Masked Prey

by John Sandford

  “How many people, kids . . .”

  “There are six children on the website, ranging in age from elementary school to college. Nobody older, although a lot of senators have older children. We think that’s basically because all of these kids are going to school in the Washington area, so the photographer is probably from the area. The Starbucks, where the website was loaded, is right across the river, in a shopping center across I-395 from the Pentagon,” Chase said. “All the kids, but one, are children of senators, all the senators but one are Democrats. One kid is the son of a New Jersey member of the House, also a Democrat. A very senior member of the House. I could give you more details, but you’ll get them all when you read the file. Names, ages, addresses, along with a commentary from our analysts.”

  “None of the kids were aware of the photo, or the contact?”

  “No, they weren’t. None of them felt a thing. Oh: most of the photos were apparently taken surreptitiously, but Audrey Coil’s was lifted off her website—a photo that showed her outside her school with a friend.”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS ASKED CHASE, “If I have questions, I should call you?”

  “Yes. Nobody else. Although your friend, Deputy Director Mallard, has been read into this situation.”

  “You’re friends with Mallard now?” Lucas asked.

  “The deputy director and I have developed an excellent working relationship,” Chase said. “He seems to have taken an interest in my career.”

  “Fascinating,” Lucas said.

  Chase blinked at him, then turned away.

  Henderson leaned forward and rapped on his desk with his knuckles: “Lucas, we need to shut this down before somebody gets hurt. If somebody does get hurt . . . a kid . . . the shit will hit the fan.”

  “If somebody does get hurt, do you think we could blame the FBI?” Lucas asked.

  Chase showed a tight smile. The last time they’d worked together, Lucas had seen signs that she had a sense of humor, even if it was a Washington sense of humor: “If that were going to happen, Lucas, do you think you’d be here?” she asked.

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  There was more talk, which came down to a long series of warnings about not involving the two senators or the FBI in anything questionable. Lucas said he’d try not to do that, which led to more warnings and pleadings.

  “Then I’m like that Mission: Impossible thing, where the secretary will disavow any knowledge of me?”

  “So fast your head will spin off—although it’d probably be a deputy assistant undersecretary in charge of cover-ups,” Henderson said. “You’re not nearly important enough to be disavowed by an actual secretary.”

  Lucas and Chase left at the same time, with Lucas promising to provide regular updates to Henderson and Smalls. When they were alone, leaving the building, Chase said, “Don’t get too detailed when you’re updating the senators. Both of them are close to the local media. If we nail these people, there’ll be some credit to be given. Time on the CNN and Fox talk shows.”

  “Which might otherwise go to the FBI?”

  “I didn’t say that,” she said. “I’d prefer that nobody got any credit at all. We don’t need to plant this extortion idea in anybody else’s head.”

  “Got it,” Lucas said.

  Chase had planned to get an Uber back to the Hoover Building, but Lucas still had the limo on call and offered her a ride: “If you know where we could get a sandwich around here, I’d like to talk for a few more minutes.”

  She knew a salad place that was open on Sunday, three or four blocks away, and they walked there and got salads and Diet Cokes and sat next to the window to eat. Lucas said, “I’ll look at the files for the details, but tell me what you feel about them.”

  “There’s a load of information there. Most of it is useless,” she said, efficiently slicing through an asparagus spear. She popped the asparagus into her mouth, chewed, swallowed, and continued: “This whole situation has an odd feeling about it. There’s something going on that we haven’t been able to figure out, but it’s not as straightforward as it looks. That’s what I feel about it.”

  “Anybody I should pay attention to, in particular?”

  “A Nazi named Charles Lang. Charlie Lang. He denies being a Nazi, but he is. He calls himself, and I quote, ‘an expert on later forms of National Socialism.’ He inherited the Nazi gene and a lot of money from his father and grandfather, who also carried the gene. His grandfather made a fortune in aviation investments before and during World War II—he spent a lot of time in Germany during the Hitler years, knew the man himself—and was associated with Charles Lindbergh back in the 1930s and ’40s. Charlie’s pretty slick, well dressed, has a degree from Georgetown in international relations. Gets interviewed from time to time by the cable news outfits, has had some TV training. He claims his extremist contacts are part of his scholarly research, but it goes deeper than that. Read the paper, you’ll see.”

  “Is he involved in this website?”

  “Probably not. When we went to him, our agents said he appeared to be genuinely surprised by the site. Maybe a little sexually excited. He’s been stirring around, trying to make contact with 1919. Putting the word out.”

  “You’ve been watching him?”

  “No, but we’ve been interviewing everybody we think might possibly know something about 1919. A couple of people said they’ve been contacted by Lang. So he’s out there, looking. Whether he’s found anything, we don’t know.”

  “I’ll talk to him,” Lucas said.

  * * *

  —

  CHASE KNEW THAT Lucas had been shot the previous spring, and she’d been shot herself a year earlier while on a case with Lucas. “You’re a dangerous guy to hang around with. We’re the only two cops I know who’ve been shot.”

  Like Lucas, she hadn’t entirely recovered. The wound had torn up connective tissue in the hamstring at the back of her thigh, and the scar tissue lacked the flexibility of the original muscle. She didn’t limp, but it still hurt if she jogged too far and when she went skiing.

