Twisted Prey Read online

  “I am,” she said.

  “You want to come to me or should I come to you?”

  “I could meet you in the hotel restaurant in twenty minutes. Should be fairly quiet tonight.” Her contralto voice had a slight growl to it.

  “That’ll work,” Lucas said.

  “How will I know you?” she asked.

  “I’ll be the guy in the blue jacket and pink golf shirt. Probably not too many of those.”

  “Not with a gun under the jacket.”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS DID HAVE A GUN under his jacket, a new one, a Walther PPQ, the same .40 S&W caliber as the Glock pistols issued to most U.S. Marshals. Lucas had one of those, too, but didn’t like it and didn’t carry it. He’d begun to carry the new pistol on his left hip, in a cross-draw position, which made it easier to get at and less obvious than the .45 he’d carried for most of his career.

  When he was checking into the hotel, he’d been eye-checked by a security man in a gray suit. Lucas nodded at him, and, after he got his keys, walked over with his badge and ID case. “Just so you know,” he said.

  “I suspected, but thank you,” the security guy said. “You gonna be here long?”

  “I don’t know,” Lucas said. “I’m working.”

  “I’ll pass the word to our other security people. Nobody will bother you.”

  Lucas patted his shoulder, and took the elevator up.

  * * *

  —

  LATER, IN THE RESTAURANT, Lucas got a table for two, a beer and a bowl of nuts, and had been waiting for five minutes when Carter showed up. She was a short bottle-blond woman with arched thin black eyebrows who looked like she might work hard to avoid anything resembling a gym. She was in her mid-thirties, Lucas thought, and was wearing a jade-green dress with open-toed leather sandals. She spotted Lucas, twiddled her fingers at him, walked over, and took the chair opposite him.

  “Beer guy, huh?” She had a soft Southern accent.

  “Yeah . . . hot day.”

  She ordered a dirty martini with three olives, and, when the waiter was gone, asked, “Well, do you believe Senator Smalls?”

  “Yes. He has no reason to lie to me. I believe he’d be reluctant to see me investigating something he was lying about.”

  “Ooo,” she said. “You do have a good opinion of yourself.”

  Lucas shrugged, and said, “I get things done. That’s why the senator invited me in.”

  “Well, the West Virginia investigator doesn’t believe him,” she said.

  “That’s not exactly correct,” Lucas said. “I talked to the guy this afternoon and he thinks something about the accident smells wrong. He doesn’t have a single piece of evidence, but his gut tells him that Porter was telling the truth, that there was another truck.”

  He went through what he’d learned from Armstrong, including the cop’s personal judgment. “That won’t show up in his written reports, because he has no support for it.”

  “Okay . . .” The martini came, and she took it, fished out two olives, munched on them, nodded at the waiter, and when they were alone again, she asked, “What do you need from me?”

  “Tell me what you do,” Lucas said.

  “What the senator tells me to. I used to do a lot of research, but now I mostly manage the office, figure out what research we need, and make sure the research gets done. I read everything I can find, on all sides, about various policy options. I do liaison work with other senatorial aides, or House aides, or White House aides, and talk to media people. This week it’s mostly been damage control.”

  “Is Cecily Whitehead’s death going to hurt him?”

  She thought about that for a minute, then said, “No. The fact that she was killed makes the story harder to control. But there’s no definite proof that they were out there for sexual reasons . . . The medical examiner was kind enough not to look.”

  “Kind enough?”

  “Sort of encouraged to believe it wasn’t necessary.”

  “I see.”

  She shrugged. “Even if he had looked, that kind of thing happens all the time around here. Sex—adultery, I guess. Nobody wants to talk about it because too many powerful people do it. Politicians, staff, lobbyists. Even if there were proof that Porter and CeeCee were sexually involved, it wouldn’t make the news here in Washington—I suppose it might back in Minnesota, but I doubt even there. The fact is, half the newsies are sleeping with somebody they shouldn’t be sleeping with, so sex doesn’t get reported. If word got out, in the papers, to the public, it might get a little embarrassing at Senate cocktail parties, with all the senators’ wives from Idaho and Utah and such, but that’d be about it.”

