Twisted Prey (Lucas Davenport #28)(75)

“Take a nap,” Rae said. “Or I could drive down to Quantico and meet Smith for a drink. He could give me a back rub. I could use a good rub.”

Bob said, “I’ve been thinking . . .”

Rae: “Oh-oh. You know what I told you about that.”

“What’s the ‘S’ on Ritter’s belt?”

Lucas said, “What?”

“There’s an ‘S.’ Right at the end of the code. If the dots are a code, maybe the ‘S’ is, too.”

Lucas got out his iPad, called up the photos of Ritter’s belt. Bob was correct about the “S,” written in the same black ink as the Braille dots, although Lucas was not certain whether the symbol was actually an “S.” The initial, or symbol—or whatever it was—was rendered in open-ended double parallel lines, with one side of the initial/symbol shorter than the other. “It’s more like a shape than an actual initial. It’s like an S-shaped road,” Lucas said.

“That’s dumb. Who’d have to remember an S-shaped road?” Rae asked. “What good would it do you?”

“Maybe a river?” Lucas suggested, and Rae shook her head.

They sat and stared at it for a while, and Lucas said, “Fuck it, let’s think about it.”

A second later, Bob said, “You know what it looks like? It looks like the trap under a sink. Like maybe someplace you’d hide something small. A thumb drive, for instance?”

Rae and Lucas looked at each other, back at the iPad, and Rae said, “Goddamnit, we didn’t look. Now we’ve got to go back over to Ritter’s. And be back here by four.”



* * *



—

ON THE WAY, Lucas called Russell Forte, told him about the meeting with the FBI. Forte said he’d be there, and O’Conner would probably come along to add weight. When Lucas finished the call, he made another to the manager at Ritter’s condo complex, asked if they had a maintenance man. They did. “We need him to do some plumbing,” Lucas said.

The maintenance guy, a phlegmatic man with watery blue eyes, was waiting for them when they arrived. He said they might not have seen everything, but they’d seen most of it, no longer curious about why three feds in suits showed up to have him take a sink apart.

They started in the kitchen, found nothing in the trap.

In the bathroom, he looked at the trap, and said, “This has been taken apart a few times, but not by me. And I’m the only one authorized to do it.”

The maintenance man took off the looped section of the pipe, stuck his finger into it, and popped out a plastic tube about the length and diameter of Lucas’s little finger. The ends were wrapped in tape.

He handed it to Lucas, and said, “Radiator hose tape. So water can’t get in. Couldn’t put it in the kitchen because garbage going down could push the tube along and clog the sink. Nothing goes in this sink but water, soap, and whiskers.”

While the maintenance man put the sinks back together, Lucas borrowed Bob’s Leatherman tool to cut the tape off the plastic box. That done, he pulled the box apart and took out a flat, odd-looking key.

“Safe-deposit box,” Rae said. “This should be good.”



* * *



—

LUCAS CALLED FORTE. “I need a couple of clerks and another warrant, and I need them in a hurry.” He explained, and Forte wasn’t sure they’d need the warrant because Ritter was dead but decided that having a warrant when they didn’t need it was better than needing a warrant when they didn’t have it. “I’ll write it up and get it.”

The clerks started calling banks in the area, using three names: Ritter’s own, and those on the two passports they’d found under the rug. One of the clerks found a David Havelock at a Citibank a half mile away. Forte wasn’t much farther away than that, at the Marshals Service headquarters, and said he would meet them there with the warrant.

Lucas said, “Let’s go,” and they were out the door and into the heat. They arrived at the bank ahead of Forte, got to the branch manager, and told her what was about to happen. “The warrant’s fine,” she said, after looking at their IDs, “but I’ll need to call a man to drill the lock.”

Lucas took the key from his pocket. “We have Ritter’s key, and also the passport he used to get the box under false pretenses.”

The woman looked at the passport, and the key, and muttered, “Yeah, it’s one of ours. It’s a big box. I think I remember this gentleman. He’s a nice-looking fellow.”

“Not so much now,” Rae said.



* * *



—

FORTE SHOWED UP, sweaty yet well dressed, and produced the warrant. “You know I don’t do this so much, come to the scene. I’m more of an intellectual than a street guy.”

“We all know that, but it never hurts an office guy to add to his street cred,” Rae said.

“Hadn’t thought of it that way,” Forte said. “I should start packing heat.” They all looked at him, and he added, “Okay, maybe not.”

They followed the manager into the vault, along with the women who managed the registry and safeguarded the master keys. The box opened on the first try, the woman pulled it out, said, “Heavy. Let’s take it to a viewing desk.”