Twisted Prey

by John Sandford

  Then there was a burst of light, and another, and Lucas thought maybe he’d been shot at, but there was no sound, and the lightning flash came from across the street rather than from behind him. He glanced that direction and saw a tall, thin Asian man holding a cell phone and a briefcase, and it registered in the back of Lucas’s brain that the Asian man had taken a cell phone photo of the fight . . .

  The flash also diverted the attackers. One of them took several running steps toward the Asian man, but another of the men shouted, “No! No! No!” as the Asian man turned and sprinted down the street. Lucas followed, slower than he might have if he hadn’t worn dress shoes to buy a suit.

  And Lucas began screaming: “Help! Help! Help!”

  He was loud and moving fast, and though there were few people on street, heads were turning their way. Lucas continued running for another hundred feet before risking another glance back . . . and saw the three men running in the opposite direction, before disappearing down a cross street.

  The Asian man had stopped ahead, and Lucas ran toward him and called out, “U.S. Marshal. Wait! Wait!”

  The man slowed, and Lucas got his ID from his jacket pocket and held it in front of him. Gasping for air, he stuttered, “I’m a . . . I’m a U.S. Marshal . . . Did you take a . . . a photo of that fight?”

  The Asian man nodded, and said, in perfect English, “Yes. Two pictures. Who were those men?”

  “I don’t know,” Lucas said. “Maybe muggers.”

  “I don’t think so,” the Asian man said. “They all wear masks. They all look the same. I don’t think muggers.”

  Lucas nodded. “Could you please send those photos to my phone?”

  “Yes, I will. Of course.”

  The photos came in: they were sharp enough, but all you could read from them were shapes and sizes. Lucas got the man’s name and address in Japan. He was staying at a Washington hotel, on a business trip.

  * * *

  —

  AS LUCAS shook the man’s hand, a cab came around the corner. Lucas jumped in front of it, and the driver ran his window down, and said, “I’ve got a call,” and Lucas said, “If it’s Figueroa & Prince, it’s me.”

  He was still breathing hard and sweating, and the driver looked at him doubtfully, said, “Well, okay, that’s where I was going.”

  Lucas got in the back, and said, “Watergate Hotel.”

  The driver pulled away, saying, “I could be wrong, but in my opinion it’s too goddamn hot to jog in a suit and tie.”

  “Gotta get your cardio where you can,” Lucas said. They passed the spot where he’d last seen the trio of men, but they were gone. He wouldn’t be going out again without a gun, but even if he’d had one, he didn’t know if he could have gotten it out in time. The three men had been closing fast, and looked competent, and maybe were armed. If he’d pulled a gun, they might have shot him. Still, he was . . . embarrassed. He’d had to run, and he’d been screaming for help like a little girl.

  “So how about them Nationals?” the driver asked.

  “I’m from Minnesota,” Lucas said, sinking back in the seat. “I’m a Twins fan.”

  The driver thought for a few seconds, and said, “Then I got nothin’.”

  * * *

  —

  AT THE HOTEL, he checked the recorder. Nobody had been in the room, as far as he could tell. And he called Rae. “How soon can you and Bob get here?”

  She said, “Oh-oh.”

  Lucas said, “Yeah.”

  * * *

  —

  WHEN HE GOT OFF THE PHONE, he was still high on adrenaline. He eventually put on some gym shorts, a T-shirt, and athletic shoes, went down to the fitness center, and ran off the high on the elliptical machine.

  Back in his room, he showered, concentrating on his back: he’d have a major bruise where the Maglite hit, he thought. Out of the shower, he watched the end of a Dodgers game from the West Coast, flopped on the bed, and thought about getting old. He’d barely cracked fifty, but he’d lost at least a step in the past ten years, and maybe two steps. The three muggers would have beaten the shit out of him.

  He spent some time brooding, and finally managed to get to sleep at two in the morning.

