Twisted Prey (Lucas Davenport #28)(22)

“Leaving you . . . where?”

“Where I was. I had an obscure job, important but not flashy. At least, I thought it was important, and I was good at it. Then, we had a situation come up . . . uh . . . that I don’t want to talk about yet. Parrish advocated one kind of response, we advocated another. My boss and I went over to SIC—the Senate Intelligence Committee—with some, mmm, documents that suggested that Parrish was bullshitting them on behalf of a faction over at the Pentagon. He and the Pentagon got their way, and what happened later was a goddamn disaster. Too big even for an effective cover-up.”

He looked up at the ceiling, both hands in the air, grinned at Lucas, but leaned forward and whispered, “People died. People who shouldn’t have. Lots of them.”

Lucas: “Who got blamed?”

Rose tapped his chest. “I did. Not for the disaster but for the fact that some of it got out to the press. One of the senators brought the deputy director over for a closed-door meeting, and, the next thing I knew, I was talking to our security people about leaks. Shit, I didn’t even know a reporter. I said so. But they kept after me—this went on for a year—and I got what they called a lateral transfer to a nonsensitive position, pending resolution of the leaking case. I had thirty-three years in, and I said fuck it and retired. When I was going out the door, a pal of mine, higher up the line, took me aside and said that be believed the whole thing was a dirty trick engineered by Parrish, who’d been telling people that I’d been leaking and that me leaking might even have caused the problem—that I’d been leaking before the action, somebody overheard me, and word had been passed to the Syrians . . . Damn lie, every bit of it. I found out later he’d gone to work for the senator who’d been asking the questions.”

“Taryn Grant,” Lucas said.

Rose nodded, and asked, “You want a Pepsi or a beer?” After asking the question, he nodded vigorously, a pantomime nod.

Lucas said, “Yeah, I could use a Pepsi. I haven’t had anything to drink since I left the hotel . . .”

“C’mon, I’ll get you one,” Rose said.

In the kitchen, he opened the refrigerator, took out two Pepsis, handed one to Lucas, and said, “Let’s go out and sit by the pool. I got an umbrella out there.”

Outside, he led the way past the pool to the end of the backyard. “I’m probably overcooking things a little, but I worry about surveillance. Especially since I know what can be done, if they want to do it,” he said. “I doubt anyone’s actually watching me . . . If they are, they wouldn’t be bugging us out here.”

Lucas said, “Okay . . .”

“Anyway, what I don’t understand is, why did Senator Grant jump into this with both feet? Stick a bullshit investigation on me and on my boss? She didn’t have to do that. What would she get out of it?”

Lucas had an answer to that question, but he didn’t say what he thought: that Grant was buying Parrish’s loyalty. Instead, he said, “I need to know the dimension of this . . . disaster. I won’t talk about it to anyone, but I need to know. I will tell you that the matter I’m investigating is extremely serious . . . more so than you can probably imagine.”

Rose looked around the yard, took a hit on his Pepsi, and said, “I don’t even know if you’re really a marshal. You could be spoofing me.”

“You could look me up on the Internet. There’s a lot of stuff there, going back years.”

“I’ll do that,” Rose said. “In the meantime . . . I’m not going to say anything more. We’re talking about federal prison.”

“I don’t think so,” Lucas said. “If all this works out the way I suspect it will, they’d be afraid to go after you.”

“You don’t know,” Rose said. “I don’t believe that they’re afraid of anybody.”

“You’d be wrong about that,” Lucas said.

“Give me your email,” Rose said. “Maybe I’ll get back to you.”

“Tell me one more thing—I’m sure it isn’t classified, but it’s something you’d know,” Lucas said. “Parrish was an active duty military officer, stayed in the Reserve, and is now a major, and he’s moving up to lieutenant colonel sometime soon. Would his service with the Army and the CIA, and now with the Senate, give him access to, you know, people with an ability to do violence?”

Rose squinted at him, licked his lips: “Who’d he get shot?”

“Nobody. But if he wanted to get somebody shot, would he have the connections? I’m not talking about a military shooting, a terrorist shooting, but a civilian shooting here in the U.S. Could he get a couple of names?”

Another hit on the bottle, and a quick nod. “Oh, yeah. In about five minutes. And now I am done.”

Rose refused to say anything more. Lucas left him standing by the pool and walked around the house and out to the street.



* * *



—

THE SECOND, third, and fourth entries on Carter’s list all lived in Virginia, on the other side of the District. He’d get them later in the afternoon, he thought, and could stop at the hotel on the way.

The first time Lucas had encountered Grant, she’d worked through two ex-military security men, whom she’d paid to kill for her—and one of them she’d bound to herself with the pretense of loving him. Grant would do what was necessary to recruit people she thought she needed—political favors, money, sex—whatever she thought it would take.