Twisted Prey (Lucas Davenport #28)(69)

Lucas said, “Yeah. I hear ya.”



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CLARK CAME BACK a few minutes later, and said, “The doc will talk to us now.”

The pathologist’s name was Benjamin Woode; he was a fleshy man, with thinning red hair, who asked, “Why are federal marshals chasing this one?”

“Because we were asked to, and we have jurisdiction,” Lucas said. “Did you see anything that might help?”

“Yes, a couple of things,” Woode said. He carried with him the faint but peculiar scent of autopsy rooms: something like a butcher’s shop, but with noxious chemicals attached. “He was shot twice, the bullets both penetrated the breastbone, one an inch or so above the heart, the other directly through it. And they made a mess of it. The slugs started coming apart as soon as they hit the victim. They were man-killers, designed to do just that. One passed entirely through the body. The core of the other one hung up on the skin of the victim’s back. He was shot from the front, by the way, and there are extensive powder traces on his shirt and around the bullet’s entry point, so the shooter probably wasn’t more than five or ten feet away, if that.”

“Can the slugs be identified?” Bob asked.

“That’s not up to me; that’s up to the forensics people . . . But they were in pieces, and one core is missing. What may interest you is that while one core didn’t make it through the body, a few small pieces cut channels in the body and did penetrate through both the body and the victim’s skin and shirt. If you can find the scene of the shooting, and it was inside somewhere, a good crime scene lab might be able to find those fragments in a wall. You probably couldn’t see them at all unless you looked closely. They’re tiny, like chips off a fingernail clipping. The killer might not have been able to clean it up . . . might not even know about it. If that turns out to be important.”

“It could,” Lucas said. “Do you have a time of death?”

“There’s a limit to what we can say at this point, until we get some labs back.”

“I know that, but what do you think?”

“He was still showing signs of rigor. He was shot last night. He’s not twenty-four hours dead.”



* * *



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THERE WAS MORE OF THAT, but not enough to help identify the killer. When they’d finished talking to the medical examiner, they looked at Ritter’s clothing, which had been separated and bagged. His wallet was missing, and a watch and ring were gone as well: they only knew about them because of the white they’d left on Ritter’s tanned skin. The only thing the clothing told them was that Ritter habitually dressed in high-end outdoor garb and boots and that he wore a heavy leather belt designed to accommodate a holster: Bob knew that because he wore the same belt.

“The only difference is that he wrote his name on the back of his with a Sharpie or something,” Bob said, turning the belt in his hands. “Probably because he spends time in a barracks, and everybody wears pistol belts; this is an expensive one.”

Lucas glanced at the belt, which had an elaborate “James Ritter” written on it in black ink, with decorative dots preceding the first name and following the last to either end of the belt. There was also an “S.”

“Must have had a lot of time to kill,” Rae said, “him doing art deco design on his belt.”

Lucas told Clark, “We’re going to run over to his apartment, take another look. Won’t need a warrant now. He’d have been driving either a Ford F-250 or a Mazda Miata roadster. We have both tag numbers. We need to get all the local patrol guys looking for it.”

“We’ll get that out, call you when we find it,” Clark said. “I need to be there when you look at the apartment, though.”

“You’re welcome to come along,” Lucas said.



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—

LUCAS, BOB, AND RAE left for Ritter’s apartment, with Clark trailing. On the way, Bob said, “The truck didn’t look like it’d been driven all that much. Maybe we should have had it processed for DNA. Ritter was probably driving; we should look for traces in the passenger seat, see who might have been sitting there.”

Rae said, “The FBI has that fast forensic DNA analysis going now. If we can get a team over there, they can have the results back tomorrow.”

“Not a bad idea,” Lucas said. “What we need is an FBI crime scene team at Ritter’s, to check if he might have been killed there. I’ll call Forte, see if he can get one moving. After that, they can hit the truck.”

Bob said, “We need a new Ritter. Right now, we’re back to zero.”

“Always Moore and McCoy,” Rae said.

“Yeah, they’re up,” Lucas said.

“Fuckin’ Ritter,” Bob said.



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—

FORTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER, they pulled into Ritter’s apartment complex, swung around back. No Miata.

“Probably not shot here. The killers wouldn’t have driven it away,” Lucas said.

Forte called. Chase had gotten the crime scene team moving.



* * *



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WHILE THEY WERE WAITING for the FBI team to show up, Armstrong called from West Virginia. “You might want to have another hard talk with Ritter,” he said. “We got test results back on the fabric samples from the truck, and they match the fabric samples from the logs exactly. It’s apparently a kind of canvas used for martial arts mats. It’s not common.”