Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30)(68)

“Get the fuck off my back,” Blake Winston snapped.

“What!”

“Get the fuck off my back. We’ll talk about this later when Dad gets here. Right now, I don’t want to hear about it. Go read a New Yorker or something.”

His mother turned and steamed out of the room. Lucas walked down the three steps into the tennis room and said, “I’m causing you trouble.”

“You’re not causing me anything—I’m causing it,” Winston said. He seemed five years older than he had the last time they talked. “Mom makes complications where there aren’t any. Or shouldn’t be. That’s what she does. Come look at this.”

He took a thumb drive out of his shirt pocket, plugged it into a USB port on the side of the computer and said, “I won’t bother you with the details. The 1919 site is down now, but I’d downloaded the whole site. I searched Audrey’s computer hard drive and found the 1919 articles in her deleted files.”

“Which weren’t totally deleted?”

“No. They’re still there on the hard drive until they’re overwritten and they hadn’t all been overwritten. I also found four of the photographs . . . the rest were gone.”

“How do you know she didn’t take the files off the 1919 site because she was interested in learning something about them?” Lucas asked. “I mean, you did.” Winston waved him off. “Remember how the photos on the website didn’t have any metadata? The metadata had been stripped off? Well, the metadata is still there on her photo files, which means she didn’t get them off the site. The photos were all shot with a Sony RX100 Mark III, which is a nice little camera. I happen to know she has that exact model. The metadata has all the dates and stuff that the photos were shot.”

Lucas sat silently for a moment, then said, “Let’s see the photos.”

Winston brought them up one at a time, showed Lucas the metadata, which included the time, date, and camera setting used to make them. They’d been done the past spring, before summer vacation.

When he’d looked at them all, Lucas said, “Okay. Give me the thumb drive.”

Winston ejected it, pulled it from the USB port, and tossed it to Lucas. “It’s gonna hurt if you tell her where this came from,” Winston said. “The word will get around the school that I’m a narc.”

“I’ll cover you if I can, but she may suspect,” Lucas said. “I’m willing to tell her some lies to cover up my sources.”

“Try hard,” Winston said. “What Mom’s saying . . . that’s what a lot of my friends would say, too. You say, ‘Maybe a kid would get killed if you didn’t turn her in,’ but that’s all theoretical. If a kid doesn’t get killed, I’m gonna be the school dick.”

“I understand,” Lucas said.

“Do you?”

“Yes. I did murder investigations in Minnesota and I had a number of confidential sources,” Lucas said. “If they were found out, they weren’t the school dick. They were dead men walking.”

Winston thought about that, then bobbed his head: “Okay.”

Lucas stood, patted him on the shoulder, said, “Go easy on your mother,” and left.



* * *



—

HE WAS BACK AT THE WATERGATE fifteen minutes before Henderson was due to arrive, so he took a quick shower and changed into a clean shirt. As he was getting dressed, he took a phone call from Rae.

“See,” she said, “you really don’t want to be one of those shitkickers who kills somebody, but then thinks, ‘This is an expensive gun, I think I’ll keep it.’ And then, you get clever and hide it under your spare tire, where every moron who ever wore a Carhartt jacket hides his gun.”

“What kind?”

“Smith M&P nine, the perfect size to make that hole in Gibson. Threaded barrel, and we found the suppressor stuck in the crack between the seat back and the seat, in the back of the car. About the only thing small enough to fit back there.”

“Call Jane . . .”

“That’s all done, the FBI guys have the gun and suppressor. Nothing else of interest in there. We’re leaving here now, heading back to the Watergate.”

“Let’s meet at nine tomorrow; I’m jammed up right now.”

“See you then.”



* * *



—

HENDERSON MESSAGED that he was running ten minutes late, so Lucas plugged Winston’s thumb drive into his own MacBook, pulled up the files, and ran through them again. He was making notes on the metadata on the last photo when Henderson knocked.

Lucas let him in, and the senator, looking harried, yanked his necktie loose, took a chair, and asked, “I don’t suppose there’s a beer in that refrigerator?”

“As a matter of fact, there is.”

Lucas got a beer, popped the top, and handed it over. Henderson took it, swallowed some beer, said, “You know the most amazing thing about my job? It’s talking to famous people, people you see on TV all the time, pontificating, and realizing how many of them are grubbing around for money. Still looking for angles that will make them a few bucks. And they don’t care what they have to do. Bend over the desk and take it in the ass? Sure, no problem, give me a hundred bucks.”