  “If the senator was killed, would it derail anything? Any important legislation, anything like that?”

  She thought again, and said, “This summer it might have. If Porter had been killed, and you’ve got a Democratic governor in Minnesota—he’d be appointing a Democrat to replace Porter. The Senate’s balanced on a knife-edge. If Porter were replaced by a Dem, it’d be even tighter. So . . . there’s that. Then, if the senator was carrying a particularly important piece of pork, and somebody was desperate that it not get passed . . . maybe then killing him might stop something.”

  “Gimme an example?” Lucas asked.

  She pulled the bowl of nuts closer, took a few of them, crunched them, and said, “Okay. Say Porter had a widget factory in his district and he planned to sneak a few lines into an appropriations bill that would give that factory, and no other widget factory, a tax break. That would give the factory a price advantage over all the other widget factories. The folks who own those other factories could get upset.”

  “Enough to kill somebody?”

  “Suppose the widgets were actually electronics suites and critical to construction of the Navy’s new Ford class of aircraft carriers. Say the suites sold for seventy million each, and the Navy wanted six for each carrier, and there’ll be two more carriers after the Ford. Could you get somebody killed for a billion dollars?”

  “Know the right guy, you could get somebody killed for the keys to a five-year-old Prius,” Lucas said.

  She grinned. “There you are,” she said.

  “But you couldn’t get anybody good,” Lucas amended. “You couldn’t get a serious pro.”

  “But for a couple of hundred thousand, plus an office at the White House?”

  “Okay. Was Smalls carrying a bill like that? Anything that important?”

  She took another scoop of nuts, and said, “It’d be an amendment, not an entire bill . . . but, no. I’ll review what we’re doing this session, I can get back to you tomorrow, but there’s nothing I can think of. And I’ll tell you, this kind of stuff goes on all the time in Washington. Tight votes, preferential tax rates, and nobody gets killed. Not for that kind of stuff.”

  “Smalls had a particular person in mind for this . . . attempt . . . accident . . . whatever it was,” Lucas said.

  “I know.” She reached out to the bowl of nuts again, pushed it away. “Don’t let me eat any more of those things. They make me fart.”

  “Okay.” She had made him smile.

  “I’ve been thinking about that particular person, reading up on her,” Carter said. “She hates Porter like rat poison, of course, because Porter won’t keep his mouth shut about what happened in that election. If he keeps talking, he could queer her presidential ambitions. You could consider that a motive.”

  “Yes.”

  “About means. She’s on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and she has an aide who does nothing but committee work for her. He worked for the CIA for five or six years before he moved over to the Hill; he was in the Army before that; and he has contacts all over the intelligence community, both public and private. He is a pit viper of the first degree. A fixer, a sneak, may
be crazy. He would know people who’d take the job. Our particular person has all the money in the world to pay for it.”

  “Motive, means, and, of course, with Porter out wandering around the backwoods with his friend from Minnesota, plenty of opportunity,” Lucas said. “I’ll need this guy’s name.”

  “I’ll get you a whole file on him tomorrow,” Carter said.

  Lucas said, “Don’t get killed before then.”

  “I’ll try not to. But it’s Porter they want, not a humble farm girl from Tifton, Georgia.”

  * * *

  —

  NEITHER OF THEM wanted a second drink, and Lucas walked Carter back to her apartment building. She lit up a thin, dark cigarillo with a stainless-steel Zippo, leaving a scent trail of cigar smoke and lighter fluid behind them.

