Masked Prey

by John Sandford

  “So do we,” Jackson said.

  * * *

  —

  LANG WAS SITTING on a purple couch in the living room, a vase of yesterday’s yellow flowers wilting on the piano behind him.

  When he saw Lucas, he started to get to his feet, but Lucas put up a hand and he settled back down, his face nearly as purple as the couch.

  “Are you okay?” Lucas asked. “I mean, physically? You don’t look good.”

  “I’m completely undone,” Lang said. His mouth hung open. Then, “What am I going to do? Stephen is dead.”

  “Do you know who he was talking to the last few days? Where his research was going?”

  “I think it must be the ANM who did this,” Lang said. “Stephen found that gun training site for you.”

  “Okay, we’ll look at that for sure,” Lucas said. “Who else was he looking into? Any groups with a history? Patriotus?”

  “He did talk to Patriotus, to Roland Carr. That seems unlikely to me, that Roland would be involved with a killing. They’re more . . . verbal.”

  “Like the Greene Mountain Boys?”

  “More like that.”

  “What about Forlorn Hope or White Fist?” Lucas asked.

  Lang nodded: “He talked to White Fist day before yesterday. He went to their headquarters and talked to Toby Boone. And he went back last night, I think. I told him to be careful—after his first trip there, he said a man who was there with Toby was ‘scary.’ I think . . . an ex-convict.”

  Jackson: “Scary?”

  “That’s the word he used,” Lang said.

  Lucas said to Jackson, “White Fist is prison-based. They’re on our list. The three of us . . .” He nodded at Bob and Rae “. . . were going to look them up. We can still do that. You could send an investigator along, if you want.”

  “Maybe a SWAT team,” Jackson said.

  “Bob and Rae are SOG,” Lucas said.

  “Then you won’t need our SWAT—I’d like to come along, if I can get a break here.” Lang told them that Gibson had been asking about the 1919 website when he approached White Fist and two other groups, one called River Klan and the other called Bellum. River Klan and Bellum were both small, no more than a dozen or so members each, and both were focused on states’ rights issues, Lang said. Both had been present at a violent demonstration in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.

  “‘Bellum’ is Latin,” Lang said. “It means, ‘civil war.’”

  “Terrific,” said Rae.

  * * *

  —

  CHASE’S PHONE RANG and she walked away to answer it.

  Lang asked, “What happens now? What about Stephen’s . . . body?”

  Jackson explained the crime scene routine and the body’s removal to a medical examiner, and gave him a timeline. There was a chance that they’d be finished in the garage and the apartment by the end of the day, but they might want to look at it again, depending on the preliminary findings, so it would be sealed for an indefinite time. Gibson’s car would be taken to a secure parking lot where the crime scene techs could scour the interior for DNA.

  “We’ll need to interview you about Gibson’s lifestyle,” Jackson said. “We can best do that at the station . . .”

  “Do I need a lawyer?” Lang asked.

  Jackson shrugged: “That’s up to you. If you haven’t done anything . . .”

  Chase came back, had overheard the last comment, and said to Lang, “As a law enforcement official, I hate to say this, but you’d be better off with an attorney present when you’re interviewed. It’s best to have somebody on your side with you, even if you’re totally innocent.”

  “Thanks,” Jackson said.

  Chase shrugged: “Hey, I’m an attorney.”

  She turned to Lucas: “The man they arrested this morning is named William Christopher Walton. They’re sure that’s his real name because they found his fingerprints, taken when he joined the Army twelve years ago. He was discharged after four months as being psychologically unsuitable for military duty. He has no priors of any kind, that we can find. They’re entering his house now, he apparently lives with his mother. They did find a rather unusual letter in his pocket, which refers him to the 1919 site, explains what it means, and suggests that he might want to take action. The letter is smudgy, apparently a Xerox copy of an original. It was still in an envelope addressed to him. Walton’s asked for a lawyer—or as he put it, a white lawyer—so we’re not getting anything from him.”

  “Lone wolf,” Lang said. “How are you going to stop that?”

  Lucas said to Jackson, “Give us some booties. We need to look at the body and up in the apartment. We really can’t wait all day.” And he asked Lang, “How did Gibson take notes? Did he take them on a laptop, or in notebooks, or a recorder?”

  “He had a recorder, a very expensive one. Digital. A lot of the time, though, it wasn’t possible to take notes. He had a lavalier microphone that he could put inside his shirt, with a wire to the recorder, but he rarely tried to do that. Getting caught would be . . . disastrous, in some cases. Like with White Fist, you wouldn’t want to risk it. What he usually did—he had a very good memory—he’d interview people and then drive around a block and get his recorder out and talk into it. That’s what he probably did yesterday. I doubt that he would have transcribed anything, getting home when he did. He was an early-to-rise fellow. If he needed to transcribe anything, he would have waited until this morning.”

  “We need to listen to that recorder,” Lucas said to Jackson.

  “And look at his computer,” Chase said. To Lang: “Do you know if it’s password-protected?”

  “Of course it is, but I happen to know the password,” Lang said. “I’ll have to write it down for you. It’s complicated, it’s one of those super-strong ones you can get generated on the internet.”

