Audrey Coil had done this to him: made him into a fool. He paced through the house, hating on it. The girl’s image was a tick in his brain, with Rachel Stokes there as well, taunting him.
He put both hands over his ears, staggered back up the stairs to the bedroom, fell on the bed.
He never passed out. He couldn’t. He hoped for it, some sort of darkness, oblivion. He got Rachel Stokes, with a bullet hole, sneering . . .
* * *
—
AT SEVEN O’CLOCK Sunday morning, back at the computer, on Google Maps, eleven hours, twenty minutes from door to door, Warrenton, Virginia, to Tifton, Georgia. He paced some more, thinking about it, but he was never in doubt.
He loaded his cabin gear into his truck—never could tell what you might need on the road—along with the new rifle and the carry pistol, ammo, three days’ clothes, his dopp kit. He got gas, donuts, and coffee at a Sunoco station, and headed out of town, down the highway to I-95, the right turn onto the freeway and nothing ahead but Tifton, Georgia, a little less than twelve hours away.
This was the only road to redemption, the only way to erase the insult.
* * *
—
RACHEL STOKES RODE WITH HIM, in the passenger seat, now silent, but always looming. He was afraid to look at her, the mutilated head, the sunken eyes with their blackening flesh around the sockets, the smell of blood suffusing the truck.
Dunn put his head down and pushed south.
Sunday morning, coming down.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO
Sunday morning.
Rae called first: “We’re at National. I wanted to give you a chance to tell us to turn around and come back.”
“It’s a snake-hunt now,” Lucas said. He yawned, kicked off the bedsheet, scratched his chest, and put his feet on the floor. “The FBI has DNA, they’ve got a million leads to work. They got analysts crawling out their ass. That’s not really what we do. You go on home and do some research. Find something for us.”
“So last night when I was going to bed, I started thinking about Audrey Coil, and I was thinking, Wow! I wonder how that could possibly have happened, with Jane plugging leaks in the FBI like the little Dutch boy and the dike.”
“Despite Jane, the FBI leaks like a sieve. That’s how it happened,” Lucas said.
After a deliberate silence, Rae said, “Maybe. Maybe the FBI. But you’re up to something, you sneaky shit. I can tell. You’re getting rid of witnesses, that being Bob and me.”
“You have no faith in my integrity; you should be ashamed,” Lucas said.
“I got plenty of time to be ashamed when it turns out that I’m wrong. Until then, I say you’re a sneaky shit and you’re up to something.”
When he got off the phone, Lucas considered shaving and getting a shower, but he figured Jane Chase would be calling about the time he got in the shower, so he lay back on the bed and waited.
She called ten minutes later; twelve minutes after eight o’clock.
“You up?”
“Almost. You have something for me?”
“I’ve got something to do, if you guys aren’t doing anything else.”
“I sent Bob and Rae home,” Lucas said. “They’re getting on the plane now. I gotta get some tickets myself. Maybe get out of here tomorrow morning.”
“One more day. Two at the most,” she said. “You’re my good-luck charm.”
“I saw you on TV,” Lucas said. “Great move there, taking off the jacket, showing the gun. You looked hot, in that eastern-establishment, women’s-college way. There’s gonna be a made-for-TV movie about you. Somebody’s already writing it.”
“Lucas?” she said, sweetly. “Fuck you.”
He laughed and asked, “What do you want to do?”
“We’re talking to everybody who got letters and especially a guy who got what we think is a first-generation letter. We got a list of names from him. Unfortunately, it’s a long list. I’d like you to come in and chat with him. He’ll be here, with his lawyer, at nine, which gives you about forty-seven minutes to get here. Wait. Forty-six.”
“I can almost do that,” Lucas said. “I might be a few minutes late. I need a bagel or two.”
* * *
—
WHEN PRESSED, Lucas could clean up and get out the door in seventeen minutes, in jeans, casual shirt, and sports jacket; a suit and tie took him twenty. Twenty minutes after Chase called, he was in the Watergate restaurant, collecting two bagels with cream cheese.
