Twisted Prey

by John Sandford

  She buzzed him in. Inside the door was an enclosed booth for mail, with mailboxes on the outside for the residents and an enclosed area behind them that would allow the mail carrier to insert mail in the open backs of the boxes without needing keys to open them. No camera was monitoring the booth’s door.

  Lucas tested the door: locked, but the lock was crappy, and the door rattled in its frame. He continued on into the building, took the first left, walked down to the end of the hall and into the office, where a woman sat at a desk behind a service counter. She looked up from her computer and asked, “What’s going on?”

  Lucas flashed his ID and badge at her, said, “I’m a U.S. Marshal. We are trying to talk to Thomas D. Pope, who we understand lives here.”

  She looked puzzled, and said, “I know everybody who lives here. There’s no Thomas Pope.”

  Lucas said, “Huh? Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely positive,” she said. “Are you sure you got the name right?”

  Lucas scratched his head. “I got the name right, but I might have the wrong apartment building . . . I’m navigating with a description and don’t have an exact address, as such.”

  “You need an address,” the woman said. “There are about a million apartment buildings around here. This is a nice one, but there are quite a few that look like it.”

  Lucas rubbed his nose. “Well, shoot, I guess I’m going to have to do it the hard way. Getting an exact address is a little harder than it usually would be, since the guy moves around a lot.”

  “I wish I could help you . . .”

  “Well, not your fault . . . Have a good day.”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS WALKED BACK toward the main entrance, but, instead of going out, he passed the elevators and then took a staircase up to the second floor. Hallways stretched in both directions from the landing, burgundy carpet in one direction, blue in the other. Nobody was in the hallway; the complex was white-collar, and residents were at work. If he needed to black-bag Ritter’s apartment, there wouldn’t be a lot of people around, and he saw no security cameras. He went back down the stairs, headed toward the exit.

  At the mail booth, he checked for movement inside and out, grabbed the doorknob and put all of his weight against the door, pushing it sideways toward the door hinges, and with an additional punch from the shoulder, the door popped open. He looked around again, stepped into the booth. The backs of the mailboxes were all identified by name and apartment number. Lucas scanned them, found Ritter’s. A half dozen pieces of mail sat inside it, and he quickly thumbed through them while listening for footsteps. Three ads, an electric bill, and a bank statement.

  He stuck the bank statement in his jacket pocket, replaced the rest of the mail. The lock on the door had a turn bolt on the inside, and he unlocked it, stepped outside, and pushed the door shut behind him. Maybe the mail carrier would think he’d forgotten to lock it.

  He walked outside, let the stress fall away in the sunshine. Mail theft: a federal felony, if anybody found out about it, but nobody would.

  He hoped.

  * * *

  —

  HE WALKED BACK around the building. The heat was stifling, and though he’d only been out of the Evoque for a few minutes, the interior was already intolerably hot. He started the truck, stood outside briefly, peeling off his jacket while the air conditioner took hold, got back in, and opened Ritter’s bank statement.

  The statement listed routine payments to fifteen or twenty different places—gas, electric, water, cable, Visa, Amex. The incoming money was more interesting. He found what appeared to be weekly paychecks from a company called Flamma Consultants.

  He stuck the letter in his hip pocket: he’d shred it and flush it down the toilet back at the hotel.

  * * *

  —

  AS HE WAS HEADED BACK across the Potomac, he took a call from Rae Givens. “We talked to your man Forte, and we’re on our way down to New Orleans right now. We’ll be flying back straight into D.C. He got us rooms at the Watergate Hotel. I said, ‘Are you kiddin’?’ and he said, ‘No, why would I be?’ I said, ‘Okay’ . . . So we’ll see you there tonight.”

  A second call came from Forte himself, with information about Ritter. “There’s not much on him in the files; we’re not allowed to see his income tax returns, but we did take a look at his Army records and his passport. He did three tours in Iraq, got good evaluations, landed a job with Delta and looked like he was in there for life. Instead of reenlisting a third time, he dropped out. His passport would suggest he’s been out of the country, in Iraq, Kuwait, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, for most of the time since then.”