  “Please do that,” Chase said.

  Lang said, “I will. Oh, I do want to call my attorney.” He nodded at Chase and said, “Thank you for that, young lady.”

  They got the password from Lang and as they walked away to the apartment, Chase muttered, “Nazi nincompoop.”

  “About that password,” Lucas said.

  “I’ve got it . . .”

  “Looks quite a bit like the password to the 1919 site.”

  Chase stopped in her tracks, looked at the slip of paper in her hand. “Now that’s a thought.” She looked back at Lang’s house. “Charles Lang is exactly the kind of person who’d love to have some power over a senator.”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS, CHASE, BOB, and Rae followed Jackson out to the garage, where a crime scene technician was pulling on a pair of Tyvek overalls. Somebody had run up the garage overhead door, and even standing back, they could see Gibson’s body on its side, with a puddle of blood around his head. He had the sudden-shot, rag-doll look, collapse and complete relaxation, his tongue partway out of his mouth, his eyelids half open, reddish streaks under the skin of his face, where gravity was pulling blood down through his flesh.

  Lucas took a step closer, squatted, as the crime scene guy said, “Not too close,” and looked at the bullet hole in Gibson’s face. No sign of a fight, no abrasions on his hands that Lucas could see. He’d simply been shot.

  Lucas said, “There’s no powder penetration in the skin around the bullet hole. The shooter might have used something to muffle the shot, a towel or something.”

  The crime scene guy squatted next to Lucas and said, “Look, there on his chest. See that white stuff? Looks like little specks of fabric. I think you’re probably right. We’ll bag it.”

  “Huh.”

  “And right there, by his hip, by his other hand . . .”

  Lucas could see a black cord. He and the crime scene guy both edged around to the other side of the body, and they could see a thin
plastic box under Gibson’s hip, like a cell phone, but too thick to be a phone.

  “His recorder,” Lucas said. “We gotta pull that out of there. Right now.”

  “That could be a problem,” the crime scene guy said. “We could lose some evidence.”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS CALLED JACKSON OVER, pointed out the plastic box, and after a brief argument with the crime scene guy, Jackson agreed they should pull the recorder, but should give the tech time to process the area right around it.

  “Let’s go look at the apartment, then,” Lucas said.

  Chase, who’d been watching from the driveway, said, “We’ve got a crime scene team on the way. They’ll help process the apartment. Since the murder happened here, we’ll mostly be talking about looking at his records, at his notebooks and computer and recordings and all that.”

  The apartment, connected to the garage area by an interior stairs, was fairly large and an extremely efficient work space. What normally would have been a living room was more like a working library, with a long center table covered with notebooks, papers, and magazines; the walls were lined with overflowing bookcases, one section filled with military thriller fiction, but most of it was packed with nonfiction war and political histories. An odd-shaped musical instrument case sat against a wall, next to a music stand; somebody later told Lucas that the case contained a rare and expensive oud.

  A small functional kitchen showed unwashed dishes on a breakfast bar, the remnants of a microwave taco dinner. The bedroom showed a queen-sized bed with a night table holding several more books and magazines, with a reading light hanging over a central stack of pillows.

  Lucas stepped around the place, looking without touching, then said to Chase, “There’s nothing really for me, here. This is for your crime scene team. Let’s go see about that recorder.”

  * * *

  —

  THE COUNTY CRIME scene tech had pulled the recorder from under Gibson’s thigh and had bagged it. “There appear to be several recordings,” the tech said. “I assume you want the last folder. The folder appears to have three segments . . .”

  “Play it,” Jackson said.

  The recording consisted of dictated notes of an interview with the leader of the group called Bellum, a Lawrence Gray, followed by dictated notes of an interview with the White Fist leader Toby Boone.

  And at the end, they found a recording of Gibson’s murder.

  * * *

  —

  “COP, PLEASE, C’MON, please, man . . .” Gibson began crying. “I’m not talking to him, I’m not giving him anything, please, man, he came to us, we didn’t go to him. You want to kill somebody, please please, man, kill Davenport, don’t do this. Did Toby send you? I bet Toby doesn’t know you’re here, we’re friends . . .”

  A man’s baritone voice:

  “Toby knows I’m here. The problem is, you saw Linc, and Linc, well, we can’t have any connections back to Linc, because Linc’s gonna kill himself a senator’s kid. If you’d gotten there two minutes later, we wouldn’t have a problem. But . . .”

  “Cop, please. I will not tell a soul. I will not tell Charles. I will not say a word to any . . .”

  BAP.

  * * *

  —

  CHASE JUMPED: “Good God!”

  Rae: “I don’t think he was present.”

  “Man had some balls,” Bob said. “He knew what was coming and managed to record it and leave us some names.”

  “Was Cop a name or a profession?” Rae wondered.

  “The way he used it, I think it was a name,” Lucas said. “We got three people we’ve got to hit, and right now: Toby, Cop, and Linc.”

  Chase said, “I’m aware of Bob and Rae’s skills, because I’ve seen them work, but they’re not enough. I’m calling in one of our SWAT squads, or maybe two of them. I’ll have HVE run Toby Boone, I know we’ve got stuff on him, but we need to run Cop and Linc to see if we can identify them. We need search warrants. This is gonna take a while.”