  He’d gotten up the next morning, had shaved, showered, and was about to go to breakfast when Forte called and said, “You’re not fucking around with this Heracles place, are you?”

  8

  Forte said, “These are bad guys, Lucas. Mercenaries. There have been a dozen complaints filed against them by military people in Iraq and Syria, and more by the Iraqi and Libyan governments. They shoot first and ask questions later, but it appears that we continue to contract with them. By ‘we,’ I mean the Defense Department and contractors working with foreign governments. Can’t tell about the CIA, but probably there, too.”

  “Do they work here in the U.S.?”

  “They’ve got no special status here,” Forte said. “They poke a gun at somebody, and that’s ag assault, and they go to jail. They’re not LEOs. Not law enforcement officers, no way, shape, or form.”

  “If they jumped me on the street . . .”

  “Did they do that?”

  “Somebody did,” Lucas said. He told Forte about the problem he’d had the night before, and described the three men; he left out the part about screaming for help like a little girl.

  “Well, there you go,” Forte said. “It sounds like what I imagine the Heracles guys are like, though I’ve never actually seen them myself. Most of what they call action executives are former SEALs, Delta, Force Recon, Rangers, that sort of thing. You didn’t see a gun?”

  “No. All three were wearing jackets that had some bulk—like they were wearing light armor, or maybe thick shirts, or padding of some kind, like they were ready for a fight,” Lucas said. “I suspect they were planning to take me down but not kill me. Killing me would cause somebody a much larger problem than what might pass as the mugging of an out-of-towner.”

  “You’re sure that’s not what it was?” Forte asked.

  “Yeah, I’m sure. They were all too neat. Uniform. They wore masks. They didn’t look like raggedy-ass muggers; they looked like . . . cops, actually.”

  “Here’s what I want you to do,” Forte said. “Write it up, all the details. Put those cell phone photos with it. I’ll file it as ‘Attack on a U.S. Marshal, Unsolved.’ Then if you identify one of the guys, we grab him, file charges. With you as the only witness, we might not get far with it, but we might be able to squeeze the guy while we’ve got him . . .”

  “Probably should have done that last night—or called the D.C. cops.”

  “I’ll call the cops, inform them. I can somewhat mask the time of your report. If they think you reported it immediately . . . well, let them think that. That way, we’re on record with two different agencies.”

  “All right.”

  “So, sounds like life is getting complicated, but that’s why you were hired,” Forte said. “What else are you going to do about it?”

  “Called Bob and Rae, for one thing. They’ll be talking to you guys about coming up here.”

  “We’ll clear them through. Now, about that Ford F-250 . . . There are forty-seven black F-250 short beds of last year’s model registered in the three zip codes surrounding the area where those plates were stolen. Black is a popular color, but the F-250 is pricey, so there weren’t as many as I expected . . .”

  Lucas: “The West Virginia cop I talked to . . .”

  “Armstrong,”

  “Yeah, he said the truck was new, but didn’t specify a year, so maybe we should look at this year’s, too.”

  “Nope. I talked to him this morning, soon as I got in, and he sent me some grab shots from the security video,” Forte said. “The taillights changed between the two years—it was last year’s model, not this year’s.�
��

  “Did you get the driver’s licenses and run them?”

  “I did. Got a whole bunch of hits, but nothing that went directly to Heracles. Several military people—more Navy than Army, but that could include SEALs. Criminal activity is all minor stuff. A few drunk driving arrests, domestics, like that.”

  “Can you get me the license photos?” Lucas asked.

  “We’re queuing them up now—my assistant is. You’ll have them in twenty minutes.”

  “Russell, thank you. I’ll keep you up to date.”

  “Stay safe,” Forte said. “I don’t like the sound of that thing from last night.”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS TOOK the elevator down, ate breakfast, took the elevator back up, and found forty-seven driver’s license photos attached to an email. Twelve were women, which, if not irrelevant, wouldn’t match any of the faces either he or the hotel security man had seen.

