Twisted Prey

by John Sandford

  “Ah, yeah—he runs Heracles. They call him the director,” Forte said. “Anyway, there’s no sign that any names that we know rented a car in Omaha. Probably used phony IDs.”

  “They fly into Omaha . . . What’s that? Six hours from the Twin Cities?” Lucas asked.

  “I checked on Google Maps. It’s six hours if you pay strict attention to the speed limit. If you let it out, seven miles over the limit, drive straight through, with one gas stop, less than that.”

  “Cell phone?”

  “Okay, there’s a problem,” Forte said. “Ritter placed a half dozen calls to various people around the D.C. area the day Weather was attacked. There were more calls the day before, and the day after, and every day since, all in the Washington metro area. Of course, everybody but a complete idiot knows that calls can be traced. His phone made the call; we don’t know that Ritter did.”

  “You know who he called?”

  “That’s where it gets interesting. In the days before and immediately after Weather was hurt, he called only four different guys, including Parrish and Claxson,” Forte said. “Parrish made quite a few other calls, but Claxson, Ritter, and the two other guys didn’t call anyone but Parrish and each other.”

  “Tell me that again,” Lucas said.

  “They only called each other and Parrish,” Forte said. “We know that if Ritter was the driver in West Virginia, he had at least one other accomplice, because that old lady saw two guys in the black truck. There may have been a third if they had a spotter, and they probably did. Then there’s Parrish and Claxson.”

  Lucas: “The other two guys, the accomplices, fly out to Omaha with Ritter and Claxson. They all leave their regular cells behind in Washington and take burners. Parrish uses the regular phones to call all the others to establish alibis. If that’s what happened, we should have the names of the two accomplices, too.”

  “Yes, we do,” Forte said. “I’m digging out their records right now.”

  * * *

  —

  FOR THE REST of the afternoon, Forte forwarded records to Lucas, including everything he could find for John McCoy and Kerry Moore, the other two men who were calling Ritter, Parrish, and Claxson around the time of Weather’s auto accident. Like Ritter, both McCoy and Moore worked for Flamma, the Heracles subsidiary. And both had been in elite Army or Marine units before they went private.

  Forte found photos of the other two, and Lucas was fairly certain that Moore, an ex-Marine, was the mugger he’d hit in the face.

  He called Rae with Moore’s information, including his apartment address in Virginia, and asked them to check him out. “I’m especially interested to know whether he has a black eye or a swollen nose,” Lucas said.

  “I’ll go now—I’m looking at his address on my iPad, and it’s only a half mile from Ritter’s. I’ll walk over, see if I can find a place to hang. If Bob’s not seeing anything at Parrish’s place, maybe you ought to switch him over here to keep an eye on Ritter’s.”

  Lucas did. By the end of the day, neither Ritter or Moore had shown up at their apartments—but they were young and single, so that wasn’t entirely improbable. At the same time, Rae couldn’t hang out any longer at the Starbucks she’d found, and Bob felt he might be conspicuous if he continued to park and repark on the streets around Ritter’s.

  Lucas called them in.

  * * *

  —

  THE THREE OF THEM had a late meal at the hotel, and Lucas laid out what he and Forte had found in the records.

  “So they did it,” Bob said. “If we can get this Armstrong guy to say he believes that Ritter’s truck was involved in the West Virginia hit, would that be enough to get a search warrant for Ritter’s apartment?”

  “Maybe, if we found the right judge,” Lucas said. “Forte may have some ideas about that.”

  Rae was shaking her head. “I have my doubts. We know, but it’s weak on paper.”

  “The other problem being, Ritter might have pulled the trigger, both on Smalls and Whitehead, and on Weather, but I mostly want to get the people behind Ritter,” Lucas said. “That looks to me like Grant, Claxson, and Parrish. We’re nowhere near those guys.”

  “Rousting Ritter will stir things up,” Rae said.

