Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30)(95)

“That’s done,” the patrolman said, cheerfully enough.

Dunn’s truck was halfway up the wall of the ditch, and they walked back, Dunn’s ears still ringing. The tow truck driver had the truck up out of the muck in another five minutes, and the driver said, “Sorry this happened, bud.”

The patrolman, looking at the blood on the windshield, said, “Man, it looks like that buck exploded.” He added that he’d file a report that Dunn might need for an insurance claim. The tow truck driver had a pressure tank with a washer and hosed down the windshield, took a credit card for three hundred dollars, and he and the patrolman disappeared down the road toward Harrisonburg.

Dunn got a flashlight out of his toolbox and walked back up the road to where the buck was lying in the ditch. He shined the light farther back in the woods, saw the tawny coat of the doe, stared at it for a moment, sad, still a little stunned by what had happened, shook his head, and walked back to his truck.

At Warrenton, he went to a twenty-four-hour car wash and hosed the remaining blood off the truck. The windshield showed a short crack at the bottom edge, on the passenger side, probably caused by a hoof or possibly an antler. In Dunn’s experience, the crack would grow. There were a few scrapes on the hood. That wasn’t uncommon with trucks that worked construction sites, but Dunn, as a neat freak, scowled at the scratches, picked at them with a fingernail, and decided he would file an insurance claim, asking for a new paint job.

When he got back to the truck, he looked around, then got the Sig out from under the front seat in its sticky/slippery holster, and put it back in his jeans pocket.

At home, he took the rifle out of its case, and toyed with it, loading and unloading it, looking through the scope, through a window at a streetlight that must have been a half mile distant, and then at a lighted house window a block away. As he was looking at the window, a man appeared in it, from the waist up, well lit, and Dunn put the crosshairs on his ear and pulled the trigger slowly. When the trigger broke, he said, “Bam!”



* * *



—

AND HE RESUMED HIS RESEARCH into possible targets, eventually picking out a girl named Cynthia Cootes, daughter of Franklin Cootes, the junior senator from New Hampshire. Unlike the Coil situation, Cynthia Cootes hadn’t moved with her father to live in Washington. Her father, in fact, lived part-time on a boat in a Washington marina, while his wife and daughter remained at home.

Her photo on the 1919 site had been taken at the National Book Festival, where her father spoke about a book he’d written on offshore sailing. A feature story first in the Hampton Union, and later apparently stolen (or closely replicated purely by coincidence) by the Washington Post, reported he annually sailed with his daughter from New Hampshire, around to the Chesapeake and up to Washington. Cynthia Cootes was shown standing on a stage with her father, holding the book.

He couldn’t find a reference to her school, but he did find her home address, and when he looked it up on Google Maps, he found that it was on a semirural road outside Hampton. The bad part was that the road didn’t have any immediate exit; the good part was, it was heavily wooded. He could work with it.



* * *



—

THE TRIP WOULD REQUIRE some travel. Dunn didn’t want to fly, because that would mean declaring the gun. He checked, and found that Hampton was an eight-hour drive: manageable on a three-day weekend, even allowing time for scouting.

If he waited ’til the following weekend, he might lose some momentum, but the news stations were still hot on the story of the first shooting, so he shouldn’t lose much.

A pleasurable stress soaked down into his shoulders. He’d already had an effect on the way the nation worked.

One more shot, and the founders of 1919 could go to work, if they hadn’t already. He wished he could meet them; he doubted that he ever would.



* * *



—

HE CLICKED ON THE TELEVISION without thinking about it, almost as a reflex, since the remote was right there by his hand. He looked through the scope at a typically goofy family in a pizza ad, the whole bunch of them stuffing their faces with “Chicago-style” pizza of about ten thousand calories per serving; all the eager eaters were improbably thin.

The pizza eaters disappeared and a talking head said, “We have more breaking news on the Audrey Coil story. Coil has admitted that she invented the right-wing 1919 website as a way to get herself on television—”

Dunn blurted, “Wait!”



* * *



—

THE STORY STUNNED HIM IN WAYS that the collision with the deer hadn’t. He clicked through three different stations catching bits and pieces of the story and then ran into his office and went out on the ’net and got the whole thing. Reading story after story, he sat frozen at the computer.

Couldn’t be true.

One reporter even suggested that Audrey Coil, obviously good at media manipulation, might be doing it again. But nobody believed that. Coil hadn’t just confessed, she’d been caught. The FBI was leaking details . . .

And he saw a press conference with the FBI agent in charge, a brisk young woman with a shoulder holster. A reporter asked her if the FBI had found the gun used to shoot James Wagner, the victim of the Stillwater School murder. She demurred, a firm cut to her mouth, and threw out some bureaucratic talk about making significant progress.