Masked Prey

by John Sandford

  Lucas: “We’ve been talking about this, me’n Bob and Rae. We got unbelievably lucky with Gibson’s digital recorder and busting Cop. We’ll be even luckier if we find this Linc guy before he pulls a trigger. But we won’t find any more of them this way. We won’t get that lucky again.”

  “What then?”

  “You’ve got to start planning some kind of media offensive—and FBI offensive,” Lucas said. “Take down all the sites that mirrored 1919, file lawsuits, make explicit threats, talk about people getting the needle. Talk to Greene, the Greene Mountain Boys guy, about doing a blog post on the penalties you’re talking about. Don’t just take down likely extremist groups, take them all down. Roust them. Make threats. Make it look like the end of the world is coming down.”

  “What about you? Are you giving up?”

  Lucas spread his hands: “If you wind up taking down everybody we know about, then what would we contribute?”

  “Stay on a while longer. I tend to agree with you about a media blitz, but that’s gonna take a few meetings,” Chase said.

  “We could stay a couple days anyway. We could do some sight-seeing if nothing specific comes up . . .”

  “Do that. Or go look around Cop’s house and see if you spot anything that might lead to this Linc guy—you’ve got a great eye,” Chase said. “If you hadn’t seen that phone list, and taken the time to read it, we might not have gotten to Cop as quickly as we did. We’re really looking good. So stay. Buy me some luck.”

  “All right. I would like to take a look at Cop’s place, the sooner the better. And we’ll want to take a look at his car. We’ve got that spotted. We’re gonna need warrants.”

  “I’ll have those in an hour. Boone’s married, we’ve already hit his house. I understand his wife is giving us a hard time. But, that is what it is; so far, nobody’s called to tell me about any big discoveries there.”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS’S PHONE BUZZED and he looked at the incoming call, but didn’t recognize the number.

  “Davenport,” he said.

  “Marshal Davenport?” Young male voice, heavy breathing. “This is Blake Winston.”

  “What’s happening, Blake?” His eyes clicked over to Chase, who’d caught the name, and stepped closer. Lucas thumbed the speaker option so she could listen.

  “You were right. I got into Audrey’s computer and that 1919 site is in there, the pieces of it. Audrey put the site together.”

  “Where are you?”

  “At home,” Winston said. “I put all the pieces I found on a thumb drive for you. I have it here.”

  “Don’t talk to anyone. I mean, anyone. We’re coming,” Lucas said. “I’m way up north, it’ll take an hour.”

  “I’ll go hit some tennis balls with my mom. I did tell her about it and she’s royally pissed.”

  “Try to calm her down, Blake. I’m on my way.”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS CLICKED OFF AND CHASE, eyes wide with horror, said, “No, no, no, no-no-no.”

  Lucas: “Oh, yeah. I had a funky feeling right from the first meeting with Audrey and her mother. I recruited Blake to spy on her.”

  “That’s awful.”

  “What’s awful is that she did it,” Lucas said. “Anyway, I don’t think you want to have heard what you just heard.”

  “Lucas . . .”

  “This can’t get out,” Lucas said. “The Senate will go batshit, or at least half of it will. If something happens and you have to claim later that you didn’t know about this, I’ll back you up. I’ll lie. I’ll say nobody knew but me. ’Cause this is about to get desperately political. If it gets out, then everybody who knew about it, about a cover-up, which is what we’re talking about, is going to carry a little stink.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’ve got forty million dollars in my investment accounts,” Lucas said. “If it turns into a huge deal, I could maybe lose my job, but so what? I’ll take the chance, and if I lose, I’ve got a pillow to fall on. What do you have?”

  She bit her lower lip and then said, “Probably be a county prosecutor, but it’d be a small county in a cold place.”

  “Exactly. So, you know, but you don’t know. You might be able to direct some traffic that you wouldn’t if you didn’t know. Take the emphasis off uncovering 1919 and put it on finding any lone wolves who are rattling around. But that’s only because you’re really, really smart—not because you know who put the site up.”

