Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30)(18)

He considered other possibilities, including doing nothing about the Stokeses. If he took out one of the targets on the 1919 site, and if the FBI came around, he might admit talking to Randy Stokes but denying everything else. If he were careful enough . . .

There were lots of reasons that wouldn’t work: there was simply too much surveillance to claim that he wasn’t somewhere a camera said he was. If Randy had told his sister about Dunn, which was perfectly possible, and if the Stokeses got suspicious and gave him up, and then if the FBI started searching videos for his specific face, they’d find him. There were cameras everywhere. But if the Stokeses weren’t around to give him up, if the FBI didn’t know what face they were looking for . . .



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—

HE RECOGNIZED THE RISK in killing the Stokeses, but trusted his planning skills. One step at a time. Details.

And, of course, planning the killings, and then doing them, would be useful gauges of his physical and emotional capacity for murder. He wasn’t a crazy man. Not at all. Maybe, when it came to actually pulling a trigger, he’d find he couldn’t do it. Maybe he would falter—he saw that possibility in himself. That was something to be tested.



* * *



—

AS A CIVIL ENGINEER, he occasionally did property searches to make sure that he wouldn’t be digging up somebody’s sewer line or fiber-optic cable. The day after Stokes had told him about the 1919 site, Dunn had gone to the Fauquier County courthouse. Stokes had mentioned that he’d been a renter, but had eventually been kicked out of his apartment and was temporarily living with his sister, Rachel, who owned an acreage around the town of The Plains.

He found a Rachel Stokes on a six-acre property in a rural area three miles north of The Plains, a small town not far from Warrenton. He cruised the place—an old flat-roofed cracker box with two pillars holding up a porch roof, all of it badly in need of paint. Another house sat a couple of hundred yards away, but the weather was still warm, verging on hot, and everybody would be using air conditioners, which made effective silencers.

He’d read that, anyway, or maybe had seen it on a TV show.

After spotting the Stokes property, he’d gone back to his job site, talked briefly to the general contractor’s foreman, and then he and his crew continued laying out a series of cul-de-sacs. After a long discussion of drainage issues in the afternoon, he left an hour early, went home to shower and get his guts up for killing Randy and Rachel Stokes.

He wouldn’t do it without regret. Randy would be a loss to no one, but Rachel might be a perfectly decent woman caught in a moment of political necessity. He’d always liked that name: Rachel, even though it sounded Jewish to his ear.



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—

THE FOLLOWING DAY WAS A SATURDAY, and he began moving from planning to action. He began by renting a car; he didn’t want his car anywhere near the Stokeses’ house. He cruised the house twice on Saturday, but never saw Randy Stokes’s car parked there. No matter: he wasn’t quite ready to kill. He noted that the road was most often empty.

On Sunday, he cruised the house twice more. Still no sign of Stokes’s car, and that began to worry him. Had Stokes taken off for parts unknown? At home Sunday night, he prepped the Ruger 9mm, making sure that it was mechanically perfect, that all possible prints and DNA were scrubbed off the cartridges. When he was satisfied, he smelled somewhat of gun oil, but . . . so what?

On Monday, he went to work, as usual. Stokes was there, leaning on his shovel. Dunn stayed away from him.

At home that afternoon, Dunn put on a long-sleeved overshirt, worn unbuttoned at the front, which would conceal the pistol tucked into the small of his back, under his belt, but would be loose enough to provide easy access to the gun. For the trip over to the Stokes place, he put the Ruger, in a fabric holster, under the front seat of his car.

When he was set, he checked the time: ten minutes after five. Way too early. Stokes was a regular, in the way only an addict can be regular, at Chuck’s Wagon. He’d be there as soon as he got off work, and would stay as long as he had money, or until the bartender cut him off. That might be as late as eight o’clock.

A Walmart Supercenter and a Home Depot both had busy parking lots not far from Chuck’s Wagon, and after checking them out, he found a spot in the Home Depot lot from which he could see the bar’s driveway. He drove over to the bar to make sure that Stokes was there: and he was.

Encouraged by the way his plan was working, in his head, anyway, he drove back to the Home Depot and parked. And waited. Longer than he’d hoped. People came and went from the Home Depot, and as far as he could tell, nobody paid him any attention. Six o’clock. Six-thirty. He began to get cold feet. Killing two people? What was he thinking? He almost left then, headed back home to think about it some more.

He might have, if he hadn’t seen Stokes’s car pulling out of the parking lot . . .



* * *



—

HE FELL IN BEHIND STOKES, who drove too slow, the speed that experienced drunks drive when they know they’ve had a few too many. They threaded through Warrenton, then out Highway 17 to the turnoff at Old Tavern, across I-66, through The Plains and then out of town on Hopewell Road and finally to Rachel Stokes’s house, where Stokes pulled into the driveway.

As he did, Dunn honked his horn twice, then pulled into the driveway and half-climbed out of the rental car, tucking the gun in behind his belt, pulling the shirt over it. Stokes was out of his car, squinting into Dunn’s headlights.