Twisted Prey (Lucas Davenport #28)(103)

But they would find her, sooner or later, if she didn’t get completely clear, and now. With three dead and the shooter loose and on foot, they’d be putting up roadblocks, bringing in an army of cops to walk the woods.

The sound of the siren was coming from behind her but still distant. She’d gone a half mile or more, jogging and walking fast, when a garage door began rolling up at the house that she’d just passed. She stopped at the side of the road and watched as a small car, a green-and-white Mini, backed out of the garage. The garage door rolled down, and in the light she could see only a single person inside the car, small, probably a woman.

At the end of the driveway, the car turned toward her. She flipped down her hood to show her blond hair, and as the Mini slowly approached, she stiffened one leg to simulate limping and waved at the vehicle, which slowed some more, and Grant could see an elderly woman’s face peering out at her.

The car came up, stopped beside her, and she limped around to the passenger side. She already had the gun in her hand. When the driver’s-side window rolled down, the old lady said, “Is there something—”

Grant shot her in the face.

The car started to ease forward, the car in gear but the woman’s foot apparently still on the brake. With the street gradually inclining upward, Grant was able to reach inside the window and grab the door latch and open it. She had to struggle to stay with the car, as she unlatched the old lady’s safety belt and pulled her out on the street. Then Grant was inside.

She’d lucked out: the car had an automatic transmission. She put it in park, got out, ran back to the woman, dragged her body to the side of the road—she couldn’t have weighed a hundred pounds—and threw it under a spreading evergreen shrub. As she did, the woman’s phone fell out of her pocket. Grant crushed it underfoot and kicked it into the brush.

Back in the car, she drove slowly out to a main road, the one Parrish had driven in on, and turned back toward Washington. A mile down the road, two cops cars sped past, their lights flashing and their sirens screaming, into the murky darkness. Followed by a third, and a fourth, but no ambulances. She almost got lost twice, thinking about Davenport and the Watergate. There was a public garage at the Watergate.



* * *



—

SHE PARKED THE CAR at the Watergate forty-five minutes after leaving Great Falls. As she was getting out, she noticed a green bottle in the door pocket: hand cleaner. She rummaged around the inside of the car, found a packet of tissues, soaked one in the cleaner, which was mostly alcohol, and used it to wipe down the steering wheel and gearshift. She pulled her hood up, got out of the car, wiped down the seat, closed the door, locked it, and walked out to the street.

The Park Hyatt was a half mile away. She moved quickly, without running, up New Hampshire Avenue to 24th Street, north on 24th. She checked for cops, dropped the gun and magazine, separately, into sewers; it was still raining, and water bubbled over both as they disappeared through the grates and down the culverts.

At the Park Hyatt, hood still up, water trickling down the jacket, she caught an empty elevator and ten minutes later was back in her room.

Her hair was a mess, and she smelled like raw wet oak bark and the whiskey Douglas had thrown at her, and she was still sweating. She combed her hair out, hit it with a dryer, jumped into the shower, used the hotel soap to scrub herself down for a full two minutes. She had several small cuts on her hands from tree branches, but her face was clear. Out of the shower, she checked her hair and fluffed it with the dryer again, did a quick rework of her makeup, covered a scratch on the back of her hand with more makeup. The five quick dabs of Black Orchid. Her black clothing was locked in the overnight bag, to be dumped as soon as she could safely do it. She’d been gone an hour and a half, needed to mix, needed to be seen.

A lot.

She closed her eyes, took several long breaths, calmed herself. What would the Buddha do?

Her heartbeat slowed, a smile on her face, she was out of the suite.



* * *



—

SHE WALKED BACK into the party, heart pounding a bit more. She got a drink, swirled it around her mouth simply to saturate her breath with the odor of alcohol. She talked briefly to more hospital people—three women and two men—a couple of Minnesota congressmen, and finally, hunting around, spotted Porter Smalls, hooked into some conversations, and let herself be pushed in Smalls’s direction. She got close, blundered into him when she suddenly turned, spilling a little of her drink.

Smalls: “Whoa. Almost knocked me off the bluff. Excuse me—I meant, off my feet.”

Grant threw back her head and fake laughed, reached out and grabbed Smalls by one of his blue-green tourmaline shirt studs—chosen, she thought, to precisely match his eyes, the vain motherfucker—pulled him close, and muttered into his ear, “I knew what you meant, you piece of shit. You keep telling people I was involved in your drunken fuckfest, I’ll hand you your ass.”

Smalls tipped his head back, laughed, leaned close, muttered, “Get your hands off me, you murderous cunt.”

Grant was laughing with him, and they broke apart, both satisfied. Smalls got to call her a cunt to her face, and Grant had him as a witness to her being present at the tail end of the party, in a conversation neither one of them would forget.

Smalls was exactly what she’d wanted: the most credible witness imaginable.