Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30)(83)

The man glanced back over his shoulder, and then said, “Ahm, uh, my wife’s not dressed.” He turned his head and called, “Amy? Are you okay if some marshals come in?”

A woman shouted something back—“One second”—and ten seconds later called, “I’m okay. They can come in.”

Both Bob and Rae had their hands on their pistols as they edged through the door. The apartment had a living room with a broken-down velvet-covered couch that looked across a shaky wooden coffee table at a new wide-screen television; there were two ashtrays on the coffee table full of cigarette butts. A half dozen plastic toys were lying against one wall—the FBI agents had said there were two children at home, both toddlers.

Bob and Rae pointed Sutton at the couch, and the three of them went that way, Bob saying, “Listen, we’re sorry to barge in on you like this, I know you spoke to FBI agents yesterday, and we thank you for that . . .”

Lucas trailed, and as Sutton sat down, he glanced at Lucas, then did a second take, frowned and asked, “Are you the boss here?”

Lucas smiled and shook his head. “No, I’m with the Marshal’s Service Inspector General. I tag along on selected interviews and evaluate, mmm, the behavior of our marshals.”

“Really? That’s weird.”

“Gotta agree with you on that, brother,” Bob said. He snorted once, turned to Lucas and said, “No offense.”

“Do the interview,” Lucas said. “We gotta keep moving.”



* * *



—

A SMALL KITCHENETTE sat off the living room and a woman appeared in a doorway from the back of the apartment, stepping into the kitchenette. She looked at her husband and Bob and Rae, talking on the couch, and then at Lucas.

She was thin, with bones in her face, and a prominent nose; blondish hair swept back, not in a ponytail, but cut short, held in place with hair butter, and showing the tracks of a heavy comb. She was wearing jeans with a white blouse. Lucas thought she looked Appalachian, though if he were asked to define that, he couldn’t: she just looked like Depression-era photographs.

Lucas smiled at her and said, “I smell baby formula,” and she said, “We’ve got two.”

“So do I,” Lucas said. “At least we’re out of the formula stage. Out of Huggies. Now they poop in regular underpants.”

“Oh, God, I’m really looking forward to that,” the woman said, with a quiet laugh. “If I could sell poop, I’d be a rich woman now.”

Lucas said, “I’m Lucas.”

She said, “Amy. How do you do? And what’s going on?”

“I do all right, I guess . . .” He told her the story about being with the inspector general’s office and evaluating the behavior of Bob and Rae, then grimaced and said, “They’ve got a tough problem. They’re looking for a guy named Linc, who’s involved with Toby Boone’s group. They’re working hard, but they’re not getting anywhere.”

“Toby got raided yesterday,” the woman said. “Were you there?”

“No, I don’t go on raids. I’m more of a desk guy, except when I’m doing something like this,” Lucas lied. “This Linc guy, we’ve heard that he’d set up to shoot some children. We think he already killed one kid.”

“I heard about that. He shot the wrong kid, that’s what they’re saying on CNN.”

“He did, and he’s going to shoot again. We think he’s . . . unbalanced. Bob and Rae are trying to locate him, they thought your husband might have some idea of who he is. Linc and Toby Boone are friends. And he’s friends with a guy named Cop.”

“He, uh, Mark, doesn’t talk to marshals much. He’s not much for police in any way, shape, or form.”

“I understand he’s had his problems with the law.” Lucas glanced at the couch, where Bob, Ray, and Sutton were deep in discussion, then leaned toward Amy Sutton and said, quietly, with a grin, “We’ve been talking to as many of the White Fist people as we can find, and, well . . . most of them don’t have a pretty young wife and babies to come home to. They’re real dead-enders . . . kind of . . . strange guys. Rather have a gun than a woman. In my observation.”

She nodded. “There are some unusual men around Toby. He sort of pulls them in. Me’n Mark . . . I’m trying to get him away from all that. We’re hoping he can find a job in trucking. He used to be a loader, but he’d like to be a driver. Get that white-line fever.”

They talked about that for a moment and she said full-time drivers could make more than fifty thousand a year, and Lucas said he heard that it could be even more than that. Then, “Where are the kids?”

“Put them back in the bedroom. I call it their playroom.”

“They’re quiet,” Lucas said. “One of each or . . .”

“One of each, “she said. “C’mon, let’s take a peek. They are pretty quiet. Maybe too quiet.”

They walked down a short hall to a bedroom door, and Amy opened it quietly, and they both peeked. The kids, a boy maybe three and a girl maybe two, were piling up stuffed animals into a pyramid, intent upon the process.

Amy nodded and pulled the door shut and whispered, “Don’t know what they’re doing, but they’re working at it.”