Twisted Prey (Lucas Davenport #28)(23)

If she needed Parrish’s particular kind of expertise, she’d probably bought his loyalty by protecting him from criticism; maybe even saved his job. There was also the prospect of the White House . . .



* * *



—

BACK AT THE HOTEL, Lucas washed his face and went to the laptop, clicked on his email, expecting a note from Weather, and maybe from his daughter Letty, who was in her third year at Stanford. There was nothing from Letty, but he did have a brief note from Weather, with school news, and another email from Rose, hiding behind the name Donald R. Ligny, with a subject line that identified him: “Looked you up on the Internet.”

Scrolling down, Lucas found a Washington Post story about the bombing of a Syrian nerve gas warehouse that turned out to be a souk, or marketplace, instead, with a small school for girls at one end. The Syrians claimed that ninety-four people had been killed, most of them women or children, a claim verified by a religious charity and with photographs. The school had been wiped out.

Under the story, there were six added words:

“We told them. They didn’t listen.”



* * *



—

YEARS BEFORE, Lucas had seen a Tom Clancy movie—he couldn’t remember the name of it, but Harrison Ford was in it. He remembered one scene in particular, in which a British SAS team had wiped out a terrorist training camp someplace in North Africa. The scene had stuck in Lucas’s head because he’d spent his life working murders, murders which had often horrified him. In the Clancy movie, the SAS attack had been monitored by satellite, and a group of CIA suits had casually watched the attack and conducted a running commentary. “There’s a kill,” one had said while leisurely drinking a cup of coffee.

The scene was chilling, as it was intended to be. There were people down there, dead, executed while they slept. They were terrorists, probably deserved what they got, but they were still people, snuffed out in an instant.

The Post story, combined with what Lucas had been told by Rose, reflected the same kind of bureaucratic attitude as the Clancy scene: people more interested in taking care of their operational lives, their political lives, than the fact that a whole lot of people died at their hands.

Parrish and Grant hustling around to shift the blame . . . Forget about the women and children blown to bloody rags in a split second.



* * *



—

LUCAS GOT HIS CAR BACK, and let the navigation system guide him across the Potomac to a neighborhood of neat brick homes and crooked, elderly trees on a blacktopped lane in Arlington, Virginia. Another bedroom community, but at least a hundred years older than Rose’s place in Maryland. Of the three additional names on Carter’s list, Lucas had gotten no answer with two of his phone calls, but the third call had been picked up by a woman named Gladys Ingram. She was a partner in an Arlington law firm, and said she could be home for an hour or so.

“If I’m going to talk to a marshal about anything, I’d rather it not be here,” she said, referring to her office. Lucas looked up the firm, found that it had two dozen partners, and more than eighty associates, and did a lot of lobbying.

Ingram’s car, a silver Mercedes SL550, was parked in the driveway when Lucas arrived. The street was so narrow that he pulled in behind her car to keep from blocking it.

Like Rose, when she came to the door, Ingram asked to see Lucas’s ID.

Unlike Rose, after Lucas’s original call, she’d gone straight to a computer and looked him up on the Internet. There were several hundred references to his time as a cop, with two different Minnesota agencies, and there was a brief note in a Star-Tribune gossip column that he’d moved to the U.S. Marshals Office. There were also a dozen photos taken over a twenty-year span of Lucas at various crime scenes. Not content with that, she’d used a law office code to check his credit rating.

“Okay, if you’re spoofing me, you’ve gone to a lot of trouble to do it,” she said, still standing in the doorway. “I have to say, you’re apparently the richest marshal I’ve ever met.”

“I got lucky with a computer start-up when I was between police agencies,” Lucas said. “You’re the second person I talked to today who worried about being spoofed. ‘Spoofed’ means, like, a fraud or a deception, right?”

“Yes,” she said. She was a gawky woman, with reddish brown hair that barely escaped being mousy. She had brown eyes, looking at him through tortoiseshell glasses, and wore a dress that was conservatively fashionable. Lucas thought she might be forty. “It’s ’Net slang. So, what are we talking about here? You said you were investigating an automobile accident that has nothing to do with me—but that I might have some information about. I don’t know about any automobile accident.”

“Like I said, your information might be important, but it’s . . . peripheral to the accident.”

“What accident?”

“An auto accident involving Senator Porter Smalls,” Lucas said.

“Was there something unusual about it? I thought that was all settled,” she said.

“He’s a U.S. senator. We’re taking another routine look at it,” Lucas said.

“Okay.” She nodded.

Lucas said, “Now, I understand you know a man named Jack Parrish . . .”