Twisted Prey (Lucas Davenport #28)(39)

“Yeah, I know, but what are we gonna do?” Lucas asked.

“How about if we got your West Virginia cop over there to document it, sometime when Ritter isn’t around,” Rae suggested. “We’d at least have a record of the damage, and somebody official who could testify to it.”

“That might be something,” Lucas said. “Be nice if we could do it somewhere besides his apartment complex. Even if he’s not home, somebody could see us and mention it to him.”

They talked about how that might work and then let it go—they’d make some kind of decision the next day.

“Is there any possibility that Smalls could prod Grant?” Rae asked. “You say he’s already pissing on her. What if he made some kind of statement that hinted he thought she’d tried to assassinate him and wound up murdering Whitehead?”

“That could drive her underground,” Lucas said. “She might freeze out everyone, tell them all to disappear. What we need to do is get her worried, get her moving around, get her trying to fix things. Get her boys more out in the open.”

Bob: “I don’t think we should mess with either Parrish or Grant—not yet. For our sake. Listen, we’re messing with the U.S. Senate here. If that became public, we could lose our jobs.”

Lucas: “But she’s nuts, we need to get at her . . .”

Bob nodded. “Yeah, we do, but we have to come at it from another direction. We have to be protecting the Senate. Somebody tried to off Smalls, right? An assassination attempt. We try to find the assassins. That takes us to Ritter and Heracles, and Heracles takes us to Parrish, and Parrish works for Grant. We take that to the attorney general, maybe get a look-in from the FBI . . .”

Rae and Lucas looked at each other, and Lucas said, “He’s right, of course.”

Rae nodded. “He might be right, but where do we go with that?”



* * *



—

LUCAS MENTIONED that he and Smalls shared a theory about how Smalls’s Cadillac could have been hit but show no signs of anything other than impacts with trees. “They’d have hung a grid of tree trunks off the side of the truck, like a Boy Scout raft.”

Bob said, “So . . .”

“We know Ritter lives back here, in the Washington area, and his accomplices, whoever they are—another guy was seen in the truck—probably live here, too, working for Heracles. After they ran Smalls off the road, they’d have wanted to get those tree trunks off the truck as soon as they could. As invisibly as they could. I asked my West Virginia guy to talk to the local sheriffs, to have their deputies keep their eyes open for that, for the tree trunks, but that’s probably a low priority over there. We need to light some fires.”

Rae: “You think we should wander around West Virginia looking for tree trunks?”

“What the hell else you got to do, other than watch my back?” Lucas asked. “It has two benefits: if they’re tracking me somehow and see what we’re doing, they’ll try to interfere, and we’ll have a shot at them. If they’re not tracking us, there’s a fair chance we’ll find the tree trunks. Then, if we wanted, we could take the whole thing public. Or talk to big guys at the Department of Justice. Or do something to drive Ritter and his pals out in the open.”

“Like what?” Rae asked.

“I haven’t figured that part out yet,” Lucas said.

“I’d like to talk to the big guys at the Department of Justice anyway,” Bob said, “to tell them what I think about everything.”

“That’s a real good idea,” Rae said. “Remind me not to be there.”

Bob yawned, and said, “Let’s find a pancake place tomorrow morning and work it out. Pancakes, coffee, and West, by God, Virginia. They got pancakes in D.C.?”

“Haven’t looked, but there’s gotta be something. Maybe even downstairs,” Lucas said. “We’ve got to move early. Before nine.”

Rae: “In case somebody needs to tell you, nine’s not early . . . Say, I wonder if they got grits?”

“Jesus, I’m not watching you eat grits. Or okra. Let’s stick with pancakes,” Lucas said.

“Waffles,” Bob said. “Big scoop of creamery butter. They got cows in D.C.?”

“With all the bullshit that comes outta here, you’d think there’d be a cow around somewhere,” Rae said.

“Let’s talk more in the morning,” Lucas said.



* * *



—

BEFORE HE WENT TO BED, Lucas went to his iPad and called up maps of Virginia and West Virginia. Because the mountains ran northeast to southwest, so did most of the roads. The quickest way out of the area around Smalls’s cabin and back to the D.C. area was almost straight east. If they were right about the tree trunks, they would have been ditched in Hampshire County, West Virginia, or in Frederick or Shenandoah counties in Virginia.

But the killers wouldn’t have wanted to drive in traffic with the logs on the side of their truck . . .

Lucas called up a satellite view of the area and made some notes on likely roads back toward I-66 into Washington. Avoiding towns and traffic . . .

He spent an hour at it, then did a search for the sheriff’s contact emails in the three counties. He made up three emails, explaining what he wanted to do, asking for help, and telling them that he’d arrive with two other marshals by noon. He finally put away his electronics, read the Hiaasen book for a while, and went to bed at one o’clock.