Twisted Prey (Lucas Davenport #28)(28)

“You’re saying that Parrish—”

“I’m not saying anything specific,” Stout said. “I’m saying it happens with some people.”

Lucas said, “The reason I’m talking to you is, I heard you didn’t care for Parrish. When we’re doing investigations, we try to talk with people who—”

“I know, I know . . . I know what you’re doing,” Stout said. “I don’t care for Parrish. Not at all. You know when you’re working in logistics, in a war zone, stuff has to be done in a hurry, and sometimes material goes . . . astray.”

“Parrish stole stuff?”

Stout ticked a finger at him. “I’m not saying he stole stuff, I’m just saying . . . an inordinate amount of material went astray after it passed through his unit. He had an E-8 working for him . . .”

“I’m sorry, I don’t know military ranks.”

“E-8, master sergeant. It’s no big secret that the Army has some crooked NCOs, but I believe that man was one of the crookedest I’ve ever encountered. He retired to a rather lush lifestyle down on the Gulf Coast, as I hear it. But even that . . .”

He paused, thinking it over, and Lucas pressed him: “What? Nobody else is listening.”

“There were a lot of private military contractors roaming around Iraq. Our security guards were contracted out of Africa, for instance. Uganda, mostly, although they usually worked for stateside-based companies,” Stout said. “I’ll tell you, marshal, Parrish was way too close to these guys, the stateside managers. Most straight-up officers stayed well away from those assholes. Not Jack. Jack seemed to think they were romantic warriors. He liked hanging with them. I suspect, but I can’t prove, that some of the missing material went out to these guys.”

Lucas said, “That’s interesting. Is he still close with them? These companies?”

“That’s the word. He went to the CIA after he left the Army, and the CIA uses a lot of the same contractor organizations. After the CIA, Parrish worked for one of them for a while. I don’t like him, and he doesn’t like me, thinks I’m a prig.” He glanced at Lucas, as if trying to figure out whether Lucas knew what a “prig” was, then continued. “What I don’t like is, he wasn’t . . . a professional officer. He’s a hustler. He was a hustler in the Army, a hustler in the CIA. People are talking about Senator Grant running for the presidency. So now he’s hustling that.”

“That word gets used a lot when people are talking about Parrish,” Lucas said. “When he was with the Senate Intelligence Committee, there was a stink about the bombing of a marketplace in Syria . . .”

“I know about that,” Stout said. “If the place is full of poison gas, he’s a hero. If it turns out there’s nothing but a bunch of dead towelheads, who cares? A typical Parrish operation, in my opinion.”

“Was there any particular military contractor he was especially tight with?”

Stout nodded. “There’s the one I mentioned where he worked for a while . . . Heracles Personnel,” he said. “Don’t tell anyone that I told you that. They’re big in the military contractor world. They’ve got a private army, along with the usual support staff.”

They talked for a bit longer, and when Lucas said good-bye, Stout shook his hand, and said, “Listen, marshal, give me a call when you’re done with this. I’d like to know what happened.”

“If I can,” Lucas said.



* * *



—

HE WAS ON HIS WAY back to the hotel when Armstrong called again, from West Virginia.

“I don’t mean to bother you,” Armstrong said.

“You’re not bothering me, Carl,” Lucas said. “What’s up?”

“I’ve been thinking. That F-250 is a common truck, but more out in the rural areas than in urban places. Whoever switched those plates found the two trucks close to each other, which maybe means they scouted them out in advance. Which might mean that they actually live or work in that general area.”

“Yeah, possibly.”

“So I got to wondering, how many F-250s are there in that zip code? The Virginia DMV can sort vehicles by zip code—I checked,” Armstrong said. “If you could get a list and compare that list with driver’s license photos and then run those guys through the Internet, you might come up with something. Not that I’m saying there’s anything to come up with . . .”

“Carl . . . you’re a smart guy.”



* * *



—

LUCAS HAD SEVERAL THINGS WORKING: somebody may have tried to break into his hotel suite and may actually have succeeded; he had a name, Heracles Personnel; and now he had an idea of how to find the F-250.

His nominal boss worked out of the Marshals Service headquarters no more than a few miles from where he was, but telephones were faster. As he drove back toward Washington, against rush hour traffic, he got hold of Russell Forte, who was about to leave for home.

Lucas asked him to get whatever information he could on Heracles Personnel and to see if the Virginia DMV could produce a list of black F-250s around the area where the plates had been stolen and driver’s license photos of the registered owners.

“Well, hell, I didn’t want to go home and talk to my wife and kids and go to all the trouble of cranking up the barbecue and cooking up those ribs my wife bought this afternoon . . .”