  “A guy who knows his way around. A hard guy.”

  “Yes . . . Did you get anything?”

  “I did. I’ll tell you, Russell, I’m going back to the hotel to write this up, but, basically, Smalls’s accident was no accident. It was an assassination attempt and a murder, and Ritter was in it up to his neck. His truck was used to run Smalls and Whitehead off the road.”

  “Lucas, you gotta be sure,” Forte said. “It’s too hot to be wrong.”

  “I am sure now, but I can’t prove it yet. Between us, we have to figure out where to go with this. Think about it.”

  “Write it all up, in detail, don’t leave a single fuckin’ thing out of it. If they smell you coming for them, they might not try to beat you up again. And next time they might come with guns.”

  “Bob and Rae . . .”

  “Are a good idea, but might not be enough. I need to know everything you get, in case you have a problem.”

  Like getting shot, Lucas thought, smiling to himself. “I’ll send you an email, Russell. Later this afternoon.”

  * * *

  —

  AT THE HOTEL, Lucas made a few notes, then shredded Ritter’s bank statement and flushed it. That done, he kicked off his shoes, dropped onto the bed, and used his burner phone to call a St. Paul friend named Kidd, a painter and an expert in computer databases. Kidd’s wife, Lucas believed, was a jewel thief, but that was another story.

  Kidd came up, and Lucas identified himself—“Oh-oh. Using a burner?”—and asked Kidd what his favorite charity was.

  “Other than myself? The Minneapolis Institute of Art. Weather’s a big deal over there, I understand,” Kidd said.

  “I will give a thousand dollars to the institute if you can dig up some stuff on the Internet and tell me how I could have done it myself,” Lucas said.

  “What’s it all about? That you have to use a burner to even ask me the question?”

  “It’s about a murder and an assassination attempt . . .”

  Kidd had helped Lucas with the original investigation of Taryn Grant. Like Lucas, he believed that Grant was a murderer and that she had gotten to the Senate through a murderous political trick. Lucas explained about the accident, and what he’d found about Ritter, and told him about Jack Parrish and Heracles.

  “I, uh, would have a hard time explaining how I came up with the connection between Ritter and Flamma,” Lucas said. “I need to be able to make the connection on the ’Net. You know, like I did some research, and there it was. I need it quick.”

  Kidd said he’d start looking. “I’d like to see you get Grant. She’s your basic fascist thug, but with great tits,” he said.

  From the background, Lucas heard Kidd’s wife, Lauren, shout, “Hey! I’m standing right here.”

  “Call me at this number,” Lucas said. “Don’t use my regular one. I worry about being tracked.”

  “As you should,” Kidd said. “Give me an hour or two.”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS SPENT AN HOUR putting together an email to Forte, explaining how he’d tracked Ritter, leaving out the part about stealing the bank statement. He saved the email to his laptop but didn’t sen
d it. He went back to the bed, closed his eyes, and thought about the case.

  So far, he had nothing on Grant or Parrish. They were the ones he needed to get to. If he could nail Ritter for the murder of Whitehead, he could talk to the West Virginia cops about a prosecution. Looking at life in a West Virginia prison would be a powerful incentive to talk about Grant and Parrish.

  Of course, Ritter might be one of those hard-nosed stoics who’d take pride in not talking, who’d go to prison first.

  * * *

  —

  KIDD CALLED BACK.

  “You said you already knew about Heracles. If you look at the company’s incorporation papers—I’ll send you a link—you’ll find the list of officers. If you run the officers, you’ll see that they’re also the officers of two other companies, Flamma Consultants and Inter-Core Ballistic Products.”

  “Wait—there’s a direct connection among Heracles, Flamma, and Inter-Core?”

  “Not technically direct, but, yeah, they’re all run by all the same people.”

  “Kidd . . . this is serious shit. I’m throwing an extra ten dollars at the museum.”

