Masked Prey Read online

  Out in the car, he figured he’d screwed up. They needed to go, and he’d been unable to do it. He had to harden his heart, he thought. Had to harden his heart.

  * * *

  —

  HE THOUGHT ABOUT that the entire next day; and he hardened his heart as he worked, laying out the subdivision that was being carved out of the red dirt of a former farm. He sometimes used an independent surveyor, but on this job, did the surveying himself, working with a rodman and two assistants. They were all taciturn men who’d worked together on other projects and moved quickly and efficiently with almost no chatter; they even ate lunch separately.

  At the end of the workday, he drove around the subdivision until he spotted Stokes, leaning on his shovel at the end of a new culvert. He got out of his truck and walked over to Stokes and said, “Listen, what time are you getting home?”

  “Couple beers, probably about seven. Why?”

  “I found some old color aerial photographs at my house. I thought I might drop them off for your sister to look at. There are some interesting quilt ideas in there.”

  Stokes shrugged. “Sure. You could drop them off anytime, though.”

  Dunn shook his head: “I think it’d be better if you were there. I mean, she doesn’t really know me. Semi-strange man, and all.”

  “Okay. Come by at seven-thirty. I’ll be there. I think Rachel kind of liked your looks, if you know what I mean.”

  “She seemed like a real nice girl,” Dunn said.

  “She is a nice girl,” Stokes said.

  * * *

  —

  BETWEEN THE END OF THE WORKDAY and seven o’clock, Dunn did nothing but shut down all of his softer thoughts about Randy and Rachel Stokes. They had to go. They knew about him—as they were sitting around the kitchen table the night before, Rachel had asked about the weird website he’d sent her brother to, and he’d managed to laugh it off. “Something a guy told me about, and the way Randy talks, I figured it was up his alley.”

  She’d bought that. Maybe. And maybe not. If a question ever came up, they’d remember.

  * * *

  —

  RANDY STOKES GOT to Rachel’s house just as Dunn was leaving home. Randy said to Rachel, “Dunn’s coming over. Mostly to see you, I guess. He said he found some aerial pictures you’d like for your quilts. Or maybe he just wanted to talk to you some more.”

  “Oh, for God’s sakes, Randy, he’s your friend. He’s just being nice.”

  “He was never that nice to me in the past,” Stokes said. “I kinda had the idea that he thought I was a dumb shit.”

  “Whatever,” Rachel said. “By the way, the mortgage payment is up. You were supposed to give me a few dollars while you’re living here . . .”

  They talked about that for a while, and Randy put her off and then went to heat up a frozen beef pot pie in the microwave. With Randy otherwise occupied, Rachel took a moment to wash her face, check herself in the mirror, add just a hint of makeup and a touch of lipstick. A hint of perfume, but only a hint, she didn’t want to come off like a floozy. Her blouse was all right, she thought, she wished her jeans weren’t quite so tight, she really had to get back on her diet . . .

  * * *

  —

  DUNN THOUGHT: SHOOT RACHEL FIRST, she’d never suffer. She’d never even see it coming, if he shot her from behind; she’d go from everything to nothing in a split second. Then Randy Stokes. More dangerous that way, shooting Rachel first, Stokes had that muscle from his shovel work, he could be in your face in a hurry. But he didn’t want Rachel to suffer.

  Dunn got to Rachel Stokes’s house a few minutes early, saw Randy’s car parked in the side yard, a light in the back, where the kitchen was. He took a few long breaths, got out of the car, touched the pistol tucked in his belt, the sight pressing against his coccyx like the devil’s pitchfork. He reached over to the passenger seat and grabbed a four-foot-long plastic tube, the kind used to protect building plans or artwork, and walked up to the door.

  Rachel met him there, smiling, backed into the front room, said, “Hi, El, come on in. Randy said you had some photos?”

  Dunn said, “Uh, yeah,” lifted the tube with his left hand while his right went under his shirt, grabbed the pistol, clicked the safety off . . .

