Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30)(87)

Long silence.

Lucas repeated, “That’ll put him away for a while.”

“About that . . .”

“Ah, shit.”

“Look, we’re really worried about these alt-right groups and all the guns. Turns out Sutton and Lacey are involved in three or four of them. They can give us some real insight into their operations and the membership. Lacey has a federal job that she’s scared to death she’s about to lose, and will lose, if we charge her with assaulting a federal officer. We think, you know, if we don’t charge them . . . they could be really useful in this alternate modality.”

Lucas: “You said, ‘alternate modality.’ I mean, Jesus, Bob nearly got his fuckin’ head cut off. You at least ought to use real words.”

“Well, you know. I’m a fed,” Chase said. “Sometimes I can’t help myself.”

“Sometimes that excuse wears a little thin.”

“Suck it up, Lucas. Listen. I know you tend to sleep in,” Chase said. “Are you up and around?”

“Yes. I’m getting dressed.”

“I’m about a mile away. Meet me in the restaurant in ten minutes.”



* * *



—

LUCAS’S BRAIN USUALLY wasn’t fully working for an hour or so after he got up, especially when he got up early; Chase, on the other hand, was a lark, bright and cheerful at the crack of dawn, every hair in place, looking good in a raspberry jacket, dark blouse with navy slacks and matching shoes and a purse designed to hold a .40 caliber handgun, which she’d begun carrying when she found out that it impressed other federal suits.

Lucas was drinking a Diet Coke with pancakes when she arrived. She was one of those women that waitresses seemed commanded by, and as she slid into the booth opposite Lucas, one rushed over to get her order of a cup of coffee and toast, plain, no butter.

“We need to talk about the letters,” she said. “Actually, let me restate that. I need to talk about the letters. You need to listen.”

“You find something on them?”

“Yes. Letters. And words and sentences and paragraphs. We’ve had our analysts looking at them.”

“You’ve got analysts for everything, don’t you?”

“Yes. Now, be quiet,” Chase said. “Nobody we’ve arrested or looked at, with two or possibly three exceptions, could have written those letters. And, the letters are all absolutely identical in content—and by that I mean, the original text, type fonts, spacing. For instance, the writer always puts two spaces after a period, which means he probably learned to type on a typewriter, rather than a keyboard. There are at least three iterations. We have one copy-machine version that is perfectly straight on the page, one copy-machine version that is crooked, and one copy-machine version that has a smudge on a word at the bottom of the page, as if maybe somebody got a bit of spit on it, or maybe was reading it while eating breakfast and got some milk on it, or maybe . . .”

“I get the idea,” Lucas said. “All copied, but different.”

“That’s right. What we don’t have, is an original copy. The analysts have questioned why we would have all these different copies if they came from the same secondary source. The primary source, the writer of the letter, could have made as many copies as he wished, by pushing a button on his laser printer. We think there’s one person behind the letter, but they’re spreading out in chain-letter fashion. A person gets one, copies it, and sends it along to friends or group members who might want to read it and perhaps act on it.”

“And what are we doing about that? By ‘we,’ I mean you, the FBI.”

“What we’re doing is pressing the people we’ve arrested for names of people who might have sent these letters to them. We’re hoping to find more letters, and by cross-indexing names, get up the pyramid to the original sender.”

“Can you identify a printer if you get an original?”

“Yes. Color laser printers—this is a color laser printer, by the way—actually have tiny dots, invisible to the naked eye, sprayed on the paper that will identify exactly what printer printed the letter, and even when it was done.”

“You gotta be shittin’ me.”

“Nope. That’s not a secret, but not a lot of people know about it. We would like to keep it that way. If we can find an original letter, we can match to the printer.”

“You said with two or three exceptions, none of the people we know about wrote the letter. How do you know that?”

“Because we’ve taken samples of all their writing styles and word patterns. All the little stuff—word choice, vocab, spellings, and so on. With three exceptions, none of the people we’ve looked at could have written the letter, because they’re all nearly functionally illiterate. The person who wrote the letter is literate, trained in writing to some degree, probably a college graduate. The exceptions are Stephen Gibson, Charlie Lang, and John Oxford from ANM.”

“I don’t think ANM,” Lucas said. “Could be, but my gut says they’re not involved. They’re very different, but they’re not psychotic.”

“Stephen Gibson has a color laser printer. I would expect Charlie Lang does, too. If we could find an original printed copy of the letter, we could either pin it to one of those machines, or clear them,” Chase said.