Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30)(59)

“Oh, boy.” The cop glanced back at Lang’s house. “This is tied in?”

“Could be. We don’t know. I got a bad feeling about it.”

The cop’s name was Andy Jackson—“Not the President.” Chase came up, trailed by her assistant, and shook his hand.

“You want to go in?” Jackson asked. “Not much to see except a dead body, shot once in the forehead, apparently after getting out of his car. The car door is still open, but the garage door is down. It looks like he went to meet somebody at the exit door and was shot where he stood. Probably a .38 or .40-something caliber handgun, judging from the hole. The slug went through his head and into the wall and out the back—the wall’s Sheetrock, and didn’t slow it down much. We’re probably not going to find the slug without jumping through our butts. I’d like to finish with the crime scene stuff before we trample all over it . . .”

“Finish with the crime scene,” Chase said. “What does Lang have to say? Can we talk to him?”

“Sure. He’s in the main house, Gibson has an apartment over the garage.” Jackson pointed at the garage and Chase turned to look. “Far enough away that Lang says he never heard a thing. Neighbors didn’t hear anything, either, the ones we’ve been able to find.”

“What do you think about Lang?” Lucas asked.

“Don’t tell him I said so, not yet, but he looks okay to me. Shook up, bad. Of course, you could be shook up if you killed somebody, but I don’t think he did. No complicated alibi. He said Gibson went out last night, after work, said he was going to meet some people on a research project. He was talking to some members of a group called White Fist. Lang’s not sure of the time, but he watched a news program until 10:30 or so, and spent some time in the bathroom, washing his face and brushing his teeth and putting on his pajamas, so he thinks he was in bed around eleven. He saw headlights on his curtains before he went to sleep, and that’s the last thing he knew until he got up this morning.”

“He’s sure it was Gibson? The headlights?”

“He assumed it was, but he didn’t look. Not to say that there might not have been somebody in the car with him. But it looks to me like somebody might have either followed him here, or been waiting for him here, and met Gibson at the door.”

Chase: “Was Gibson involved with anyone?”

“Lang says no. He said Gibson had a girlfriend a couple of years back, for a short time, but he hadn’t seen her for a while. We’ll check to see what she has to say: we’ve got a name. We haven’t had time to talk to Lang much—I’ve been here for . . .” He looked at his watch. “. . . about fifteen minutes.”



* * *



—

“LET’S TALK TO LANG,” Chase said.

On the walk to the main house, Jackson asked, “You think it had to do with Gibson’s research? On these alt-right people?”

“That’s an obvious possibility,” Chase said, “depending on who exactly he was looking at, and how he was going about it.”

“As soon as your crime scene people are done, we need to get up in his apartment and look for a notebook or a laptop or anything else he might have taken notes on,” Lucas said. “We need to check his phone calls, see if there are GPS links that the phone company can help us with.”

“We can do all that,” Jackson said. “There is a laptop up there for sure, and quite a few legal pads.”

“We’d like to be there when you look,” Chase said. “If there’s a link going out to a shooter group—this White Fist sounds interesting—we need to know which one it was.”

“So do we,” Jackson said.



* * *



—

LANG WAS SITTING on a purple couch in the living room, a vase of yesterday’s yellow flowers wilting on the piano behind him.

When he saw Lucas, he started to get to his feet, but Lucas put up a hand and he settled back down, his face nearly as purple as the couch.

“Are you okay?” Lucas asked. “I mean, physically? You don’t look good.”

“I’m completely undone,” Lang said. His mouth hung open. Then, “What am I going to do? Stephen is dead.”

“Do you know who he was talking to the last few days? Where his research was going?”

“I think it must be the ANM who did this,” Lang said. “Stephen found that gun training site for you.”

“Okay, we’ll look at that for sure,” Lucas said. “Who else was he looking into? Any groups with a history? Patriotus?”

“He did talk to Patriotus, to Roland Carr. That seems unlikely to me, that Roland would be involved with a killing. They’re more . . . verbal.”

“Like the Greene Mountain Boys?”

“More like that.”

“What about Forlorn Hope or White Fist?” Lucas asked.

Lang nodded: “He talked to White Fist day before yesterday. He went to their headquarters and talked to Toby Boone. And he went back last night, I think. I told him to be careful—after his first trip there, he said a man who was there with Toby was ‘scary.’ I think . . . an ex-convict.”

Jackson: “Scary?”