  Randy Stokes came into the room carrying a bowl and a spoon and said, “Hey, El . . .”

  Dunn yanked on the pistol stock, but the sight hung up in the fabric of his Jockey briefs and in his haste he’d already slipped his finger into the trigger guard and when he yanked on the gun, his finger yanked on the trigger and he fired a shot between the cheeks of his butt and into the floor, and the noise was terrific and Rachel’s mouth dropped open and her eyes widened and then the pistol was up and Dunn shot her in the face and she went down.

  Stokes threw the bowl past Dunn’s head and turned to run and Dunn shot him twice in the back, then stepped over Rachel’s body and put the pistol close to the back of Stokes’s head and fired another shot.

  When he turned back, he found, to his real horror, that his slug had hit Rachel in the jaw and had come out the back of her head, and she was still alive and aware, looking up at him in fear and trying to back-crawl away, like doing a backstroke, and she gurgled something and he stepped closer and said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry” and shot at her head and missed, though he was only four feet away. He put the pistol right at her forehead then, and her eyes tried a final plea and then went calm, accepting, and he pulled the trigger again, and then she was gone.

  He’d dropped the plastic art tube, and he picked it up and turned away from the bodies. Dunn had no idea of how many times he’d fired the gun, but it seemed like a lot. And he hurt. His butt hurt, and he reached back to feel it, and his hand came away bloody. He stumbled toward the door, and out, to his truck, and he climbed into the driver’s seat, and then thought, DNA.

  He fumbled in the backseat pocket and found an LED flashlight, climbed back out of the truck and looked for blood on the ground. He found nothing. The blood seemed restricted to his underwear and an orange-sized spot on the seat of his pants.

  His buttocks were on fire; but a hand check seemed to indicate that he had only creased the skin on both cheeks, and had never actually poked a bullet hole in himself.

  He didn’t want to revisit the horror inside the house, so he got back into his truck and drove home.

  He was all right, he thought. He needed some bandages, he needed some antiseptic, but he was all right. His blood-spotted clothing would go into a wood-burning fireplace, and the ashes scattered in the woods.

  He was all right: except for nightmares that would last for the rest of his life.

  CHAPTER

  FIVE

  After a nine o’clock breakfast Monday morning, as Elias Dunn was working toward the murders of Randy and Rachel Stokes, Lucas drove to Potomac, Maryland, where Charles Lang lived in a newer but traditionally styled stone-and-timber house, off Bentcross Drive, set among mature oaks and a screen of lower pines.

  Two granite pillars flanked the driveway entrance, and the long blacktopped driveway led to a detached garage eighty or a hundred feet from the house itself. The house side of the driveway was edged with a knee-high granite wall. The wall looked nice, but it occurred to Lucas, who’d seen a similar driveway at the home of a powerful intelligence officer in Mexico, that it also worked as a security feature: you couldn’t get a car or truck close to the house—or a car or truck bomb.

  Lucas parked at the garage and walked through a four-foot-wide slot in the granite wall, up to the house. Before he had a chance to ring the doorbell, the door opened and a tall slender man, with a neat Vandyke beard, perhaps thirty-five, opened the door and asked, “Marshal Davenport?”

  Lucas nodded and said, “Yes.”

  “I’m Charles’s assistant. He’s in the den.”

  Another assistant
, Lucas thought—it must be a Washington thing.

  The assistant backed up and Lucas followed him inside. Once past the entry, he found himself in an expansive living room decorated with eighteenth-century British hunting prints and paintings, mounted on pale blue plaster walls; a six-foot grand piano sat in a corner, half the size of the piano at the Winstons’ house. There was no sheet music in sight, but a crystal vase sat on the piano top, filled with yellow and pink bell-shaped flowers; the room smelled of funeral.

  As they went through, Lucas asked, “What’s your name?”

  The man said, “Stephen.” And after a pause, “Gibson.”

  “Have you been with Mr. Lang for a while?”