  Chase stepped back: “You’re right. About all of it. I know, but I don’t know.”

  She walked away, glancing back only once.

  CHAPTER

  FOURTEEN

  Lucas pried Bob and Rae away from the SWATs, said, “I need the truck, but you guys can’t come. What you need to do is, get a ride from Jane. She’ll give you a warrant to search Cop’s car down at the UPS center. Call me when you get it done.”

  Rae: “We can do that, but why?”

  “Because this is about to get political and you don’t want to know about it. You want to be able to look a Senate investigating committee in the eye and say, ‘Davenport never told me about it.’”

  Bob and Rae looked at each other, and Rae shrugged: “You usually know what you’re talking about,” she said. “But it sounds bad.”

  “It is bad.”

  Lucas called Chase, who was standing fifty feet away, and fixed a ride for Bob, Rae, and their guns, first to the UPS center, then back to the Watergate. Then he headed south, the late-afternoon traffic beginning to congeal, but most of it was coming toward him, rather than with him. On the way, he called Senator Elmer Henderson on his private line.

  Henderson picked up on the fifth ring and said, “I’m in a meeting—on a scale of one to ten . . .”

  “Ten.”

  “Give me a second to get out in the hall,” Henderson said. There were some shuffling sounds and a door closed, then Henderson said, “I assume you cracked it. Did you kill anyone?”

  “I’ve cracked part of it. I’ll know for sure in an hour or so.”

  “What is it?”

  “We’re talking on radios and I’m told it’s child’s play for somebody to listen in, if you’ve got the right child,” Lucas said. “I’ll want to see you in, say, two hours. But not with your Minnesota sidekick. Just you.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I do have a certain level of trust in my sidekick,” Henderson said, referring to Porter Smalls.

  “Then you can tell him—or call him and I’ll tell him, but I want to talk to you first.”

  “You’re at the Watergate, right? What room?”

  Lucas told him and Henderson said, “Two hours. See you then.”

  * * *

  —

  THE TRIP SOUTH, across the Potomac, was mostly on interstate highways, and traffic wasn’t terrible; Lucas made it to the Winston house in exactly one hour. He was met at the door by an angry Mary Ellen Winston, who said, “I find this whole thing . . . despicable, including Blake’s part in it. I’ve told him so.”

  “You’ve heard that the FBI arrested a sniper outside the school of a senator’s child?” Lucas asked. “Depending on how this breaks out, your kid could be saving the lives of other children.”

  “Blake is betraying a friend—”

  “To save lives,” Lucas snapped. “Tell the truth, Mrs. Winston, I don’t want to hear some bullshit about how this is an ethical complication. You ever look at somebody who’s taken a bullet in the head? I have, and just this morning. That was bad enough: if it’d been a kid, I’d be having nightmares.”

  She froze up at the tone, then said, “Blake’s in the tennis room.”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS WALKED THROUGH THE HOUSE, with Mary Ellen Winston tra
iling him, and the place smelled improbably like fresh-baked bread and cinnamon; he thought it might be a spray of some kind, because he didn’t see anybody baking and Winston didn’t seem to be in the mood for anything so mellow.

  Blake was looking as frozen as his mother, sitting on a couch looking out over the tennis court, an Apple laptop on the table in front of him, the bright Apple logo glowing from the back of the machine. When Lucas walked into the room, he looked up and Mary Ellen said, “Blake, I’ve told you . . .”

  “Get the fuck off my back,” Blake Winston snapped.

  “What!”

  “Get the fuck off my back. We’ll talk about this later when Dad gets here. Right now, I don’t want to hear about it. Go read a New Yorker or something.”

  His mother turned and steamed out of the room. Lucas walked down the three steps into the tennis room and said, “I’m causing you trouble.”

  “You’re not causing me anything—I’m causing it,” Winston said. He seemed five years older than he had the last time they talked. “Mom makes complications where there aren’t any. Or shouldn’t be. That’s what she does. Come look at this.”

