Twisted Prey (Lucas Davenport #28)(13)

Grant was all of that, a little bit of OCD, a little bit of sociopathy . . . and she thought Davenport was as well. He was surely a sociopath, given his record of killings, she thought. How could he live with himself if he weren’t?

The problem was, he was also seriously intelligent. She wasn’t sure that Parrish appreciated that. Davenport had made that big wad of software cash, but instead of trying to work it, he’d gone back to hunting.

He was nuts, she thought, like she was. He was coming for her.

Something had to be done.





4


Lucas flew early on Monday, a blessedly short flight from Minneapolis into Washington. One of Smalls’s Minnesota aides had dropped a map and a key at his house on Saturday.

He was carrying two substantial bags with him, one with neatly layered summer suits and shirts, underwear, socks, and Dopp kit, as well as a couple of pairs of gym shorts, several heavy T-shirts for workouts, a pair of cross-training shoes, and three burner phones he’d bought at a Best Buy on Sunday.

The other bag, a heavy-duty Arc’teryx backpack, contained his laptop, an iPad, yellow legal pads and mechanical pencils, a compact voice recorder, a Sony RX10 III camera, and all the associated chargers, cables, batteries, and memory cards. The camera was a chunk, and he was tempted to leave it behind, but Weather had bought it for him when he joined the Marshals Service, so he felt bound to take it.

Getting the rental car was a minor hassle, but an hour after he landed, Lucas headed out of Washington in a rented black Range Rover Evoque, with a back window about the size of his hand.

Hot day: the mountains ahead were covered with a blue haze of humidity that shimmered like a gauze curtain above the interstate. The car’s navigation system took him on twisty highways through the mountains and most of the way to Smalls’s cabin. The nav got lost the last two miles, and he went the rest of the way with the paper map.

He was aware that he had driven past the place where Smalls had gone off the road, but he ignored it—he wanted to start from the cabin and experience the drive out as Smalls and Whitehead had.

The cabin sat a hundred feet back from the road, hidden by a screen of trees, which opened to a grassy lawn that spread up a short slope to the cabin. And it was, indeed, a cabin—bronze-colored logs with pine-green-painted steps leading to a front porch. A pickup had backed up the driveway with a flat trailer behind it, and an elderly woman with tight white hair was riding a John Deere lawn mower around the yard. When Lucas got out of the Evoque, she turned the mower off, took off her earmuffs, and asked, “Y’all lost?”

“Not if this is Senator Smalls’s place.”

“It is,” the old woman said. “But he ain’t here.”

“I know. He’s in Minneapolis,” Lucas said. He showed her his marshal’s badge, and said, “I’m a U.S. Marshal, working on a case with Senator Smalls. He gave me a key.”

“You investigating that wreck?” she asked.

“Yeah, checking it out.”

“Tell you what, marshal, that was one fucked-up Cadillac. I went over to Bill Bunson’s yard and took a look at it.”

“Where’s that at?” Lucas asked.

“Up to Green Spring,” she said.

“Still there?”

“Unless the cops hauled it away. Or the senator did,” she said.

“Maybe I’ll go up and take a look,” Lucas said.



* * *



—

LUCAS WENT into the cabin, which was hot and stuffy, punched Smalls’s code into the security system, turned on the air-conditioning, peeled off his jacket, got a bottle of Fat Tire from the refrigerator and a sack of pretzels from the cupboard, and went back out and sat on the porch.

The old woman had moved around behind the cabin, still mowing, and five minutes after Lucas got outside she drove the mower back around to the front lawn and onto the trailer behind her pickup truck. She killed the mower’s engine, pulled up the loading ramp, and locked it, and said to Lucas, “Good hot day for a beer.”

“There are a few more in the refrigerator. Help yourself.”

“I’m not sure the senator would be okay with that.” But she didn’t walk away from the offer.

“I’ll tell him I drank two,” Lucas said.

The old woman nodded, and said, “My name’s Janet Walker, and I thank you kindly.”

She went inside and a minute later came back out with another Fat Tire, sat down on a wicker porch chair. “You getting anything good on the accident?”

Lucas shook his head. “Got to Washington about three hours ago, from Minnesota. I’m waiting for a West Virginia highway patrolman to show up. He’s gonna tell me all about it.”

“The rumor around here is, the senator got drunk and drove off the side of the road and blamed it on his dead girlfriend,” Walker said.

“Girlfriend? I thought she was a political aide.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t doubt she was aidin’ the senator, one way or the other . . . Don’t tell the senator I said that, I need the work.”

“You’re safe with me,” Lucas said. “You know anything about the accident?”

“Not a fuckin’ thing,” Walker said. She tipped her head back and took a generous swallow of beer, and when she took the bottle down she said, “Nothing like an ice-cold beer after you mowed yourself some weeds . . . Don’t know nothing about the accident, but I heard that the senator told the cops that they was run off the road by a pickup truck. There was a couple of strange guys going through here with a pickup that weekend. Seen them around the day before the accident and not seen them since.”