The hotel had called a cab and as he was heading for the front door, bagel bag in hand, he ran into Jeff Toomes, the hotel security man and ex-cop who’d tipped him off about being followed by Stephen Gibson. “I saw Bob and Rae on their way out of here,” Toomes said. “They said they were going home . . . You must be getting close on the 1919 shooter.”
“Maybe close,” Lucas said, edging toward the door.
Toomes shook his head. “Goddamned country is going to hell in a handbasket. When did we get to the place where we shoot children because of politics?”
“Hate to say this, but I saw it coming,” Lucas said. “Maybe not this exact thing, shooting kids, but this level of craziness. The rats have finally gotten out of the woodwork.”
“When some crazy guy shoots up a church, you think, okay, he was nuts, he cracked, went psycho,” Toomes said. “With all these guns floating around, what do you expect? Background checks are bullshit. That guy who shot up the concert in Nevada, killed all those people? He bought all his guns legally. So that happens. But this guy, shooting a kid . . . he’s not exactly your basic psycho, is he? He’s a psycho, but he thought he was working for a political program.”
Lucas said, “You’re exactly right, Jeffrey. We might not be able to stop the undetected psychos, but if a guy’s got a program and if we can figure it out, we got a chance.”
“Okay. You’re gonna find him, aren’t you? I mean you, personally.”
“Yeah.”
“Listen, when you find him, kill the motherfucker.”
Lucas didn’t answer, but reached out and tapped Toomes once on the chest.
* * *
—
THE WEATHER HAD CHANGED OVERNIGHT, an overcast setting in from the west, with only a sliver of blue on the eastern horizon. The clouds had a meanness about them, as well: the arrival of autumn in Washington, a hint that summer was on the wane?
A wind kicked some scrap paper down the street and there was a coolness to it, a briskness, that Lucas felt through his summer jacket as he waited for the cab. A chill.
Sunday morning, coming down.
* * *
—
FRANCIS BACON was being treated well in a conference room at FBI headquarters. Chase’s assistant met Lucas at the entrance and escorted him through a maze of hallways and elevators to the room where Bacon was sitting, a lawyer at one elbow, a dish of nuts and a can of ginger ale at the other, talking with three agents, including Chase.
Chase pointed at a chair and said to everyone, as Lucas sat down, “We’re being joined by the Marshals Service. Lucas Davenport.”
To Lucas, she said, “We’re getting a list of everyone Mr. Bacon can think of who might conceivably have sent him the letter. Somebody well spoken, educated, uses some tech, has a computer and a laser printer . . . what else?”
“Angry,” Lucas said. “Maybe, quietly angry. Somebody who might work hard at a real job, but thinks everybody is taking advantage of him. People who don’t work. People who don’t respect American ideals.”
“Shoot, I don’t know anybody who doesn’t think that,” Bacon said. He was a blue-eyed, square-faced, snub-nosed man in a plaid shirt and jeans, who reminded Lucas of an electrician who’d done work on his lake cabin. “I’m not talking about people like me. I mean, I know I’m a right-winger. But I mean
like average people. Or teachers. Or lefties. They’re as pissed as we are.”
“This guy isn’t quite like that, though,” Lucas said. “He might make you a little nervous, but you don’t know exactly why. Might look at you a little sideways. Might look stressed, like he can’t relax. Maybe is a bachelor, but maybe divorced and angry about that. Tells you what’s what, and expects you to agree with him and you kind of go along with it, because you get this feeling that you really don’t want to piss him off.”
Bacon said, “Huh.” He scratched his nose, looked at his lawyer and then at Chase, and said, “Let me look at that list you’ve been writing down.”
Chase pushed a yellow legal pad across the table, and Bacon scanned it, then asked, “You got a pen?”
Chase slid a pen across to him, and he spent a moment, working down the list. “Kinda surprises me, but there’s more than one like that,” Bacon said. He pushed the list over to Lucas: four names had check marks next to them.