  “Thirteen years,” Gibson said. He was prematurely balding with close-cropped hair, and wore beige trousers, a yellow shirt open at the throat, a blue linen sport coat, and brown loafers. A pair of narrow silver-rimmed glasses hung from his neck. “About twelve years longer than I expected to, when I graduated from the university. I assist Charles with his research, in addition to . . . ordinary business chores.”

  They walked through a smaller room, whose function Lucas couldn’t quite identify—maybe a more intimate meeting room, with a sideboard for drinks, and a faint odor of nicotine—to the den, another large room lined with books. There were three photos in a cluster in a niche between bookcases: a young Lang shaking hands with Ronald Reagan, a middle-aged Lang shaking with George W. Bush, and a near-elderly Lang shoulder-to-shoulder with Donald Trump.

  Lang himself sat behind a walnut desk that had the look of an Early American antique: not elegant, but formidable. Another crystal vase of flowers sat on a credenza behind the desk.

  He looked up from a manuscript when Gibson led Lucas into the room, and stood up to shake hands. Lang was a middle-sized man, fleshy, bald with a few strands of steel-gray hair layered over the top of his pate, a narrow nose, extra pink at the tip, and watery green eyes. His hand was soft as warm butter. He was wearing a gray suit coat and trousers, a white dress shirt, and a yellow bow tie.

  “Marshal Davenport,” he said, showing small pearly teeth as he smiled through his greeting. “I’m pleased to meet you. I won’t apologize for it, but I asked Stephen to background you, and you seem to have had at least two extremely successful careers.”

  “We’ll have to see how successful the current one is,” Lucas said. He took a blue-leather visitor’s chair in front of Lang’s desk, as Lang sat down again.

  Gibson said, “Charles, I need to finish with that email. Would either of you like a drink before I do that? Orange juice? Lemonade?”

  Lucas said, “No, thanks. I just ate breakfast.”

  Lang said, “Not yet, but bring me a lemonade when you finish with the mail.” Gibson left, and Lang turned back to Lucas.

  Lucas said, “You know why I asked to see you—I’ve been told that you’re one of the leading experts on these alt-right groups, white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and so on. We’re looking particularly at a group called 1919.”

  “1919. Extraordinarily interesting. Came out of nowhere. You’re aware of the 88 meme . . .”

  “The letter ‘H’ is the eighth letter of the alphabet so ‘88’ is code for ‘HH’ which is code for ‘Heil Hitler,’” Lucas said. “1919 is SS, as in the Nazi SS.”

  “Exactly right.” Lang had never stopped smiling, his eyes bright. “I’ve researched these groups for years, but I’d never encountered 1919 before, but now, it seems obvious. Not the existence of the group, but the existence of the name.”

  “You wouldn’t know who might have invented it, where it might have come from . . .”

  “No, no, not a clue. I’ve spoken to some of my contacts in the field and they’re asking around. I’ve put out word that I would like to speak to the 1919 folks.”

  “That might be a little risky?” Lucas made it a question.

  “Oh . . . some of them aren’t harmless, you know, but they generally seem to appreciate my attention,” Lang said. “The biggest problem most of these groups face is misunderstanding . . .”

  “I would think their biggest problem, if you’ll excuse the language, is that they’re racist assholes and they’re widely hated,” Lucas said.

  Lang’s smile faded a bit. “Let me finish my thought, if you would, Marshal. The biggest problems most of these groups face is misunderstanding. Most are extremely conservative in the traditional sense of that word, but most have no particular liking for Adolf Hitler or the German National Socialists. Yet, when they go public with their beliefs, the media immediately brands them as ‘Nazis.’ Now, you used the word ‘racist.’ Perfectly good word, until recently. Look at what’s been happening with the Democratic Party in the struggle between the so-called Progressives and the so-called moderates. All of these people are liberal by normal standards, but they accuse one another of being racist at the slightest deviation from the Progressive party line. And heaven help the poor Republicans—they’re all racists, every last man jack of them. Once accused, once labeled, there’s barely any way to escape. The same is true with these—I hate the term ‘alt-right,’ but everybody uses it—these alt-right groups. The media won’t allow them to be alt-right without being Nazis.”

