“Do the interview,” Lucas said. “We gotta keep moving.”
* * *
—
A SMALL KITCHENETTE sat off the living room and a woman appeared in a doorway from the back of the apartment, stepping into the kitchenette. She looked at her husband and Bob and Rae, talking on the couch, and then at Lucas.
She was thin, with bones in her face, and a prominent nose; blondish hair swept back, not in a ponytail, but cut short, held in place with hair butter, and showing the tracks of a heavy comb. She was wearing jeans with a white blouse. Lucas thought she looked Appalachian, though if he were asked to define that, he couldn’t: she just looked like Depression-era photographs.
Lucas smiled at her and said, “I smell baby formula,” and she said, “We’ve got two.”
“So do I,” Lucas said. “At least we’re out of the formula stage. Out of Huggies. Now they poop in regular underpants.”
“Oh, God, I’m really looking forward to that,” the woman said, with a quiet laugh. “If I could sell poop, I’d be a rich woman now.”
Lucas said, “I’m Lucas.”
She said, “Amy. How do you do? And what’s going on?”
“I do all right, I guess . . .” He told her the story about being with the inspector general’s office and evaluating the behavior of Bob and Rae, then grimaced and said, “They’ve got a tough problem. They’re looking for a guy named Linc, who’s involved with Toby Boone’s group. They’re working hard, but they’re not getting anywhere.”
“Toby got raided yesterday,” the woman said. “Were you there?”
“No, I don’t go on raids. I’m more of a desk guy, except when I’m doing something like this,” Lucas lied. “This Linc guy, we’ve heard that he’d set up to shoot some children. We think he already killed one kid.”
“I heard about that. He shot the wrong kid, that’s what they’re saying on CNN.”
“He did, and he’s going to shoot again. We think he’s . . . unbalanced. Bob and Rae are trying to locate him, they thought your husband might have some idea of who he is. Linc and Toby Boone are friends. And he’s friends with a guy named Cop.”
“He, uh, Mark, doesn’t talk to marshals much. He’s not much for police in any way, shape, or form.”
“I understand he’s had his problems with the law.” Lucas glanced at the couch, where Bob, Ray, and Sutton were deep in discussion, then leaned toward Amy Sutton and said, quietly, with a grin, “We’ve been talking to as many of the White Fist people as we can find, and, well . . . most of them don’t have a pretty young wife and babies to come home to. They’re real dead-enders . . . kind of . . . strange guys. Rather have a gun than a woman. In my observation.”
She nodded. “There are some unusual men around Toby. He sort of pulls them in. Me’n Mark . . . I’m trying to get him away from all that. We’re hoping he can find a job in trucking. He used to be a loader, but he’d like to be a driver. Get that white-line fever.”
They talked about that for a moment and she said full-time drivers could make more than fifty thousand a year, and Lucas said he heard that it could be even more than that. Then, “Where are the kids?”
“Put them back in the bedroom. I call it their playroom.”
“They’re quiet,” Lucas said. “One of each or . . .”
“One of each, “she said. “C’mon, let’s take a peek. They are pretty quiet. Maybe too quiet.”
They walked down a short hall to a bedroom door, and Amy opened it quietly, and they both peeked. The kids, a boy maybe three and a girl maybe two, were piling up stuffed animals into a pyramid, intent upon the process.
Amy nodded and pulled the door shut and whispered, “Don’t know what they’re doing, but they’re working at it.”
“So damn cute at that age,” Lucas said. “I’ve got an older girl, we just got her through the teenage years, and let me tell you, that can be a trial.”
They tiptoed back to the kitchen and Lucas took a business card from his pocket and said, “If you have a chance to talk with Mark about this later, I mean, you know, this Linc guy, if it turns out we can save a child’s life . . . give me a ring. I won’t tell anyone where the tip came from. Not even other cops. But we’re pretty desperate.”
She nodded, didn’t say anything, but took the card and stuck it in her back jeans pocket. Lucas asked, “You guys lived here long. Settled in?”
