Twisted Prey

by John Sandford

  “Thanks. She was Jim’s girl, you know?”

  “I’d like to talk to her again,” Lucas said. “If you see her, tell her to give me a call.”

  “I’ll do that, if I see her again. I’m headed back to the ’Stan soon as I can get a plane out,” Ritter said. “We got all the paperwork done, Jim will be cremated, but it’ll take a few weeks before the ashes are interred at Arlington. They’ve got quite the waiting list.”

  “Good luck, Colonel.”

  “Same to you. One last thing. Was it Grant?”

  Lucas didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”

  “You’re sure.”

  “Yes.”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS, BOB, AND RAE spent the day making statements for the Great Falls Police Department, the FBI, and the Marshals Service. The interviewers at the FBI and Marshals Service both said that Smalls had called to make his own statement, about asking Lucas to initiate an investigation into the assassination attempt.

  That, Bob remarked as they left the FBI building, seemed to have a cooling effect.

  “Not that we did anything wrong,” Rae said.

  “I thought we did well,” Bob said. “Lucas?”

  “I’m not happy, but it is what it is,” Lucas said.

  * * *

  —

  THEY HAD A LAST DINNER that night. Bob and Rae planned to fly out early the next morning, before Lucas got up. Rae said, “We’re leaving for the airport at six. Don’t bother to come out and wave to us.”

  “I promise I won’t,” Lucas said. His plane was at one o’clock. He added, “But you’re flying Business Class, right?”

  “We are,” Bob said. He placed his hand on his chest. “Be still, my beating heart.”

  * * *

  —

  SUZIE/CAROL/WENDY called at ten. “I heard all about it,” she said. “Tom was worried that you might be coming after me. I wasn’t there.”

  “I know. I mostly wanted to make sure you were straight on the death of Jim Ritter. What caused it, who caused it, all that.”

  “I think I got it. You believe it was Parrish. So do I.”

  “Yes. Not long before we think he was killed, he was within a couple of hundred feet of Parrish’s house without any reason we’ve been able to find for being there,” Lucas said. “The phone track looks like he walked around the neighborhood, maybe to check for surveillance.”

  “Why would he do that? Nothing wrong with talking to Parrish, not at that point.” Lucas didn’t reply, and she added, “Unless Parrish asked Jim to check because he was planning to kill him and didn’t want anyone to see Jim go into the house.”

  “I think that might be it,” Lucas said. “A crime scene crew is going to take Parrish’s house apart, and they may find out what happened there. Look, you knew Jim, I didn’t, except through research and some observation. It seems to me, though, that if Parrish had given him even a hint of what was coming, Jim would have torn him to pieces.”

  “Yes, he would have,” she said.

  “So I think what happened was that Parrish completely surprised him, asked to see him for some innocuous reason, and Jim was standing there, chatting, friendly, maybe drinking some milk, and Parrish pulls a gun and kills him. That’s the way I see it.”

  After a moment, Wendy said, “Parrish wouldn’t have done it on his own. So there’s still one person out there, and you won’t get her.” Her voice had pitched higher, was almost squeaking. Lucas realized that she was crying but trying to talk through it.

  “She’s nuts, she’s a killer, but nobody would ever say she’s stupid,” Lucas said. “She’s got some guts. She went to Douglas’s house and executed three people, her whole plan blew up, and then she murdered her way out of trouble, killed Old Lady Woods, got away with it, and used Senator Smalls as an alibi, which might have been the neatest touch of all. I doubt she even thinks about it anymore. In some ways, I’ve got to admire her.”

  “A good op is a good op,” Wendy agreed, her voice almost back to normal. “And you don’t think the cops are coming after me?”

  “Nah. I told them you were accounted for last night, that I got that from a source I trusted but won’t disclose. And I won’t. They might figure out who you are and want to chat, but there won’t be much urgency to it,” Lucas said.

  “I’ll think about that,” Wendy said. “Have a nice life, marshal.”

  “Wait, wait. Tell me the truth, goddamnit. That was you at the hotel, right?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, and hung up.

  31

  The night was hazy with heat and humidity, creating fuzzy balls of light around all the streetlamps visible above the garden wall. Taryn Grant was alone in her house, moving around in a silky black camisole and thong. The air-conditioning was pounding away—the place would be intolerable without it—but she didn’t like the dry cold and had opened two small side windows to let in some of the night air. A Backstreet Boys album, Never Gone, played from hidden speakers; the Boys had been her favorites since high school, and still were.

  The Senate.

  The Senate was a political circus, but that had been true for quite a while. She didn’t care, as long as she could continue to push her profile higher.

  She had a champagne flute in her hand, holding a drink favored by her mother. It looked like champagne but was actually an inch and a half of Bollinger champagne with a double shot of Stolichnaya vodka, traditionally called a Stoli-Bolli. A delicate, feminine-looking drink that could kick like a mule.

  After she’d drunk about half of it, she thought about the senator from Colorado. He was talking about running for the presidency. And there were some good reasons to think he was viable. Grant didn’t want to murder him; she would like to keep him intact long enough to run on the ticket with her as her vice presidential candidate.