  “But 1919 is SS,” Lucas said.

  Lang’s wide smile returned. “Yes, it is. It makes them almost unique. Very interesting. Very interesting. From my perspective, of course. As a scholar.”

  “Of course,” Lucas said. “Listen, I need to ask, if I were to go looking for them, where would I start? It seems like they’d be pretty far off on the extreme right end of things. The clippings on the website include everything from old Klan people to, you know, actual saluting goose-stepping neo-Nazis.”

  “The most extreme of these people would be unlikely to talk with a marshal. You’re the enemy,” Lang said.

  “So you wouldn’t be able to make an introduction.”

  Lang’s chair was on a swivel, and he’d been swiveling from side to side as they talked, and now he slowly turned all the way around, his lips pursed, looking at the ceiling. It had the feel of a well-rehearsed act, Lucas thought.

  When Lang came back around, he said, “That might not be quite right. However, before we get to that, I would like to ask . . . why do you think this group is alt-right? 1919?”

  “The files they posted . . .”

  “Are all alt-right, or extreme right, or crazy right—the KKK and so on. But if some child should get shot, those very groups are the most likely to be attacked by the federal government. Why would they invite that? It seems to me just as likely that the posts were put up by some left-wing group, who might be able to make the same phone call to a senator that the alt-right people might make, without the risk of being attacked by the government.”

  “You’re the first person to suggest that,” Lucas said.

  “I wouldn’t doubt it, since there seems to be a hunger by the liberal deep state to eradicate the alt-right,” Lang said. “Now, you want to know about who might organize something like that. Let me suggest that you check the American National Militia. They’re certainly not Nazis. They’re more like what I would classify as anarchists—extreme libertarians. They don’t want a powerful fascist government, they don’t want any government at all—and they may very well have committed violent acts. I don’t know that for sure, that’s what I hear. The actual leader of the group is unknown to me, or to anyone other than a few members. He’s supposedly called Old John. There was some controversy over in Kentucky about a group of men doing firearms training—sniper training—and practicing guerilla tactics at a camp in a forested area, and they were said to be members of the ANM. There were quite a number of them, so it is a substantial group.”

  “What violent acts? What’d you hear?” Lucas asked.

  Lang leaned forward and put his forearms on his desk. “A number of things. There was a developer in Erie,
Pennsylvania, who asked the city council to use its power of eminent domain to condemn a series of older condominiums that took up a prime city block, so that he could build one of those mixed-use business and condominium projects. Replace something old and ugly with something new and expensive. Brew pub, fern bars, that sort of thing. Starbucks. The council was going along with it when the developer got plugged between the eyes in what looked like a road-rage incident. There was a rumor among certain extremist groups on the left that he was killed to stop the eminent domain process. And that happened. The old condominiums are there to this day.”

  “People think the ANM did it?”

  “That was the rumor on the alt-left, if I can call them that. Then there were two shootings in Michigan. Do you know what tax deed states are?”

  “Mmm . . . not exactly,” Lucas said.

  “Okay. In a tax deed state, if you’re late with your taxes, the county can sell the deed to your house, usually to an investor. There are a number of companies who buy the deeds, and quite a few individuals. The real victims are usually people who are too poor or too dumb to pay the taxes they owe, and don’t understand the process. So, somebody has a little farm acreage worth, say, a hundred thousand dollars, and owes five thousand dollars in taxes. If he doesn’t pay, or make payment arrangements, the county auctions off the farm. The minimum bid is the amount of the taxes plus processing fees. If the winning bid is twenty-five thousand, the county takes its cut, gives the rest of the money to the homeowner, and the deed to the investor.”

  “Then they kick out the original owners?”

  “That can happen,” Lang said. “When an investor buys your deed, there’s usually a redemption period, in which the original owner can pay off the amount the investor paid for the deed, plus a hefty interest and service charge. Bottom line, your five-thousand-dollar tax bill could cost you eight thousand dollars to pay off, if you can afford to pay it at all.