  As they walked, she said, “About that whole motive/means thing. What worries me is, the motive is there, but does it seem strong enough? To me, it doesn’t. She’s been quite good at fending off Porter. She’s had people talking about Porter being a little unbalanced, maybe senile. That has an effect, too, enough that I told Porter he ought to back off. He hasn’t, yet, but he will. I mean, he’s back in the Senate, so what’s the point?”

  “Hate?”

  “The thing about senators is, they learn when to cut their losses,” she said. “Porter knows that better than most. He’ll figure out that a knife in the back is better than hitting her with a ball-peen hammer. I mean, maybe she’s twisted enough to murder him or have somebody else do it, but I’m not happy about the motive. I’ll grant you the means, but the motive seems weak.”

  “I’ll make a note,” Lucas said. “Need more motive.”

  “Do that.” At the door to her building, she said, “I hope you’re as smart and mean as you obviously think you are—this is a different league here.”

  Lucas smiled his wolverine smile, and said, “Another thing we’ll have to disagree about. I know people from Washington think that, but from the outside D.C. looks like a pile of shysters and hucksters and general-purpose hustlers. If you were warning me about New York, or L.A., I’d say okay. But Washington? Washington I can handle.”

  “I hope you don’t learn otherwise,” Carter said, and went through the door.

  Lucas walked back to the hotel, quietly whistling the opening riffs of J.J. Cale’s “Fancy Dancer.”

  Washington, D.C.

  He was going to kick ass and take names.

  * * *

  —

  HE WOKE UP the next morning feeling less confident, having slept on what Carter had said. If Smalls and Whitehead had been attacked by professionals—and it certainly seemed that way—then there was a real danger. The killers were unlikely to go after a marshal because that would attract too much notice. They could go after Smalls, though, and if they gave up on subtlety . . .

  It wasn’t that hard to shoot somebody in the back, he thought, as he shaved. Gangbangers did it all the time and walked away. Former SEALs, Delta, Rangers: all were thoroughly trained and inured to killing. America had somehow gotten itself in the position of creating thousands of efficient professional killers and, at the same time, had provided them with easy access to the weapons needed for the job: you could get a perfectly adequate Savage .30-06 at your local Walmart for less than four hundred dollars. His neighbor at the lake cabin had done that, and the rifle could make a minute-of-angle shot all day and all night.

  * * *

  —

  HE’D GOTTEN OUT of the shower and was trying to decide between a pair of bright red Jockey shorts and a more subdued pair with horizontal green stripes when his phone rang. He picked it up, looked at the screen, clicked on, and said, “Hey, Rae.”

  “Lucas, what are you doing?”

  “I’m on a highly secret mission in Washington,” Lucas said. “If you were here, I’d tell you all about it. How’s Bob?”

  Rae Givens laughed. “You know what the Stump is doing? Wind sprints. Honest to God, it’s like watching a tractor-trailer trying to drag race. But he’s good. Good to go.”

  Rae and Bob Matees were marshals assigned to the Special Operations Group located in Louisiana. They’d been with Lucas as they chased a hard-core holdup man and multiple murderer across the face of Texas. Lucas had killed him in the town of Marfa, but not before Bob had been shot through both legs by an accomplice.

  Lucas asked, “Good to go, but where’s he going?”

  “Well, I called up the Minneapolis Office to see what you were up to, and they told me you were in Washington, but they couldn’t say why. I thought I’d call you up and see if we could help.”

  Lucas walked over to his window and pulled back the curtains as he said, “Tell you what, Rae, right now I’m looking at files. Not even quite doing that yet. I’ll be looking at them later today. This could get tense, and it could get political, and it might not do your careers a lot of good to get involved.”

  “C’mon, man, this is Rae you’re talking to . . .”

  “Okay, Rae, let me ask you this: what if our targets turn out to be CIA? Or military guys?”

  “Oh-oh.”

  “Yeah.”