  “Thanks, ol’ buddy. Anyway, if you run Flamma Consultants, you’ll find an online article published in last September’s Combat Tech Review magazine called ‘CanCan Dancers.’ In the gun world, suppressors—silencers—are called cans. In that article, you find a picture of Ritter and a couple of other guys all geared up, testing some big-bore silencers at a rifle range in Virginia . . . and Ritter is ID’d as an employee of Flamma. That’s how you tied them together.”

  “Excellent,” Lucas said. “I owe you.”

  “Actually, you owe the museum. A thousand and ten dollars. The original Flamma, by the way, was a famous Roman gladiator, which fits with the whole Heracles We read the classics thing. Oh, and let me encourage you to look at that magazine article. Ritter was testing that silencer on an M2010 sniper rifle, which is like a .300 Winchester Magnum and has an effective range of twelve hundred meters. In other words, they can shoot you in the back from more than half a mile away.”

  “Thanks for the tip,” Lucas said, “I’ll go hide under the bed. Listen, this Inter-Core Ballistics . . . I met this lawyer out here who told me an interesting story about a Pentagon bid . . .”

  He told Kidd what Gladys Ingram told him about a company that had outbid her client on a contract for lightweight side-panel armor for military vehicles. Lucas was checking his notes as he described his meeting with Ingram: “Her client was Malone Materials. If you could check around and see what happened with that particular lawsuit . . .”

  “I hate that kind of shit. Good guys die because of it,” Kidd said. Lucas knew Kidd had served in an unusual military unit as a young man. “I’ll get back to you—I’ve got extensive resources at the Pentagon. You go hide under the bed.”

  Rather than hiding under the bed, Lucas called up the text for the email to Forte, added the information about Flamma, which he supposedly found himself on the Internet, and sent it off.

  * * *

  —

  GRANT AND PARRISH: time to look at where they lived.

  He got his jacket and went back out, spent the afternoon cruising their houses, which weren’t far apart, in Georgetown.

  Grant had a mansion, as was fitting for a billionaire, while Parrish lived in a town house. Lucas pulled out his iPad and entered Parrish’s address: it popped up on Zillow, which showed it sold three years earlier for $1,450,000. Three bedrooms, three baths, “close to M Street shopping.”

  Not bad for a guy who’d never worked for anything other than the federal government and maybe two or three years at a private business, Lucas thought. It would be interesting to see if he had a mortgage and, if so, how large it was.

  In the meantime . . .

  He drove over to M Street to see if that was a big deal—and it was, he supposed. It was like Madison Avenue meets Greenwich Village, mixing high-end clothing boutiques with burger joints, bars, and yuppie-oriented bicycle shops.

  He got a decent burger, drank a couple of Diet Cokes, watched the Washington women walking by, almost all of them clutching cell phones. He asked the waiter where he might buy a book. The waiter had no idea, but a woman who overheard the question told him there was a used-book store three blocks down the street.

  He spent a half hour browsing there, found a Carl Hiaasen hardcover novel, Skinny Dip, selling for $5.98, bought it and took it back to the hotel.

  * * *

  —

  HE’D LEFT the burner phone in the closet safe, and when he checked it he found a call from Kidd that had come in twenty minutes earlier. He called back, and Kidd said, “Okay, it’s as bad as you thought. I’ve got some ways to check on information . . . that most people wouldn’t be able to use. The information is public, and it’s out there, so I worked backward through a lot of it.”

  “I don’t know what that means,” Lucas said.

  “It means that after you find some information, after you know what you’re looking for, you can usually find some other way to get to it. Something you could have at least theoretically gotten to. For example, if you know that a company did X, you can often find references to X as the nine hundredth entry on a Google search. Nobody looks for it there—it would take forever. But if you know it’s there and you’ve got specific search terms . . .”

  “Got it,” Lucas said. “So what was nine hundredth on the list?”