  He flipped through the forty-seven, returning a couple of times to the image of a James Harold Ritter, age thirty-nine. He resembled the man whose mask he’d pulled down. He’d been wearing a green tennis hat low on his forehead, so Lucas wasn’t positive about the ID, but the chin and mouth looked right. He got on the phone and called Schneider, the hotel security chief, and asked if Jeff Toomes was on duty. Toomes had seen the man he thought might have come from Lucas’s hotel room.

  Toomes was in the hotel, and Schneider said he’d send him up. He arrived ten minutes later, smelling faintly of onion rings. Lucas let him in, sat him at the desk in front of Lucas’s laptop, and let him scan the photos.

  “I don’t think so,” he said eventually. “Photos aren’t so great, but none of them ring a bell.”

  * * *

  —

  AS LUCAS took him to the door, Toomes turned, and said, “Let me show you something.”

  He swerved into the bathroom, where a box of facial tissue sat on the sink counter. He pulled out a sheet, tore off a quarter-sized piece, dropped the rest of it in the toilet, touched the small piece to the tip of his tongue, wetting it, wadded it into a small spitball, and pressed it into the peephole of the door.

  “These peepholes work both ways,” he said. “There was this freak who’d go around making movies of famous women who were walking around their room naked. He was shooting through the peephole. I’m told that you can buy special lenses for that specific purpose, on the Internet. Unless you want to take the chance that somebody’s looking at you, keep the spitball in it.”

  “I’ll do that,” Lucas said. “You’re good at this hotel security stuff, huh?”

  “Yeah, I am,” Toomes said. “A lot of weird shit happens in hotels. It’s interesting.”

  * * *

  —

  WHEN HE WAS GONE, Lucas called Forte. “I need everything you can find on James Harold Ritter. You’ve got his license info, so that’s a good start. Nothing’s too small.”

  “I’m in a meeting. Give me a couple of hours.”

  “Fine. I’m going to go scout his house, see what I can see,” Lucas said.

  “Easy, boy.”

  He did not leave immediately. Instead, he called Smalls, and said, “You’ve got a woman working for you at the cabin. Janet Walker . . .”

  “Yes, she runs a caretaking service for absentee landowners.”

  “I need her phone number,” Lucas said.

  Smalls went away for a while, then came back for the number. “Her cell phone; she usually answers right away.”

  She did. Lucas identified himself, and asked, “Do you have access to the Internet?”

  She said, “I live in West Virginia, not on the friggin’ moon.”

  “Great. Do you have it handy?”

  “I’m in the yard. I’d have to walk into the house.”

  “I’m going to send you eight or ten photographs. Tell me if any of them look like the guys you saw driving the F-250.”

  The whole round-trip with the photographs took five minutes. Lucas sent ten, and, after examining them, Walker said, “The third photograph—that looks like the driver. I’m not sure I could swear it was him, if it went to court, but it looks like him.”

  “Thank you,” Lucas said. “Keep this under your hat, if you would.”

  * * *

  —

  JAMES HAROLD RITTER.

  Lucas had three markers pointing at Ritter: his impression of the attacker’s face on the street; Walker’s identification; and the fact that he owned a black F-250. Could be a coincidence, with a little bit of a stretch, but Lucas felt he was on a roll, that Ritter was the one.

  Like most of the other people Lucas was trying to find, Ritter lived across the Potomac in Virginia, in what turned out to be a neatly kept condominium complex not far from where the F-250 plates had been stolen. The complex had individual covered parking spaces at the back of the building. Although Ritter’s driver’s license hadn’t included an apartment number, Lucas spotted the black Ford pickup, which did have an associated apartment number; the apartment number apparently included a vacant space beside the pickup.

  Lucas parked in a visitor’s lot and walked back to the F-250. There was nobody around in the noon heat, so he walked into the covered parking area and took a close look at the truck.

