Twisted Prey (Lucas Davenport #28)(70)



“Well, I’ve got some news about Ritter . . .” Lucas began.

Armstrong was astonished by the murder, and Lucas told him that the canvas samples were still in play if they could pull DNA out of the truck. “Hang on to that stuff, Carl. We’ll get back to you.”

“I feel like we’re rolling, but I can’t tell if it’s uphill or downhill,” Bob said when Lucas told them about Armstrong’s lab results.



* * *





THE FBI TEAM showed up, the manager let them into Ritter’s apartment, while the marshals and Clark stood around in the hall as the team took a preliminary look. An hour later, the team leader, Jake Ricardo, came out, and said, “We can’t find any sign of a shooting in here. I don’t believe he was killed in this apartment.”

No murder scene. The first time the marshals searched the place, they’d been restricted by the warrant—they’d had to specifically list what they were looking for, and they’d been strictly held to that list because their justification for the search was fairly thin. With Ritter murdered, the FBI team could tear the place apart.

They did that.

The first significant find was two passports, hidden under a carpet edge held down with a strip of double-sided tape. One passport was British, issued to one Richard Carnes, with Ritter’s photo. The other was American, issued to a David Havelock, also with Ritter’s photo.

The second and final good thing was Ritter’s laptop, which was sitting on a coffee table. They couldn’t get into it because it was password-protected. Lucas asked them if they could get the laptop to their computer lab to break the password.

“That’s in a different place, down in Quantico,” Ricardo said. “I’ll call them and see if they can pick it up. What about his cell phone?”

“Haven’t found it,” Lucas said. “We know he had one, because we got the number, and we know some places that it wasn’t.”

“When did he get killed?”

“Probably last night,” Lucas said.

“What service?”

“Verizon.”

“Okay. Verizon will have tracking data for him going back quite a while, and texts going back at least a few days. You gotta get some guys on them.”

“Could you do that?”

“Our people can. Let me call another guy.”



* * *





HE DID THAT, and then called the computer specialist at Quantico, whose name was Roger Smith. “I live up near where you are,” Smith said. “I could stop by on the way home, take a look. If I can’t do anything, I could bag it and bring it to the lab first thing in the morning.”

“That’d be great,” Lucas said.

“In the meantime, look for the password. Could be written anywhere, if he actually wrote it down. Which he probably didn’t. Probably his mom’s middle name.”

“We’ll look,” Lucas said.



* * *





CLARK, the Frederick County detective, gave up first. “If there’s anything else here, I’ll be damned if I know what it would be. I don’t think he left a note that says ‘I’m going to Joe’s house, and he might shoot me.’”

“No, but he might have left a trail to the house,” Lucas said. “The FBI is looking at his phone records. Hang on a while longer, we ought to be hearing back from them.”

They did, but not for an hour. An FBI tech called Lucas, and asked, “Do you have a cell phone or an iPad?”

“An iPad, in my car,” Lucas said.

“Give me your email, and I’ll send you a link. We’ve mapped his track for the twenty-four hours before his phone quit.”

“When did it quit?”

“About eleven o’clock last night, over in Virginia.”

“Where in Virginia?”

“There’s a place called Applejack’s . . .”

“That’s where his body was dumped,” Lucas said. “How long before I get the track?”

“About thirty seconds after you give me your email address.”



* * *





LUCAS WALKED DOWN to his car, got the iPad, and walked back to Ritter’s apartment, bringing up the email as he walked. The FBI file was simply a pdf of a Google map, with the track played across it in a red line, with ant-sized numbers attached to the track. A legend with the map showed the time for each number.

The track started at Ritter’s apartment for eight hours—he was asleep—then touched at the Heracles office, where it stayed for a few hours, followed by a wandering line at noon—lunch, Lucas thought. The phone went back to the office in the afternoon, went out to a location in Arlington, touched at the office, went over to Georgetown in the evening, and looped back toward Virginia, where the signal disappeared.

Lucas got back to the apartment, and Bob, Rae, and Clark all looked at him. “Ritter was at home last night, and he drove over to a restaurant that’s about a block from Parrish’s house,” he said. “There are some squiggles on the map, where he maybe walked over to Parrish’s place. The phone goes back across the river to that restaurant, where the body was probably dumped. Parrish killed Ritter and drove him back across the river and dumped him.”

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