  “The guys who run Heracles and Flamma invented Inter-Core Ballistics after the Army began looking for bidders on the armor panels. When they won the bid, they paid another company down in Florida, Bishop Composites, to make the armor. Inter-Core was the middleman on the deal. When I looked up Bishop, it turns out that their stuff had failed earlier tests for shrapnel resistance. They recycled their product through Inter-Core, and, this time, they passed the tests.”

  “Was it different armor or the same?”

  “As far as I can tell, it appears to be identical. Let me make that a little stronger: it was identical. After they failed the earlier tests, they were stuck with a lot of the plate, so they gave Inter-Core a cut-rate price. Bishop looks to have sold around thirty-five million in plate, and, from looking at their financial statements, it appears that Inter-Core took about twenty percent of that.”

  “Twenty percent? Seven million for doing nothing?”

  “Not for doing nothing: Inter-Core had to fix the deal.”

  “Tell me how I get to that,” Lucas said.

  * * *

  —

  KIDD DID, with explicit directions of where and how to search legally. Lucas understood most of what he found, although only a forensic accountant could pull it all together. He thought about it, and called Gladys Ingram.

  “Marshal Davenport,” she said. “Nice to hear from you. How’s the investigation going?”

  “After you told me about your Malone Materials lawsuit, I went looking for information about Inter-Core Ballistics and found that it tied in to my investigation. I’d like to pass some computer links to you. You probably have much better information resources than I do, so I thought . . . you could take a look, and if you found anything interesting, you might pass it back to me.”

  “Sure. We still represent Malone, and I have an intern who was born with a silver computer in her mouth . . . What’d you find?”

  Lucas gave her a few of Kidd’s key discoveries—she’d find the rest herself, or her intern would. Then, Lucas hoped, it would appear that the information was flowing from her to him rather than from him to her.

  When she had Lucas’s notes, Ingram said, “I’m impressed. I see why you made money on the Internet.”

  “Yeah, well, it isn’t all that hard,” Lucas said modestly. “If I had more time, I think I could probably find even more . . . Anyway, get back to me.”

  “I will.”

>   “And soon.”

  “Yes.”

  9

  Parrish was let into Grant’s house by a housekeeper who told him that Taryn Grant was in her “study”: the SCIF in the basement.

  Grant was standing behind her desk, talking into a hardwired phone. She used a yellow pencil to point him at a chair.

  He sat, and while she talked to somebody about developing a new line of Samsung cell phone apps—it sounded crooked to Parrish, but what did he know?—he considered lying to her about the attempt to mug Davenport.

  And decided against it.

  Grant was saying, to someone, “Look: I don’t want you to copy the code. I want you to look at what the code produces and I want you to produce the identical fuckin’ app with a different batch of code and I want you to translate it into fucking Zulu. Are the fuckin’ Zulus writing their own apps? Then find out. Call me back tomorrow. I want numbers.”

  Grant was wearing a white blouse and an ankle-length white skirt, both with cutouts that looked like lace and offered peeks at what lay beneath. What lay beneath, Parrish thought, was either nothing at all or a body stocking that precisely matched her complexion.

  Either way, it wouldn’t affect him much. Like Grant, he found power more compelling than sex. A quiet deal meeting at the Pentagon or the Senate Office Building, with serious people, was far more compelling than a piece of ass. Anybody’s ass.

  Grant put the phone on the hook, and said to Parrish, “I mean, Jesus, how hard can it be?”

  “What are you trying to do?”

  She inspected him, rolling the yellow pencil between her fingers like a baton, and decided to take ten seconds for the answer. “There are about a billion apps for the Samsung phone and the iPhone. The apps are mostly in the major languages. So you take the best ones and you redo the code so nobody can sue you for plagiarism, or whatever that would be, and put it into a non-English language that doesn’t have that app. Like Zulu. There are ten million Zulu speakers, and I suspect about eighty percent of them have cell phones. Eight million phones times two bucks for an app is worth doing—especially if you can translate the same app into a whole bunch of other non-major languages that add up to a billion people or so, and if developing the app costs you ten grand.”