“We move around a bit . . . I’d like to get a permanent place before we put the kids in school so they don’t have to change much . . .”
They chatted for a while, about schools, and then Bob and Rae stood up, and Bob shook hands with Sutton and said, “Listen, if anything occurs to you, man, call us. You’ve got my card. I mean, we’re talking about children.”
“Yeah, sure,” Sutton said. There was an undertone in his voice of “fuck you and the horse you rode in on.”
Out in the hallway, before the door was closed, Bob asked Lucas, “How’d I do?”
“I liked the handshake at the end,” Lucas said, for the sake of the Suttons. “I thought that was very sensitive.”
* * *
—
IN THE STREET, Rae asked, “How’d it go?”
“Pretty well, I think. I feel a little sleazy, though,” Lucas said. He looked up at a second-story window and saw a drape move. “Let’s keep moving. Six more. How was Sutton?”
“About a level-six asshole,” Bob said. “Wouldn’t talk to Rae. Rae’d ask a question, he’d answer to me.”
“He tried to look down my blouse, though,” Rae said. “You gotta give him that.”
“Everybody tries to look down your blouse,” Bob said. “You oughta put up a sign that says, ‘Dollar a look.’”
“That’s all really wonderful,” Lucas said. “Keep moving.”
“Don’t pretend you haven’t looked,” Bob said.
“Keep moving.”
* * *
—
OF THE SEVEN NAMES ON CHASE’S LIST, nobody answered the door at two of the houses.
Lucas thought he’d done well with Sutton, and of the next five houses, they found people at home at three. Bob and Rae isolated the husband, while Lucas tried to chat up the wife. That worked with two of the three, but the third wife might have been meaner than her husband and essentially told Lucas to fuck off. She said, with bared teeth, as she dropped Lucas’s card in the kitchen wastebasket, “You’ve certainly given me something to think about.” She had a glass sitting on the kitchen shelf with stamp-sized Nazi flags mounted on toothpicks, for what purpose Lucas had no idea.
They didn’t get to the last house. They were on their way when Lucas took a call from an unknown number and the woman on the other end said, “I’m supposed to tell you, Leroy Nathaniel Carter. I don’t know why. I’m supposed to say, look at the initials.” Her voice sounded hollow, and Lucas could hear chatter in the background, as though she were calling from a big-box store, like a Walmart, or Costco.
“Who, uh . . .”
“Wasn’t supposed to say no more.”
Click.
Rae was driving, Lucas in the front passenger seat, and Rae asked, “Was that . . .”
“A name. Leroy Nathaniel Carter. LNC. Linc.”
“That’s better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick,” Bob said from the backseat.
“Which one was calling, do you think?” Rae asked.
“I don’t think it was any of them. Whoever it was, she had somebody else call me, so I wouldn’t recognize a voice.” He got on the phone to Chase, gave her the name. She came back in five minutes, said, “Got an address from a parole officer. He’s just done six years for aggravated assault. He’s been out for three months. We should get the SWAT team back.”
“Give me the address,” Lucas said. “No point getting in an uproar before we know if he’s home.”
“If he’s home . . .”
“Jane, give me the fuckin’ address.”
“Lucas, the guy, his record, he was some kind of gang enforcer, and crazy. He is not somebody to take lightly.”
“We won’t. Give me the address.”
CHAPTER
NINETEEN
Leroy Nathaniel Carter lived in a town house complex on the western outskirts of Baltimore, forty minutes east of Frederick, with his girlfriend, an employee of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
They made it before dark, but not much before. To Lucas’s midwestern eye, the town houses looked brutal: cheaply built, all pale green, six or seven individual houses stuck together in a row, with three clumps on each block, facing three other clumps on the other side of the street, all identical, block after block. The designers might have hoped to give the place a little humanity, and less of a barracks feel, by curving the streets, but that hadn’t worked.
The navigation app took them to the right street, but house numbers were hard to see in the increasingly dim light. When they thought they had the right one, Bob fished the Maglite out of his gear bag and shined it on the front of the place, caught the numbers. “This is it.”