  “We need to have a presence . . .” Jackson said.

  “Of course. You’re invited, absolutely,” Chase said.

  “We really don’t have a while,” Lucas said. “The school day is already underway, we had one possible shooter this morning. If this Linc’s waiting for school to get out . . . we could have another problem.”

  “When I said a while, I meant an hour,” Chase said. “If Charlie sent Gibson to interview Toby Boone, and Gibson saw Cop and Linc there . . . then Charlie has an address for us.”

  Lang did have an address, on his old-fashioned Rolodex, in Frederick, Maryland, an hour outside of Washington.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTEEN

  Rae drove the Tahoe down Rosemont Avenue in Frederick, Maryland, past Boone Precious Metals and Pawn, which FBI files on White Fist identified as the group’s headquarters. The store was a converted two-story clapboard house remodeled with larger windows above a two-step stone porch; a red LED sign in the window blinked, successively, Gold and Silver and Bought and Sold. A ten-foot-tall orange Gumby, the kind inflated with a shop vac, was dancing outside the house with a banner that read, “Gold, Gold, Gold.”

  A detached garage sat behind the house, and, as with Charles Lang’s place, had an apartment or storage area on the second floor above car parking spaces, with a window looking out at the street. The business building, garage, and a surrounding parking lot were set into a heavily treed lot, which made it impossible to see the back of the place—but also provided an approach for the FBI SWAT team.

  “Count the doors,” Rae said. “We know there’s one on the side, probably gotta be one in the back, so that’s three on the main house, probably two on that garage, if it really is a garage.”

  “Looks like a garage,” Lucas said.

  “Could be a meeting space,” Rae said.

  “Hadn’t thought of that.”

  Bob was inspecting the place with imaged-stabilized Canon binoculars. “It has an air of being sorta old and fucked up, but I don’t think it is. You look close and everything seems to be in good shape. Those garage doors aren’t old wood, they’re metal, and they don’t look that old, and the windows are in good shape. The side door looks to be metal. There’s that hip-high concrete foundation on three sides, nothing’s going through that.”

  “I’ll talk to Jane,” Lucas said, as they passed on down the street. “The SWAT guys are on the way. They should know they may be cracking a bunker. They need to do some serious recon, maybe make a video.”

  “Sidewalks, but no pedestrians,” Rae said. “That’s one good thing.”

  “Lotsa cars,” Bob said.

  * * *

  —

  THEY MADE ONLY THE SINGLE PASS, then continued on to the Frederick city police headquarters, a red-brick building eight minutes through traffic from Boone Precious Metals and Pawn. On the way, Lucas called Chase, who said that a reconnaissance and a video were underway.

  When they got to police headquarters, Chase was huddling with the police chief and two other ranking officers. Lucas, Bob, and Rae were ushered into the chief’s office, and when Chase saw them she said, “Half an hour,” and, to the cops, “U.S. Marshals SOG team.”

  “Where’re your people?” Lucas asked Chase.

  “They’re on the way. They’re staging here in the parking lot. It’s not too visible and I’m told we’re reasonably close to Boone’s place.”

  “Eight minutes,” Bob said.

  Lucas told her about the layout and the bunker aspect—the concrete foundation—and she said they’d already looked at it from a satellite view, but couldn’t tell from that what might be at the back of the buildings. “We’ve got one of our street guys from DC, he’ll be going into those trees in the next few minutes with his camping stuff and a GoPro. There’s a creek in back but a drivewa
y comes in from the side of the buildings. We’ll hit both front and back.” She looked at her watch. “Doug should be there now. The street guy—he’s convincing, if anybody sees him. He stinks to high heaven.”

  The Frederick police would not be involved in the raid and most wouldn’t know about it, or the target, until a few seconds before it took place, when patrol cars would be given a general alert in case there were reports of gunfire from the area.

  “Lot of traffic in there, residential single-family homes across the street,” the chief said to Chase. “You gotta be careful. I know for a fact that Toby Boone’s got a handgun and what he calls hunting rifles in there, though they’re ARs and AKs that supposedly belong to his brother. His brother doesn’t have a felony record, so he can buy what he wants. With all those guns . . . I mean, I don’t need any innocent citizens getting killed.”

  “Does his brother actually work there?” Lucas asked.

  “I don’t know the exact arrangement, but I think he does. When Toby was still on probation on his ag assault conviction, two of our investigators went in there looking for a couple of stolen guitars. One of our guys spotted the pistol and braced Boone about it, and he said it was his brother’s weapon and his brother confirmed it and they had a sales receipt. We keep tabs on Toby because of this White Fist thing and because of his record. He went down on ag assault, but that wasn’t a one-time thing.”

  Chase took a call, listened for a minute, then said, “Okay, get him out of there. I’ll see you in the parking lot.”

  To Lucas, she said, “The SWAT team will be here in two minutes, our street guy has been making some movies of the target, those should be coming in any time now. Three trucks, eighteen guys. They’re asking that you guys, you and Bob and Rae, stand down. We’re all coordinated and they don’t know you.”