Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30)(72)

When they’d rung off, Lucas mulled over the situation, thinking about how much trouble he might be in if the whole thing came out, realized there wasn’t much he could do about it, and turned on the TV. He found an old movie, The Little Drummer Girl, and was halfway through it when Henderson called.

“Senator Coil told me about your little séance. She said that her husband, George, has been having a series of heart problems and that Audrey has asked that she be allowed to go home for a semester to be with her father. Coil has already spoken with the school head, and he’s agreed to the semester in Tifton, without loss of place toward graduation. Audrey’ll be down there for several months, at least.”

“Are the heart problems real?” Lucas asked.

“Lucas, I mean, for Christ’s sakes . . .”

“Okay.”

Audrey would be on a plane to Atlanta in the morning, Henderson said, and any press inquiries would be deflected with the heart-problem excuse. Her blog would be temporarily suspended, since Young’nHot’nTifton probably wouldn’t gather a crowd.

“Bob’s catching a plane to Jerusalem. She hooked onto an Armed Services Committee junket to talk about fighter jets with the Israeli government. She’ll be out of pocket for at least a week, which will also deflect media inquiries to her. If we can have this done in a week . . .”

“The problem is that we won’t know when we’re done,” Lucas said. “All we can do is hope there’s not another lone wolf out there, still believing in 1919.”

“So we fall back on prayer. I was afraid we’d get there sooner or later.”





CHAPTER

FIFTEEN



Dunn arrived at the cemetery a few minutes after 7:30 in the evening, sunlight fading under the western horizon, his car parked on the other side of a residential block opposite the cemetery. His reasoning: if he should be discovered, and if there were a foot chase, he could run across the street and disappear into the trees and bushes around a half dozen different houses, before cutting over to the car.

He was a fan of Jason Bourne movies and he’d remembered that when Bourne wanted to drive cross-country and not be followed, he would slip up behind a random car and steal a fresh license plate. Dunn scouted a couple of shopping centers, the Shops at Stonewall and the Virginia Gateway, but could never get comfortable with lifting a plate: there were eyes everywhere, people coming and going, and sometimes unexpectedly, cars turning down the parking aisles, sweeping the aisles with their headlights . . .

And cameras. He spotted a couple, but thought there must be more that he didn’t see.

He left both places with a chill down his spine and an unused screwdriver still uncomfortably large in his jacket pocket. That Bourne shit, he learned, was harder and riskier than it looked.

So his car carried its own plate, and if there were some survey of cars being done in the area, well then, he was cooked. He’d take that chance, simply because, he thought, no such surveys were being done.

He had his camera bag slung over his shoulder and now carried a tripod as well. He entered the park unseen, he thought, went to his shooting nest, settled into it. He’d dressed warmly, though it wasn’t apparent: he was wearing silk long underwear under his long-sleeved shirt, and had a military casualty blanket strapped under his camera bag.

He set up the tripod, locked the camera onto it, took a couple of shots of the western sky, and settled in to watch.

Because if the cops were still there, at the parking structure, they’d be working in shifts, and one way or the other, he’d catch a shift change, suspicious arrivals and departures.

He hadn’t planned to get bored, and he didn’t. He dozed from time to time, but not so heavily that he didn’t pick up cars arriving at, or leaving, the parking structure down the hill. Then, a few minutes before nine o’clock, he heard voices. He couldn’t see anyone, but the voices were close, and muted; a little laughter, and a few moments later, the sweet funky smell of marijuana.

A couple of kids, he thought, were off to his left, near the edge of the cemetery, inside a screen of trees. He’d been sitting on the tarp, the silvery foil side up and folded over his legs. Now, with the kids not far away, he wrapped the blanket over himself, nothing poking out but his head. The outside of the blanket was done in a camo pattern and he was confident in his invisibility. Unless, of course, they literally tripped over him.

He stayed focused on the talk, and the occasional giggling, which he suspected meant there was something sexual going on; but who knew, really, or cared?

At 10:30 or so, there was a burst of louder conversation and then the sounds of the intruders moving through trees, and then a pale light that he recognized as the flashlight from a cell phone. The flashlight bobbed around, eighty or a hundred feet away, and then disappeared up the hill.

A half hour later, he heard somebody on the street, more talking. He risked a look, and there was enough ambient light to make out a couple and a dog, walking down the hill with a flashlight showing the way. They stopped at the edge of the cemetery for a moment, then moved on. Another moment and he picked up the scent of fresh dog shit.

Didn’t bother to bag it. That annoyed him; that always annoyed him when he saw it.

Time dragged. He let it drag. Slept off and on, with no cars to disturb him. If there was still a shift of cops, he thought they’d be arriving perhaps two hours before the school opened. He set his cell phone alarm to vibrate, and dozed, sitting upright, but comfortable, his back against a gravestone.