  Smalls had said that his Cadillac had been hit by the passenger side of the attacker’s vehicle, and when Lucas squatted at the back of the truck bed, he thought he could see a subtle distortion in the truck’s sheet metal. He checked the driver’s side for a comparison, and when he came back to the passenger side, the distortion—nothing as clear-cut as a dent or a tear—seemed even more apparent, like a quarter-inch wave in the flow of the metal.

  He walked down the side of the truck, to look at it from the front. The same distortion was visible, and the front right headlight cover had a small crack on the right side. He peered in the passenger-side window, but there was nothing visible on the seats. He pulled out a shirttail, used it to cover his hand as he tried all four doors. All four were locked.

  The truck had been recently washed, Lucas thought, dragging his shirttail-covered hand across it: it was virtually spotless, and even a heavy forensic examination might have trouble placing it in West Virginia. Still, the truck had been involved in an unusual impact: he wasn’t sure he’d found the truck that had taken Smalls and Whitehead off the road, but he’d found a solid candidate. Proving it would be another problem, a greater problem than simply knowing it.

  But what kind of impact would leave both trucks without obvious damage while still being violent enough to knock one truck right off the road? He thought about it . . .

  His first thought: what if Ritter and his friends had rigged a lattice of freshly cut tree trunks and hung it off the side of their truck? They would have had to put padding under the trunks, against the side of the truck, to prevent damage, but they’d want the raw timber to hit the Cadillac.

  It’d be simple enough. When Lucas was in the Boy Scouts, his troop had built rafts out of dead wood and rope and had floated down the Rum River on them. Hung on the side of a truck, the rafts would have worked well as protection against impact, and, even better, would have left evidence of wood contacting metal.

  But who would think of that?

  People who thought about killing other people in undetectable ways, Lucas figured. Professionals who were given a problem: knock a car off the road and down a bluff without any metal-on-metal contact. Given that dilemma, the tree-trunk-lattice idea would pop right up.

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS WALKED BACK to the Evoque, cranked it up, pushed the air conditioner to max, and called Carl Armstrong, the West Virginia accident investigator.

  “I may have found that F-250,” he said when Armstrong was on the phone. He described the truck’s condition, and asked, “Since you can see there was some impa
ct, but since it’s been washed . . . is there going to be anything there for you?”

  “If we can show there’s been an impact, we could question him about when it happened and why it is that the damage was both extensive yet subtle, and whether he reported the accident. That kind of damage would be uncommon—in fact, I’ve never run into anything like it. Be hard to explain.”

  Lucas told Armstrong about the tree-trunk-lattice idea, and after a moment Armstrong said, “That seems kinda unlikely. Not to say . . . stupid.”

  “I’ve given you an explanation,” Lucas said. “Do you think my idea could result in the kind of damage I’ve seen?”

  “Well . . .”—Lucas could visualize Armstrong scratching his head—“it could, I guess. If it was padded on the back side. Maybe something like a good solid rubber mat, that would do it. As far as finding hard forensic evidence . . . Sounds unlikely. For one thing, everything you find driving around eastern West Virginia you’ll find driving around Virginia. Pollen, and all that.”

  “Okay. I don’t want to do anything with it now, but I may be calling you to take a professional look, after we’re out in the open on the investigation.”

  “Happy to do it,” Armstrong said. “But, really, a lattice?”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS WALKED AROUND to the front of the condominium complex and went to the glass front door, which turned out to be the first of two doors. He could get inside the outside glass one, but the interior door was locked. There was a phone on the wall, with a sign that boldly said “DIAL 1 + APT. NUMBER,” and, below that, not so boldly, “Dial 1+00 for Management Office.” A domed security camera in the ceiling monitored the door and the phone.

  He called the office, identified himself to the woman who answered. “I’ll buzz you in. Take the first left and walk all the way down the hall to the end. We’re the last door on the left.”