Lucas looked at Chase. “I’ll take these four.”
“What do they do?” Chase asked Bacon. “Do they have jobs? What do you know about them?”
Bacon said he thought Carl Stanley and Rollie Klein had spent time in prison, Klein for robbery, he thought, and Stanley for embezzlement. He’d met both, and both were the kind described by Lucas: they seemed smart, even educated, and maybe a little crazy.
Elias Dunn and Harold Sandberg, he thought, weren’t criminals, but were right-wing, hard-core, smart, and definitely educated. Dunn was an engineer, Bacon thought, but he didn’t know what kind; Sandberg was a moderately unsuccessful inventor. “He makes some money from his inventions, but not too much. He thinks he’s always getting cheated and he’s sort of . . . out there. But he is smart, and a little crazy, and he does use computers.”
One of the agents went away with the list of four names and came back ten minutes later with addresses for all four men, and printouts of the rap sheets for Klein and Stanley. Bacon was apparently right about Dunn and Sandberg—Dunn had no criminal record at all, Sandberg had been arrested for disturbing the peace during a political demonstration in New York City, but the charges had been dropped.
Klein had once been a minor official at the Port of New York and had been convicted of large-scale theft, misdirecting entire cargo containers of consumer products from Europe to warehouses operated by accomplices, then covering the misdirection with forged paperwork. Klein had claimed that he had nothing to do with the thefts, that he’d been framed by higher-ups at the port, who were cooperating with a New York organized crime family. He refused to roll over on accomplices, claiming that he didn’t have any, because he didn’t commit the crime. He did three years in prison and apparently had been radicalized while he was inside.
Stanley had been convicted of setting up a phony charity that collected money for the ostensible purpose of feeding homeless people in Washington. He may have fed a few, but most of the donated money he simply stole, to feed a gambling habit. He’d done eighteen months in a federal prison. He had an erratic history of political involvement, as a money-raiser and bundler for both Democratic and Republican political campaigns.
“Klein’s a possibility, depending on what happened to him in prison. I don’t like him much, not for shooting a kid. He was a schemer, not a hitter. No history of violence,” Lucas said, scanning the rap sheets the agent had brought back. “He got out two years ago. Maybe somebody could talk to the warden, see what kind of rep he had, who his friends were.”
Chase pointed at one of the other agents, and he said, “I got it.”
“I don’t like Stanley at all,” Lucas said. “He’s a hustler, and a hustler’s not going to make the mistake of murdering a kid. I mean, he might kill somebody, but he’d want an explicit payoff and right now. Not something vague, not something later. Since we know who set up the website, we know he hasn’t been offered a payoff.”
“We’ve got nothing on Dunn, not much on Sandberg,” Chase said.
Lucas went back to Bacon: “How’d you meet Dunn and Sandberg?”
“At lectures. You know, you get these retired generals and admirals and so on, they set up blogs and start commenting on world affairs—and they write books and give talks. A lot of them are really, really conservative. You see a lot of the same faces at these things. People ask questions, go back and forth, you get to know who some of the smart ones are. Dunn and Sandberg are smart. Sandberg’s hard-core and he lets you know it. Say if a general seems weak, he’ll tell him to his face. And he gets really, really angry. Dunn doesn’t talk much, but . . . you get a feeling about him. He could do something. He doesn’t seem angry, but he always asks the toughest questions. Sometimes, even the hard-right guys don’t want to answer.”
“Like what?” Lucas asked.
“Like, ‘What’s your program? You say all this stuff, but what’s your program? What do you want to do?’ Stuff like that. He wants specifics on how somebody will get things done. How they’ll change the world. If the guy starts talking about raising money for candidates or lobbying or linking up websites, Dunn will shake his head and walk away.”
Lucas turned to Chase. “I like that. And I like Sandberg, the angry thing.”
Chase went to Bacon: “If you had to choose one, which would you pick?”