  There was a moment of silence, then she said, “You know what? I’d still be up for it. Bob would be, too. Right now I’m trying to find this dude who walked out of a federal lockup in an ID mix-up, but he’s about as dangerous as a head of lettuce. I’ll get him, maybe, but I’ve got to pretend like I care. C’mon, tell me what you’re doing. Give me some specifics.”

  “This is going to sound a little paranoid, but I’m not going to tell you on the phone,” Lucas said. He was looking out at the Potomac, a nice view to the west, a forest on the far bank; if you didn’t already know it, you’d never guess that a major city was at your back. “Let me look at these files, talk to a few people. If I need help, you’re the one I’ll call.”

  “All right. Well, shit. Back to tracking Warren Beasley, who, if he has any brains at all, ditched a couple million bucks where we can’t find it and has already crossed the border and is now drinking pink cocktails with umbrellas in them.”

  “That kind of guy.”

  “Yeah, pharmaceuticals,” Rae said. “Sold about a ton more hydrocodone to doctors than the doctors actually got . . . Skimmed maybe eight mil. Got five years at Club Fed, skipped on a pre-sentencing bond.”

  “Good luck.”

  “Call me, damnit.”

  * * *

  —

  HE HAD ORDERED BREAKFAST, and was drinking the first Diet Coke of the day, when Carter called. “I’ve got several files for you. Are you carrying a laptop?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve had everything reduced to pdfs, so you should be good. I’ll come to you, if you’re still at the hotel.”

  “I am, eating breakfast. Same table.”

  “Fifteen minutes.”

  Lucas was working his way through a Washington Post when Carter arrived. She was wearing an upscale tan business dress and heels, oversized Prada sunglasses, and carried a burgundy leather satchel over her shoulder. She waved at a waiter, ordered coffee, sat across from Lucas, dug into her bag, and slid a thumb drive across the table to him.

  “The man you want is named Jack Parrish. I got a serious file on him, but I had to hint to the guy who gave it to me that we might have a romantic future together, which we don’t. Read it fast so you can tell me if I have to go back to the guy before I turn him down.”

  “Not even going to give him a shot?” Lucas asked. “You ever hear about working a source?”

  “You haven’t met the guy,” Carter said. “Does Brylcreem addiction suggest anything good to you?”

  “Ouch. On the other hand, we may need as much help as we can get. Where’d the guy get the files?”

  “Background checks for the Intelligence Committee,” Carter said. “The committee h
as its own set of files on its personnel. I wouldn’t have access to these myself, except for my Brylcreem buddy who works in the file room. So, speed-read and get back to me.”

  Lucas told her that his self-confidence had waned over the evening, but that he was more worried about Smalls than about himself. “While she might hate me, she can figure the odds. Killing me might feel good, but eventually it’d come back to bite her in the ass.”

  “When do you think you’ll know something? Anything?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll call when I do . . . In another case, a year ago, I had some strange experiences with cell phones.” He reached in his pocket, took out a burner phone, and handed it to her. “I bought a couple of burners before I left St. Paul. I’ll call you from mine before you leave here so you’ll have my number. Only use the burner to call my burner . . . never call my burner from your regular phone, and don’t call any other number from your burner. This is strictly for you and me.”

  “You think they’re monitoring us?”

  “I don’t think anything in particular. Like I said, my last case had some weird turns because of cell phones. I don’t trust them as far as I could spit a rat,” Lucas said.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN CARTER HAD GONE, with Lucas’s secret cell number in her new burner phone, Lucas went back up to his room. There, he traded his jacket and slacks for a pair of soft cotton athletic pants and a T-shirt, jacked up the air-conditioning, plugged the thumb drive into his laptop, and opened Carter’s files.

  Jack Parrish was a thin, coffin-pale man with close-set eyes who used too much gel in his dark hair, enough that you could see the tracks left by his comb; he wore suits that were too dark and too sharp, like he’d picked them out of the pages of GQ. The photos in the file were all head and shoulders only, the type used for passports and security cards. He’d always faced the various cameras with the same hard glare.