What the hell, he had a minute. Lucas pulled over, made a U-turn and went back to a turnoff into the development. The trailer was battered-looking, like every construction trailer Lucas had ever seen. He knocked on the door and a man shouted, “Who is it?”
* * *
—
THE MAN’S NAME WAS SPENCER MONROE and he was a foreman on the job site who’d come in to look at grading plans.
“He wouldn’t be working today. I got no idea what he does on weekends,” Monroe said of Elias Dunn.
Monroe was a large red-faced man sitting behind a metal desk with an illegal paper spike stacked with spiked papers. A bright yellow hard hat was hung on a rack behind him. “He put in a full day on Friday. Why are you looking for him?”
“We want to talk to him about a friend of his, actually,” Lucas said. “A background check for a federal job.”
“That’s a weird thing to do on a Sunday,” Monroe said; there was a tone of skepticism in his voice.
“We normally wouldn’t, but I was supposed to meet him at his house,” Lucas lied. “Said it was the only time he had free. But he wasn’t there.”
“Huh. He’s normally a reliable guy. Punctual,” Monroe said. “So you’re not investigating the murders?”
“What murders?”
“A guy who worked here,” Monroe said. “Him and his sister were killed up by The Plains.”
Lucas thought his mouth might have dropped open. “The Stokeses?”
“Yeah, Randy Stokes and his sister, she was, like, Roberta or something. You know about them?”
“Rachel,” Lucas said. “I don’t know exactly where I am. I’ve been following a navigation app. How far is The Plains from here?”
Monroe shrugged: “Right up I-60—maybe fifteen minutes.”
“Then how far is it from Warrenton?”
Another shrug. “I dunno. Maybe ten, fifteen minutes.” He picked up a pencil and drew a triangle on a piece of scratch paper and made points at the tips of each angle. “This is us here in Gainesville. This is The Plains, this is Warrenton.”
“Did Elias Dunn know Randy Stokes?”
“Sure. I don’t think they’d hang out together, they wouldn’t be pals. Randy was sort of a dumbass and El isn’t. But they’d run into each other. In fact, I think I seen them talking.”
“Did Stokes ever talk about his shooting hobby?”
“All the time—that’s about all he did talk about, other than how unfair life was. Drank like a fish, hungover every morning. I’m not the big boss here, but I kinda think Randy wasn’t going to make it through to the end of this project. He was going to get his sorry butt fired for pure laziness.”
* * *
—
LUCAS WALKED OUT to his car and called Chase.
She picked up and said, “We haven’t gotten the IRS—”
“Forget it,” Lucas said. “It’s Elias Dunn.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE
Lucas headed back to Warrenton and Dunn’s house. On the way, he called Henderson, who was in his car, on his way home from church. “Quite the interesting sermon,” Henderson said, without even saying hello. “The minister—junior minister, actually—spoke on the Book of Common Prayer, the history of it, and how it should guide individual members of different political beliefs. Quite enchanting, even if he did have his head up his ass. So, what’s going on?”
“I believe I’ve identified the shooter . . .”
“Yes!”
“. . . but I don’t have him yet. Can you either loan me your plane for a flight to Macon, Georgia, or get me a first-class ticket for a flight to Macon? For tonight?”
“Can’t get you the plane, my wife is in Los Angeles with some woman named Oona, trying to exhaust each other on Rodeo Drive.”
“Do you care?”
“I do not. I can get you on any flight you wish, any class you want. That’s because I know people. What time do you want to fly and where do you want to fly from?”
“National or Dulles, either one. Macon if possible, but I’ll take Atlanta. One flight if possible, before dark.”
“I’ll have my assistant call you back,” Henderson said. “I want you to call Porter and tell him. He’s now suspicious of our relationship and you need to kiss and make up.”
* * *
—
LUCAS CALLED PORTER SMALLS, who hadn’t gone to church, and who said, “I’ll look forward to the denouement. I’m looking at my vocabulary-word-of-the-day calendar, and denouement means the point in a narrative when the different pieces of the plot are pulled together and we reach the climax.”
“I knew that,” Lucas said.
“Well, you had all those hockey pucks hitting you in the head since childhood, so I’m always uncertain of where you stand, brains-wise,” Smalls said.
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. Stay in touch. I would like to hear something before your friend Henderson does.”
* * *
—
AT DUNN’S HOUSE, Lucas pounded on the door, got no response. The older couple in the nearest home were no longer there, so he moved to the other side of Dunn’s house and a woman came to the door, peered through the tiny door window, then shouted through it, “Who are you?” and Lucas held up his ID and badge and she opened the inner door.
“Federal marshal?” She had dirt on her face, as though she’d been cleaning behind the refrigerator.
“Yes. Have you seen Mr. Dunn today?”
“What’d he do?”
“We don’t know if he did anything,” Lucas said. “Have you seen him?”
