Twisted Prey (Lucas Davenport #28)(20)

Parrish was thirty-eight. He’d graduated from Ohio State when he was twenty-two with a B.S. in economic geography, served four years as an Army intelligence officer, and joined the Central Intelligence Agency when he finished his active military service. He spent four years with the CIA, worked for a private company called Heracles Personnel for three more years, then took a job as a researcher for the Senate Intelligence Committee and later became an aide to Taryn Grant. He was still in the military Reserve, currently with the rank of major.

That would, Lucas thought, give him a broad range of contacts both in the Pentagon and in the wider intelligence community. The file included a list of publications, some of which were marked as classified, although the level of classification wasn’t specified.

At the CIA, Parrish seemed to have specialized in aerial and satellite photo interpretation, and had written a number of papers on the subject; he’d also written two papers with obscure titles that seemed to be mathematical studies of where “irregular fighters” could be found.

That all sounded like desk jobs to Lucas, but Parrish had a Bronze Star with “V” device and a Purple Heart. Lucas didn’t know what a “V” device meant, and when he looked it up, it turned out that a Bronze Star could be awarded for general meritorious service, even to a civilian—a news reporter had gotten one once—but a “V” device indicated “Valor” and was a combat award. Lucas knew the Purple Heart meant that Parrish had been wounded, but there were no details on the wound. Other military awards included ribbons for service in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

So Parrish had been shot at and apparently hit. Nothing in the files indicated that the Army had any doubts about him.

He’d been married and later divorced, and currently seemed to be not married. His ex-wife was named, and had a security clearance, but the level of the clearance wasn’t mentioned. Parrish got consistently high evaluations as a Senate researcher and later as an aide to Grant.

A second file contained Parrish’s divorce decree. The divorce had been in Maryland and had apparently been by mutual consent. His wife got the house but no alimony. There was no testimony about abuse or anything else, other than their agreement that the marriage was “irretrievably broken.”

A third file contained a list of companies that would incur economic impacts, both bad and good, under Senate bills that Carter expected to receive bipartisan support. Heaviest impacts were on businesses and communities that supported now-obsolete military bases that were facing closure.

Smalls supported all of the closures except one on the West Coast. Carter noted that he wanted that base kept open as the possible site for an atomic power reactor, but since all of the California delegation, both Republicans and Democrats, opposed the idea of a reactor on the coast, Smalls’s opposition to the closure was seen as idiosyncratic and garnered little support. There was no reason to kill Smalls for any of his Senate activity, as far as Lucas could see.

A fourth, even shorter file contained nothing but a list of four names, with addresses and telephone numbers, and a note from Carter that said “These people don’t like Parrish and might talk to you. Call me when you’re done with this.”



* * *



—

WHEN HE’D FINISHED with the files, Lucas knew all kinds of things he hadn’t known that morning, but nothing that pointed in any particular direction. If anything, Parrish seemed like an accomplished bureaucrat, somebody who’d always been good at what he did.

Lucas closed the laptop down and called Carter on the burner phone. She answered on the third ring, and he asked, “Can you talk?”

“Sure.”

“I’ve read the files, and Parrish doesn’t seem like a terrible guy, but you said he was a snake. Why’s he a snake? And what’s with the list of names?”

“He is a snake, and part of his snakiness is that he doesn’t seem like an awful guy to most people. He’s a sociopath, in my opinion, but a cautious one. He doesn’t care who gets hurt as long as it’s not him.”

“A good match for Grant, then,” Lucas said. “I think the same thing about her, although she might be darker than a simple sociopath; she could be a full-blown psycho.”

“Whatever—I’m not sure how much definitions help,” Carter said. “Anyway, that list of names . . . those are people who have reason to seriously dislike Parrish and who might be in a position to give you some information about him. He has made some enemies getting to where he is, and I listed them in the order that would reflect the intensity of their dislike. Joe Rose, the first guy, probably likes him the least—hates him, actually. And so on. That’s something I keep track of.”

“Okay. Thank you.”

“Lucas, you scared me this morning,” she said. “The secret phones and all that. If you read those files, you can see that there’s not much detail in them—you can remember everything you need to know, about Parrish and his wife and his jobs. I’d appreciate it if you’d get rid of that thumb drive: if somebody got that drive from you, they might be able to figure out who copied the files, and, from that, who got them: me.”

“I’ll get rid of it,” Lucas said. “I mean, really get rid of it, everything but the names.”

He did just that when he got off the phone. He copied down the names, addresses, and phone numbers of Parrish’s supposed enemies, smashed the thumb drive with the sliding shower door, and flushed the pieces down the toilet.