Bacon had to think it over, finally shook his head. “I don’t know. Like I said, there’s something about Dunn that’s spooky. But Sandberg . . .”
Lucas asked Chase, “Can you get access to their IRS records?”
“Yes. I’ll have to put together some paper, but I could have it this afternoon.”
“Do that, then. Have your analysts look at it.”
“What are you going to do?” Chase asked.
“We’ve got their addresses. I’ll cruise them, take a look. Call me as soon as you get the IRS stuff. I want to know where they work, where their money comes from. I’d like to talk to their employers.”
* * *
—
LUCAS CAUGHT A CAB BACK to the hotel, checked the addresses for Dunn and Sandberg. They both lived in Virginia, Sandberg close-in, Dunn farther south. He got in the Cadillac and headed out.
Sandberg lived in a semi-crappy apartment complex in Manassas, two-story red-brick buildings, not new, shaggy lawns, no particular amenities. He wasn’t home: a young couple, apparently coming back from a central laundry room, toting two plastic baskets full of folded clothing, said they hadn’t seen him for a couple of days. Lucas asked about his car, and the woman said that he drove a Toyota FJ Cruiser that he’d had repainted a military green. “Blue one day, green a week later. An ugly Army green,” she said.
“And he hasn’t been around?”
She pointed to the next door down the hall: “I live right there. The walls are about an inch thick. I’m standing in the kitchen, I can hear every word from his TV.”
“Worse than that,” the man said. “We heard him fart one time.”
The woman: “That’s true. Anyway, we think we did.”
“We did,” the guy said. “He also boils cabbage. You can smell it right through the walls. Which explains the farts.”
They didn’t know about his political affiliations: “We don’t talk.” They had the idea that he might have had something to do with a commercial sign manufacturer, from T-shirts they’d seen him wearing.
* * *
—
LUCAS WALKED AWAY, a thrill crawling up between his shoulder blades. Whoever the killer was, he hadn’t expected him to be home. And he thought he knew where he might be going. Sandberg was now at the top of his personal list. He called Chase, told her to pound on the Sandberg material from the IRS. “He looks real to me,” Lucas said. “I think he’s a candidate.”
* * *
—
DUNN’S HOUSE WAS IN WARRENTON, half an hour west of Manassas, Lucas tracking his way in
with his nav app. The place was impeccable, the lawn perfectly green, perfectly cut, the house a perfectly efficient pale yellow cuboid with white trim. No sign of a car, but then, it was midday and Dunn might be shopping or at a park or whatever. An engineer, Bacon thought.
He rang the doorbell, got no answer, peeked through the door window and saw an interior as impeccably neat as the lawn.
The nearest house was thirty yards away, with a red minivan parked in the driveway. Lucas went that way. When he knocked, an elderly man came to the door, peered out, opened the door and asked, “Can I help you?”
An elderly woman was doing something at a dining room table at the back of the house, and called, “Who is it, Tommy?”
Lucas identified himself and the woman came to listen. They’d lived next to Dunn for seven years, said that he was quiet, standoffish but friendly enough, divorced, a civil engineer. “I guess he works all over the place,” the man said. “I don’t think he has a regular employer, he’s freelance.”
“Right now he’s working on a job down in Gainesville, that new development. I saw his truck down there and I thought I saw him, too,” the woman said.
“Have you see him around today?” Lucas asked.
“Not today, but we haven’t been around much today, we’re helping our daughter move,” the man said.
The Gainesville job site would be on his way back to Washington, the woman said: “It’s right off the highway, but . . . today’s Sunday. There won’t be anybody working.”
Lucas thanked them, took a last look at the Dunn house, and headed back east toward Washington. Had Dunn skipped? Had Sandberg skipped? Maybe they were out on the river, rowing their boats. He spotted the new Gainesville development, raw dirt and idle heavy equipment sitting around, doing nothing on a cool Sunday afternoon. Then he saw a man get into a trailer . . .
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