Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30)(35)

“Ed,” Faye said. “Never did catch no last name.”

“Were all the guys from around here?”

“Listen, Marshal, I didn’t spend a lot of time talking to them,” Faye said. “Showed them the range, let them be.”

“You didn’t see their license plates?”

“Nope, guess I didn’t think to do that. And I got to tell you, I’m getting tired of being talked to on my own property.”

Lucas ignored that. “What kind of weapons were they using?”

“Rifles, some pistols, too, I guess. I could hear that difference, you know, rifles going bang bang, pistols going pop pop. That’s about all I got to say. Don’t know no more.”

“Mind if I look at the range?”

“I do mind. If you want to look, come back with a search warrant,” Faye said. “I done nothing wrong and I like my privacy. Now, I’m going inside to call my attorney. C’mon, Butch.”

The Rottweiler followed him inside and the door closed.

Lucas looked around, saw nothing that might give him reason to stay, got in the Jeep, turned around and headed back down the driveway. At the bottom of the hill, he called Chase and said, “I’m out.”

“I’ll call you back,” she said.

Three or four minutes later, she did: “He made a call to Cincinnati. They’re still on the phone.”

“You got a name and address?”

“Yes. One John Henry Oxford. I’ll text the address to you. I’m going out to the NCIS, right now, to see if we’ve got anything on him.”

“Call me.”

His phone beeped a moment later and he pulled over, found a text with John Oxford’s address, put it into his cell phone navigation app and continued north, following the app’s vocal instructions.

Kentucky looked not unlike Minnesota, as long as he was looking at the foliage piled up along the Interstate. As he got closer to Cincinnati, that changed, and the landscape began to look older, more eastern; more wrought iron, more like New Jersey, somehow, than the Midwest. He passed a tall cylindrical building and began picking up the buildings of downtown Cincinnati—again, they looked more eastern than midwestern, more like Philadelphia than Chicago—and he crossed a muddy brown Ohio River on the lower deck of an interstate, stayed to the right, and took I-71 into Cincinnati.



* * *



—

CHASE CALLED BACK: “Interesting stuff. Oxford has one arrest, for disorderly conduct as a member of the Weatherman faction of the Students for a Democratic Society, during some riots called the Days of Rage in 1969. I never heard of them before this, but I read the Wiki article on it. Days of Rage was a violent anti-government and anti-cop demonstration. Lot of people were hurt. After that, nothing.”

“So he was political when he was a kid, and then, what? Went underground?”

“Maybe he did politically, but not personally. He worked for the post office from 1970 to 2010, a letter carrier the whole time. Forty years. He’s been retired ever since. One interesting thing. Before he was with the Weatherman, he was in the Army, a draftee, for two years.”

He’d been sent to Korea as a clerk, Chase said, and was eventually promoted to Specialist E-4, equivalent to a corporal.

“Anyway, he had a bit of trouble and his company commander tried to give him what’s called an Article 15, which is like a traffic ticket for a minor infraction. But in the Army, you don’t have to accept an Article 15. He refused to take it and demanded a summary court-martial, which is a big risk, because with an Article 15 you might pay a small fine, but a court-martial can send you to jail.”

Chase said Oxford had been accused of negligence during a routine practice drill intended to put a fast-reaction squad in front of possible North Korean commandos. He claimed that he was in no way negligent, that his apparent negligence was in fact negligence on the part of the company commander, who had supposedly organized the fast-reaction squad.

When all was said and done, he was found not guilty by the military court and all charges were dismissed.



* * *



—

“I FIND THAT INTERESTING because he refused the easy way out and was willing to take on his own commanding officer. He’s a rigid guy. Even when he was young. He knows his rights and he won’t bend. Then he comes back home, goes to college at Wayne State, apparently gets radicalized by an anti-government group. And then . . . fades into the background.”

“I wonder how long he’s been doing the ANM thing?” Lucas asked. “Is this a retirement hobby or has he been at it longer than that?”

“Well, you saw what we have on them. They’ve been around at least since the early 2000s and maybe back into the nineties.”

“Huh. Then he could be anything. He could have an army of his own.”

“He could,” Chase said. “We’ve got an office in Cincinnati. I could scramble a couple of people to go to his house with you.”

“Let me think about that,” Lucas said. “I need a relatively friendly talk rather than an angry confrontation. Get him demanding a lawyer and we’re screwed.”

“Have him shoot you and you’re screwed.”

“I don’t see that happening,” Lucas said.