Twisted Prey (Lucas Davenport #28)(86)

Lucas took off the door chain and backed away from the door, kept the PPQ pointed to one side but still up. “Yeah, come on. Push the door shut behind you.”

Like his brother, Ritter was short, muscular, tanned, and dressed in outdoor clothing—a long-sleeved blue cotton shirt, covered by a blue linen sport coat, tan nylon/cotton cargo pants, and light hiking boots. Lucas began to pick up some differences: James Ritter had a scarred face from a shrapnel wound, Tom Ritter didn’t but carried the same military look.



* * *



—

LUCAS SAID, “Take off your jacket before you come in.”

“I don’t carry a gun. Not in the States.”

Lucas said, “Take your jacket off anyway.”

Ritter did, stepped into the room, nudged the door closed with his foot, and did a pirouette so Lucas could see that he didn’t have a gun holstered at the small of his back. “I’ve got some questions, and I might have some information you need,” he said, when he was looking at Lucas again.

Lucas had backed up to the desk. He said, “Sit on the bed. I’ll take the chair.” Sitting on the bed would make a hidden gun harder to get at. Lucas sat on the edge of a hard-seated office chair. Ritter might well have been a computer programmer, or a life insurance salesman, but he didn’t look like that. You had to have experience as a cop to notice he bore the wound-spring look of a man who could hurt you.

When Ritter was sitting on the bed, his jacket across his lap, Lucas asked, “Who told you where to find me?”

“I’ve got a story about that,” Ritter said. He was younger than he looked, Lucas thought: the tan put on a few years and some wrinkles, but Ritter was not yet thirty-five.

“I’m listening,” Lucas said.

“I’m an Army officer, Third Stryker Brigade Combat Team, Second Infantry Division, in Afghanistan. I was granted leave to bury my brother.”

“That’s . . . rough. Maybe even rougher with a twin.”

“Yeah, it is. Hard even to explain how rough it is. It’s like you lost a leg. Non-twins wouldn’t understand,” Ritter said in his quiet voice. “The people over at Heracles say you shot him.”

“I know what they’re saying. It’s horseshit. Your brother was our best way into our case. I don’t want to sound . . . insulting . . . but he was small fry. The last thing we wanted was him dead. The people who killed him are responsible for murdering three people now—two of them completely innocent. The third was your brother.”

Ritter watched Lucas for a minute or two, judging him, and asked, “What do you know about waterboarding?”

Lucas said, “Nothing. I was going to look it up on the Internet tonight, but I forgot. We were told by a source that Heracles is passing around some fake autopsy papers that say he was waterboarded, but he wasn’t. If you check with the ME, the medical examiner, he’ll tell you so. Heracles was trying to convince people that I killed Jim.”

“But you were pissed about what happened to your wife, and you’re working for Senator Smalls . . .”

Lucas nodded, and said, “Yes. I’m more than pissed about my wife, I’m . . . if I was sure I found a guy involved in that, he might fall down a couple of flights of stairs. But I wouldn’t kill him. I wouldn’t kill him especially if it was your brother. Like I said, he was about our only entry into the case, but he was nowhere near the top of the food chain.”



* * *



—

ANOTHER BIT OF SILENCE, then Ritter asked, “If you didn’t kill Jim, do you have any idea who might have? Specific names? Anything at all?”

Lucas said, “I’m not ready to talk about that—we’ve got an ongoing investigation.”

Ritter looked around the room, appraising it as if for ways to defend it, and said, “I looked you up on the Internet. You’re a rough guy, huh?”

“I have my moments,” Lucas said. “What are we talking about here?”

Ritter said, “I was passing through Kuwait when I heard about Jim and caught a flight back home. I’ve got fourteen days. You gonna find the killer in that time?”

“I could if I could get some leverage on somebody involved,” Lucas said. “Now, tell me how you knew where to find me . . . or even what my name is?”

“I called some people. I went over to Heracles Personnel. I guess you’ve already been looking at them.”

“Yes, we have,” Lucas said.

“I know people at Heracles, ex-Army guys, friends of Jim—and tapped into the rumor mill. Word is, some guys have been involved in questionable actions here in the States. I’ve got names, not easy to get, but I’m . . . trusted, to a certain extent.”

“They weren’t questionable actions, Colonel,” Lucas said. “The first attack was an attempted assassination of a U.S. senator and the murder of a completely innocent woman. The guys who did it, including your brother, I’m sorry to say, knew what they were doing—that they’d kill her along with the senator. The second attack was an effort to get me, personally, off their backs. They did it by going after my wife—and by the cold-blooded murder of an innocent man. Do you know about all of that?”

“Yeah, I was told about it, and I read a newspaper story.” Ritter put his jacket aside and stood up, looked around the room again, and Lucas said, “Sit back on the bed,” and he did, but asked, “Why?”