  Lucas had been shot three times in his career: “I specialized in violent crime. That was my main interest. The one that came closest to killing me was a little girl who nailed me in the throat with a piece-of-crap street .22 . . .”

  He’d been shot in a remote area of the Wisconsin Northwoods, in the throat, and almost drowned in his own blood, but a surgeon who’d been nearby sliced open his trachea with a pocketknife to free up an airway.

  “You probably still owe him, then,” Chase said. “And always will.”

  “Actually, it was a her, and she’s gotten paid back with interest,” Lucas said. “I married her and she’s been in sexual heaven ever since.”

  “More than I needed to know,” Chase said. She frowned. “Maybe I should call her and ask what that’s like.”

  They talked some more about 1919 and watched people come and go and Lucas called the limo and dropped her at the Hoover Building. As she got out of the car, she said: “Talk to me, Lucas. Daily, if anything is happening. When do you think you’ll be out working?”

  “I’ll call this girl and her boyfriend today, see if I can talk to them this afternoon. I’ll want to read your stuff on Lang before I talk to him. He seems to be the best bet for a way into it.”

  “You take care,” she said. “And talk to me.”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS GAVE THE DRIVER the address of a Hertz dealer where he’d reserved a car. They had to backtrack a bit through Washington, but Lucas gave the driver another twenty dollars and left Hertz in a black Cadillac CTS, a long German-looking sedan with a lot of technology he’d never use.

  At the Watergate, he left the car in the garage and went up to his room. His phone dinged as he stepped inside, and when he opened it, he found th
e code for the FBI files Chase had given him. He plugged the thumb drive into his laptop, opened the only app on the drive, and was prompted for the code. He entered it, the files popped up as Chase had promised, simple PDFs in the shell of the encryption app. He put the code into his phone’s password vault and erased Chase’s message.

  There were a lot of files, but the shell had a search function and he dropped in the names of Audrey Coil, Blake Winston, and Charles Lang. That gave him contact information for all three, which he noted in a fresh pocket-sized Moleskine notebook.

  He read for two hours, encountered quite a few facts and, as Chase had suggested, most of them were useless. Some of it was FBI clip-and-paste investigation files of neo-Nazi, white supremacist, anti-immigration, Klan, prison-based, biker-based, and states’ rights hate groups, along with a few pro-Israeli and Islamic radical groups. Most of them had few members; some of them, only one, and so didn’t even qualify as a “group.” Even some of the single-member organizations produced publications, so could be involved in a website.

  There was nothing substantial on the 1919 group, though there was considerable speculation. The lead agent looking at the group suggested that there might be only one person behind it, or perhaps two or three—“. . . unless the group is tightly controlled with heavy security, which would suggest that they may be unusually dangerous.”

  Lucas skimmed a dozen files, decided the daylight hours would be better spent talking to Coil and Winston. He could always read in the middle of the night.

  * * *

  —

  COIL AND WINSTON lived within a few miles of each other in Virginia. Lucas was somewhat familiar with McLean, where Winston lived, from the case he’d worked the year before. Coil lived on the north side of Arlington, the big Virginia city directly across the Potomac from Washington. Both were expecting calls from him.

  The call to Coil went to the personal phone of Senator Roberta Coil, who picked up on the third ring and said, simply, “Yes?”

  Lucas introduced himself, said he’d spoken to Henderson and Smalls, and asked if her daughter would be available for an interview that evening. “She is, of course, Marshal. She really doesn’t have much to say about it. I’m sure you’ve read the FBI interview, but I understand you’d like to get a feel for the various personalities yourself.”

  “I would,” Lucas said.

  “We’re home now. I have a small party beginning at seven o’clock, if we could get it done before then.”

  “I’m at the Watergate. I could probably be there in an hour or so,” Lucas said.

  “We will wait for you.”

  The connection for Winston also went to a parent, his mother, whose name was Mary Ellen, and who said her son was out with friends, making a movie. “I’ll call him. I can have him here whenever you say.”

  And he called Lang, again on a personal phone. Like Coil, he answered with a “Yes?” He would be available Monday morning, at his home in Potomac, Maryland. “I hope the FBI people haven’t confused you. You won’t actually be interviewing a Nazi, a white supremacist, an alt-right person. I’m a scholar who studies those groups.”

  “I understand,” Lucas said. A little suck-up, then: “I’m pleased that you’re willing to share information with us.”

  “Always happy to help the government,” Lang said.

  Lucas coughed, and took down his address.

  * * *

  —

  FROM THE WATERGATE garage to the Coil home in Arlington was a fifteen-minute drive, out of the monuments of the District into a leafy, routine-looking fifties or sixties suburban neighborhood now showing its age.

  Lucas had worked with a half dozen senators in his time as a marshal and had come to believe that the Senate was a club for the uber-wealthy. Roberta Coil was apparently not one of those. She lived in a nice-enough, but not elaborate mid-century red-brick house set on a bank in north Arlington, with a tuck-under garage and a curling set of flagstone steps leading up to the front door.