There were lights on, and they drove around the block, saw more lights in the back. Lucas called Chase and asked if they could enter without a warrant.
“We’ve got a warrant—went after one as soon as you called. I’m about halfway up there. Do you have your iPad?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“I’m going to transmit a copy of the warrant to you, for the home of a Carol Lou Lacey. She’s the girlfriend. You’ll have it in one minute. Or, you could wait until I get there.”
“I think we want to move,” Lucas said. “I don’t want to hover outside the house too long and I don’t want to move away to where we can’t see it. What’s the basis for the warrant?”
“Paroled felon believed to be in possession of a firearm. It’s a no-knock because of the weapon angle.”
“Send it.”
“I did. You should have it.”
Lucas had turned on the iPad as they were talking. He checked his mail, found a PDF of the warrant, sworn by Chase before a federal judge. Bob: “That’s the coolest thing I’ve seen in weeks.”
Rae asked, “How’re we going to do this?”
Bob and Rae were trained in violent felon apprehension; that was much of what they did. They’d take the front door, they decided, while Lucas watched the back. Bob would kick the door and he and Rae should be on top of the occupants before they could resist.
In theory anyway.
* * *
—
THEY DECIDED THAT BOB would go with his handgun, Rae with her M4 carbine, and Lucas would take Bob’s M4 around to the back. They moved to a park three blocks away, and armored up. Bob and Rae would wear helmets and U.S. Marshal jackets with reflective lettering, in addition to vests. Lucas would wear a Marshal jacket over his vest.
A cyclist rode by, did a circle, came back and peered at them: “What’s happening?”
“A law enforcement issue,” Rae said. “Be best if you went on your way.”
“Do you have warrants?” the man asked, still circling. He was wearing black cycling shorts, a black cycling shirt with Italian words on the chest, and a black helmet that looked like half of a football.
“You a lawyer?” Bob asked, as he pulled on his jacket.
“I’m a concerned citizen,” the man said.
“Go home and call your congressman,” Lucas said. “We’d hate to have to bust you for interfering with the arrest of a violent felon.”
“What if I took your picture with my iPhone?”
“That would be annoying, but not illegal,” Lucas said.
The cyclist rolled in a circle, like he was thinking about it, and then Rae jacked a shell into the chamber of her M4, a lethal ratcheting sound, and the cyclist said, “Okay,” and rode off, away from the target house.
“Why are bicycle riders so much more annoying than motorcycle guys?” Bob asked.
“I don’t know, I drive a Porsche,” Lucas said.
“Well la-dee-fuckin’-da,” Rae said. “Listen, guys, I’m getting my rush on. Let’s go.”
* * *
—
THEY DROPPED LUCAS on the block opposite the target, where he would wait in the street until he saw the Tahoe pull up in front of the target. Then he’d run through the yard to the back door of the target house. Like Rae, he could feel the adrenaline; and God help him, he liked it.
The Tahoe disappeared around the corner and, fifteen seconds later, he saw it pull up outside the target. He jogged through the side yard of the house behind the target, to the back door, and he heard the front door go down and Bob and Rae shouting. The back door looked cheap, like the house, and he kicked it at the lock, once, twice, and the door splintered and broke open and he was inside looking at a man and a woman sitting at a kitchen table looking at the muzzles of the guns held by Bob and Rae, then they turned and looked at Lucas, and Bob said, “Leroy Nathaniel Carter, you’re under arrest on suspicion of possession of a firearm as a felon.”
The woman screamed, “Get out of my house!”
Then Carter was on his feet, a huge man in jeans and a T-shirt, muscles bulging in his arms and chest, red-faced, and he shouted, “Fuckin’ cops. I hate you fuckin’ . . . ”
And he lurched toward Bob with the woman right behind him.
Bob said, “Back, back . . .”
“Go ahead and shoot, motherfucker, go ahead and shoot me . . .”