  Put a cowboy hat on him, peel off some of the redneck votes that the Republicans had been counting on.

  As far as murder went, she didn’t think about that long rainy night in July anymore. She’d been frightened for a few days, but then not. No cops came calling, no FBI. None of those people—the dead people—amounted to much, scratching around for their petty little retirements, playing with their guns. And the woman she shot? Well, she was just plain old.

  There was nothing left of that night: the weapons, the ammo, the clothing, the witnesses, the victims—all gone forever.

  She drifted toward the bay window that looked out over the garden. She could smell herself, the delicate scent of sweat and a hint of that morning’s Black Orchid. At the window, she looked over at the neighbor’s house. Only the peak of a gable was visible, with its single window, always, before tonight, totally dark. An attic, she’d thought. Tonight, there was a very faint light glowing in the window.

  She was wondering about that when the 300-grain .338 slug ripped through her heart.

  Grant felt no impact, no pain. She did feel herself falling, wondering for the seconds of the life remaining to her why that was. Then she was on the floor, her shoulder and head landing on a very fine Iranian carpet. The champagne flute landed on the same fine carpet, bounced once.

  The last thing Grant registered was the flute, sparkling in the overhead lights, unbroken, elegant . . . innocent.

  And she was gone.

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS WAS IN HIS GARAGE, working with Sam, his son. It was time, he’d told Weather, to start teaching his kid some shit. He had two immediate projects in mind. One was cleaning up the engine on an elderly twenty-five-horsepower outboard motor, including the installation of new spark plugs. The other was the construction of a simple wooden box, which involved the use of a tape measure, a compact table saw, an electric drill, screws, a sander, and varnish. They’d decided to start with the box and had gone to a s
pecialty lumber store, where they picked out some nice one-inch walnut planks.

  When finished, the box would be given to Weather as storage for her piano sheet music. They’d measured and cut the first planks when she came to the door, and said, “Porter Smalls is calling. He said it’s important.”

  Lucas took Sam inside with him, didn’t want him out there alone, maybe thinking about using the table saw to cut the planks himself.

  He’d left his cell phone inside specifically to avoid calls. Weather handed it to him, and when he said, “Hello?” Smalls asked, “Have you heard?”

  “Heard what?”

  “Somebody shot Taryn Grant last night. She’s dead as a doornail.”

  “Hang on a second,” Lucas said. He turned to Weather, asked, “Could you get me a Diet Coke? This is gonna take a few minutes.”

  “What happened?”

  “Porter says somebody shot and killed Taryn Grant last night.”

  “Oh my God,” she said, her voice hushed, and she went to get the Coke.

  Lucas sat down, and said, “Tell me.”

  * * *

  —

  SMALLS DIDN’T KNOW all the details, but he had friends in the Justice Department who’d leaked a few of them. At about eight-fifteen the night before, an elderly couple had been watching Anderson Cooper on CNN when a woman dressed all in black, wearing a black balaclava, sunglasses, and gloves, had appeared in their media room and pointed a gun at them. Because of the total body coverage, they couldn’t even tell the FBI what race she was. She’d told them that she didn’t want to rob them, or hurt them, but simply wanted to look out a window.

  She’d marched them into a bathroom that faced the street, made them sit down on either side of the toilet, and had handcuffed them together with their arms wrapped around the toilet. She’d searched them for cell phones, found some newspapers and magazines, taken some bottles of water and a bottle opener, and a couple of pillows, and left them.

  Some long time later, they’d heard a single rifle shot. The old man had been a hunter and knew a rifle shot when he heard one. The woman had come running down the stairs, opened the bathroom window, and told them, “If you yell for help in the morning, somebody will hear you.”

  Nobody actually did, but they had a housekeeper who arrived at nine o’clock. She found them, called the cops. They told the cops about the single rifle shot; the cops were horrified to learn that Senator Taryn Grant lived next door.

  “They went over and pounded on the door,” Smalls said, “they got her chief of staff to come over with a key. They found her dead, on a very expensive Iranian carpet, shot once in the heart. That’s all I know.”

  “Wonder if it was somebody from Heracles?” Lucas asked.

  “No idea. But it was a professional hit, no doubt about that.”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS HAD PUT the cell phone in his pocket, he and Sam were back in the garage, with Weather closely watching Sam operate the table saw, when he felt the phone vibrating.

  Jane Chase: “Have you heard?”

  “Porter Smalls called.”

  “This sounds exactly like the woman who attacked you at the hotel,” Chase said, the excitement riding close beneath her dry tone. “Do you know anything at all about her?”

  “No. I eventually got three different possible names for her, from the Heracles people, but I doubt any of them were real.”

  “This is going to cause endless trouble,” Chase said. “The Senate’s going totally insane and we’re right in the bull’s-eye.”

  “Jane, some advice: stay away from it. Find something else to do,” Lucas said. “You won’t find this woman. She apparently worked with Heracles, and for the CIA, and is probably back in Iraq, or Syria, or one of those places, by now. If she belongs to the CIA, do you think they’ll give her up as the person who assassinated a senator?”

  She thought for a second, then said, “It does sound unlikely.”

