Twisted Prey (Lucas Davenport #28)(59)

She squinted at Lucas, and said, “Hey, you’re the marshal who got lost. You were lying to me when you were here before.”

Lucas said, “Sorry.”

He was lying again.



* * *



—

THEIR SEARCH WARRANT was sharply limited to records, both paper and computer files, and to weapons, since Ritter was suspected in the Douglas Last shooting in the Twin Cities. Last had supposedly been shot with his girlfriend’s gun, a fact not mentioned in the warrant application. The warrant specifically said that they were allowed to search for records that might be hidden in the apartment, which, for practical purposes, meant they could look at everything, but if they found something criminal that was not openly visible, and was not a record or a weapon, it probably wouldn’t make it into court.

Ritter’s apartment smelled of almost nothing, except maybe pasta and kitchen cleaner. He lived a spartan life except in three areas: he had a high-end, high-definition television, which sat in front of a seven-foot couch; he had a high-end stereo system, with a turntable in addition to a CD player, and a load of fashionable vinyl records; and he had lots of guns.

The guns were in a gun safe, as opposed to a real safe, in a closet. It was bolted to the floor, and the locks-and-safes specialist took no more than five minutes to get it open.

Inside were fourteen guns—five rifles, a tactical shotgun, and eight handguns—none of them cheap, in a variety of sizes and calibers. Two of the handguns were equipped with screw-on silencers. The marshal noted the serial numbers on the silencers and checked with the ATF computer records and learned that they were both licensed to Ritter and so were legal.

“That’s a shame,” he told Lucas. “That would have been a nice round federal felony if they weren’t registered.”

They also found about a thousand rounds of ammo for the guns. The apartment had a small, tidy kitchen, with two tables. One table was for eating, the other was a gun repair and reloading station.



* * *



—

RITTER HAD an inexpensive Dell desktop computer and a small multipurpose printer/scanner. The computer had no password. All its software was the standard stuff that came with the machine, plus Microsoft Word and a privacy application called Win/DeXX.

That was it: there were no emails, there was no browser history, there were no documents, there were no cookies. The computer specialist marshal explained that Win/DeXX was a Windows software package that could remove any trace of the computer’s use at the end of each session. Click on the Win/DeXX icon, and whatever you’d been doing was lost to history.

“It all goes to where television pictures go when you turn off the TV,” the marshal said.

Ritter also had three black, two-drawer file cabinets in the office: Rae worked through those, while Bob and Lucas prowled the apartment, trying the common hiding places and plugging a lamp into each outlet to make sure it was operable. Outlet caches were currently fashionable among the crooked.

Lucas found the first useful piece of information: Ritter had a modest selection of clothing, mostly athletic and outdoorsy, including camo cargo pants and jackets, along with a dark suit, suitable for funerals, three sport coats in varied textures and shades of blue, three pairs of gray or black slacks, four pairs of boots, and one pair of black dress shoes.

Lucas was patting down the jackets when he felt something stiff in the inside breast pocket of one of the sport coats. When he pulled it out, it was a plastic hotel key card. On the back was a logo of the Hilton Garden Inn Omaha East/Council Bluffs.

Ritter had been in Omaha.

“Bag that baby,” Bob said.

“Think we can call it a record?” Lucas asked.

“Fuck yeah.”



* * *



—

OF THE SIX file cabinet drawers Rae was working, two drawers were a jumble of office supplies and computer cables, the other four a collection of investment and bank statements and employment and tax records. “I’m looking at it, and he does have some money, about . . . maybe eight hundred thousand dollars in cash and investments, if I’m not missing anything. He seems to spend a lot of time overseas, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he gets free food and housing along with a nice salary that he can’t spend anywhere over there . . . so his investments don’t seem outlandish. You’d need a good accountant to tell you for sure, and I’m not one.”

Sitting on one of the file cabinets was an innocuous framed photo showing Ritter, with two male friends and two women, in what looked like a park. He had his arm around the shoulder of one of the women, who might have been who they’d seen at the Wily Rat nightclub. She was half turned away from the camera, her face obscured, but Lucas could see that she was short and dark-haired.



* * *



—

FORTE HAD LEFT with the computer specialist a half hour after they started the search. The locks-and-safes guy was helping go through the apartment inch by inch when he took a call from one of the two marshals who were at the truck.

He listened for a moment, then said, “Hey, Lucas, Ritter’s down at the truck. He just showed up.”

Lucas took the phone, and asked, “He’s driving the Miata?”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t let him leave,” Lucas said. “We’ll be right down.”