Twisted Prey

by John Sandford

  * * *

  —

  PARRISH HURRIEDLY stripped all the ID off the body—wallet, telephone, Rolex, an Army ring with a blue stone—set it aside, took a contractor’s trash bag out of the cupboard, knelt and pulled it over Ritter’s upper body. Ritter began shaking again as he did that: brain cells dying. He pulled another bag over Ritter’s legs, rolled the body over to look at the floor. There was a pink smear of blood mixed with milk. Parrish, scrubbing with household cleaner, wiped the blood and milk up with a paper towel, making sure he’d gotten it all. He remembered to pick up the .45 shells: once he was on the highway, he’d throw them out the window.

  When he was done, he looked at the bagged body, then went on with the worst of it. The killing had been reasonably sanitary and drama-free. But if the body should be found, it would be best to delay identification as long as possible. He got a cleaver out of the hardware door and cut the third joint off each of Ritter’s fingers, grimacing at the sound of the cleaver going through bone and tendon.

  He set the severed fingertips aside on a sheet of Saran Wrap, carried them to the bathroom. He flushed three at a time down the toilet, four with the last flush. When he was satisfied, and still with the strength and energy from whatever hormone he’d stirred up, he dragged Ritter’s body down the stairs to the garage tucked under the house and lifted it into the back of his Jeep.

  Almost forgot: his own phone. He called Grant. She picked up, and neither of them said anything. After a minute had passed, he hung up and carried the phone upstairs and put it on the kitchen counter.

  * * *

  —

  HE DROVE across the river to a brewpub called Applejack’s Burger & Beer, which happened to be near a metro station. The place had no cameras overlooking its dumpster, no windows. He parked next to the dumpster, looked for people out walking, and, in another ten-second burst of energy, boosted Ritter out of the Jeep and into the dumpster, where he landed almost soundlessly on a pile of cardboard and garbage.

  He’d taken Ritter’s car keys and telephone. He crushed the phone under his foot, pulled out the battery, threw the pieces in the dumpster. Five seconds later, he was out of the parking lot and on his way back to Georgetown. He dropped the phone battery out the car window, along with the .45 shells, and after parking in his garage, and checking the back of the Jeep for any traces of blood, he walked to the Jitterbug Café, clicked the key fob, and spotted the flashing lights of Ritter’s Mazda.

  He drove the Mazda carefully to the metro station, near the body dump site, parked it, and took the train back to Washington, to Foggy Bottom. He walked home from there, a bit more than a mile.

  A mile was nothing.

  He whistled most of the way, fighting back the adrenaline surging through him while reliving the shooting mentally in split-second frames.

  Nobody, he decided, could have done it better.

  At home, he called Claxson on his cell phone. Claxson didn’t answer, as planned. The call alone from Parrish’s number meant that everything had gone well.

  He hadn’t liked seeing Jim go, but they’d sealed off the problem, and he’d gotten the thrill of a lifetime. He hoped to do it again someday.

  18

  When Allah wants to mess with a perfectly good murder, He doesn’t hesitate.

  Jasim Nagi, a moderately faithful Islamic man of Arabic descent born in Atlantic City, who carried with him the full faith and credit of the New Jersey accent, drove a garbage truck.

  Not a humble garbage truck: it was a two-year-old, forty-cubic-yard McNeilus Front Loader painted bright green, and it took some skill to operate.

  At six o’clock in the dawn’s early light, Nagi maneuvered through Applejack’s empty parking lot, picked up the dumpster, and when the load dumped in the cargo box, he heard a loud bang as something large and metallic hit the bottom.

  He said, “Aaa . . . shit,” in his best Joisey Shore accent, because he knew what it probably was: a piece of obsolete office equipment, like a printer. It had probably been thrown in the dumpster because the owner didn’t want to dispose of it in an environmentally responsible way.

  That also meant that if Nagi tried to unload it at the landfill without reporting it and got caught, he’d get stuck with both a fine and the printer.

  Nagi went on with his route, had the first full load ready to go by nine o’clock. At the landfill, he told the supervisor at the gate that he probably had a big printer in his load, and the supervisor pointed him to a specific dump area, a laborer following him with a Kabota Front End Loader.

  Nagi dumped the load, waited for the wave from the laborer. Instead, he got the white-faced laborer running down the side of the truck, calling, “You better get out here.”

  The printer was there, at the top of the load of foul-smelling garbage. Right next to a partially exposed leg, an expensive Salomon hiking boot still on the foot.

  Nagi crossed himself, although he was a Muslim, because that’s what you did if you were raised in New Jersey. To the laborer, he said, “This ain’t good. Go get the boss.”

  * * *

  —

  THE COPS CAME, and the medical examiner, and over the span of two hours the body was exposed, photographed, and re-covered. The top of the torso was still wrapped in a black plastic garbage bag, which was packed away for a further forensic examination. The lack of fingertips was recorded, and the detective team working the scene noted that the body had probably been fingerprinted at some point and that the killer knew it. The crime scene crew checked the clothing for any kind of identification but found nothing.

