At the CIA, Parrish seemed to have specialized in aerial and satellite photo interpretation, and had written a number of papers on the subject; he’d also written two papers with obscure titles that seemed to be mathematical studies of where “irregular fighters” could be found.
That all sounded like desk jobs to Lucas, but Parrish had a Bronze Star with “V” device and a Purple Heart. Lucas didn’t know what a “V” device meant, and when he looked it up, it turned out that a Bronze Star could be awarded for general meritorious service, even to a civilian—a news reporter had gotten one once—but a “V” device indicated “Valor” and was a combat award. Lucas knew the Purple Heart meant that Parrish had been wounded, but there were no details on the wound. Other military awards included ribbons for service in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
So Parrish had been shot at and apparently hit. Nothing in the files indicated that the Army had any doubts about him.
He’d been married and later divorced, and currently seemed to be not married. His ex-wife was named, and had a security clearance, but the level of the clearance wasn’t mentioned. Parrish got consistently high evaluations as a Senate researcher and later as an aide to Grant.
A second file contained Parrish’s divorce decree. The divorce had been in Maryland and had apparently been by mutual consent. His wife got the house but no alimony. There was no testimony about abuse or anything else, other than their agreement that the marriage was “irretrievably broken.”
A third file contained a list of companies that would incur economic impacts, both bad and good, under Senate bills that Carter expected to receive bipartisan support. Heaviest impacts were on businesses and communities that supported now-obsolete military bases that were facing closure.
Smalls supported all of the closures except one on the West Coast. Carter noted that he wanted that base kept open as the possible site for an atomic power reactor, but since all of the California delegation, both Republicans and Democrats, opposed the idea of a reactor on the coast, Smalls’s opposition to the closure was seen as idiosyncratic and garnered little support. There was no reason to kill Smalls for any of his Senate activity, as far as Lucas could see.
A fourth, even shorter file contained nothing but a list of four names, with addresses and telephone numbers, and a note from Carter that said “These people don’t like Parrish and might talk to you. Call me when you’re done with this.”
* * *
—
WHEN HE’D FINISHED with the files, Lucas knew all kinds of things he hadn’t known that morning, but nothing that pointed in any particular direction. If anything, Parrish seemed like an accomplished bureaucrat, somebody who’d always been good at what he did.
Lucas closed the laptop down and called Carter on the burner phone. She answered on the third ring, and he asked, “Can you talk?”
“Sure.”
“I’ve read the files, and Parrish doesn’t seem like a terrible guy, but you said he was a snake. Why’s he a snake? And what’s with the list of names?”
“He is a snake, and part of his snakiness is that he doesn’t seem like an awful guy to most people. He’s a sociopath, in my opinion, but a cautious one. He doesn’t care who gets hurt as long as it’s not him.”
“A good match for Grant, then,” Lucas said. “I think the same thing about her, although she might be darker than a simple sociopath; she could be a full-blown psycho.”
“Whatever—I’m not sure how much definitions help,” Carter said. “Anyway, that list of names . . . those are people who have reason to seriously dislike Parrish and who might be in a position to give you some information about him. He has made some enemies getting to where he is, and I listed them in the order that would reflect the intensity of their dislike. Joe Rose, the first guy, probably likes him the least—hates him, actually. And so on. That’s something I keep track of.”
“Okay. Thank you.”
“Lucas, you scared me this morning,” she said. “The secret phones and all that. If you read those files, you can see that there’s not much detail in them—you can remember everything you need to know, about Parrish and his wife and his jobs. I’d appreciate it if you’d get rid of that thumb drive: if somebody got that drive from you, they might be able to figure out who copied the files, and, from that, who got them: me.”
“I’ll get rid of it,” Lucas said. “I mean, really get rid of it, everything but the names.”
He did just that when he got off the phone. He copied down the names, addresses, and phone numbers of Parrish’s supposed enemies, smashed the thumb drive with the sliding shower door, and flushed the pieces down the toilet.
That done, he went back to the desk, looked at the notepad with Joe Rose’s phone number on it, and punched the number into his phone.
6
Joe Rose had a voice that sounded like gravel being shoveled from a truck—too much whiskey, cigars, or both. Lucas only told him he was a U.S. Marshal, that he was investigating an auto accident only peripherally involving Mr. Rose. He didn’t mention either Jack Parrish or Porter Smalls.
Rose told Lucas he lived in Bethesda, Maryland, and that he’d be around all day. “I work at home now.”
Lucas retrieved his car from the valet, followed the GPS through tangled traffic to Bethesda, which was northwest of the District. The distance couldn’t have been more than ten miles but took him almost forty minutes to drive.
Rose lived in what was probably an expensive house, half brick, half white clapboard, of a style that Lucas thought of as confused—it had a bunch of overlapping roofs, a truncated clapboard turret, two single-car garage doors that probably fed the same double-car garage, a cobblestone driveway, and a manicured front lawn. The front door gave onto a tiny covered porch, good only for keeping the rain off visitors while they waited for a ride.
Several black cables led from a telephone pole near the street to the house—power lines, maybe a hardwired phone, maybe cable television/Internet . . . but a couple of more as well, although Lucas didn’t know what function they might serve.
Lucas parked in the driveway, stepped out into a humid, nearly wet heat, and rang the doorbell. As he waited, he looked up and down the street: no people, no cars, nothing moving, not even a cat.
A bedroom community.
* * *
—
THE DOOR OPENED, and a man who was probably Joe Rose stood in the doorway and asked, “Do you have some ID?”
“I do,” Lucas said. He showed Rose his badge and ID card, and Rose stepped back and said, “Come on in. Uh . . . I can’t think of any reason that I would, but should I have a lawyer here?”
Lucas shook his head. “No. The investigation doesn’t involve you in any way, except as a possible source of information.”
Rose was Lucas’s height and build, but older, retirement age, gray-haired, large-nosed, with a pair of inexpensive computer glasses pushed up on his forehead. Close up, his voice sounded even harsher than it had on the phone—an injury of some kind; he hadn’t gotten it singing. He was pale, like an office worker, and freckled, wore tan slacks and a golf shirt, loafers but no socks.
He said, “Okay, I got the time. You know I don’t have a regular job anymore.”
“No, I didn’t know that,” Lucas said, as he followed him into the house and down a hallway. The hallway opened into what had probably been designed as a family room but now was being used as a spacious office, with three separate computer monitors on a library table.
“Yeah, I’m a contract researcher now. You know what’s not on the Internet now?”
“I thought everything was.”
“Nope. There’s tons of government stuff that isn’t—stuff that’s still important but that was recorded before 2000 or so,” Rose said. “Internet people don’t know how to do paper research, courthouse research, so I’m doing fairly well. I’m praying it keeps up, because I can use the money.”
“Cool. You invented your own job,” Lucas said.