Twisted Prey (Lucas Davenport #28)(58)

“Are you in a safe spot?” Lucas asked.

“I’m so safe that even I don’t know where I’m at,” Smalls said.

When Lucas hung up, Rae said, “Sometimes this inside baseball makes me nervous, speaking of things ethics-wise.”

Bob shook his head. “You know better than that. Almost everything in Washington is inside baseball, ethics-wise. Been that way since the git-go.”

“Didn’t have as many lawyers at the git-go,” she said.



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SMALLS CALLED BACK at eleven o’clock, and said he’d spoken with the judge, who agreed to take an expedited look at a search warrant request.

“I believe you’ll get it,” he said.

They drove over to Ritter’s apartment complex in two cars, and Lucas led the way around back, where the truck was still sitting in the carport. They didn’t approach it until one o’clock, when Carl Armstrong and a technician named Jane Kerr rolled into the parking lot.

They all got out, shook hands, and walked as a group to the black F-250. Lucas pointed out the ripples down the right side of the truck, and both Armstrong and Kerr took a look, running their hands over the panels, and Armstrong asked Kerr, “Do you see it?”

“I definitely see it,” she said. “I can feel it, too—at least as good as I see it.”

Armstrong said to Lucas, “We’ve got templates from an undamaged truck just like this one, and when we fit the cutouts over the side of the truck, you’ll be able to see the damage more clearly. We’ll take photos in case we need the evidence.”

“Great,” Lucas said.

“In the meantime . . .” He jogged back to his SUV and pulled out a piece of what looked like white rubber. When he carried it back to the F-250, Lucas could see it was actually a cast made from the truck tire tracks they’d found on the mountainside where the logs had been dumped.

Armstrong squatted next to the truck, held the cast up to one of the tires, and they all bent over to look. “Same tires,” he said. “They come as one of the standard options with the truck, but less than thirty percent are equipped with them. Not definitive, but supportive.”

“Another straw on the camel’s back,” Bob said.



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THE SIDES AND FRONT END of the truck bed had been fitted with a steel rack to give it more carrying capacity and better tie-down capability. Kerr walked along the side of the bed with a Sherlock Holmes–style magnifying glass. Halfway down, she stopped, looked more closely, turned to Armstrong, and said, “Carl . . . take a look.”

Armstrong took the magnifying glass to look at what appeared to be nothing at all. He said, “Huh,” and, “You guys want to look?”

Lucas took the magnifying glass, and Armstrong took a mechanical pencil from his pocket and pointed at the truck, and said, “Right at the end of the pencil point.”

Lucas looked, and under the glass could see three or four wispy beige threads clinging to a tiny nick in the steel rail. “What am I looking at?”

“Those look exactly like the threads that were stuck to the padded side of the log. I’ll kiss your ass if they aren’t identical. We need to find as many as we can and collect them; a lab will tell us if they’re the same.”

Bob and Rae both took a look, and Bob said, “That’s the search warrant.”



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LUCAS CALLED FORTE. Forte wrote the search warrant application for Ritter’s apartment and the interior of the truck and drove it over to the judge’s chambers. Getting the warrant back to Ritter’s place took three boring hours. Lucas, Bob, Rae, Armstrong, and Kerr hung out in their vehicles in the parking lot, making occasional individual runs out to a Safeway Supermarket for food, drinks, and magazines.

They didn’t need the search warrant to fit the F-250 templates to the side of the truck, so Armstrong and Kerr did that while the others watched and waited. The photography was interesting, in a way, for a while, and then they slipped back into a hot, sweating boredom.

When Armstrong finished, he transferred his photos to a laptop and brought the laptop over to Lucas’s Evoque. With Bob and Rae looking over their shoulders from the backseat, Armstrong ran through the high-res photos on the laptop’s screen, and the impact dent was plain enough—Kerr had been on the other side of the templates with a flash, which fired when Armstrong took the shot, illuminating the space between the templates and the truck.

“It’s what you’d expect if they did what we think they did with the logs,” Armstrong said. “I bet they don’t even know that the truck was damaged.”



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FORTE DELIVERED the warrant himself, bringing along four additional marshals. Two of the marshals were left in the parking lot to watch the truck; Armstrong and Kerr began collecting fiber samples from the truck and bagging them for the lab.

Lucas, Bob, Rae, Forte, and the other two marshals went to Ritter’s apartment; the two marshals specialized in searches, the first man computers, the second safes and lockboxes. There was no answer to their knocks, so they showed the search warrant to the apartment manager and ordered her to open Ritter’s door.