“Stepping right,” Rae said to Bob, and Bob switched his handgun to his left hand and the woman shouted, “Get that nigger out of my house . . .”
Carter lurched forward another step. He was huge, most of it muscle, some of it fat, but he was slow. Bob had finished third in the heavyweight division of the NCAA wrestling tournament, losing on points only to the eventual champion, and while not as big as Carter, he was very fast and very well trained. Bob stepped into Carter and hit him in the solar plexus with his right fist, a sound like a meat axe going into a side of beef, and Carter bounced backwards and opened his mouth as if to object, but then turned white and sank to his knees and then toppled onto the floor, holding his chest.
The woman, Lacey, bent as if to help him, but then made as if to slap Bob on the face, which wouldn’t have bothered him. But she wasn’t slapping: she raked him with knife-like fingernails, cutting his forehead open, and Bob bumped back, blood streaming from his forehead below his hairline, and then she turned on Lucas with her nails, which were an inch long and filed to silver points and swung her hands to slash him . . .
Lucas had at least a foot of reach on her. The punch started at shoulder height, snapped out to her chin, caught her perfectly, one of the better punches Lucas had thrown in his life, and the woman flew backwards and landed on top of Carter, rolled off and lay on the floor, one leg twitching, no other sign of life.
“Hope I didn’t kill her,” Lucas said; but he wasn’t hoping all that hard.
“I was kind of hoping you did,” Rae said. “Cuff ’em. Bob, you okay?”
“Sliced the shit out of me,” Bob said. Blood was trickling down into his eyes, and he wiped it with the back of a hand, but he put the cuffs on Carter and the woman, who still wasn’t moving, but was breathing.
“We need an ambulance,” Lucas said. “She might have a broken jaw.”
* * *
—
RAE CALLED 9-1-1, and an ambulance and a couple of local cop cars were dispatched; Lucas called Chase, who was still ten minutes out. “Any sign of a gun?”
“Haven’t looked,” Lucas said.
“You’ve got a warrant.”
* * *
—
THEY HAD GUNS.
Ther
e were four AR-15–style black rifles, two 9mm semi-auto handguns, a .357 Magnum revolver, a twelve-gauge shotgun with cut-down stock and barrel that made it illegal, and, most interesting, a bolt-action CZ 527 American in .223, mounted with a Sig Sauer scope. The CZ and scope would make a decent light sniper combination.
The ambulance showed up—Lacey’s eyes were open, but she couldn’t close her mouth, and wasn’t clearly responsive to questions. An EMT thought her jaw might be broken, and that she might be concussed, and they took her away.
Carter had gotten off the floor, and was sitting on a kitchen chair, stunned, but not so stunned that he hadn’t immediately asked for a lawyer. Lucas, looking through the bedroom, found a copy of the letter: not an early version, but apparently a much-copied one, and the original had not been quite centered on the photocopy machine.
Chase arrived, looked at the letter, and said, “Same letter, different copy. The goddamned thing is everywhere.”
They were standing in the living room, and she turned and looked at Carter sitting in the kitchen chair: “You think he shot the kid?”
“I dunno,” Bob said. His forehead had been patched up by the EMT, who suggested that he might wish to go to an emergency room for stitches. “I can tell you only one thing about that: the ammo in the apartment is not the same as it was in the rifle we recovered. There aren’t any partial boxes of it, nothing of that brand. So . . .”
“He has the attitude and we’ve got that recording,” Lucas said. “We get a lawyer on him, maybe he’ll have something to say.”
Chase nodded: “We’ll have a better idea by morning. We’ll seal up the house, get a crime scene crew over here. Bob, go get your stitches.”
* * *
—
BOB GOT HIS STITCHES, with Lucas and Rae waiting in the hospital with him, like nervous parents. The stitches were done by a young physician’s assistant, who told Bob that she was so good at it, he wouldn’t have scars, as long as he didn’t mess with the cuts. She put a big bandage on his forehead that made him look as though he’d had a lobotomy, and sent them on their way.
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