Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30)(12)

FROM THE WATERGATE garage to the Coil home in Arlington was a fifteen-minute drive, out of the monuments of the District into a leafy, routine-looking fifties or sixties suburban neighborhood now showing its age.

Lucas had worked with a half dozen senators in his time as a marshal and had come to believe that the Senate was a club for the uber-wealthy. Roberta Coil was apparently not one of those. She lived in a nice-enough, but not elaborate mid-century red-brick house set on a bank in north Arlington, with a tuck-under garage and a curling set of flagstone steps leading up to the front door.

The FBI’s background material on her daughter, Audrey, said that Senator Coil and Audrey lived in Arlington, while the senator’s husband, the owner of a grass-development company, stayed at home in Tifton, Georgia. The file noted that the grass involved was for lawns and golf courses, not for smoking.

Lucas parked in the street and climbed the bank to the house and was about to ring the bell when the door popped open. Senator Coil was a tall woman, with an angular face and dark hair. She wore a black dress suitable for a party, and careful, almost bland makeup. She smiled and said, “Marshal Davenport? I’m Bob. Come in. Audrey’s in her room, I’ll call her.”

The house smelled like bakery and Lucas could hear somebody banging around a stove in the kitchen, which was down a hallway off a large and sparsely furnished living room—a room designed for people to stand in, at a party, rather than to lounge in. Coil climbed some stairs and disappeared down a hallway, calling for her daughter.

Lucas perched on a narrow couch, looked around; there were built-in bookshelves and the books themselves, biographies, histories, and the more serious kind of political tomes, appeared to be little used, as if they’d come with the shelves.



* * *



—

“HERE WE ARE.”

Coil reappeared, trailed by a pretty teenager in a loose silky blouse and fashionable denim boy-shorts with a string of oversized buttons on the fly. Like her mother, Audrey Coil was carefully made-up, except for her lipstick, which was bloody red and deliberately overdone, the fake-cheap/hot-sexy but too-expensive-for-you Hollywood look.

Lucas stood up to shake hands with Audrey, nodded at a right-angled couch, and when the women were sitting, sat down again. Looking at Audrey, he asked, “I’ve read the FBI reports, so this should be short. Did you ever have any hint of this 1919 website before you found it with your friend?”

Then something happened.

Audrey said, “No! I was amazed!”

At the moment he asked the question, Lucas saw something lizard-like flicker in her eyes. She hadn’t expected precisely that question and she’d come up with an answer that was at least partially false.

Lucas thought, Uh-oh. That’s what he thought. But he didn’t know what was behind the flicker.

“You’re sure? I mean, young people go through dozens of websites and I imagine with your business, you go through more than the average . . . person.” He bit off “girl,” “woman,” and “teenager” and opted for the most neutral noise he could make.

Audrey shook her head: “I’d remember it. These people are Nazis and they have nothing to do with fashion. That’s my crew: fashionistas. I’m strictly focused on girls. Nazis? No. I don’t even do boys.”

“I understand the photo was taken by a friend of yours . . . Blake, uh . . . ?”

She nodded. “Blake Winston. He does photos and video for my blog. You’ll talk to him, right?”

“Soon as I leave here,” Lucas said.

“Okay. Well, Blake knows everything about photography. He took my picture for a blog entry, we picked that up, right away. We couldn’t figure out what it was doing on that crazy website, Nazis and all that. Then, the other pictures, he says they were all taken with a telephoto lens. He can tell, something to do with what’s in focus, and what isn’t. He can explain it. But, they’re taken from a long way away. He also thinks that even then, they have to blow them up quite a bit. That’s why they look so crappy.”

“I’ll talk to him about all that,” Lucas said. “You don’t think there’s any possibility that Blake—”

“Oh, no.” She was shaking her head. “No, no, no. For one thing, he hates Nazis and all that white nationalist stuff. He’s really a nice guy, for being as rich as he is.”

“He’s rich?”

“His father is, anyway,” Audrey said. “He runs a fund. His father does. A hedge fund.”

Lucas smiled at her: young as she was, she sounded like she knew what she was talking about, that she knew about funds. He turned to Roberta Coil: “Nobody’s contacted you about this?”

“No. I know what you’re thinking, that came up with the FBI agents. Nobody’s tried to blackmail me into changing a vote,” she said. “If you looked at all my votes since this website was created, you’d see they were all party line and my vote wasn’t critical in changing anything.”

“All right.”

“And that worries me,” Roberta Coil added. “They should have contacted me. If they don’t contact me, and if they haven’t contacted the other parents, what does that mean? Does that mean it’s not an extortion racket? Does that mean the kids are simply up there as targets?”