Twisted Prey (Lucas Davenport #28)(21)

That done, he went back to the desk, looked at the notepad with Joe Rose’s phone number on it, and punched the number into his phone.





6


Joe Rose had a voice that sounded like gravel being shoveled from a truck—too much whiskey, cigars, or both. Lucas only told him he was a U.S. Marshal, that he was investigating an auto accident only peripherally involving Mr. Rose. He didn’t mention either Jack Parrish or Porter Smalls.

Rose told Lucas he lived in Bethesda, Maryland, and that he’d be around all day. “I work at home now.”

Lucas retrieved his car from the valet, followed the GPS through tangled traffic to Bethesda, which was northwest of the District. The distance couldn’t have been more than ten miles but took him almost forty minutes to drive.

Rose lived in what was probably an expensive house, half brick, half white clapboard, of a style that Lucas thought of as confused—it had a bunch of overlapping roofs, a truncated clapboard turret, two single-car garage doors that probably fed the same double-car garage, a cobblestone driveway, and a manicured front lawn. The front door gave onto a tiny covered porch, good only for keeping the rain off visitors while they waited for a ride.

Several black cables led from a telephone pole near the street to the house—power lines, maybe a hardwired phone, maybe cable television/Internet . . . but a couple of more as well, although Lucas didn’t know what function they might serve.

Lucas parked in the driveway, stepped out into a humid, nearly wet heat, and rang the doorbell. As he waited, he looked up and down the street: no people, no cars, nothing moving, not even a cat.

A bedroom community.



* * *



—

THE DOOR OPENED, and a man who was probably Joe Rose stood in the doorway and asked, “Do you have some ID?”

“I do,” Lucas said. He showed Rose his badge and ID card, and Rose stepped back and said, “Come on in. Uh . . . I can’t think of any reason that I would, but should I have a lawyer here?”

Lucas shook his head. “No. The investigation doesn’t involve you in any way, except as a possible source of information.”

Rose was Lucas’s height and build, but older, retirement age, gray-haired, large-nosed, with a pair of inexpensive computer glasses pushed up on his forehead. Close up, his voice sounded even harsher than it had on the phone—an injury of some kind; he hadn’t gotten it singing. He was pale, like an office worker, and freckled, wore tan slacks and a golf shirt, loafers but no socks.

He said, “Okay, I got the time. You know I don’t have a regular job anymore.”

“No, I didn’t know that,” Lucas said, as he followed him into the house and down a hallway. The hallway opened into what had probably been designed as a family room but now was being used as a spacious office, with three separate computer monitors on a library table.

“Yeah, I’m a contract researcher now. You know what’s not on the Internet now?”

“I thought everything was.”

“Nope. There’s tons of government stuff that isn’t—stuff that’s still important but that was recorded before 2000 or so,” Rose said. “Internet people don’t know how to do paper research, courthouse research, so I’m doing fairly well. I’m praying it keeps up, because I can use the money.”

“Cool. You invented your own job,” Lucas said.

“Yup. So . . . what’s up?”

Rose pointed Lucas at a leather club chair and took an identical chair facing Lucas across a fuzzy brown-and-tan rug. Not married, Lucas thought: women generally didn’t allow big fat leather chairs or brown fuzzy rugs in their family rooms.

Lucas: “I’m told you don’t much care for a man named Jack Parrish. I need to know more about Mr. Parrish. About his character.”

Rose responded with a grunt, then asked, “What does that have to do with an auto accident?”

“I don’t want to talk about that,” Lucas said. He softened things with a smile. “I know it’s horseshit, but . . . I can’t right now tie two things together with somebody I don’t know.”

“Got it,” Rose said. He sighed, and said, “Parrish is . . . I mean, calling him an asshole or a sonofabitch doesn’t do the man justice. Even in Washington, he’s something special. And, believe me, we’ve got a glut of assholes around here.”

Rose had worked for the CIA at the same time Parrish had, both as middle managers in “parallel departments,” as Rose put it. “I can’t tell you what we were doing, but it was technical.”

“I saw a file that said Parrish did something with photo interpretation.”

“He did, but . . . let’s just leave it there. If you got that information by seeing a list of his so-called publications, he stole most of those things from his subordinates,” Rose said. “Anyway, he was there for five or six years—I overlapped him on both ends, in terms of employment. During that time, I watched him undermine anyone he thought might someday challenge him—bad personnel reports, that kind of thing. He was an attention junkie and an ass-kisser. What I’m saying is, he stepped on a lot of good people and tried to crawl up the org chart over their bodies. Eventually, people began to catch on, it caught up with him . . . and he got out. Moved over to the Senate as a staff member.”