Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30)(4)
The bartender, who was looking up at the titsy chick reading the news on the Fox channel, glanced after him as he went through the door, and muttered to himself, “Asshole.”
* * *
—
DUNN DROVE HOME, to a neatly kept, two-story house on the edge of Warrenton, for which he’d paid seven hundred thousand dollars. He lived alone, his wife having departed six years earlier, leaving him with a red-striped cat, which, like his wife, eventually disappeared and was not missed. He did miss the eight hundred thousand in savings she’d taken with her, but he did all right, putting twenty percent of his income into savings every year, toward an early retirement.
With his tight black combat boots, his tight jeans, his tapered work shirts, his workout body, and blond hair cut in a white sidewall, Dunn looked like a comic-book Nazi. He wasn’t a comic-book anything and he definitely was not a Nazi—Nazis were more dumb guys like Stokes who went marching around and saluting and carrying shields and baseball bats and generally behaving like fools.
Dunn wasn’t a Nazi, but he was a fascist.
He went to political lectures in the evenings, when they caught his interest, and there was always something going on in DC; and he knew a few people and placed some money where he thought it might do political good, used for intelligent publications aimed at influential people. Very carefully placed the money: being known as a fascist would not help business.
After his wife left, Dunn had moved out of the master bedroom and into a smaller one, converting the master into an office and library. When he got home from Chuck’s Wagon and his talk with Stokes, he went to his computer and typed in the URL address Stokes’s sister had written on the paper. The website popped up: 1919 in large type, and in much smaller type, beneath that, the words, “Thy Honor Is Thy Loyalty.”
Dunn immediately recognized the motto as one used by the Nazi SS. At first he ignored the photos on the page and instead flipped through the articles that ran on the website. He recognized several of them from his quiet lurking on neo-Nazi and white supremacist sites.
At first, he didn’t understand. There was a space to post responses, but no way to directly address the owners of the site. The articles were routine and all over the place, some from Nazi or KKK fruitcakes, others that might charitably be regarded merely as ultra-conservative. It was one of the worst websites he’d ever seen.
He then turned to the photographs, and they mystified him. Pictures of the children of prominent politicians, but nothing to explain why they were there.
Still mystified, he went to his bedroom, stripped off his clothes, pulled on a clean black latex bodysuit and a pair of ankle socks and walked down to his garage.
The garage had three stalls. He kept his Ford F-150 in one and a Ford Mustang in the middle. His ex-wife, when she was living there, had occupied the third stall with her Lexus, but when she’d left, he’d put up a studs-and-Sheetrock wall separating his two stalls from the third, painted the walls white, and built himself a home gym.
The gym was based around a Peloton bike for cardiovascular exercise, racks of free weights for strength workouts, and a wall of mirrors. He rode the bike five days a week for forty minutes or an hour. For the weight work, he’d divided his body’s muscle groups in half, and worked each zone three days a week, on alternate days.
He did the bike first, pulling on the biking shoes, putting on the earphones and heart monitor, mounting the bike, bringing up a workout program, then following one of the tight-bodied women on the video screen, who pushed him up hills and more hills, standing, sitting, blowing off five hundred calories, cranking until his leg muscles were screaming at him.
Thinking about that 1919 website.
When he got off the bike, his body pouring sweat, he walked back into the house and drank a protein drink, moved around until the lactic acid had burned off in his legs.
When he was feeling loose and supple again, he went back to the gym, rolled out a yoga mat, set the alarm on his iPhone, sat and closed his eyes and meditated for exactly twenty minutes. When the alarm went off, he rolled onto his stomach, used the iPhone as a timer, and did a “plank” for three minutes, building core strength. That done, he rolled up the mat and went to the free weights.
Thinking about that website.
The workout took an hour. When he finished, he pulled off the bodysuit and the Nike weightlifting shoes, and checked himself in the mirror, nude, top to toe, looking for any extraneous fat. And, truth be told, he liked looking at himself. He posed, flashing his six-pack and biceps. He was pumped, his muscles inflated and burning again: strong, pale, perfectly cut.
If his ex-wife could see him now, he thought, she’d flop down on her back and spread her legs. Bitch.
He did poses for ten minutes, then walked back through the house to his bedroom, stepped into the attached bath, looked at himself in the mirror for a moment, then masturbated into the sink, watching his own crystalline blue eyes the whole time.
All done, he showered, dried himself, dressed again.
Feeling perfect.
Thinking about the website.
* * *
—
THEN—IN A FLASH—he understood.
The website was a message in a bottle, thrown out to whoever might find it, and might be willing to act on it.
He’d been looking for something like this, he realized. He’d been looking for a long time, without realizing it. Right there, in that cryptic setting, was a whole action plan and an invitation to anyone who could understand it.