“Yes, I have,” she said. “He was loading things into his truck early this morning and then he took off. To where, I don’t know. Somebody told me once that he has a cabin in West Virginia, but I don’t know that for sure. We don’t talk much. I think he went over to the Bixbys’ place before he left. The Bixbys are across the street in the red house.”
Lucas thanked her and headed across to the Bixbys. Again, the only person home was a woman, older, with carefully set silver hair and a pale British complexion and long British nose. She also looked through the door window before opening the door, although she didn’t shout through it. Lucas showed her his ID and asked about Dunn.
“My husband . . . they’re not exactly friends, but they talk from time to time.” Her accent was from farther south, like South Carolina. “Elias is a civil engineer and my husband is a building contractor, so they have things in common. I didn’t see Elias this morning, but I heard him talking to Frank. My husband, Frank. Elias was going on a short trip but won’t be here for the trash pickup, so he asked if he could leave a bag of trash with us, if we’d take it out for him.”
“That was this morning? And you still have the trash bag?”
“Yes, we do. We have a little trash and recycling corral out back. The bag is there. Do you need it?”
“Yes, I believe so. I’ll know in a few minutes when some FBI people show up. Why would Mr. Dunn leave his garbage?”
“Because we have crows,” the woman said. “They know all about the bags, and they’ll peck right through them to get at the contents and then they spread the stuff all over the street.”
“Okay. Could you show me that corral?”
* * *
—
THE CORRAL WAS A TEN-FOOT-WIDE square of red bricks surrounded by a five-foot-high woven fence, with a trash bag sitting by itself, in the middle of the square. Two rakes and a shovel were leaning against the fence, with an upended wheelbarrow.
“And that’s Mr. Dunn’s trash?”
“Yes, we haven’t put ours out yet.”
Lucas thanked the woman and walked into her backyard and called Chase. “Where are you?”
“We’re on the way.”
�
��Do you have a warrant?”
“Not yet. It’s a Sunday, that presents certain logistical difficulties. But we’ll get one.”
“I have a bag of trash that Dunn took to a neighbor’s house this morning. He said he was going on a trip and asked them to put it out for him.”
“Excellent. We don’t need a warrant for that. We’ll transport that as soon as we get there. We’ll be there in twelve minutes, according to my app.”
* * *
—
THE FBI ARRIVED IN THREE FORD SUVS. Chase hopped out, looked at Dunn’s house, and said, “We’ve got his truck make, model, and tag number. We’re looking for it. The judge who handles Sunday warrants may be playing golf, but I just got a text that says somebody knows where he is, and have gone to look for him. Where’s the garbage?”
Lucas showed her the garbage bag, and two minutes after that, the bag was on its way back to Washington.
The feds had the Rapid DNA technology that could provide a fast DNA result within two hours, although its findings couldn’t be used in court. What it could do was confirm that a suspect was almost certainly the producer of a particular sample of DNA. Whatever was in the garbage bag could be used to match DNA from the rifle used to shoot James Wagner and from the blood at the Stokeses’ house. A more scientifically advanced and court-acceptable DNA sample would be obtained from biological samples taken from the house and from Dunn personally, when they caught him.
Lucas sat with Chase in the back of one of the Fords, with two more feds in the front seats, and filled them in on the connection between Dunn and the Stokeses, and provided them with the names of the people at the job site who could confirm the connection.
“Do you think he’s running?” one of the front-seat feds asked.
“I don’t know why he would think we were closing in, unless he’s on a DNA register somewhere,” Lucas said, evading the question.
Chase said, “He isn’t. We don’t know his name at all, not from before today.”
“But he was known to at least some of these alt-right guys,” Lucas said.
“Yes.”
* * *
—
THEY TALKED ABOUT the case in general for twenty minutes or so, everything that everybody already knew, speculated on the possibility that more shooters would come out of the woods, or that an actual 1919-type extortion would occur, inspired by Audrey Coil’s website.
Chase was working her phone as they talked, trying to get the warrant moving, and then Lucas, bored, and another bored agent got out of the truck and walked around Dunn’s yard and peered through his windows. The blinds were firmly down on most of them, but where they could see in, the house was almost preternaturally neat. “Too neat,” the other agent said. “The guy’s an obsessive-compulsive at some level.”
* * *
—
WHEN THEY WALKED back to the truck, they found that Chase had gone across the street to interview Mrs. Bixby, and had apparently been invited inside. She reappeared in ten minutes and told Lucas, “Dunn lives by himself. Had a wife, they divorced a few years ago, her whereabouts are unknown, current name is unknown. No known personal friends, no visitors. Mrs. Bixby says he’s smart and not bad-looking, but there’s something that’s always been off-putting about him. I’m going to go talk to the lady in that house . . .”
She pointed to the first house Lucas had gone to—they’d seen the woman at the door, watching them—but before Chase could go that way, her phone dinged and since she carried it in her hand like a permanent appendix, she glanced at it and said, “We got the warrant.”
They headed for the house, and as they did, two more FBI trucks arrived, one with a crime scene crew. One of the agents who had arrived with Chase had a battery-powered lock rake, and they went through the front door without having to break anything.
