“Porter Smalls called.”
“This sounds exactly like the woman who attacked you at the hotel,” Chase said, the excitement riding close beneath her dry tone. “Do you know anything at all about her?”
“No. I eventually got three different possible names for her, from the Heracles people, but I doubt any of them were real.”
“This is going to cause endless trouble,” Chase said. “The Senate’s going totally insane and we’re right in the bull’s-eye.”
“Jane, some advice: stay away from it. Find something else to do,” Lucas said. “You won’t find this woman. She apparently worked with Heracles, and for the CIA, and is probably back in Iraq, or Syria, or one of those places, by now. If she belongs to the CIA, do you think they’ll give her up as the person who assassinated a senator?”
She thought for a second, then said, “It does sound unlikely.”
“And when the Senate starts looking for an FBI scapegoat, you don’t want to be the one standing there with your dick in your hand.”
“Certainly not,” she said, tempted to laugh at his metaphor.
“Now that that’s settled, give me a few details.”
She told him the same story he’d gotten from Smalls, with a couple of extras. “The crime scene team recovered the bullet. It’s a 300-grain .338 slug, fired from a .338 Norma Magnum. She was hit very precisely. The assassin was shooting from an attic window in an adjoining house. She shot from a stack of books sitting on top of a table; she was sitting in an old wooden chair. She either didn’t eject the brass or she picked it up.”
“I don’t know the gun—is it an exotic?”
“Couldn’t get one across the counter at Walmart, but you could probably order one there,” she said. “So it’s uncommon but not exotic. We’re trying to trace all sales, but there’ll be a whole bunch of them, and secondary sales and trades . . . It’s impossible.”
“Once again: stay away. This is a professional job. You won’t get her,” Lucas said.
“And I certainly don’t want to be standing there with my dick in my hand.”
“Atta girl.”
When he hung up, Weather said with a certain tone in her voice, “Sounds like the two of you got pretty close.”
Lucas nodded. “Yeah . . . If we were living in Baghdad, I’d probably make her my second wife.”
Weather kicked him in the calf, said, “Oh, sorry, I slipped.”
* * *
—
LUCAS HAD BEEN HOME for two weeks. In that time, the FBI had torn Heracles to pieces, and it appeared that the company was about to be indicted on dozens of charges, from illegal weapons trafficking to illegal contacts with foreign terrorist groups, having provided both material and training support. The blight had spread to other contactor companies as well. The operators turned by FBI investigators had worked with several of those companies in addition to Heracles, and with criminal charges hanging over them, they were eager enough to take deals in return for information.
Lucas didn’t have a clear idea of how it all worked. The FBI was a swamp, and unless you were in it, it was impossible to tell precisely who was doing what. He’d called his friend Deputy Director Louis Mallard to ask a few questions, and it appeared that Jane Chase was right in the middle of it all.
* * *
—
JOHN MCCOY gave up everything he knew about Heracles but admitted to no knowledge of murder. He took a plea deal and would spend two years in a minimum security federal prison, which Lucas knew he could do standing on his head. Nobody had heard anything of Kerry Moore. Some thought he’d been murdered, like Jim Ritter; others thought he’d run. When asked, McCoy shook his head, but one perceptive interrogator thought he might have looked amused.
* * *
—
AN FBI CRIME SCENE CREW detected tiny pieces of copper in the walls of Jack Parrish’s kitchen and matched them to the bullet fragments taken from Jim Ritter’s body.
* * *
—
SENATOR SMALLS asked around quietly, a few friends, and told Lucas, “You know what? I can’t find anybody who talked to her halfway through the party, only at the beginning and at the end.”
“Toldja,” Lucas said.
* * *
—
LATE THAT NIGHT, on the same day that Taryn Grant was found dead, Lucas took a third call. There was a whistling sound in the background, and when Lucas asked about it, Tom Ritter told him it was satellite noise.
“I’m calling on a satphone. I’m sitting on a bench, on a nice bright day, at Bagram Air Base.”
“Is that—”
“In Afghanistan? Yes,” Ritter said. “Listen, I heard about Grant. It’s on the Internet here.”
“They’re interested in Wendy. Or Suzie or Carol, or whatever her name is. Maybe. I didn’t have much to say about it, but they’ll be pushing McCoy.”
“Think they’ll come to me?” he asked.
“I don’t think so. You’re out of it, given where you’re at. They might have some questions about Jim, but . . .”
“I haven’t seen him a lot in the past few years,” Ritter said. “Don’t know much about his love life.”
“Stick with that,” Lucas suggested.
“Tell me what happened,” he said. “All I know is what I’ve seen on the Internet news feeds.”
Lucas told him what he’d gotten from Smalls and Chase, and, when he was done, Ritter said, “Oh boy. It does sound like her, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah. But it’s not my case anymore,” Lucas said. “Or yours.”
“Stay loose, Lucas. You ever get to Afghanistan, give me a ring,” Ritter said. “We’ll go get some fried chicken. They got good fried chicken here.”
“I will. If you hear from Wendy, tell her to give me a ring.”
* * *
—
A COUPLE OF DAYS LATER, Lucas was sitting in his backyard with Virgil Flowers, waiting for the charcoal briquettes to get right for the steaks. Flowers had come up with Sam, the youngest child of his girlfriend. Flowers’s Sam and Lucas’s Sam were the same age, were amazed that they shared a name, had rapidly become friends, and were playing their version of mixed martial arts–croquet, while Lucas and Flowers sat in lawn chairs and talked.
They were drinking Leinenkugel’s and discussing child care when Lucas’s iPhone dinged with an incoming call from an unidentified phone.
Satellite noise. Then Wendy said, without preface, “I’ve been thinking about it. And I’ve been thinking about you. You believe I was involved in that shooting at the Watergate Hotel. Why didn’t you ever come after me?”
“We were looking for you . . .”
“No, you weren’t. Or if you were, you weren’t looking very hard. The media was going wild, Homeland Security was issuing press releases every five minutes—all of them wrong—the FBI was running in circles. The one group that might have given me trouble, which was you and your marshal friends, never came looking. You didn’t come even though you knew some people I was friends with. You never squeezed Tom, you never really squeezed John McCoy, you never squeezed Claxson or the lady who worked for him . . . Why was that?”
“We don’t have the investigatory resources to throw around like the FBI does,” Lucas said. “Or like Homeland Security. Whatever happened at the Watergate, it didn’t seem likely to have much connection with our main objective, which was to find out who tried to murder Senator Smalls.”
“Oh, bullshit, Davenport. Nobody came to the Watergate and shot the place up by accident, not with a machine gun,” she said. “You had to know there was some connection.”
When Lucas didn’t say anything, Wendy demanded, “Were you grooming me?”
“What?”
“When you got Tom to give me your phone number, did you want to talk so you could manipulate me . . . Were you grooming me to kill Grant?”
Lucas let that hang in the air, then said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” and hung up.
“What was that?” Flowers asked.
“Unfinished business,” Lucas said. He picked up his Leinie’s, took a swallow, and added, “But it’s finished now.”