Twisted Prey (Lucas Davenport #28)(110)
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AN FBI CRIME SCENE CREW detected tiny pieces of copper in the walls of Jack Parrish’s kitchen and matched them to the bullet fragments taken from Jim Ritter’s body.
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SENATOR SMALLS asked around quietly, a few friends, and told Lucas, “You know what? I can’t find anybody who talked to her halfway through the party, only at the beginning and at the end.”
“Toldja,” Lucas said.
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LATE THAT NIGHT, on the same day that Taryn Grant was found dead, Lucas took a third call. There was a whistling sound in the background, and when Lucas asked about it, Tom Ritter told him it was satellite noise.
“I’m calling on a satphone. I’m sitting on a bench, on a nice bright day, at Bagram Air Base.”
“Is that—”
“In Afghanistan? Yes,” Ritter said. “Listen, I heard about Grant. It’s on the Internet here.”
“They’re interested in Wendy. Or Suzie or Carol, or whatever her name is. Maybe. I didn’t have much to say about it, but they’ll be pushing McCoy.”
“Think they’ll come to me?” he asked.
“I don’t think so. You’re out of it, given where you’re at. They might have some questions about Jim, but . . .”
“I haven’t seen him a lot in the past few years,” Ritter said. “Don’t know much about his love life.”
“Stick with that,” Lucas suggested.
“Tell me what happened,” he said. “All I know is what I’ve seen on the Internet news feeds.”
Lucas told him what he’d gotten from Smalls and Chase, and, when he was done, Ritter said, “Oh boy. It does sound like her, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah. But it’s not my case anymore,” Lucas said. “Or yours.”
“Stay loose, Lucas. You ever get to Afghanistan, give me a ring,” Ritter said. “We’ll go get some fried chicken. They got good fried chicken here.”
“I will. If you hear from Wendy, tell her to give me a ring.”
* * *
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A COUPLE OF DAYS LATER, Lucas was sitting in his backyard with Virgil Flowers, waiting for the charcoal briquettes to get right for the steaks. Flowers had come up with Sam, the youngest child of his girlfriend. Flowers’s Sam and Lucas’s Sam were the same age, were amazed that they shared a name, had rapidly become friends, and were playing their version of mixed martial arts–croquet, while Lucas and Flowers sat in lawn chairs and talked.
They were drinking Leinenkugel’s and discussing child care when Lucas’s iPhone dinged with an incoming call from an unidentified phone.
Satellite noise. Then Wendy said, without preface, “I’ve been thinking about it. And I’ve been thinking about you. You believe I was involved in that shooting at the Watergate Hotel. Why didn’t you ever come after me?”
“We were looking for you . . .”
“No, you weren’t. Or if you were, you weren’t looking very hard. The media was going wild, Homeland Security was issuing press releases every five minutes—all of them wrong—the FBI was running in circles. The one group that might have given me trouble, which was you and your marshal friends, never came looking. You didn’t come even though you knew some people I was friends with. You never squeezed Tom, you never really squeezed John McCoy, you never squeezed Claxson or the lady who worked for him . . . Why was that?”
“We don’t have the investigatory resources to throw around like the FBI does,” Lucas said. “Or like Homeland Security. Whatever happened at the Watergate, it didn’t seem likely to have much connection with our main objective, which was to find out who tried to murder Senator Smalls.”
“Oh, bullshit, Davenport. Nobody came to the Watergate and shot the place up by accident, not with a machine gun,” she said. “You had to know there was some connection.”
When Lucas didn’t say anything, Wendy demanded, “Were you grooming me?”
“What?”
“When you got Tom to give me your phone number, did you want to talk so you could manipulate me . . . Were you grooming me to kill Grant?”
Lucas let that hang in the air, then said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” and hung up.
“What was that?” Flowers asked.
“Unfinished business,” Lucas said. He picked up his Leinie’s, took a swallow, and added, “But it’s finished now.”