Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30)(33)
“That could be tough if he’s got a burner phone,” Chase said. “Which he probably does, if he’s security-conscious.”
“If there’s any way you could call him a national security threat, we could black-bag him,” Lucas suggested.
“Nope, that won’t work,” Chase said, shaking her head. “He’s basically a political operator working for a conservative political group. If we went for a warrant, the judge would laugh us out of the courthouse.”
Donald said, “Stingray.”
They both looked at him and he added, “Or a tower dump, if we know where he’s at in the evenings. When the PR lady talked to Lucas, she probably connected with Old John right away, or at least somebody high up in the ANM. They had to do some organization to make the approach to Lucas so quickly. They had to talk to Aline, and he had to get in touch with whoever photographed Gibson, the people looking for surveillance.”
Chase said to Lucas, “If he’s at home in the evenings, we can dump the nearest cell phone tower. There’ll be thousands of calls, but most of them will go to homeowners and we can get the associated addresses, which will leave a certain number of burners, but not a huge number. We’d look for a cluster of calls from a burner. It’s all computer-sorting . . .”
“You don’t need a warrant?”
“No. We can issue a subpoena on our own to the cell companies, get a dump,” Chase said.
“Or we could track him with a Stingray unit,” Donald said. “The Stingray’ll force all the nearby calls through the unit, so we can see who he’s calling. We can’t actually intercept the call, though.”
“Let me talk to some people,” Chase said. “We’ll explore the possibilities.”
“What happened with Audrey Coil?” Lucas asked.
“What you saw,” Chase said. “Her mother’s a little angry with her, but not too, because she’ll undoubtedly get a few invitations herself, from Fox or CNN or MSNBC, to talk about this. Audrey was insufferably cute, by the way. Insufferably sincere.”
“She won’t be cute if somebody shoots her in the face,” Lucas said.
They all thought about that, then Chase asked, “What’s next up? You got anything else going?”
“Not a thing,” Lucas said. “I’ve got nothing to work with. None of the alt-right people have given me anything useful. I could go interview the other kids who were photographed, and their parents, but you guys have already done that and I’ve read the transcripts. If nothing comes out of the Aline thing, I might as well go home.”
“Please don’t,” Chase said. “Let me get something going on Aline. Take the rest of the day off. Take tomorrow off. We could have something by the day after.”
* * *
—
INSTEAD OF TAKING THE DAY OFF, Lucas went back to the Watergate and called Charles Lang. Gibson answered and said Lang was shopping.
“I don’t need to talk to Charles,” Lucas said. “You’ll do fine, since you’re the researcher. Charles told me that the ANM had a training camp in Kentucky. I need to know where it was. Exactly.”
“We never looked into it,” Gibson said. “We didn’t want to . . . expose ourselves . . . to them.”
“Well, look now,” Lucas said. “You were snooping on me and that pisses me off, and it might even be a crime; and you do research, so do some research and call me back.”
* * *
—
WITH THAT UNDERWAY, Lucas changed into jeans and walked a mile or so to Dupont Circle, to a bookstore he’d visited the last time he was in DC. He spent a pleasant hour browsing, got a sandwich at the café, talked to Weather for ten minutes, and was strolling back to the Watergate with a Martha Grimes novel under his arm, when Charles Lang called back.
“Well, you scared Stephen, thank you very much. He gets upset when people snap at him.”
“Life in the big city,” Lucas said. “Did you find out where that training camp was?”
“I’ve emailed you what we found, along with a map and a satellite photo of the area. It’s in Kentucky, as I said, not far south of Cincinnati, Ohio. It’s a farm owned by a person named Milton Faye.”
Back at the hotel, Lucas booked a Delta flight to Cincinnati the next morning, leaving a little after nine o’clock, and another one back, in the evening, and reserved a Jeep at Hertz. He checked his email, found the incoming file from Lang. The place he was looking for was outside a Kentucky hamlet called Piner, and from the looks of things, was in the hills.
“Take a day off, my ass,” he muttered to himself, as he settled back with the Martha Grimes novel.
* * *
—
THE NEXT MORNING, after another fear-inflected but absolutely smooth flight to Cincinnati—the airport was actually across the Ohio River in Kentucky, where Lucas got a couple of bagels with cream cheese at a Bruegger’s—he picked up the Jeep and headed south. The town of Piner turned out to be a crossroads with a couple of dozen homes, a red-brick school, a red-brick church, and a convenience store where Lucas stopped for a Diet Coke and to check that he was on the right road.
He was. He headed south out of Piner, through heavily wooded hills and small farms, turned east on a narrower road and eventually found a mailbox that said “Faye” at the end of a gravel-and-dirt driveway that disappeared up a hill into heavy timber.