Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30)(11)

Lucas had been shot three times in his career: “I specialized in violent crime. That was my main interest. The one that came closest to killing me was a little girl who nailed me in the throat with a piece-of-crap street .22 . . .”

He’d been shot in a remote area of the Wisconsin Northwoods, in the throat, and almost drowned in his own blood, but a surgeon who’d been nearby sliced open his trachea with a pocketknife to free up an airway.

“You probably still owe him, then,” Chase said. “And always will.”

“Actually, it was a her, and she’s gotten paid back with interest,” Lucas said. “I married her and she’s been in sexual heaven ever since.”

“More than I needed to know,” Chase said. She frowned. “Maybe I should call her and ask what that’s like.”

They talked some more about 1919 and watched people come and go and Lucas called the limo and dropped her at the Hoover Building. As she got out of the car, she said: “Talk to me, Lucas. Daily, if anything is happening. When do you think you’ll be out working?”

“I’ll call this girl and her boyfriend today, see if I can talk to them this afternoon. I’ll want to read your stuff on Lang before I talk to him. He seems to be the best bet for a way into it.”

“You take care,” she said. “And talk to me.”



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LUCAS GAVE THE DRIVER the address of a Hertz dealer where he’d reserved a car. They had to backtrack a bit through Washington, but Lucas gave the driver another twenty dollars and left Hertz in a black Cadillac CTS, a long German-looking sedan with a lot of technology he’d never use.

At the Watergate, he left the car in the garage and went up to his room. His phone dinged as he stepped inside, and when he opened it, he found the code for the FBI files Chase had given him. He plugged the thumb drive into his laptop, opened the only app on the drive, and was prompted for the code. He entered it, the files popped up as Chase had promised, simple PDFs in the shell of the encryption app. He put the code into his phone’s password vault and erased Chase’s message.

There were a lot of files, but the shell had a search function and he dropped in the names of Audrey Coil, Blake Winston, and Charles Lang. That gave him contact information for all three, which he noted in a fresh pocket-sized Moleskine notebook.

He read for two hours, encountered quite a few facts and, as Chase had suggested, most of them were useless. Some of it was FBI clip-and-paste investigation files of neo-Nazi, white supremacist, anti-immigration, Klan, prison-based, biker-based, and states’ rights hate groups, along with a few pro-Israeli and Islamic radical groups. Most of them had few members; some of them, only one, and so didn’t even qualify as a “group.” Even some of the single-member organizations produced publications, so could be involved in a website.

There was nothing substantial on the 1919 group, though there was considerable speculation. The lead agent looking at the group suggested that there might be only one person behind it, or perhaps two or three—“. . . unless the group is tightly controlled with heavy security, which would suggest that they may be unusually dangerous.”

Lucas skimmed a dozen files, decided the daylight hours would be better spent talking to Coil and Winston. He could always read in the middle of the night.



* * *



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COIL AND WINSTON lived within a few miles of each other in Virginia. Lucas was somewhat familiar with McLean, where Winston lived, from the case he’d worked the year before. Coil lived on the north side of Arlington, the big Virginia city directly across the Potomac from Washington. Both were expecting calls from him.

The call to Coil went to the personal phone of Senator Roberta Coil, who picked up on the third ring and said, simply, “Yes?”

Lucas introduced himself, said he’d spoken to Henderson and Smalls, and asked if her daughter would be available for an interview that evening. “She is, of course, Marshal. She really doesn’t have much to say about it. I’m sure you’ve read the FBI interview, but I understand you’d like to get a feel for the various personalities yourself.”

“I would,” Lucas said.

“We’re home now. I have a small party beginning at seven o’clock, if we could get it done before then.”

“I’m at the Watergate. I could probably be there in an hour or so,” Lucas said.

“We will wait for you.”

The connection for Winston also went to a parent, his mother, whose name was Mary Ellen, and who said her son was out with friends, making a movie. “I’ll call him. I can have him here whenever you say.”

And he called Lang, again on a personal phone. Like Coil, he answered with a “Yes?” He would be available Monday morning, at his home in Potomac, Maryland. “I hope the FBI people haven’t confused you. You won’t actually be interviewing a Nazi, a white supremacist, an alt-right person. I’m a scholar who studies those groups.”

“I understand,” Lucas said. A little suck-up, then: “I’m pleased that you’re willing to share information with us.”

“Always happy to help the government,” Lang said.

Lucas coughed, and took down his address.



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