  He took a thumb drive out of his shirt pocket, plugged it into a USB port on the side of the computer and said, “I won’t bother you with the details. The 1919 site is down now, but I’d downloaded the whole site. I searched Audrey’s computer hard drive and found the 1919 articles in her deleted files.”

  “Which weren’t totally deleted?”

  “No. They’re still there on the hard drive until they’re overwritten and they hadn’t all been overwritten. I also found four of the photographs . . . the rest were gone.”

  “How do you know she didn’t take the files off the 1919 site because she was interested in learning something about them?” Lucas asked. “I mean, you did.” Winston waved him off. “Remember how the photos on the website didn’t have any metadata? The metadata had been stripped off? Well, the metadata is still there on her photo files, which means she didn’t get them off the site. The photos were all shot with a Sony RX100 Mark III, which is a nice little camera. I happen to know she has that exact model. The metadata has all the dates and stuff that the photos were shot.”

  Lucas sat silently for a moment, then said, “Let’s see the photos.”

  Winston brought them up one at a time, showed Lucas the metadata, which included the time, date, and camera setting used to make them. They’d been done the past spring, before summer vacation.

  When he’d looked at them all, Lucas said, “Okay. Give me the thumb drive.”

  Winston ejected it, pulled it from the USB port, and tossed it to Lucas. “It’s gonna hurt if you tell her where this came from,” Winston said. “The word will get around the school that I’m a narc.”

  “I’ll cover you if I can, but she may suspect,” Lucas said. “I’m willing to tell her some lies to cover up my sources.”

  “Try hard,” Winston said. “What Mom’s saying . . . that’s what a lot of my friends would say, too. You say, ‘Maybe a kid would get killed if you didn’t turn her in,’ but that’s all theoretical. If a kid doesn’t get killed, I’m gonna be the school dick.”

  “I understand,” Lucas said.

  “Do you?”

  “Yes. I did murder investigations in Minnesota and I had a number of confidential sources,” Lucas said. “If they were found out, they weren’t the school dick. They were dead men walking.”

  Winston thought about that, then bobbed his head: “Okay.”

  Lucas stood, patted him on the shoulder, said, “Go easy on your mother,” and left.

  * * *

  —

  HE WAS BACK AT THE WATERGATE fifteen minutes before Henderson was due to arrive, so he took a quick shower and changed into a clean shirt. As he was getting dressed, he took a phone call from Rae.

  “See,” she said, “you really don’t want to be one of those shitkickers who kills somebody, but then thinks, ‘This is an expensive gun, I think I’ll keep it.’ And then, you get clever and hide it under your spare tire, where every moron who ever wore a Carhartt jacket hides his gun.”

  “What kind?”

  “Smith M&P nine, the perfect size to make that hole in Gibson. Threaded barrel, and we found the suppressor stuck in the crack between the seat back and the seat, in the back of the car. About the only thing small enough to fit back there.”

  “Call Jane . . .”

  “That’s all done, the FBI guys have the gun and suppressor. Nothing else of interest in there. We’re leaving here now, heading back to the Watergate.”

  “Let’s meet at nine tomorrow; I’m jammed up right now.”

  “See you then.”

  * * *

  —

  HENDERSON MESSAGED that he was running ten minutes late, so Lucas plugged Winston’s thumb drive into his own MacBook, pulled up the files, and ran through them again. He was making notes on the metadata on the last photo when Henderson knocked.

  Lucas let him in, and the senator, looking harried, yanked his necktie loose, took a chair, and asked, “I don’t suppose there’s a beer in that refrigerator?”

  “As a matter of fact, there is.”

  Lucas got a beer, popped the top, and handed it over. Henderson took it, swallowed some beer, said, “You know the most amazing thing about my job? It’s talking to famous people, people you see on TV all the time, pontificating, and realizing how many of them are grubbing around for money. Still looking for angles that will make them a few bucks. And they don’t care what they have to do. Bend over the desk and take it in the ass? Sure, no problem, give me a hundred bucks.”

