Twisted Prey (Lucas Davenport #28)(78)

“Goddamnit,” McCoy said. He stood up, walked around his chair, brushing a hand through his hair, and sat down again. “Nobody told us. That’s the kind of shit we had to know. Bad intel can kill us.”

“Yeah, well, Davenport’s back, and you know what happened next. Jim Ritter gets killed. We got an autopsy report off the Medical Examiner’s files . . .”

Claxson had that report in his hand and pushed it across the table they were sitting at to McCoy. “Looks like Jim was waterboarded and then shot up close, in the heart. Executed. He was looking right down the barrel when they pulled the trigger.”

Moore was incredulous. “You think Davenport and the marshals did that?”

“There’s no proof. All we know is, Jim disappeared and turned up in a landfill. But he was tortured first, and Davenport was here and he’s a killer. He’s killed eight or nine guys as a cop, and some of the killings were seriously questionable. He’s always done the hard-core stuff, which explains some of it . . . The point is, killing isn’t something that worries him.”

“We made a mistake when we went after his wife,” Moore said to McCoy. “When I was married, if somebody had gotten rough with Jeannie, I would have killed him.”

McCoy flashed a grin, and said, “Fortunately for that guy, he was only fuckin’ her.”

“Bite me,” Moore said, but he laughed. He then stopped laughing, and said to Claxson, “Maybe it’s time to get a job somewhere else. Like Niger. Go up the river for a couple of years.”

Claxson said, “That’s one option. The other option is, get rid of Davenport. We didn’t want to do it because it’d attract attention, but Davenport is the only one who’s got the personal . . . animus . . . to keep pushing this thing.”

Moore was skeptical. “So we put a .338 through his heart from six blocks away? That’d get some attention—and since they’re looking at us anyway . . .”

Claxson shook his head. “Can’t look like a pro killed him. Has to look like something else. An accident, a mugging, anything. We’re still thinking pushing him downstream a couple of months would probably get us out of it.”

McCoy and Moore looked at each other again, and McCoy said, “So if he just got sick—I mean, like really sick . . .”

“You got something that’ll make him sick?” Claxson asked.

“No, but somebody might,” McCoy said.

Moore was shaking his head. “That’s bullshit. We don’t know how to do that. The thing is, we got that lady on the books, the one riding with Smalls. If we get caught, if we get identified, we’re looking at the needle. If we’re gonna kill him, we do it when we got an exit plan. I’m not sneaking into some fuckin’ hotel without good intel, not knowing where the cameras are, and try some goofy idea like gassing him or giving him chicken pox or something.”

McCoy said, “You’re right.”

Moore said to McCoy: “I’m sayin’ Niger.” He looked at Claxson. “Unless you got something good in Syria, or with the Kurds.”

Claxson said, “We’re talking about the White House. We put this chick in there, knowing what we know, we can get anything we want. Anything. You want ten million bucks? No problem. Twenty million bucks? No problem.”

“Unless she knows a couple of more guys like us to remove that problem,” Moore said.

Claxson shook his head. “Never’ll happen. Money is easy. Killing all of us would be way too hard. And dangerous.”

They sat and looked at one another for a while.

Claxson stood, picked up the autopsy report, and said, “Think of something. And I’ll try to come up with something. Worse comes to worse, we give you a jar of malaria pills and you go on up that river.”

Claxson headed for the door, but before he got there, McCoy said, “Hey. Jim’s got a twin brother. Heavy hitter, right? He’s like a major or a lieutenant colonel, did some work with Delta? I think they were tight, the brothers . . .”

“Lieutenant colonel,” Claxson said.

“What if we sicced him on Davenport? He gets caught . . . no skin off our asses.”

Claxson raked his lower lip with his upper teeth, thinking, and said, “That could be it. He wouldn’t even have to kill him, if he beat the shit out of him or something. Anything that’d slow things down, take the heat off, get people to move on.”

“How do we find out when he gets here? The colonel?”

Claxson shrugged. “We’ll check and see if Jim’s parents were notified. I’m sure they were, so we’ll call them up and offer to fly them here. Jim’s will says he wanted cremation, and burial at Arlington, and it’ll take some time to set that up. We’ll offer to take care of the Arlington paperwork, but the cremation can take place as soon as the medical examiner releases the body. Anyway, his folks should know when the colonel gets here and where he’ll be. We’ll brief him . . . point him at Davenport. If nothing happens, nothing happens.”

“Hard to believe that nothing would,” McCoy said.

“He’s not one of us,” Moore said. “He doesn’t think like us. You can’t predict.”

“What if one of us . . . did something, but made it look like the colonel?” Claxson asked.