  “Yeah. I’m counting on that,” Lucas said.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN THEY FINISHED DINNER, Lucas called Armstrong in West Virginia: “Can you make it over here tomorrow to look at the truck?”

  “Yup. I’ll call my boss right now, and I’ll bring a tech with me,” Armstrong said. “What time do you want me there?”

  “How long will it take you to get here?”

  “Five hours, if we drive,” Armstrong said. “We could be out of here by seven o’clock, get there about noon.”

  “How about flying?” Lucas asked.

  “Rather drive,” Armstrong said. “We’d have to drive down to Charleston, wait for the plane, fly for an hour, get a car at the other end, and we’ve got some equipment—it would take almost as long to fly as to drive—and then we’d have to get back.”

  “So drive; we’ll plan to look at our guy at noon.”

  When he was off the phone with Armstrong, Lucas called Weather, and told her what he’d figured out.

  “Good. You learned a lot,” she said. “You’ve got the names of the men who hit me and murdered Last. You’ve always said that knowing was a big deal.”

  “It is,” Lucas said. “Now to bag them.”

  15

  Lucas, Bob, and Rae went out for breakfast together, and Lucas called Forte to tell him about the day’s plan. Forte thought the information they had was too sparse for a search warrant, but Lucas asked him to spot a friendly federal judge in case they found a bit more.

  “If it would help, I could call Smalls and see if he’d talk to the judge. Explain the seriousness of the situation,” Lucas said.

  “Also explain the seriousness of getting confirmed by the Senate in case a judge should be nominated for the appeals court,” Forte said.

  “He might do that,” Lucas said. “What do you think?”

  A long pause. “Call Smalls. He’s a lawyer, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then he’ll be aware that there might be some lines he wouldn’t want to cross . . . when making the request.”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS CALLED SMALLS on his burner and made the request. Smalls said, “I could do that. In fact, I know a judge down that way who’d probably give you a warrant with what you’ve got right now. Benjamin Park. Nice fellow. I’ll give you a ring after I talk to him.”

  “Are you in a safe spot?” Lucas asked.

  “I’m so safe that even I don’t know where I’m at,” Smalls said.

  When Lucas hung up, Rae said, “Sometimes this inside baseball makes me nervous, speaking of things ethics-wise.”

  Bob shook his head. “You know better than that. Almost everything in Washington is inside baseball, ethics-wise. Been that way since the git-go.”

  “Didn’t have as many lawyers at the git-go,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  SMALLS CALLED BACK at eleven o’clock, and said he’d spoken with the judge, who agreed to take an expedited look at a search warrant request.

  “I believe you’ll get it,” he said.

  They drove over to Ritter’s apartment complex in two cars, and Lucas led the way around back, where the truck was still sitting in the carport. They didn’t approach it until one o’clock, when Carl Armstrong and a technician named Jane Kerr rolled into the parking lot.

  They all got out, shook hands, and walked as a group to the black F-250. Lucas pointed out the ripples down the right side of the truck, and both Armstrong and Kerr took a look, running their hands over the panels, and Armstrong asked
Kerr, “Do you see it?”

  “I definitely see it,” she said. “I can feel it, too—at least as good as I see it.”

  Armstrong said to Lucas, “We’ve got templates from an undamaged truck just like this one, and when we fit the cutouts over the side of the truck, you’ll be able to see the damage more clearly. We’ll take photos in case we need the evidence.”

  “Great,” Lucas said.

  “In the meantime . . .” He jogged back to his SUV and pulled out a piece of what looked like white rubber. When he carried it back to the F-250, Lucas could see it was actually a cast made from the truck tire tracks they’d found on the mountainside where the logs had been dumped.

  Armstrong squatted next to the truck, held the cast up to one of the tires, and they all bent over to look. “Same tires,” he said. “They come as one of the standard options with the truck, but less than thirty percent are equipped with them. Not definitive, but supportive.”

