Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30)(84)

“So damn cute at that age,” Lucas said. “I’ve got an older girl, we just got her through the teenage years, and let me tell you, that can be a trial.”

They tiptoed back to the kitchen and Lucas took a business card from his pocket and said, “If you have a chance to talk with Mark about this later, I mean, you know, this Linc guy, if it turns out we can save a child’s life . . . give me a ring. I won’t tell anyone where the tip came from. Not even other cops. But we’re pretty desperate.”

She nodded, didn’t say anything, but took the card and stuck it in her back jeans pocket. Lucas asked, “You guys lived here long. Settled in?”

“We move around a bit . . . I’d like to get a permanent place before we put the kids in school so they don’t have to change much . . .”

They chatted for a while, about schools, and then Bob and Rae stood up, and Bob shook hands with Sutton and said, “Listen, if anything occurs to you, man, call us. You’ve got my card. I mean, we’re talking about children.”

“Yeah, sure,” Sutton said. There was an undertone in his voice of “fuck you and the horse you rode in on.”

Out in the hallway, before the door was closed, Bob asked Lucas, “How’d I do?”

“I liked the handshake at the end,” Lucas said, for the sake of the Suttons. “I thought that was very sensitive.”



* * *



—

IN THE STREET, Rae asked, “How’d it go?”

“Pretty well, I think. I feel a little sleazy, though,” Lucas said. He looked up at a second-story window and saw a drape move. “Let’s keep moving. Six more. How was Sutton?”

“About a level-six asshole,” Bob said. “Wouldn’t talk to Rae. Rae’d ask a question, he’d answer to me.”

“He tried to look down my blouse, though,” Rae said. “You gotta give him that.”

“Everybody tries to look down your blouse,” Bob said. “You oughta put up a sign that says, ‘Dollar a look.’”

“That’s all really wonderful,” Lucas said. “Keep moving.”

“Don’t pretend you haven’t looked,” Bob said.

“Keep moving.”



* * *



—

OF THE SEVEN NAMES ON CHASE’S LIST, nobody answered the door at two of the houses.

Lucas thought he’d done well with Sutton, and of the next five houses, they found people at home at three. Bob and Rae isolated the husband, while Lucas tried to chat up the wife. That worked with two of the three, but the third wife might have been meaner than her husband and essentially told Lucas to fuck off. She said, with bared teeth, as she dropped Lucas’s card in the kitchen wastebasket, “You’ve certainly given me something to think about.” She had a glass sitting on the kitchen shelf with stamp-sized Nazi flags mounted on toothpicks, for what purpose Lucas had no idea.

They didn’t get to the last house. They were on their way when Lucas took a call from an unknown number and the woman on the other end said, “I’m supposed to tell you, Leroy Nathaniel Carter. I don’t know why. I’m supposed to say, look at the initials.” Her voice sounded hollow, and Lucas could hear chatter in the background, as though she were calling from a big-box store, like a Walmart, or Costco.

“Who, uh . . .”

“Wasn’t supposed to say no more.”

Click.

Rae was driving, Lucas in the front passenger seat, and Rae asked, “Was that . . .”

“A name. Leroy Nathaniel Carter. LNC. Linc.”

“That’s better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick,” Bob said from the backseat.

“Which one was calling, do you think?” Rae asked.

“I don’t think it was any of them. Whoever it was, she had somebody else call me, so I wouldn’t recognize a voice.” He got on the phone to Chase, gave her the name. She came back in five minutes, said, “Got an address from a parole officer. He’s just done six years for aggravated assault. He’s been out for three months. We should get the SWAT team back.”

“Give me the address,” Lucas said. “No point getting in an uproar before we know if he’s home.”

“If he’s home . . .”

“Jane, give me the fuckin’ address.”

“Lucas, the guy, his record, he was some kind of gang enforcer, and crazy. He is not somebody to take lightly.”

“We won’t. Give me the address.”





CHAPTER

NINETEEN



Leroy Nathaniel Carter lived in a town house complex on the western outskirts of Baltimore, forty minutes east of Frederick, with his girlfriend, an employee of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

They made it before dark, but not much before. To Lucas’s midwestern eye, the town houses looked brutal: cheaply built, all pale green, six or seven individual houses stuck together in a row, with three clumps on each block, facing three other clumps on the other side of the street, all identical, block after block. The designers might have hoped to give the place a little humanity, and less of a barracks feel, by curving the streets, but that hadn’t worked.

The navigation app took them to the right street, but house numbers were hard to see in the increasingly dim light. When they thought they had the right one, Bob fished the Maglite out of his gear bag and shined it on the front of the place, caught the numbers. “This is it.”