Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30)(34)

He went on by, eventually intersected with a larger highway, where he pulled over and checked his cell phone: he had three bars and called Chase.

“Nothing yet,” she said, when she picked up.

“I’m in Kentucky, checking out the farm where ANM supposedly did weapons training,” Lucas said. “It’s remote and spooky, but there’s good cell service.”

“Jesus, Lucas . . .”

“Could you check on a guy named Milton Faye, see if he has a cell phone? If he does, could you watch who he calls?”

“I can do that, but are you going to get shot?”

“Not if I can help it.”

“Why don’t I call in the state cops to go with you?”

“No. I don’t want to make a deal about this. If I show up with a bunch of cops, I don’t think he’ll call anyone. He’ll hunker down. I want him to think that the only thing I’ve got going for me is an old newspaper clipping.”

“I don’t know . . .”

“Call me when you’re set up.”

“Might take more than an hour,” she said.



* * *



—

WHEN SHE CALLED BACK, an hour and a half later, Lucas was wandering through a Flying J Travel Center in the town of Walton, off I-75. He took his phone outside to the parking lot and asked, “What do you got?”

“Milton Faye and Barbara Faye have AT&T phones, plus Milton may have gotten sneaky and acquired a second phone from RurCon, which is an MNVO, which actually buys time through AT&T . . .”

“It’s a what?”

“MNVO—Mobile Network Virtual Operator. Since it buys time through AT&T, we only have to talk to one company to look for connections and we’re all set to do that. Our phone guy faxed a subpoena to AT&T a half hour ago and they’ve acknowledged it, so we’re all set. I bet if Mr. Faye calls Old John, he’ll do it on the RurCon phone. Sneaky-like.”

“Whatever. I’m going over there,” Lucas said.

“Lucas . . .”

“Watch the phones.”



* * *



—

LUCAS CRUISED THE FAYE place a second time. He couldn’t see a house or any other structure up the hill; there was a small cornfield that ran along the road, and an old rust-covered hay rake in one corner of the field, probably dumped there a few decades earlier.

He turned around, got out of the car, pulled his shirt out to cover the cross-drawn PPQ on his left hip, got back in the car, called Chase and said, “I’m going up there now.”

“We’re all set. Call when you leave.”

Lucas turned up the driveway past the “No Trespassing” sign. The Faye house, a metal barn, and a trailer home on blocks, were four hundred yards up the rutted driveway, where the hill flattened out into a long narrow crest. The house looked like it came out of a ’60s low-income suburb, a faded baby-blue ranch-style with asbestos shingle roof. A well-waxed black Ford F-150 was parked in the yard; a bumper sticker read, “I support U.S. Truckers.”

As Lucas parked, a heavyset bearded man stepped out on the stoop at the front door; he was dressed in crusty jeans and a flannel shirt, though the temperatures must have been in the upper seventies. An oversized black-and-tan Rottweiler came out behind the man, walked around him and down the three steps. He might have come all the way to Lucas, but the man spoke a single word, which Lucas couldn’t quite hear, and the dog stopped.

The dog would have looked more dangerous than the man, had the man not been carrying a shotgun. He didn’t point it, it just dangled from one hand, but it was there.

“Guess you didn’t see the ‘No Trespassing’ sign,” the man said.

Lucas wrinkled his nose—dog poop, he thought—and said, “I did, but I’m a U.S. Marshal working on a case and I came to see you, if you’re Mr. Faye.”

“I’m Faye. See me about what?”

“About a militia training camp here on your property a couple of years ago,” Lucas said. “I found an article about it in the Cincinnati paper.”

“Didn’t talk to the paper,” Faye said. “Told their reporter to get off my property.”

“You didn’t talk to them, but they identified you,” Lucas said.

“Nothing illegal about a training camp,” Faye said. “A bunch of guys came up to do some self-defense shooting.”

“I didn’t say there was anything illegal, unless it was done as part of a conspiracy—say, to shoot somebody,” Lucas said. “I need to talk to someone high up in the militia. I talked to one man who wasn’t, and he couldn’t give me the help I need. That’s why I’m here.”

“Can’t help you with that.” Faye switched the shotgun to his other hand, still dangling. “Gentleman come up here and said he knew I had a shooting range on the property. He asked if he could rent it for a few days for some friends of his to do firearms training. He give me nine hundred dollars in advance and some guys came up for four days—they stayed up in Cincinnati or somewhere, came down during the day—and that was about it. They shot up some ammo, got back in their cars, and went home.”

“Who arranged it? What was the guy’s name?”