  “Another straw on the camel’s back,” Bob said.

  * * *

  —

  THE SIDES AND FRONT END of the truck bed had been fitted with a steel rack to give it more carrying capacity and better tie-down capability. Kerr walked along the side of the bed with a Sherlock Holmes–style magnifying glass. Halfway down, she stopped, looked more closely, turned to Armstrong, and said, “Carl . . . take a look.”

  Armstrong took the magnifying glass to look at what appeared to be nothing at all. He said, “Huh,” and, “You guys want to look?”

  Lucas took the magnifying glass, and Armstrong took a mechanical pencil from his pocket and pointed at the truck, and said, “Right at the end of the pencil point.”

  Lucas looked, and under the glass could see three or four wispy beige threads clinging to a tiny nick in the steel rail. “What am I looking at?”

  “Those look exactly like the threads that were stuck to the padded side of the log. I’ll kiss your ass if they aren’t identical. We need to find as many as we can and collect them; a lab will tell us if they’re the same.”

  Bob and Rae both took a look, and Bob said, “That’s the search warrant.”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS CALLED FORTE. Forte wrote the search warrant application for Ritter’s apartment and the interior of the truck and drove it over to the judge’s chambers. Getting the warrant back to Ritter’s place took three boring hours. Lucas, Bob, Rae, Armstrong, and Kerr hung out in their vehicles in the parking lot, making occasional individual runs out to a Safeway Supermarket for food, drinks, and magazines.

  They didn’t need the search warrant to fit the F-250 templates to the side of the truck, so Armstrong and Kerr did that while the others watched and waited. The photography was interesting, in a way, for a while, and then they slipped back into a hot, sweating boredom.

  When Armstrong finished, he transferred his photos to a laptop and brought the laptop over to Lucas’s Evoque. With Bob and Rae looking over their shoulders from the backseat, Armstrong ran through the high-res photos on the laptop’s screen, and the impact dent was plain enough—Kerr had been on the other side of the templates with a flash, which fired when Armstrong took the shot, illuminating the space between the templates and the truck.

  “It’s what you’d expect if they did what we think they did with the logs,” Armstrong said. “I bet they don’t even know that the truck was damaged.”

  * * *

  —

  FORTE DELIVERED the warrant himself, bringing along four additional marshals. Two of the marshals were left in the parking lot to watch the truck; Armstrong and Kerr began collecting fiber samples from the truck and bagging them for the lab.

  Lucas, Bob, Rae, Forte, and the other two marshals went to Ritter’s apartment; the two marshals specialized in searches, the first man computers, the second safes and lockboxes. There was no answer to their knocks, so they showed the search warrant to the apartment manager and ordered her to open Ritter’s door.

  She squinted at Lucas, and said, “Hey, you’re the marshal who got lost. You were lying to me when you were here before.”

  Lucas said, “Sorry.”

  He was lying again.

  * * *

  —

  THEIR SEARCH WARRANT was sharply limited to records, both paper and computer files, and to weapons, since Ritter was suspected in the Douglas Last shooting in the Twin Cities. Last had supposedly been shot with his girlfriend’s gun, a fact not mentioned in the warrant application. The warrant specifically said that they were allowed to search for records that might be hidden in the apartment, which, for practical purposes, meant they could look at everything, but if they found something criminal that was not openly visible, and was not a record or a weapon, it probably wouldn’t make it into court.

  Ritter’s apartment smelled of almost nothing, except maybe pasta and kitchen cleaner. He lived a spartan life except in three areas: he had a high-end, high-definition television, which sat in front of a seven-foot couch; he had a high-end stereo system, with a turntable in addition to a CD player, and a load of fashionable vinyl records; and he had lots of guns.

  The guns were in a gun safe, as opposed to a real safe, in a closet. It was bolted to the floor, and the locks-and-safes specialist took no more than five minutes to get it open.

