The Investigator (Letty Davenport, #1) (74)

“No. No more than people who warned about Osama Bin Laden were sure that Nine-Eleven was imminent. I’m fairly sure that something is under way—when it takes place, I don’t know.”

“I can tell you that the FBI is moving, but . . . not so fast as you want them to,” Greet said. “Frankly, you’re part of the question—you’re a new twenty-four-year-old employee, and . . .”

“I got the same attitude from the agent we talked to. So, all right, I’ll continue poking around with John. But if the federal building blows up, don’t call me to complain.”

“Letty!”

“Two words, Billy: C-4, I-beams. They’re not making firecrackers.”

“It’s the end of day, here. I’ll press this tomorrow morning. Promise.”



* * *





When she finished with Greet, Letty went to her computer and began digging through years of news stories coughed up by Google and Bing without making much progress. There were women in the local militias, and some had happily spoken to the media about their political beliefs, which stretched from hard right to the seriously dysfunctional, Democrats-drink-the-blood-of-white-babies fringe.

None of them seemed likely as the organizers of a major conspiracy. Some of the women might be willing to kill, given the opportunity, Letty thought, but—to steal a phrase from Kaiser—they couldn’t lead a Marine into a whorehouse, much less manage a huge conspiracy.

The evening was still too hot for a run, and the local area didn’t seem particularly congenial to running, so she brought up a heavy-duty YouTube yoga session, took a shower, and went down to the lobby to meet Kaiser.

“Where to?”

He shook his head. “If you’re not thinking gourmet, I’m told we could walk a block or so to a pizza joint.”

“That’s fine,” she said.

The pizza place was nice enough, and they went halves on a mushroom (Letty) and pepperoni (Kaiser). “Did you talk to the cops?” Kaiser asked.

She shook her head. “I’ll try them in the morning if we can’t think of anything better. You find anything online?”

“Nothing that feels right. I wonder if we should have stayed up at Midland? We had something to chew on there.”

“Hard to tell,” Letty said. She told him about her conversation with Greet. “I think we’re on our own.”



* * *





They walked back to the hotel and Kaiser said he’d probably be tasting pepperoni in the back of his throat all night, but the pizza had been good enough. As they passed a Chevron gas station, Letty stopped and put a hand to her forehead.

“What?”

“That thing I thought I saw back on Pear Tree Lane. There’s that Chevron sign . . .”

“What?”

“The Chevron logo . . .” She pointed at the sign on the outside of the station.

“The V’s?”

“Yes. Remember when we were talking to Kaylee Turner up in Lubbock? She said the members of the militia, the gang, whatever it was, had blue stickers on their bumpers with green triangles. That’s what I saw. A sticker. Those chevrons reminded me.”

Kaiser looked up at the Chevron sign again, said, “Okay.”

“That’s why I saw the thing only once, going down the street—it was on the back bumper of a truck. When we came back, we were going in the other direction, so I wouldn’t see it.”

“We need to take another ride past what’s-her-name’s house, Serrano.”

“I don’t think . . . It wasn’t by Serrano’s house. It was on the other side of the street, it was on my side, not yours.”

They thought about that as they walked into the hotel, then Letty said, “I wonder if they were smart enough to put a nearby address into visitors’ navigation systems, instead of the real address they were going to. Then, you know, the nav system gets you on the block, but you have to do that last hundred feet on your own.”

“Sure, they say, ‘Go to the pink house on the other side of the street.’ Good security. I don’t know if they’d be smart enough to do that.”

“I don’t know, either,” Letty said. “I’m going back to the computer. Most places are online with tax assessment and collection information. I’ll see if I can spot a likely house . . .”

“What name are you looking for?”

“Don’t know that, either. I’ll just be browsing for something interesting.”

They said “good night,” and Letty went up to her room, got online, and found that El Paso County didn’t show a Pear Tree Lane in their records, although she was pretty sure she had the name right—and it did show up on Google and Bing. She messed around with various options, but came up empty.

They’d have to go back the next day.

Kaiser called just before she got in bed. “You know how you gave me those instructions, up in Midland, about putting my gun on the floor beside the bed?”

“Yes. We should do that here, too,” Letty said.

“Yeah, but now I have some instructions for you.”

“Okay.”

“You know the little peephole in your door? It works both ways. Make a spit wad out of toilet paper and push it in the hole so nobody can look in from the outside. As a woman, you ought to be doing that anyway. Keep the chain on the door. If somebody knocks, stand behind the wall to the side of the door, not behind the door, when you ask who it is. And just because they say, ‘Housekeeping,’ don’t automatically believe them. If you open the door on the chain, they can kick it without any trouble at all. Yank the chain right off the wall. If they do that, they’ll come down on that front foot, inside the door, and when they turn to you, they should be looking straight down a nine-millimeter hole.”