Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30)(109)

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TWO DAYS AFTER DUNN was killed, when Lucas was nearly finished with the bureaucracy, Rae called and asked, “I was right, wasn’t I?”

Lucas: “I’m sorry?”

“Don’t play dumb, Lucas. You wanted us out of the way. You didn’t want witnesses.”

“You’ve got an overactive imagination, is what I think,” Lucas said. “How’s Bob?”

“Bob’s just fine.”

“You find a case we can work?” Lucas asked.

“Jesus, Lucas. The Dunn thing? That was damned cold. Damned cold.”

“Okay . . . I don’t know what to tell you. Except . . . yeah, you were right.”

“Good. I wanted to hear you say it. And yeah, we’ve got a case. Did you hear about the Coast Guardsmen getting murdered down in Fort Lauderdale?”

“Something about it. Like a couple of months ago?”

“That’s the case. I’m going to email you the file. The FBI is stuck in a ditch, as usual, the locals all deny that it was in their jurisdiction . . .”

“Send me the file,” Lucas said. “Lauderdale in the winter. I can see that.”



* * *



—

AUDREY COIL WAS NEVER charged with any crime, as two separate U.S. Attorney’s Offices concluded that nothing she’d done had constituted a crime. She hadn’t recommended the shooting of anyone, all she’d done was post some photos and neo-Nazi articles on the same page. The articles were protected by the constitutional provisions guarding freedom of speech and of the press, and there was nothing illegal about taking photos of people in public places and posting them.

There were mutterings in the press about fixing what appeared to be a hole in federal laws, but that quickly went away, when the press realized they’d be shooting themselves in the foot.



* * *



—

A LAWYER FOR THE PARENTS of James Wagner, the boy killed by Dunn, announced plans to sue Audrey Coil, but nothing happened with that, because Audrey had no assets of her own. They did sue Dunn’s estate and eventually got most of it, amounting to over a million dollars even after the attorney’s fees. Part of the money was used to create a bronze statue of their son, which was erected in the schoolyard, showing him about to shoot a basketball. The rest of it was donated to a local animal shelter, as both mother and son had volunteered at the shelter and were committed to animal rescue.



* * *



—

HENDERSON CALLED A SECOND time and asked, “Can you believe it?”

“Can I believe what?”

“Audrey Coil. You don’t know?”

“Oh, Jesus, she didn’t—”

“No, no. She didn’t get shot. Listen, I won’t tell you about it, you got to see it to believe it. I’m sending you an email with a YouTube link. I’m sending it . . . now. Watch it.”

Mystified, Lucas opened his email and clicked on a link. A video came up, with a freeze-frame on Audrey Coil’s face, which was carefully made up to look like a Leonardo da Vinci Madonna. Her hair was covered by a white shawl, like the Virgin Mary might have worn, and a voice-over said, “Audrey Coil, by Blake Winston.”

The freeze frame began to move, and then pulled back, and Audrey Coil was shown walking barefoot along a dirt path with a half dozen other women, all wearing white shawls over their hair and long white gowns that might have been sewn from bedsheets. Music: a woman and choir began singing “Down to the River to Pray” as the women walked slowly down a bank to the edge of a narrow, slow-moving river. A black preacher waited by the water’s edge, and as the chorus of music swelled, the women were taken one at a time and dipped in the river, newly baptized.

When the baptisms were over, the camera tracked back to Audrey Coil, who began, “I know there’s no way that I can make full recompense . . .”

Lucas was struck dumb and stayed that way for a while, walking around in his living room, running his hands through his hair.



* * *



—

JANE CHASE CALLED LUCAS a couple of weeks after he got home.

“It took me a while, but I put it all together,” she said.

“Put what together?” Lucas asked.

“What you did,” she said. “I wondered right from the beginning why you wanted to interview William Christopher Walton, or Bill-Boy as we now call him, at the federal lockup. I had a quiet off-the-record chat with Brett Abelman, Bill-Boy’s attorney, and he told me what you did during the interview. You poked at Bill-Boy to see what would happen. He blew up and that’s what you wanted to see.”

“Why do you call him Bill-Boy?”

“Apparently, many years ago there was a TV series called The Waltons and one of the main characters was called John-Boy—but you’re trying to move me away from the question of why you got Bill-Boy to blow up.”

“Jane . . .”

“I thought, now why did he do that? The answer is, because you thought Dunn would react the same way. He’d be enraged and he’d go after Audrey Coil. You used a teenaged girl as a tethered goat to attract Dunn to the place where you could kill him. But how could you set up Audrey Coil? Well, you didn’t know who Dunn was, so she’d have to be exposed as the creator of the website—Dunn would have to be told that the whole site was a fake. You could only reach him through the media. I talked to the media outlets that got the original tips on Audrey, and guess what? Gasp! The phone that the calls came from was a burner.”