Twisted Prey (Lucas Davenport #28)(26)

When that moment had passed, he called Smalls, who blurted, “Can’t talk at this exact minute, call me back in . . . four minutes.”

Lucas called back in four minutes, and asked, “You were with somebody inconvenient?”

Smalls said, “No, I was standing at a urinal. I’m at a luncheon. Try not to call when I’m taking a leak.”

“All right.” He told Smalls about the possible illegal entry, and asked, “Have you told people that I’m looking at the accident?”

“I had to tell a couple of people at the office. I trust them, and I told them not to talk to anyone else. I took my wife to lunch and I didn’t even tell her.”

“There’s a leak somewhere, Senator, and it’s probably Grant. You might think about that,” Lucas said. “Now I’ll be working out in the open, I guess. If this was an entry and not a mistake by the security guy . . . If it’s not a mistake . . . I mean, they knew where my room was.”

“I think a mistake’s most likely—though given the shot they took at me, the attack, you can’t know for sure, can you?”



* * *



—

LUCAS CARRIED a Sony voice-activated recorder in his pack, a unit only five inches long and less than an inch and a half wide. He dug it out, checked the battery, found a place to leave it—tucked under the mattress at the head of the bed, with only the microphone sticking out. He recorded precisely ten seconds of sound from the room television, a CNN news report. If somebody found the recorder and erased it, or simply took it, he would know as much as he would if it recorded somebody coming and going.



* * *



—

HE CALLED the last two names on Carter’s list, still got no answer. Since both numbers were supposedly good, and both supposedly to cell phones, he suspected that the calls were being ignored. He’d decided to drive back across the river, find the houses, hang around until someone showed, when a call came in to his cell phone from an unknown number.

He said, “Lucas Davenport.”

“Marshal Davenport? This is Carl Armstrong, the accident investigator.”

“Hey, Carl. What’s up, man?”

“You mentioned that lawn mower lady saw a black Ford F-250 going through town. There’s a nursery there with a video camera that covers the street. I asked them to let me take a look, and I spotted the truck and got the tags. It’s outta Virginia. But there’s a problem.”

“Like what?”

“The truck I saw on the video was black, like the lawn mower lady said, but when I looked up the registration it says the truck is blue.”

“So what do you think?” Lucas asked.

“If I was gonna do something like run another car off the road, and I thought somebody might see me or remember me, I’d steal the plates off another 250 and change them.”

“I would, too,” Lucas said. “Give me the details, I’ll look into it . . . What about faces? Could you see the guys in the truck?”

“You can see them, but you can’t quite make them out. I could see sunglasses and black hats.”

“Could you send me the video?”

“Sure, I got it here—I’ll email it to you. I had our computer guy make it the highest resolution he could.”

“This is good stuff, Carl.”



* * *



—

THE VIDEO CAME IN, but it wasn’t much to look at. The black pickup rolled past the camera, but the two people in the cab were obscured by reflections off its windows. Lucas agreed with Armstrong that the men were wearing sunglasses, but he wasn’t sure about the hats. To Lucas, it looked more like one of the men had long dark hair.

The truck was registered from a place called Centreville, which Lucas found on a Google map. A D.C. suburb, it was straight west, across the river, in Virginia. He turned on the tape recorder, tucked it into the mattress, put the “Do Not Disturb” sign on the doorknob, and went down to get his car.

The afternoon was getting on, but Lucas was in front of the first wave of the outgoing rush hour and made it into Centreville in a half hour, following the Evoque’s GPS. The license tag had gone to a Gerald and Marie Blake, who lived in a town house complex off I-66. The complex didn’t have a parking lot, as such, but instead nose-in parking right off the street.

Lucas cruised the Blakes’ address. The truck was parked out front—blue Ford F-250—but the plates no longer showed the number that Armstrong had given him. There was no sign that the truck had ever been involved in an accident.

Lucas considered for a bit, then pulled in, popped the restraining strap on his pistol, walked up to the front door, and pushed the doorbell. A minute later, the door opened, and a teenage girl looked out at him.

Lucas: “Are your parents home?”

Girl: “Who wants to know?”

Lucas took out his ID case with the badge. “U.S. Marshal Lucas Davenport . . . I need to talk to Gerald or Marie Blake, or both of them.”

Girl, turning: “Mommm . . .”



* * *



—

MARIE BLAKE came to the door a minute later, peering at him near-sightedly through computer glasses. She took them off as the girl said, “He says he’s a U.S. Marshal. He has a badge.”