said.
“That went well,” Rae said, when Lucas rang off.
“Not gonna get us anywhere,” Lucas said. “We need that list from Jane.”
* * *
—
CHASE CAME BACK in half an hour, downloading a list of names and addresses to Lucas’s iPad. “Not as many as I’d hoped—most of the members are singles.”
She’d gotten seven names. Two of them were in Frederick, where Toby Boone’s shop was located, and not far apart. Three more were in the general Frederick neighborhood, so they decided to start there.
Frederick was a forty-minute drive, traffic beginning to build in the late afternoon. The two targets, Mark Sutton and Jack Byrd, lived three blocks apart in an older neighborhood of painted brick and red-brick apartment and retail buildings, some of them shuttered, some looking over cracked sidewalks to vacant lots.
They took Sutton first. As they pulled up outside Sutton’s apartment, Lucas said, “You guys know what to do . . .”
“Isolate, isolate, isolate . . .” Rae muttered.
* * *
—
TWO FBI AGENTS HAD SPOKEN to Sutton the day before: he’d been reluctant, but not aggressive. He lived on the second floor of the building, up narrow wooden stairs that knocked and groaned as they climbed, the building smelling of damp rotted plaster and flaking wallpaper.
&nb
sp; They found Sutton’s apartment door, with a bell. Bob rang, and Lucas stood well back. They heard footfalls inside, and a moment later the door popped open, and a short stocky man in jeans, a Levi’s snap-button shirt, and white socks opened the door and looked out and asked, “Police?”
“U.S. Marshals,” Rae said, holding up her ID. “Mr. Sutton, we need to talk to you. Can we come in?” And, she added, “This is not what you think. We’ll only need to talk. We’re not here to arrest anyone.”
The man glanced back over his shoulder, and then said, “Ahm, uh, my wife’s not dressed.” He turned his head and called, “Amy? Are you okay if some marshals come in?”
A woman shouted something back—“One second”—and ten seconds later called, “I’m okay. They can come in.”
Both Bob and Rae had their hands on their pistols as they edged through the door. The apartment had a living room with a broken-down velvet-covered couch that looked across a shaky wooden coffee table at a new wide-screen television; there were two ashtrays on the coffee table full of cigarette butts. A half dozen plastic toys were lying against one wall—the FBI agents had said there were two children at home, both toddlers.
Bob and Rae pointed Sutton at the couch, and the three of them went that way, Bob saying, “Listen, we’re sorry to barge in on you like this, I know you spoke to FBI agents yesterday, and we thank you for that . . .”
Lucas trailed, and as Sutton sat down, he glanced at Lucas, then did a second take, frowned and asked, “Are you the boss here?”
Lucas smiled and shook his head. “No, I’m with the Marshal’s Service Inspector General. I tag along on selected interviews and evaluate, mmm, the behavior of our marshals.”
“Really? That’s weird.”
“Gotta agree with you on that, brother,” Bob said. He snorted once, turned to Lucas and said, “No offense.”
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