  Inside were fourteen guns—five rifles, a tactical shotgun, and eight handguns—none of them cheap, in a variety of sizes and calibers. Two of the handguns were equipped with screw-on silencers. The marshal noted the serial numbers on the silencers and checked with the ATF computer records and learned that they were both licensed to Ritter and so were legal.

  “That’s a shame,” he told Lucas. “That would have been a nice round federal felony if they weren’t registered.”

  They also found about a thousand rounds of ammo for the guns. The apartment had a small, tidy kitchen, with two tables. One table was for eating, the other was a gun repair and reloading station.

  * * *

  —

  RITTER HAD an inexpensive Dell desktop computer and a small multipurpose printer/scanner. The computer had no password. All its software was the standard stuff that came with the machine, plus Microsoft Word and a privacy application called Win/DeXX.

  That was it: there were no emails, there was no browser history, there were no documents, there were no cookies. The computer specialist marshal explained that Win/DeXX was a Windows software package that could remove any trace of the computer’s use at the end of each session. Click on the Win/DeXX icon, and whatever you’d been doing was lost to history.

  “It all goes to where television pictures go when you turn off the TV,” the marshal said.

  Ritter also had three black, two-drawer file cabinets in the office: Rae worked through those, while Bob and Lucas prowled the apartment, trying the common hiding places and plugging a lamp into each outlet to make sure it was operable. Outlet caches were currently fashionable among the crooked.

  Lucas found the first useful piece of information: Ritter had a modest selection of clothing, mostly athletic and outdoorsy, including camo cargo pants and jackets, along with a dark suit, suitable for funerals, three sport coats in varied textures and shades of blue, three pairs of gray or black slacks, four pairs of boots, and one pair of black dress shoes.

  Lucas was patting down the jackets when he felt something stiff in the inside breast pocket of one of the sport coats. When he pulled it out, it was a plastic hotel key card. On the back was a logo of the Hilton Garden Inn Omaha East/Council Bluffs.

  Ritter had been in Omaha.

  “Bag that baby,” Bob said.

  “Think we can call it a record?” Lucas asked.

  “Fuck yeah.”

  * * *

  —

  OF THE SIX file cabinet drawers Rae was working, two drawers were a jumble of office supplies and computer cables, the other
four a collection of investment and bank statements and employment and tax records. “I’m looking at it, and he does have some money, about . . . maybe eight hundred thousand dollars in cash and investments, if I’m not missing anything. He seems to spend a lot of time overseas, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he gets free food and housing along with a nice salary that he can’t spend anywhere over there . . . so his investments don’t seem outlandish. You’d need a good accountant to tell you for sure, and I’m not one.”

  Sitting on one of the file cabinets was an innocuous framed photo showing Ritter, with two male friends and two women, in what looked like a park. He had his arm around the shoulder of one of the women, who might have been who they’d seen at the Wily Rat nightclub. She was half turned away from the camera, her face obscured, but Lucas could see that she was short and dark-haired.

  * * *

  —

  FORTE HAD LEFT with the computer specialist a half hour after they started the search. The locks-and-safes guy was helping go through the apartment inch by inch when he took a call from one of the two marshals who were at the truck.

  He listened for a moment, then said, “Hey, Lucas, Ritter’s down at the truck. He just showed up.”

  Lucas took the phone, and asked, “He’s driving the Miata?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t let him leave,” Lucas said. “We’ll be right down.”

  “He’s already parked,” the marshal said. “He’s coming up, and he’s pissed.”

  “Walk with him,” Lucas said.

  * * *

  —

  RITTER WAS at the door five minutes later. He was a bit shorter than average, but muscular, dark-haired, dark-eyed, dark-complected, with three parallel white scars on one side of his face that might have been inflicted by a woman’s fingernails or, in Ritter’s case, shrapnel. He was wearing a black T-shirt, tan cotton/nylon cargo pants, light hiking boots, and a black ball cap.