Twisted Prey (Lucas Davenport #28)(32)

“I’ll do that,” Lucas said. “You’re good at this hotel security stuff, huh?”

“Yeah, I am,” Toomes said. “A lot of weird shit happens in hotels. It’s interesting.”



* * *



—

WHEN HE WAS GONE, Lucas called Forte. “I need everything you can find on James Harold Ritter. You’ve got his license info, so that’s a good start. Nothing’s too small.”

“I’m in a meeting. Give me a couple of hours.”

“Fine. I’m going to go scout his house, see what I can see,” Lucas said.

“Easy, boy.”

He did not leave immediately. Instead, he called Smalls, and said, “You’ve got a woman working for you at the cabin. Janet Walker . . .”

“Yes, she runs a caretaking service for absentee landowners.”

“I need her phone number,” Lucas said.

Smalls went away for a while, then came back for the number. “Her cell phone; she usually answers right away.”

She did. Lucas identified himself, and asked, “Do you have access to the Internet?”

She said, “I live in West Virginia, not on the friggin’ moon.”

“Great. Do you have it handy?”

“I’m in the yard. I’d have to walk into the house.”

“I’m going to send you eight or ten photographs. Tell me if any of them look like the guys you saw driving the F-250.”

The whole round-trip with the photographs took five minutes. Lucas sent ten, and, after examining them, Walker said, “The third photograph—that looks like the driver. I’m not sure I could swear it was him, if it went to court, but it looks like him.”

“Thank you,” Lucas said. “Keep this under your hat, if you would.”



* * *



—

JAMES HAROLD RITTER.

Lucas had three markers pointing at Ritter: his impression of the attacker’s face on the street; Walker’s identification; and the fact that he owned a black F-250. Could be a coincidence, with a little bit of a stretch, but Lucas felt he was on a roll, that Ritter was the one.

Like most of the other people Lucas was trying to find, Ritter lived across the Potomac in Virginia, in what turned out to be a neatly kept condominium complex not far from where the F-250 plates had been stolen. The complex had individual covered parking spaces at the back of the building. Although Ritter’s driver’s license hadn’t included an apartment number, Lucas spotted the black Ford pickup, which did have an associated apartment number; the apartment number apparently included a vacant space beside the pickup.

Lucas parked in a visitor’s lot and walked back to the F-250. There was nobody around in the noon heat, so he walked into the covered parking area and took a close look at the truck.

Smalls had said that his Cadillac had been hit by the passenger side of the attacker’s vehicle, and when Lucas squatted at the back of the truck bed, he thought he could see a subtle distortion in the truck’s sheet metal. He checked the driver’s side for a comparison, and when he came back to the passenger side, the distortion—nothing as clear-cut as a dent or a tear—seemed even more apparent, like a quarter-inch wave in the flow of the metal.

He walked down the side of the truck, to look at it from the front. The same distortion was visible, and the front right headlight cover had a small crack on the right side. He peered in the passenger-side window, but there was nothing visible on the seats. He pulled out a shirttail, used it to cover his hand as he tried all four doors. All four were locked.

The truck had been recently washed, Lucas thought, dragging his shirttail-covered hand across it: it was virtually spotless, and even a heavy forensic examination might have trouble placing it in West Virginia. Still, the truck had been involved in an unusual impact: he wasn’t sure he’d found the truck that had taken Smalls and Whitehead off the road, but he’d found a solid candidate. Proving it would be another problem, a greater problem than simply knowing it.

But what kind of impact would leave both trucks without obvious damage while still being violent enough to knock one truck right off the road? He thought about it . . .

His first thought: what if Ritter and his friends had rigged a lattice of freshly cut tree trunks and hung it off the side of their truck? They would have had to put padding under the trunks, against the side of the truck, to prevent damage, but they’d want the raw timber to hit the Cadillac.

It’d be simple enough. When Lucas was in the Boy Scouts, his troop had built rafts out of dead wood and rope and had floated down the Rum River on them. Hung on the side of a truck, the rafts would have worked well as protection against impact, and, even better, would have left evidence of wood contacting metal.

But who would think of that?

People who thought about killing other people in undetectable ways, Lucas figured. Professionals who were given a problem: knock a car off the road and down a bluff without any metal-on-metal contact. Given that dilemma, the tree-trunk-lattice idea would pop right up.



* * *



—

LUCAS WALKED BACK to the Evoque, cranked it up, pushed the air conditioner to max, and called Carl Armstrong, the West Virginia accident investigator.

“I may have found that F-250,” he said when Armstrong was on the phone. He described the truck’s condition, and asked, “Since you can see there was some impact, but since it’s been washed . . . is there going to be anything there for you?”