  The FBI’s background material on her daughter, Audrey, said that Senator Coil and Audrey lived in Arlington, while the senator’s husband, the owner of a grass-development company, stayed at home in Tifton, Georgia. The file noted that the grass involved was for lawns and golf courses, not for smoking.

  Lucas parked in the street and climbed the bank to the house and was about to ring the bell when the door popped open. Senator Coil was a tall woman, with an angular face and dark hair. She wore a black dress suitable for a party, and careful, almost bland makeup. She smiled and said, “Marshal Davenport? I’m Bob. Come in. Audrey’s in her room, I’ll call her.”

  The house smelled like bakery and Lucas could hear somebody banging around a stove in the kitchen, which was down a hallway off a large and sparsely furnished living room—a room designed for people to stand in, at a party, rather than to lounge in. Coil climbed some stairs and disappeared down a hallway, calling for her daughter.

  Lucas perched on a narrow couch, looked around; there were built-in bookshelves and the books themselves, biographies, histories, and the more serious kind of political tomes, appeared to be little used, as if they’d come with the shelves.

  * * *

  —

  “HERE WE ARE.”

  Coil reappeared, trailed by a pretty teenager in a loose silky blouse and fashionable denim boy-shorts with a string of oversized buttons on the fly. Like her mother, Audrey Coil was carefully made-up, except for her lipstick, which was bloody red and deliberately overdone, the fake-cheap/hot-sexy but too-expensive-for-you Hollywood look.

  Lucas stood up to shake hands with Audrey, nodded at a right-angled couch, and when the women were sitting, sat down again. Looking at Audrey, he asked, “I’ve read the FBI reports, so this should be short. Did you ever have any hint of this 1919 website before you found it with your friend?”

  Then something happened.

  Audrey said, “No! I was amazed!”

  At the moment he asked the question, Lucas saw something lizard-like flicker in her eyes. She hadn’t expected precisely that question and she’d come up with an answer that was at least partially false.

  Lucas thought, Uh-oh. That’s what he thought. But he didn’t know what was behind the flicker.

  “You’re sure? I mean, young people go through dozens of websites and I imagine with your business, you go through more than the average . . . person.” He bit off “girl,” “woman,” and “teenager” and opted for the most neutral noise he could make.

  Audrey shook her head: “I’d remember it. These people are Nazis and they have nothing to do with fashion. That’s my crew: fashionistas. I’m strictly focused on girls. Nazis? No. I don’t even do boys.”

  “I understand the photo was taken by a friend of yours . . . Blake, uh . . . ?”

  She nodded. “Blake Winston. He does photos and video for my blog. You’ll talk to him, right?”

  “Soon as I leave here,” Lucas said.

  “Okay. Well, Blake knows everything about photography. He took my picture for a blog entry, we picked that up, right away. We couldn’t figure out what it was doing on that crazy website, Nazis and all that. Then, the other pictures, he says they were all taken with a telephoto lens. He can tell, something to do with what’s in focus, and what isn’t. He can explain it. But, they’re taken from a long way away. He also thinks that even then, they have to blow them up quite a bit. That’s why they look so crappy.”

  “I’ll talk to him about all that,” Lucas said. “You don’t think there’s any possibility that Blake—”

  “Oh, no.” She was shaking her head. “No, no, no. For one thing, he hates Nazis and all that white nationalist stuff. He’s really a nice guy, for being as rich as he is.”

  “He’s rich?”

  “His father is, anyway,” Audrey said. “He runs a fund. His father does. A hedge fund.” />
  Lucas smiled at her: young as she was, she sounded like she knew what she was talking about, that she knew about funds. He turned to Roberta Coil: “Nobody’s contacted you about this?”

  “No. I know what you’re thinking, that came up with the FBI agents. Nobody’s tried to blackmail me into changing a vote,” she said. “If you looked at all my votes since this website was created, you’d see they were all party line and my vote wasn’t critical in changing anything.”

  “All right.”

  “And that worries me,” Roberta Coil added. “They should have contacted me. If they don’t contact me, and if they haven’t contacted the other parents, what does that mean? Does that mean it’s not an extortion racket? Does that mean the kids are simply up there as targets?”

  “Jeez, Mom, thanks a lot,” Audrey said. “That totally makes me feel better.”

  Lucas looked back at Audrey. “Since you found the photo, you haven’t felt like somebody was watching you?”

  “No. Nothing.”

  “There was another girl in the photo with you,” Lucas said, going with “girl” since Audrey used the word. “Is there any possibility that she was the targeted one?”

  The senator shook her head: “That was Molly McWilliams. Her father owns a liquor distributorship here in northern Virginia. They’re quite well-off, but not political. All the kids on 1919 are children of politicians, so it seems unlikely that Molly would be the target.”

  Lucas asked how a predator might locate Audrey and be able to pick her out from all the other students at her school.

  Audrey brushed back a hank of auburn hair: “It’s easy. You go to mom’s website and it lists my dad’s name and mine—I’m the only child. Then you look me up on the internet and you find my blog and there I am. All kinds of pictures. I write about school, and parties, and I get kids to give me iPhone snapshots of who’s looking hot, and so on.”