  When the cops were satisfied that they’d done everything possible at the scene, the body was moved to the Medical Examiner’s Office. There, the clothing was removed and bagged for forensics, the body examined: it bore two tattoos. One was a generic American flag, but the other was Special Forces, with the designation ODA 331.

  That information, with a photograph of the dead man’s face, was sent to the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command, which, in the Army’s idiosyncratic way, was abbreviated “CID,” since “CIC” was reserved for the “Commander in Chief.”

  Two hours later, the CID came back with the information that the body was almost certainly that of former master sergeant James Harold Ritter, who had been subsequently identified by two of his former teammates. He had been honorably discharged from the Army a few years earlier.

  The cops found a Virginia driver’s license for Ritter, matched the photos, and went to his address in Arlington, where the apartment manager told them that the apartment had just been searched by federal marshals.

  The cops eventually found Russell Forte, told him about Ritter, asked him about the search. Forte said, “I’ll call the marshal in charge of the search and have him get back to you.”

  By that time, an autopsy was under way at the Medical Examiner’s Office.

  Nagi had pointed the Alexandria cops to the Applejack’s parking lot, though he couldn’t tell them for sure where the body had come from. Applejack’s was a good guess, but it could have come from either of his next two stops as well.

  The cops checked all three places but found no evidence of a murder in any of the dumpsters.

  * * *

  —

  THE COPS FOUND FORTE more quickly than they might otherwise have because he had put in a request for all available information on Ritter. A history of being murdered was definitely information.

  Forte called Lucas two minutes after he finished talking to the cops.

  “Bad news, man,” Forte said when Lucas picked up.

  “What is it?” Lucas asked. He, Bob, and Rae were ambling along M Street in Georgetown because they didn’t know of a more interesting place to go.

  “Somebody murdered James Harold Ritter and threw his body in a dumpster. The body was found by chance. At a landfill. There’s an autopsy going on rig
ht now, but the cops say he was shot twice, in the chest. Best guess right now is, he was killed last night.”

  “Oh, no. Ah, man.” Bob and Rae stopped when they heard Lucas’s tone. He turned to them, and said, “Somebody killed Ritter.”

  “The killer cut off Ritter’s fingertips to prevent printing, but he was identified by a tattoo from his Special Forces group and then by matching photos with his license,” Forte said. “There’s not a hell of a lot more unless the autopsy comes up with something. That looks like a long shot.”

  “We better get over there—we’ll need an address for wherever the autopsy is.”

  “Got that for you,” Forte said. “And the cops want to talk to you.”

  “Listen, call the cops back and ask them to stay quiet about the murder . . . a couple of days. Ask for cooperation. It’d be best if this didn’t make it in the papers until we’ve figured out what to do.”

  “I can do that,” Forte said.

  * * *

  —

  “WHAT HAPPENED TO HIM?” Rae asked.

  “Somebody shot him to death,” Lucas said. He told them the rest of it, and they stood there, shaking their heads, as they heard the story.

  When Lucas was done, Bob looked at Rae, and said, “Heavy-duty, girlie.”

  The three of them had been waiting for something to happen; they’d talked about pushing things harder but decided in the end to wait until they had the lab results from West Virginia, which were due any minute. They had spent the previous afternoon and that morning reading everything the FBI, the Marshals Service, and the Army could produce on Ritter, Parrish, and other employees of Heracles.

  As they walked out to Lucas’s Evoque, Forte messaged the address where the autopsy was going on.

  “Manassas,” Lucas said. “I don’t know where that is.”

  “Over in Virginia,” Bob said. “I think there was a big Civil War battle around there.”

  Rae: “I thought it was something white people kept in a jar, in the refrigerator.”

  * * *

  —

  THE DRIVE TO MANASSAS took an hour. The Medical Examiner’s facility looked like an elementary school, and a detective named Roger Clark from the Frederick County Sheriff’s Department met them at the front entrance. He said that the autopsy was nearly over.

  “Whoever did it probably didn’t know about the tattoo, because that got us an ID faster than fingerprints would have,” he said.

  “Do you know the time of death yet?” Lucas asked.

  “Not yet, but we should know in the next few minutes. If you have the time, there’s a conference room down the hall. I’d like to get a statement from you guys to put in my report.”

  “Sure,” Lucas said. “We’d like to know the details of the discovery. In a landfill? Any idea where the truck came from?”

  Clark filled them in on what they’d learned and asked to record Lucas’s statement. Lucas agreed, and started with the accident that had killed Whitehead, and nearly killed Smalls, on through to the attack on Weather and the murder of Douglas Last. He also described Ritter’s background and involvement with Heracles.

  “Wow. You think that Ritter was in on it all?” Clark asked.

  Lucas nodded. “This killing confirms it, as far as I’m concerned. The people who set this up knew we were getting close to him and couldn’t take the chance that he might roll over on them.”

  “You have suspects . . .”

  “Yes. A number of people associated with Heracles. They are professionals, and I doubt you’d get much from them, but I can give you names if you want to go talk to them.”

  * * *

  —

  WHEN CLARK was satisfied and had gone to check on the progress of the autopsy, Rae said, “If the locals go talk to the Heracles guys, that should give them a nasty bump.”