As soon as they did, an alarm went off. Chase said, “Damnit, turn that thing off.”
The agent with the lock rake said, “I can turn it off, but I don’t think . . .” He found the alarm box in the kitchen, pulled out his cell phone, made a call and identified himself. “You know who I am and this is an urgent national security . . . then get me to that call center. Right now, fast as you can. Well, try . . .”
He put his hand over the microphone and said, “They’re switching me to the call center that services this alarm. But I can tell you right now, we’re too late. Somebody’s called Dunn and told him that we’re here.”
“Get the number for that phone,” Lucas said. “We can track the phone.”
The agent nodded and a moment later, went back to the call. He identified himself again, gave Dunn’s name and address, listened for a moment, then said, “Do not alert him. He’s a fugitive. If you need a more official order, we can email or fax you a form . . . We’ll do that.”
He hung up and said to Chase, “Dunn’s phone is dead. No response at all. He’s probably pulled the battery, or thrown it in a river. He probably knows it can be tracked.”
“That means he doesn’t know this alarm has gone off.”
The agent nodded. “He doesn’t. The alarm center couldn’t reach him.”
Chase turned to the other agents inside the house. “Move the crime scene van inside the garage. We’ll want to get the rest of the vehicles out of sight, in case he comes back.”
The agents started moving and Chase asked Lucas, “What do you think?”
“I don’t think he’s coming back. He took the garbage out two days ahead of time.”
“Where’s he going?”
Lucas shrugged: “Maybe he’s got a bolt-hole somewhere. Somebody mentioned that he might have a cabin in West Virginia . . .”
* * *
—
CHASE GOT INVOLVED with the crime scene team in taking the house apart. They got biologics from the drain in the shower, which were bagged for the more elaborate DNA tests. Lucas was interested in the procedures, and at one point, Chase came back and said, “He has a whole right-wing library in his office. Lot of theoretical stuff. Political commentaries. He seems more interested in Mussolini than in the Nazis.”
Lucas didn’t know what to make of that, and said so. After an hour of hanging out, he got a call from Henderson’s assistant who said, “You’re out of National at 3:14, arrive at Hartsfield-Jackson in Atlanta at 4:37. Couldn’t get you to Macon in one flight and it was faster to send you into Atlanta and then put you in a car. You’ve got a car, an SUV, reserved in your name at Hertz. Drive time from Hartsfield-Jackson to Tifton is two and a half hours.”
Lucas looked at his watch: almost one o’clock. It’d be tight. “I’ll take it.”
Lucas told Chase he was leaving. “There’s nothing for me here, that you can’t tell me by telephone.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Poke around. Maybe go home.”
“Give me one more day.”
Lucas shrugged. “To do what?”
She had no answer to that.
* * *
—
AS SOON AS HE WAS IN HIS CAR, Lucas called Russell Forte, his supervisor with the Marshals Service, who worked out of the service headquarters in Arlington. “It’s Sunday,” Forte said.
“Really? I thought it was Tuesday. We think we’ve identified the guy who shot the kid.”
“Can I put out a press release, taking credit?”
“Not yet. I need a gun.”
Silence. Then, “I assumed you had one. Or maybe several.”
“I need a rifle. I need it in the next hour and I need it in a case that I can ship on an airline.”
“Ah, Jesus, I’m in a canoe.”
“You can still canoe,” Lucas said. “Make a phone call, pull some strings, get me a rifle. Couple mags to go with it. Doesn’t need a scope or selective fire. I’ll pick it up at headquarters in one hour. Less tha
n an hour. Forty-five minutes. I won’t have time for a lot of paperwork.”
* * *
—
CHASE CALLED. “We got a little break. Nobody knows this but us chickens, but Senator Coil flew into National, stayed behind security and caught a flight to Atlanta. She’s on her way home.”
“Good. She won’t be on TV, at least, not right away. Listen, in case I run into him while I’m poking around, send me any photos you’ve got of Dunn.”
“We’ve got a couple, now. You’ll have them in five minutes. By the way, he might know we’re looking for him. About ten minutes after you left, the team found a second security system, one of those do-it-yourself things that sends video out to an internet site. They would have taken video of all of us walking around his house. If he has a computer with him, and checks the site, he’ll see us.”
“Why don’t you take down the cameras?”
“We’ve done that, Lucas. But we can’t even find where it’s going out to, the video that’s already been shot. Even if we find the security server, I doubt they’d take the site down, even if we yelled at them. I mean, they’ll have hundreds of surveillance videos coming in all the time, we can’t simply order them to shut down.”
“Figure something out,” Lucas said.
“We’re trying,” Chase said. “The big brains are scratching their heads. I don’t know what will come of it.”
“I thought you were a big brain.”
“Well, yes, but I’m on the strategy side. This problem is tactical,” she said.
“More left to the second lieutenants.”
“Exactly.”
* * *
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