  “Maybe you’re amazed because you never had to do that,” Lucas said. “Being born with a gold brick up that ass.”

  “That’s not it,” Henderson said. “Sure, I chose the right parents and got born rich. But if I wasn’t rich, I wouldn’t grub. I know all kinds of good people who are willing to work hard but would refuse to grub around for money like some of these guys. I’m mean, it’s embarrassing.”

  He hesitated in mid-rant, then said, “Anyway, that’s not why I’m here. What happened? And why can’t I tell Porter?”

  “Because Porter’s a Republican and Roberta Coil is a Southern Democrat who is holding on to her seat by her fingernails. I looked. She won her last election by fewer than nine thousand votes. And the Senate is delicately balanced right now.”

  Henderson leaned forward. “Jesus Christ, what are you about to tell me?”

  Lucas said, “The 1919 website was invented by Audrey Coil, Senator Coil’s daughter.”

  Now Henderson leaned back, nearly speechless, until he managed, “Oh, fuck me! Lucas, that can’t be right!”

  “Yeah, it is. I was afraid Porter . . .”

  “Porter can’t know about this,” Henderson sputtered. “He would turn it into a political sledgehammer. In fact, nobody can know. If it gets in the media, Coil might have to resign from the Senate. We can’t afford to lose her.”

  “That’s what I was thinking.”

  “And you have proof? That the daughter did it?” Henderson demanded.

  Lucas explained about Audrey Coil’s laptop and about Blake Winston’s investigation, and about the metadata.

  “You trust this Winston kid?”

  “Yes. He looked because I asked him to,” Lucas said. “His mother was dead-set against it.”

  “Wait—so there are at least two other people who know about this? Winston, and his mother?”

  “And his father will probably hear about it, if he hasn’t already. I’ve warned them to keep their mouths shut, but, you know . . . freedom of speech. I don’t know their political affiliation, but they’re rich and have Southern roots.”

  “Goddamnit, that’s not good,” Henderson chugged half of the remaining beer, eyes closed.

  Lucas
didn’t mention Jane Chase.

  * * *

  —

  “WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DO?” Lucas asked.

  Henderson got up, prowled around the room, hands in his jacket pockets, a scowl on his face. He looked out the window where he could see a curve in the Potomac, and down at Lucas’s Walther sitting on the desk, in its holster. He picked up the gun, hefted it, put it back down.

  Finally, he said, “We have to talk to Bob Coil. Like, right now. I’ll call my office, get her personal cell phone. Maybe we can catch her on this side of the river.”

  “You want to talk to her without the daughter?”

  “If we can. Because, we’re gonna sit here and figure out how we can convince Bob Coil that Audrey did this and how she might get Audrey to admit it, so we know for sure,” Henderson said. “Then the daughter gets shipped back to wherever they’re from and where no media is likely to go chasing after her.”

  “The FBI may start a blitz, hitting alt-right groups. They’ll use that would-be sniper they caught as an excuse,” Lucas said. “They’ll try to scare the shit out of the leadership, so maybe there won’t be any more attempts and the whole thing will go away. If we can just make it go away for a while, drop out of the news . . .”

  Henderson pulled at his lower lip. “If the FBI does that, we’ll go to the media outlets, Porter and I, and tell them that their coverage is encouraging crazies to go after these kids. We’ll tell them that if somebody gets shot, we’ll start a bipartisan boycott of their advertisers. That’ll cool off the news coverage. You’re right—if it goes away for a while, we’re probably good.”

  * * *

  —

  HENDERSON CALLED HIS OFFICE, got a number for Roberta Coil, called it, learned that Coil was in a staff conference. He asked her to come to the Watergate, told her it was urgent. She asked about that. “I was told not to discuss certain things on cell phones because they’re actually radios, that other people listen to,” Henderson told her, glancing over at Lucas.