  “I’m counting on it,” Lucas said. “But it would have helped to have Ritter as a hammer.”

  “The idea that we might try to use him that way, probably got him killed,” Bob said. “I’m not feeling too good about that.”

  Lucas said, “Yeah. I hear ya.”

  * * *

  —

  CLARK CAME BACK a few minutes later, and said, “The doc will talk to us now.”

  The pathologist’s name was Benjamin Woode; he was a fleshy man, with thinning red hair, who asked, “Why are federal marshals chasing this one?”

  “Because we were asked to, and we have jurisdiction,” Lucas said. “Did you see anything that might help?”

  “Yes, a couple of things,” Woode said. He carried with him the faint but peculiar scent of autopsy rooms: something like a butcher’s shop, but with noxious chemicals attached. “He was shot twice, the bullets both penetrated the breastbone, one an inch or so above the heart, the other directly through it. And they made a mess of it. The slugs started coming apart as soon as they hit the victim. They were man-killers, designed to do just that. One passed entirely through the body. The core of the other one hung up on the skin of the victim’s back. He was shot from the front, by the way, and there are extensive powder traces on his shirt and around the bullet’s entry point, so the shooter probably wasn’t more than five or ten feet away, if that.”

  “Can the slugs be identified?” Bob asked.

  “That’s not up to me; that’s up to the forensics people . . . But they were in pieces, and one core is missing. What may interest you is that while one core didn’t make it through the body, a few small pieces cut channels in the body and did penetrate through both the body and the victim’s skin and shirt. If you can find the scene of the shooting, and it was inside somewhere, a good crime scene lab might be able to find those fragments in a wall. You probably couldn’t see them at all unless you looked closely. They’re tiny, like chips off a fingernail clipping. The killer might not have been able to clean it up . . . might not even know about it. If that turns out to be important.”

  “It could,” Lucas said. “Do you have a time of death?”

  “There’s a limit to what we can say at this point, until we get some labs back.”

  “I know that, but what do you think?”

  “He was still showing signs of rigor. He was shot last night. He’s not twenty-four hours dead.”

  * * *

  —

  THERE WAS MORE OF THAT, but not enough to help identify the killer. When they’d finished talking to the medical examiner, they looked at Ritter’s clothing, which had been separated and bagged. His wallet was missing, and a watch and ring were gone as well: they only knew about them because of the white they’d left on Ritter’s tanned skin. The only thing the clothing told them was that Ritter habitually dressed in high-end outdoor garb and boots and that he wore a heavy leather belt designed to accommodate a holster: Bob knew that because he wore the same belt.

  “The only difference is that he wrote his name on the back of his with a Sharpie or something,” Bob said, turning the belt in his hands. “Probably because he spends time in a barracks, and everybody wears pistol belts; this is an expensive one.”

  Lucas glanced at the belt, which had an elaborate “James Ritter” written on it in black ink, with decorative dots preceding the first name and following the last to either end of the belt. There was also an “S.”

  “Must have had a lot of time to kill,” Rae said, “him doing art deco design on his belt.”

  Lucas told Clark, “We’re going to run over to his apartment, take another look. Won’t need a warrant now. He’d have been driving either a Ford F-250 or a Mazda Miata roadster. We have both tag numbers. We need to get all the local patrol guys looking for it.”

  “We’ll get that out, call you when we find it,” Clark said. “I need to be there when you look at the apartment, though.”

  “You’re welcome to come along,” Lucas said.

  * * *r />
  —

  LUCAS, BOB, AND RAE left for Ritter’s apartment, with Clark trailing. On the way, Bob said, “The truck didn’t look like it’d been driven all that much. Maybe we should have had it processed for DNA. Ritter was probably driving; we should look for traces in the passenger seat, see who might have been sitting there.”

  Rae said, “The FBI has that fast forensic DNA analysis going now. If we can get a team over there, they can have the results back tomorrow.”

  “Not a bad idea,” Lucas said. “What we need is an FBI crime scene team at Ritter’s, to check if he might have been killed there. I’ll call Forte, see if he can get one moving. After that, they can hit the truck.”

  Bob said, “We need a new Ritter. Right now, we’re back to zero.”

  “Always Moore and McCoy,” Rae said.

  “Yeah, they’re up,” Lucas said.

  “Fuckin’ Ritter,” Bob said.

  * * *

  —

  FORTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER, they pulled into Ritter’s apartment complex, swung around back. No Miata.

  “Probably not shot here. The killers wouldn’t have driven it away,” Lucas said.

  Forte called. Chase had gotten the crime scene team moving.

  * * *

  —

  WHILE THEY WERE WAITING for the FBI team to show up, Armstrong called from West Virginia. “You might want to have another hard talk with Ritter,” he said. “We got test results back on the fabric samples from the truck, and they match the fabric samples from the logs exactly. It’s apparently a kind of canvas used for martial arts mats. It’s not common.”

  “Well, I’ve got some news about Ritter . . .” Lucas began.

  Armstrong was astonished by the murder, and Lucas told him that the canvas samples were still in play if they could pull DNA out of the truck. “Hang on to that stuff, Carl. We’ll get back to you.”