Twisted Prey (Lucas Davenport #28)(67)

Almost forgot: his own phone. He called Grant. She picked up, and neither of them said anything. After a minute had passed, he hung up and carried the phone upstairs and put it on the kitchen counter.



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HE DROVE across the river to a brewpub called Applejack’s Burger & Beer, which happened to be near a metro station. The place had no cameras overlooking its dumpster, no windows. He parked next to the dumpster, looked for people out walking, and, in another ten-second burst of energy, boosted Ritter out of the Jeep and into the dumpster, where he landed almost soundlessly on a pile of cardboard and garbage.

He’d taken Ritter’s car keys and telephone. He crushed the phone under his foot, pulled out the battery, threw the pieces in the dumpster. Five seconds later, he was out of the parking lot and on his way back to Georgetown. He dropped the phone battery out the car window, along with the .45 shells, and after parking in his garage, and checking the back of the Jeep for any traces of blood, he walked to the Jitterbug Café, clicked the key fob, and spotted the flashing lights of Ritter’s Mazda.

He drove the Mazda carefully to the metro station, near the body dump site, parked it, and took the train back to Washington, to Foggy Bottom. He walked home from there, a bit more than a mile.

A mile was nothing.

He whistled most of the way, fighting back the adrenaline surging through him while reliving the shooting mentally in split-second frames.

Nobody, he decided, could have done it better.

At home, he called Claxson on his cell phone. Claxson didn’t answer, as planned. The call alone from Parrish’s number meant that everything had gone well.

He hadn’t liked seeing Jim go, but they’d sealed off the problem, and he’d gotten the thrill of a lifetime. He hoped to do it again someday.





18


When Allah wants to mess with a perfectly good murder, He doesn’t hesitate.

Jasim Nagi, a moderately faithful Islamic man of Arabic descent born in Atlantic City, who carried with him the full faith and credit of the New Jersey accent, drove a garbage truck.

Not a humble garbage truck: it was a two-year-old, forty-cubic-yard McNeilus Front Loader painted bright green, and it took some skill to operate.

At six o’clock in the dawn’s early light, Nagi maneuvered through Applejack’s empty parking lot, picked up the dumpster, and when the load dumped in the cargo box, he heard a loud bang as something large and metallic hit the bottom.

He said, “Aaa . . . shit,” in his best Joisey Shore accent, because he knew what it probably was: a piece of obsolete office equipment, like a printer. It had probably been thrown in the dumpster because the owner didn’t want to dispose of it in an environmentally responsible way.

That also meant that if Nagi tried to unload it at the landfill without reporting it and got caught, he’d get stuck with both a fine and the printer.

Nagi went on with his route, had the first full load ready to go by nine o’clock. At the landfill, he told the supervisor at the gate that he probably had a big printer in his load, and the supervisor pointed him to a specific dump area, a laborer following him with a Kabota Front End Loader.

Nagi dumped the load, waited for the wave from the laborer. Instead, he got the white-faced laborer running down the side of the truck, calling, “You better get out here.”

The printer was there, at the top of the load of foul-smelling garbage. Right next to a partially exposed leg, an expensive Salomon hiking boot still on the foot.

Nagi crossed himself, although he was a Muslim, because that’s what you did if you were raised in New Jersey. To the laborer, he said, “This ain’t good. Go get the boss.”



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THE COPS CAME, and the medical examiner, and over the span of two hours the body was exposed, photographed, and re-covered. The top of the torso was still wrapped in a black plastic garbage bag, which was packed away for a further forensic examination. The lack of fingertips was recorded, and the detective team working the scene noted that the body had probably been fingerprinted at some point and that the killer knew it. The crime scene crew checked the clothing for any kind of identification but found nothing.

When the cops were satisfied that they’d done everything possible at the scene, the body was moved to the Medical Examiner’s Office. There, the clothing was removed and bagged for forensics, the body examined: it bore two tattoos. One was a generic American flag, but the other was Special Forces, with the designation ODA 331.

That information, with a photograph of the dead man’s face, was sent to the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command, which, in the Army’s idiosyncratic way, was abbreviated “CID,” since “CIC” was reserved for the “Commander in Chief.”

Two hours later, the CID came back with the information that the body was almost certainly that of former master sergeant James Harold Ritter, who had been subsequently identified by two of his former teammates. He had been honorably discharged from the Army a few years earlier.

The cops found a Virginia driver’s license for Ritter, matched the photos, and went to his address in Arlington, where the apartment manager told them that the apartment had just been searched by federal marshals.

The cops eventually found Russell Forte, told him about Ritter, asked him about the search. Forte said, “I’ll call the marshal in charge of the search and have him get back to you.”