  “And when the Senate starts looking for an FBI scapegoat, you don’t want to be the one standing there with your dick in your hand.”

  “Certainly not,” she said, tempted to laugh at his metaphor.

  “Now that that’s settled, give me a few details.”

  She told him the same story he’d gotten from Smalls, with a couple of extras. “The crime scene team recovered the bullet. It’s a 300-grain .338 slug, fired from a .338 Norma Magnum. She was hit very precisely. The assassin was shooting from an attic window in an adjoining house. She shot from a stack of books sitting on top of a table; she was sitting in an old wooden chair. She either didn’t eject the brass or she picked it up.”

  “I don’t know the gun—is it an exotic?”

  “Couldn’t get one across the counter at Walmart, but you could probably order one there,” she said. “So it’s uncommon but not exotic. We’re trying to trace all sales, but there’ll be a whole bunch of them, and secondary sales and trades . . . It’s impossible.”

  “Once again: stay away. This is a professional job. You won’t get her,” Lucas said.

  “And I certainly don’t want to be standing there with my dick in my hand.”

  “Atta girl.”

  When he hung up, Weather said with a certain tone in her voice, “Sounds like the two of you got pretty close.”

  Lucas nodded. “Yeah . . . If we were living in Baghdad, I’d probably make her my second wife.”

  Weather kicked him in the calf, said, “Oh, sorry, I slipped.”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS HAD BEEN HOME for two weeks. In that time, the FBI had torn Heracles to pieces, and it appeared that the company was about to be indicted on dozens of charges, from illegal weapons trafficking to illegal contacts with foreign terrorist groups, having provided both material and training support. The blight had spread to other contactor companies as well. The operators turned by FBI investigators had worked with several of those companies in addition to Heracles, and with criminal charges hanging over them, they were eager enough to take deals in return for information.

  Lucas didn’t have a clear idea of how it all worked. The FBI was a swamp, and unless you were in it, it was impossible to tell precisely who was doing what. He’d called his friend Deputy Director Louis Mallard to ask a few questions, and it appeared that Jane Chase was right in the middle of it all.

  * * *

  —

  JOHN MCCOY gave up everything he knew about Heracles but admitted to no knowledge of murder. He took a plea deal and would spend two years in a minimum security federal prison, which Lucas knew he could do standing on his head. Nobody had heard anything of Kerry Moore. Some thought he’d been murdered, like Jim Ritter; others thought he’d run. When asked, McCoy shook his head, but one perceptive interrogator thought he might have looked amused.

  * * *

  —

  AN FBI CRIME SCENE CREW detected tiny pieces of copper in the walls of Jack Parrish’s kitchen and matched them to the bullet fragments taken from Jim Ritter’s body.

  * * *

  —

  SENATOR SMALLS asked around quietly, a few friends, and told Lucas, “You know what? I can’t find anybody who talked to her halfway through the party, only at the beginning and at the end.”

  “Toldja,” Lucas said.

  * * *

  —

  LATE THAT NIGHT, on the same day that Taryn Grant was found dead, Lucas took a third call. There was a whistling sound in the background, and when Lucas asked about it, Tom Ritter told him it was satellite noise.

  “I’m calling on a satphone. I’m sitting on a bench, on a nice bright day, at Bagram Air Base.”

  “Is that—”

  “In Afghanistan? Yes,” Ritter said. “Listen, I heard about Grant. It’s on the Internet here.”

  “They’re interested in We
ndy. Or Suzie or Carol, or whatever her name is. Maybe. I didn’t have much to say about it, but they’ll be pushing McCoy.”

  “Think they’ll come to me?” he asked.

  “I don’t think so. You’re out of it, given where you’re at. They might have some questions about Jim, but . . .”

  “I haven’t seen him a lot in the past few years,” Ritter said. “Don’t know much about his love life.”

  “Stick with that,” Lucas suggested.

  “Tell me what happened,” he said. “All I know is what I’ve seen on the Internet news feeds.”

  Lucas told him what he’d gotten from Smalls and Chase, and, when he was done, Ritter said, “Oh boy. It does sound like her, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah. But it’s not my case anymore,” Lucas said. “Or yours.”

  “Stay loose, Lucas. You ever get to Afghanistan, give me a ring,” Ritter said. “We’ll go get some fried chicken. They got good fried chicken here.”

  “I will. If you hear from Wendy, tell her to give me a ring.”

  * * *

  —

  A COUPLE OF DAYS LATER, Lucas was sitting in his backyard with Virgil Flowers, waiting for the charcoal briquettes to get right for the steaks. Flowers had come up with Sam, the youngest child of his girlfriend. Flowers’s Sam and Lucas’s Sam were the same age, were amazed that they shared a name, had rapidly become friends, and were playing their version of mixed martial arts–croquet, while Lucas and Flowers sat in lawn chairs and talked.

  They were drinking Leinenkugel’s and discussing child care when Lucas’s iPhone dinged with an incoming call from an unidentified phone.

  Satellite noise. Then Wendy said, without preface, “I’ve been thinking about it. And I’ve been thinking about you. You believe I was involved in that shooting at the Watergate Hotel. Why didn’t you ever come after me?”