Twisted Prey (Lucas Davenport #28)(100)

“According to my Google Earth, about two hundred and ten feet, if you run out the driveway and down the street,” Moy said. “In a straight line, a hundred and ninety-one feet, but of course there are a lot of trees between here and there. And it’s dark.”

They sat and waited in four different cars. A while later, a fifth car pulled up, and Moy walked over to it, a door popped open, and he got in. He was in there for two or three minutes, then all the doors opened, and Jane Chase got out of one of them and walked over to Lucas’s Evoque. She was wearing jeans and a long-sleeved black shirt and running shoes, the first time Lucas had seen her when she wasn’t wearing a dress. “Nothing happening,” she said.

“I know,” Lucas said, as he got out and eased the car door closed. Bob and Rae got out to join the huddle, and Chase gave them a couple of paragraphs on Douglas’s background. “One of those lawyers who got rich writing bills for Midwestern congressmen,” she said. “Sent lots of government defense money out that way.”

Moy jogged over to them. “Larry says there’s a car coming down the street, moving slow.”

He was carrying a radio but listening through earphones. He listened for a few more seconds, and said, “It turned into the driveway . . . Okay, two people are getting out . . . Looks like a man and a woman . . .”

Lucas felt sudden apprehension. “What’s the woman look like?”

Moy repeated the question, said, “Can’t tell, it’s too dark. And Larry’s not positive it’s a woman but thinks it is. She’s wearing a hooded black rain jacket . . .”

“Aw, Jesus,” Lucas said.

He looked at Bob, who said, “Suzie?”

“I think so.”

“We gotta get down closer,” he said. To Chase: “I think it might be the woman who shot us up at the hotel. I don’t like the idea that she’s here with Claxson because—”

“Larry says they’re inside,” Moy said.

Seconds later—three or four, no more, Lucas thought—they heard a series of whumps, like you might hear if somebody fell down the stairs in your house.

Lucas pulled his gun, and Chase said, “What?” and Bob said, “That was gunfire,” and Rae yanked open the back hatch of the Evoque, and as Lucas and Bob ran toward the opening of the driveway, she pulled out an M4 and a thirty-round mag and slammed the mag into place as she ran after them.





28


Taryn Grant stood in the bay window at the back of her Georgetown mansion, watching the drizzle deflect off the multicolored foliage and the red-brick walkways of the sprawling garden she never thought to sit in. In the middle of a densely built world capital, she felt alone: not only was she alone in the house, and would be for the rest of the day, she couldn’t even see the city. She could see a few windows in the gabled roof of her next-door neighbor, but that was it. Other than that, she might be out in the Minnesota countryside.

The temperatures were in the low seventies, low enough that she shivered in the cool air, after the long string of stultifying hot and humid days. But the rain—she liked the idea of the rain. The rain was like a sign.

Time to roll the bones, she thought. Everything would ride on this night.

The idea was . . . arousing. In a sexual sense. She took a deep breath, feeling the heat between her thighs, turned away from the window, and walked through the kitchen to the basement door, to the SCIF, walked down the stairs, got her pistol from the desk.

The gun was a Beretta 92F, once owned by a security man who’d killed for her and was now dead himself. He’d picked the gun up after a firefight in Iraq, had taken it off the body of a dead intelligence officer who’d made the mistake of popping up from behind a wall at the wrong split second. In movie cop terms, the piece was cold as ice.

She carried the Beretta up the stairs, stopped in the kitchen to pick up a plastic mixing bowl and a bottle of dishwashing liquid, which she took back to the laundry room. There, she popped the magazine and thumbed the fifteen rounds out on the top of the dryer. She poured the dishwashing liquid in the bowl, dropped the rounds in. Using a dishrag, she scrubbed each round clean until the brass shone like a new gold coin, eliminating any possible fingerprints. That done, she rolled the rounds out on the dryer again and washed the bowl in the utility sink.

Next step: she took a bottle of bleach from the cupboard, poured it in the bowl until it was two-thirds full, and dropped the rounds in. She let them sit for a minute, then gingerly picked each one out with a paper towel, dried it, and lined them all up on a paper towel on the dryer top. The magazine went into the bleach for a minute. She took it out, again handling it with a paper towel, patted and waved it dry. No more DNA.

When the fifteen rounds and the magazine were thoroughly dry, and yet again with paper towels, she pushed the cartridges into the magazine and loaded the mag back into the pistol. She finally put the gun in a new garbage bag.

None of that technique came from the CIA or the Intelligence Committee. It was all hot off the Internet.



* * *



—

SHE CARRIED THE PISTOL back to her bedroom, where she lay on the bed for five minutes, working out the exact sequence of events, while getting her courage up and fixing it steadfastly in her heart. What did the Buddha say? Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.