Twisted Prey (Lucas Davenport #28)(27)

“What’s going on?” the woman asked.

Lucas explained what he was doing, and she said, “We’ve never been to West Virginia, even passing through. We moved here from Delaware . . .” Her husband, she said, was at work; he was a bureaucrat with the Bureau of Land Management.

Lucas asked, “Do you know what your license plate number is?”

“No . . . There’s an insurance card in the cab; that should have the license number on it.”

Lucas knew what would happen, but they went out and looked anyway. The number on the truck didn’t match the number on the insurance card because the tags had been stolen off the Blakes’ truck and replaced.

He got back on the phone to Armstrong. “Do you have access to a database of stolen license plates in Virginia?”

“Sure. Take me a minute.”

Lucas gave him the tag number, and a minute later Armstrong came back and said, “Those plates were taken off a blue F-250 probably at the Fair Oaks Mall a week ago. They weren’t replaced with anything else; they were simply gone. The owner saw they were missing as soon as he came out of the mall, so he called the cops and reported it.”

“The day before the accident,” Lucas said.

“Yes.”

“They didn’t want the Blakes to notice that their tags were gone so they replaced them with another stolen set. That way, it’d take two steps to catch them—a cop would have to stop the Blakes and report the Blakes’ tags as missing, then spot the bad guy’s truck. Which nobody did.”

“Looks like it,” Armstrong said.

They were stuck. Lucas rang off, told Blake she had a problem with the license plates, that hers had been stolen and probably dumped somewhere after a crime had been committed. She needed to get new ones. He gave her a card and told her that if anyone at the Virginia DMV gave her a hard time to have them call him.



* * *



—

HE STILL HAD two more people to talk to from Carter’s list. Since he wasn’t far from where they lived, he decided to drop in. At his first stop, he saw somebody working inside James T. Knapp’s house, so he leaned on the doorbell until a heavyset woman came to the door. “What?”

Lucas identified himself, and said, “I’m looking for Mr. Knapp?”

“I’m the housekeeper. What’d he do?”

“Nothing, as far as I know. I’m checking up on somebody Mr. Knapp knows.”

“Huh.” The woman scowled at him, as though judging his genuineness, and finally admitted, “He’s gone off to California on some sort of mission.”

“He’s in the military?”

“No, he’s a preacher. He’s gone off on a preacher mission. Supposed to be back next week, but he paid me in advance for the week after that, too.”



* * *



—

AT THE NEXT HOUSE, a stand-alone ranch-style painted blue and gray in a quiet neighborhood of similar houses and trees and small lawns, he was walking away from the front door when a black five-liter Mustang pulled into the driveway. A thin, rangy, heavily tanned man in a blue Army uniform got out. He had lieutenant colonel’s silver leaves on his shoulders. “Hello?” he called out.

Lucas walked over and identified himself, and the colonel said, “Horace Stout. What can I do for you?”

“I need to talk to you about Jack Parrish.”

Stout grimaced, and said, “Better come inside.”

Stout was single but kept a neat place that included a studio grand piano, a Model M Steinway, in a corner of the living room with a pile of piano music on its closed lid. Lucas said that his wife had a similar model, and Stout said, “That’s what I got out of eleven years of marriage. That and a sick dog, which died last year.”

“Sorry about that,” Lucas muttered.

“Can I get you an orange juice or a vitamin water?” Stout asked. “I don’t keep any alcohol.”

“Juice would be fine,” Lucas said.

They sat at Stout’s kitchen table, and Lucas assured him that anything he said about Parrish would be kept confidential. “I’m not taking testimony, I’m trying to get a grip on the guy. Who he is, what he’s like, what he does.”

“Right now, he works for Senator Taryn Grant,” Stout said, “but you know that.”

“I do.”

“My experience with him was in Iraq—our tours overlapped. He did two, I did five, working basically with logistics out of Kuwait into Baghdad.”

“He has a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star,” Lucas said. “I assumed he had a combat role.”

Stout sighed, and finally said, “I . . . You know, Marshal Davenport, it’s not right to speak poorly of an absent officer.”

“It could be important,” Lucas said. “I assume you could speak poorly if you wished?”

After a short silence, Stout looked away, and said, “Some people . . . get medals. Guys get minor but real wounds, and a local medic bandages them and gives them a couple of pills, and they never see a Purple Heart. Other guys get what you might call owies and they get the Purple Heart. Same with Bronze Stars. Nobody in the military will talk about it, but there’s sometimes a political component to the award.”