The Investigator (Letty Davenport, #1) (5)

Where she had gone, there was nothing at all.

She was a piece of the rock, a piece of a tree, a ripple in the creek.

There, but not Letty.



* * *





Two days later:

The DHS agent was a sunburned overmuscled hulk who dressed in khaki-colored canvas shirts and cargo pants and boots, even in the warm Virginia summer, topped with a camo baseball hat with a black-and-white American flag on the front panel. He had close-cut dark hair, green eyes, a two-day stubble, a thick neck, and rough sunburned hands. He yanked open the Range Rover’s door and climbed in, as Letty got in the passenger side.

He looked over at her, pre-exasperated, as he put the truck in gear. “I don’t know what I did to deserve this, but I’ll tell you what, sweetheart,” he said, in a mild Louisiana accent, “I didn’t sign up to train office chicks how to shoot a gun. No offense.”

His name was John Kaiser and he was a forty-seven-year-old ex-Army master sergeant and a veteran of the oil wars. He slapped reflective-gold blade-style sunglasses over his eyes, like a shutter coming down.

Letty sat primly in the passenger seat, knees together, an old-fashioned tan leather briefcase by her feet, a practical black purse in her lap. She was wearing black jeans and a dark gray sweatshirt with the sleeves pulled up. She said, mildly enough, “I thought you signed up to do anything Senator Colles asked you to do.”

“Colles isn’t my boss: Jamie Wiggler is.” Wiggler was the Homeland Security inspector general. “I signed up to do security. This isn’t security.”

They left her apartment complex and drove west out of Arlington, mostly in silence, except that Letty took two calls on her cell phone, listened carefully, and then said, “All right. I can do that,” and hung up. After the second call, she took a red Moleskine notebook out of her purse and made a note.

“Do what?” Kaiser asked after a while.

She said, “What Senator Colles asked me to do.”

Kaiser shook his head and looked out the window at a convenience store, where a line of locals sat smoking on a concrete curb outside the restrooms. He said again, “This is bullshit. I’m supposed to be doing serious stuff.”

“Chris isn’t punishing you,” Letty said. “You’re not doing much right now. Wiggler told me you’re back from North Carolina, waiting for another assignment. He thought you could run me through the range. If you didn’t like it, you should have told him so. I could have gone with somebody else.”

“It’s Chris? You’re calling Senator Colles Chris?” he asked.

“He told me to,” she said.

He glanced at her: “Sure. You guys must be really close.”

She was blunt: “Close enough to get your ass fired if you’re suggesting that Colles and I are sleeping together.”

“I wasn’t suggesting that,” he muttered, rapidly backing off.

“Try harder not to suggest it,” she said; her tone did everything but smear blood on the windshield.

Long, long, long silence, except for the off-road wheels buzzing on the blacktop.



* * *





The shooting range was out in the Virginia countryside, in a low, unpainted concrete-block building; the back of the building dug into a hillside. They got out, Letty carrying her briefcase, her purse over her shoulder. Kaiser led the way to the building, politely held the steel door for her, and they went inside to a narrow room that stretched across the width of the building. The place was the exact opposite of chic: concrete floor, unpainted walls, shelves of shooting accessories on the outer floor, with two locked racks of rifles and shotguns, mostly black.

The wall behind a glass counter had wide, thick windows that looked out on a ten-station shooting range. Three men were on the firing line, their shots audible but muffled, like distant backfires. Shelves of ammo sat below the windows, and the glass counter case was filled with revolvers and semiauto handguns. The air smelled of gunpowder, Rem Oil, and concrete dust, not at all unpleasant, a candidate for male cologne.

A thin man, maybe sixty, stood behind the counter, ropy muscles, hunched over a newspaper. He was wearing a Rolling Stones tongue T-shirt and an oil-spotted MAGA hat. As they walked in, he folded the paper and said, “Special K. How’s they hangin’, man?”

Letty: “Special K?”

Kaiser ignored her and said to the gun range man, “Gotta do some training.” He gestured between the counter man and Letty. “Letty Davenport—Carl Walls. Carl owns this place.”

Walls said, “You’re a regular cutie. You got a gun?”

After a second, Letty asked, “You talking to me or Special K?”

Walls snorted and said, “All right. Well, let’s get you set up. We have guns for rent, or if you’re thinking about buying . . .”

“I’m all set,” Letty said. She lifted the briefcase.

Walls: “You got ear and eye protection?”

“I do.”

“Then you’re good to go,” Walls said. “Since you’re training, I’ll go out there with you, put you on the far end, where you can talk, shuffle some folks down away from you.”

Kaiser said to Letty, “I didn’t know you had a gun with you.”

“You didn’t ask,” Letty said. “Now you know.”