Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30)(86)

Lucas had at least a foot of reach on her. The punch started at shoulder height, snapped out to her chin, caught her perfectly, one of the better punches Lucas had thrown in his life, and the woman flew backwards and landed on top of Carter, rolled off and lay on the floor, one leg twitching, no other sign of life.

“Hope I didn’t kill her,” Lucas said; but he wasn’t hoping all that hard.

“I was kind of hoping you did,” Rae said. “Cuff ’em. Bob, you okay?”

“Sliced the shit out of me,” Bob said. Blood was trickling down into his eyes, and he wiped it with the back of a hand, but he put the cuffs on Carter and the woman, who still wasn’t moving, but was breathing.

“We need an ambulance,” Lucas said. “She might have a broken jaw.”



* * *



—

RAE CALLED 9-1-1, and an ambulance and a couple of local cop cars were dispatched; Lucas called Chase, who was still ten minutes out. “Any sign of a gun?”

“Haven’t looked,” Lucas said.

“You’ve got a warrant.”



* * *



—

THEY HAD GUNS.

There were four AR-15–style black rifles, two 9mm semi-auto handguns, a .357 Magnum revolver, a twelve-gauge shotgun with cut-down stock and barrel that made it illegal, and, most interesting, a bolt-action CZ 527 American in .223, mounted with a Sig Sauer scope. The CZ and scope would make a decent light sniper combination.

The ambulance showed up—Lacey’s eyes were open, but she couldn’t close her mouth, and wasn’t clearly responsive to questions. An EMT thought her jaw might be broken, and that she might be concussed, and they took her away.

Carter had gotten off the floor, and was sitting on a kitchen chair, stunned, but not so stunned that he hadn’t immediately asked for a lawyer. Lucas, looking through the bedroom, found a copy of the letter: not an early version, but apparently a much-copied one, and the original had not been quite centered on the photocopy machine.

Chase arrived, looked at the letter, and said, “Same letter, different copy. The goddamned thing is everywhere.”

They were standing in the living room, and she turned and looked at Carter sitting in the kitchen chair: “You think he shot the kid?”

“I dunno,” Bob said. His forehead had been patched up by the EMT, who suggested that he might wish to go to an emergency room for stitches. “I can tell you only one thing about that: the ammo in the apartment is not the same as it was in the rifle we recovered. There aren’t any partial boxes of it, nothing of that brand. So . . .”

“He has the attitude and we’ve got that recording,” Lucas said. “We get a lawyer on him, maybe he’ll have something to say.”

Chase nodded: “We’ll have a better idea by morning. We’ll seal up the house, get a crime scene crew over here. Bob, go get your stitches.”



* * *



—

BOB GOT HIS STITCHES, with Lucas and Rae waiting in the hospital with him, like nervous parents. The stitches were done by a young physician’s assistant, who told Bob that she was so good at it, he wouldn’t have scars, as long as he didn’t mess with the cuts. She put a big bandage on his forehead that made him look as though he’d had a lobotomy, and sent them on their way.

At the Watergate, they got more burgers. Rae asked, “What do you think about Sutton?”

“I don’t know,” Lucas said. “He’s at least a candidate. But, I don’t know. I guess we’ll find out in the morning. I’m going to watch some football, then go to bed, and sleep in. This was a long day.”

“Hate those letters floating around,” Bob said. “They all make that same argument—that if you kill a senator’s kid, the next senator might listen to you when you want a vote changed. It makes a weird kind of sense, if you’re nuts.”

“Carter was a felon with five rifles and a sawed-off shotgun, plus a couple of pistolas,” Rae said. “You want nuts, there it is.”



* * *



—

LUCAS WATCHED SOME FOOTBALL, went to bed, and was actually up and moving when Chase called the next morning.

“Guess what?”

“From your tone, I guess he wasn’t the guy,” Lucas said.

“Two steps forward, one step back,” Chase said. “We have a connection, just not Sutton. Remember when I said we had blood on the door of Rachel Stokes’s house that probably didn’t come from her or her brother? Like somebody else had been shot?”

“I remember.”

“Well, the science guys got a match—DNA from the blood on the door matches DNA from the cheekpiece on the rifle we found under the cemetery shack. Whoever killed the Stokeses also shot the kid; the killer must’ve gone to the house specifically to get the gun, and then killed the Stokeses to eliminate witnesses.”

“How does that eliminate Sutton? You couldn’t have done DNA . . . Oh. Wait. You already had it. Sutton was typed when he was convicted of that ag assault charge.”

“Yup. We’ll re-do him, but I think he’s out of it.”

“Well, at least we got him on a gun charge and resisting arrest,” Lucas said. “That’ll put him away for a while.”