Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30)(46)

Goochland was an odd small town, because it was small, but it also apparently was the county seat. Lucas hadn’t done any research on the place, having simply poked Tabitha Calvin’s address into his phone’s navigation app.

Once in town, he spotted a clutch of red-brick buildings with cop cars in the parking lot. He slowed and turned in and found he was at the Goochland County Sheriff’s Office. A deputy was walking out to his car and Lucas grabbed him, showed him his ID. The deputy frowned at the Cadillac, and said, “Marshals are living high on the hog, huh?”

“I’m paying for it myself,” Lucas lied. “I got shot a few months back and I need the cushion of a big car.”

“Yeah? C’mon, I’ll introduce you to the sheriff, he’s having lunch,” the deputy said. “Where’d you get shot?”

“Los Angeles.”

“No, I mean, where on your body?”

Lucas tapped his chest: “Right here. .223 full metal jacket, thank God. A hollow point, I’d of been dead.”

“Kind of dumb, using a full metal jacket,” the deputy said, holding the door into the sheriff’s department.

“I’m told they were using them in case they had to fight cops with bulletproof vests,” Lucas said, over his shoulder. “FMJs are the redneck equivalent of armor-piercing bullets.”

“Didn’t think of that,” the deputy said. “Bet it hurt.”

“It did.”



* * *



—

THE SHERIFF WAS A BEANPOLE, a tall, slender, friendly man, thick glasses giving a yellow cast to his blue eyes. His name was Preston Uwell and he was eating an egg-salad sandwich at his desk. He pointed at a visitor’s chair and said, “Tell me all about it.”

Lucas told him most of it, and Uwell said, “We all knew that Sawyer Loan was a bad one. He grew up here, went to school here, I’m told he was an evil little bastard when he was twelve years old. He was one of those boys who believed that power came out of the barrel of a gun and proved it on some cats. When we heard about Chattanooga, everybody who knew him said, ‘Yup.’ Though I gotta say, they must have a mean species of liquor store clerk down in Tennessee.”

Lucas nodded. “I myself would pick a different state if I was going to hold up a liquor store. Maybe . . . Oregon.”

“You got that right,” Uwell said. “So you’re here to see Tabby Calvin?”

“Yeah. I’ve got her address.”

“Well, I’ll tell you Lucas, Sawyer was a bad one, but Tabby’s probably worse. Had a kid, she was beating that girl when the girl was two years old, finally put her in the hospital, like to die. Tabby got sent down the road to the women’s prison for two years, where she refined her mean streak. The girl was taken away and put in a foster home, probably the first real home she ever had. Tabby never even asked to see her again. If you’re going to talk to her, I’ll send a deputy or two along.”

“Does she work in town?” Lucas asked.

“She seems to have a private source of income,” Uwell said, with a thin, skeptical grin. “She spends some money, got a nice truck, but as far as anyone knows, she doesn’t do a lick of work. Not family money, either—her parents live over by Cumberland, don’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of.”

“Okay. Well, if you could give me a guy or two, only should take ten or fifteen minutes, unless she downloads everything she knows about these guys.”

“Controlled Burn, huh? Nice. Can’t say I ever heard of them, though.”

“They don’t advertise much,” Lucas said. “At least, not in the circles we travel in.”



* * *



—

THE SHERIFF SENT an investigator named Larry McCoy and a patrol deputy, Eric Cousins, to show Lucas to Tabitha Calvin’s place, which they said was a mobile home, one of a dozen or so mobile homes on a Goochland side street. Lucas followed the two cop cars out of the parking lot, over a couple of blocks, and down a shallow hill where the mobile homes were lined up, not unlike, he thought, a bunch of cartridges in a clip.

McCoy pulled his car up at the next place down from Calvin’s home, and Cousins pulled up in front of it, next to a white Ford F-150 with oversized wheels. Lucas was last in line, but couldn’t park at the house up from Calvin’s because a truck was already there, so he stopped a couple of homes farther back, parked, and walked down to Calvin’s.

Cousins was already out of his car, McCoy was walking up as Lucas got there, and the door at Calvin’s mobile home popped open and a tall, rawboned woman with a face like a chunk of granite stuck her head out and shouted, “You get out of here. I’m not talking to your kind.”

McCoy said, “Hey, Tabby, we got a U.S. Marshal here who needs to chat with you about some friends of Sawyer. You need to talk to him.”

“Fuck you, you’re the same fuckers who shot Sawyer. Get the fuck out of here.”

Lucas called, “We only want to talk. We understand there was a group called Controlled Burn that Sawyer . . .”

“Fuck you!” She slammed the door.

There was an open window near the door, and Lucas called, “It’d be a lot easier to just come out and talk, Tabby. We’re not here to arrest you, we just . . .”