Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30)(98)

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FRANCIS BACON was being treated well in a conference room at FBI headquarters. Chase’s assistant met Lucas at the entrance and escorted him through a maze of hallways and elevators to the room where Bacon was sitting, a lawyer at one elbow, a dish of nuts and a can of ginger ale at the other, talking with three agents, including Chase.

Chase pointed at a chair and said to everyone, as Lucas sat down, “We’re being joined by the Marshals Service. Lucas Davenport.”

To Lucas, she said, “We’re getting a list of everyone Mr. Bacon can think of who might conceivably have sent him the letter. Somebody well spoken, educated, uses some tech, has a computer and a laser printer . . . what else?”

“Angry,” Lucas said. “Maybe, quietly angry. Somebody who might work hard at a real job, but thinks everybody is taking advantage of him. People who don’t work. People who don’t respect American ideals.”

“Shoot, I don’t know anybody who doesn’t think that,” Bacon said. He was a blue-eyed, square-faced, snub-nosed man in a plaid shirt and jeans, who reminded Lucas of an electrician who’d done work on his lake cabin. “I’m not talking about people like me. I mean, I know I’m a right-winger. But I mean like average people. Or teachers. Or lefties. They’re as pissed as we are.”

“This guy isn’t quite like that, though,” Lucas said. “He might make you a little nervous, but you don’t know exactly why. Might look at you a little sideways. Might look stressed, like he can’t relax. Maybe is a bachelor, but maybe divorced and angry about that. Tells you what’s what, and expects you to agree with him and you kind of go along with it, because you get this feeling that you really don’t want to piss him off.”

Bacon said, “Huh.” He scratched his nose, looked at his lawyer and then at Chase, and said, “Let me look at that list you’ve been writing down.”

Chase pushed a yellow legal pad across the table, and Bacon scanned it, then asked, “You got a pen?”

Chase slid a pen across to him, and he spent a moment, working down the list. “Kinda surprises me, but there’s more than one like that,” Bacon said. He pushed the list over to Lucas: four names had check marks next to them.

Lucas looked at Chase. “I’ll take these four.”

“What do they do?” Chase asked Bacon. “Do they have jobs? What do you know about them?”

Bacon said he thought Carl Stanley and Rollie Klein had spent time in prison, Klein for robbery, he thought, and Stanley for embezzlement. He’d met both, and both were the kind described by Lucas: they seemed smart, even educated, and maybe a little crazy.

Elias Dunn and Harold Sandberg, he thought, weren’t criminals, but were right-wing, hard-core, smart, and definitely educated. Dunn was an engineer, Bacon thought, but he didn’t know what kind; Sandberg was a moderately unsuccessful inventor. “He makes some money from his inventions, but not too much. He thinks he’s always getting cheated and he’s sort of . . . out there. But he is smart, and a little crazy, and he does use computers.”

One of the agents went away with the list of four names and came back ten minutes later with addresses for all four men, and printouts of the rap sheets for Klein and Stanley. Bacon was apparently right about Dunn and Sandberg—Dunn had no criminal record at all, Sandberg had been arrested for disturbing the peace during a political demonstration in New York City, but the charges had been dropped.

Klein had once been a minor official at the Port of New York and had been convicted of large-scale theft, misdirecting entire cargo containers of consumer products from Europe to warehouses operated by accomplices, then covering the misdirection with forged paperwork. Klein had claimed that he had nothing to do with the thefts, that he’d been framed by higher-ups at the port, who were cooperating with a New York organized crime family. He refused to roll over on accomplices, claiming that he didn’t have any, because he didn’t commit the crime. He did three years in prison and apparently had been radicalized while he was inside.

Stanley had been convicted of setting up a phony charity that collected money for the ostensible purpose of feeding homeless people in Washington. He may have fed a few, but most of the donated money he simply stole, to feed a gambling habit. He’d done eighteen months in a federal prison. He had an erratic history of political involvement, as a money-raiser and bundler for both Democratic and Republican political campaigns.

“Klein’s a possibility, depending on what happened to him in prison. I don’t like him much, not for shooting a kid. He was a schemer, not a hitter. No history of violence,” Lucas said, scanning the rap sheets the agent had brought back. “He got out two years ago. Maybe somebody could talk to the warden, see what kind of rep he had, who his friends were.”

Chase pointed at one of the other agents, and he said, “I got it.”

“I don’t like Stanley at all,” Lucas said. “He’s a hustler, and a hustler’s not going to make the mistake of murdering a kid. I mean, he might kill somebody, but he’d want an explicit payoff and right now. Not something vague, not something later. Since we know who set up the website, we know he hasn’t been offered a payoff.”

“We’ve got nothing on Dunn, not much on Sandberg,” Chase said.

Lucas went back to Bacon: “How’d you meet Dunn and Sandberg?”