—
LUCAS CARRIED a Sony voice-activated recorder in his pack, a unit only five inches long and less than an inch and a half wide. He dug it out, checked the battery, found a place to leave it—tucked under the mattress at the head of the bed, with only the microphone sticking out. He recorded precisely ten seconds of sound from the room television, a CNN news report. If somebody found the recorder and erased it, or simply took it, he would know as much as he would if it recorded somebody coming and going.
* * *
—
HE CALLED the last two names on Carter’s list, still got no answer. Since both numbers were supposedly good, and both supposedly to cell phones, he suspected that the calls were being ignored. He’d decided to drive back across the river, find the houses, hang around until someone showed, when a call came in to his cell phone from an unknown number.
He said, “Lucas Davenport.”
“Marshal Davenport? This is Carl Armstrong, the accident investigator.”
“Hey, Carl. What’s up, man?”
“You mentioned that lawn mower lady saw a black Ford F-250 going through town. There’s a nursery there with a video camera that covers the street. I asked them to let me take a look, and I spotted the truck and got the tags. It’s outta Virginia. But there’s a problem.”
“Like what?”
“The truck I saw on the video was black, like the lawn mower lady said, but when I looked up the registration it says the truck is blue.”
“So what do you think?” Lucas asked.
“If I was gonna do something like run another car off the road, and I thought somebody might see me or remember me, I’d steal the plates off another 250 and change them.”
“I would, too,” Lucas said. “Give me the details, I’ll look into it . . . What about faces? Could you see the guys in the truck?”
“You can see them, but you can’t quite make them out. I could see sunglasses and black hats.”
“Could you send me the video?”
“Sure, I got it here—I’ll email it to you. I had our computer guy make it the highest resolution he could.”
“This is good stuff, Carl.”
* * *
—
THE VIDEO CAME IN, but it wasn’t much to look at. The black pickup rolled past the camera, but the two people in the cab were obscured by reflections off its windows. Lucas agreed with Armstrong that the men were wearing sunglasses, but he wasn’t sure about the hats. To Lucas, it looked more like one of the men had long dark hair.
The truck was registered from a place called Centreville, which Lucas found on a Google map. A D.C. suburb, it was straight west, across the river, in Virginia. He turned on the tape recorder, tucked it into the mattress, put the “Do Not Disturb” sign on the doorknob, and went down to get his car.
The afternoon was getting on, but Lucas was in front of the first wave of the outgoing rush hour and made it into Centreville in a half hour, following the Evoque’s GPS. The license tag had gone to a Gerald and Marie Blake, who lived in a town house complex off I-66. The complex didn’t have a parking lot, as such, but instead nose-in parking right off the street.
Lucas cruised the Blakes’ address. The truck was parked out front—blue Ford F-250—but the plates no longer showed the number that Armstrong had given him. There was no sign that the truck had ever been involved in an accident.
Lucas considered for a bit, then pulled in, popped the restraining strap on his pistol, walked up to the front door, and pushed the doorbell. A minute later, the door opened, and a teenage girl looked out at him.
Lucas: “Are your parents home?”
Girl: “Who wants to know?”
Lucas took out his ID case with the badge. “U.S. Marshal Lucas Davenport . . . I need to talk to Gerald or Marie Blake, or both of them.”
Girl, turning: “Mommm . . .”
* * *
—
MARIE BLAKE came to the door a minute later, peering at him near-sightedly through computer glasses. She took them off as the girl said, “He says he’s a U.S. Marshal. He has a badge.”
“What’s going on?” the woman asked.
Lucas explained what he was doing, and she said, “We’ve never been to West Virginia, even passing through. We moved here from Delaware . . .” Her husband, she said, was at work; he was a bureaucrat with the Bureau of Land Management.
Lucas asked, “Do you know what your license plate number is?”
“No . . . There’s an insurance card in the cab; that should have the license number on it.”
Lucas knew what would happen, but they went out and looked anyway. The number on the truck didn’t match the number on the insurance card because the tags had been stolen off the Blakes’ truck and replaced.
He got back on the phone to Armstrong. “Do you have access to a database of stolen license plates in Virginia?”
“Sure. Take me a minute.”
Lucas gave him the tag number, and a minute later Armstrong came back and said, “Those plates were taken off a blue F-250 probably at the Fair Oaks Mall a week ago. They weren’t replaced with anything else; they were simply gone. The owner saw they were missing as soon as he came out of the mall, so he called the cops and reported it.”
“The day before the accident,” Lucas said.
“Yes.”
“They didn’t want the Blakes to notice that their tags were gone so they replaced them with another stolen set. That way, it’d take two steps to catch them—a cop would have to stop the Blakes and report the Blakes’ tags as missing, then spot the bad guy’s truck. Which nobody did.”
“Looks like it,” Armstrong said.
They were stuck. Lucas rang off, told Blake she had a problem with the license plates, that hers had been stolen and probably dumped somewhere after a crime had been committed. She needed to get new ones. He gave her a card and told her that if anyone at the Virginia DMV gave her a hard time to have them call him.
* * *
—
HE STILL HAD two more people to talk to from Carter’s list. Since he wasn’t far from where they lived, he decided to drop in. At his first stop, he saw somebody working inside James T. Knapp’s house, so he leaned on the doorbell until a heavyset woman came to the door. “What?”
Lucas identified himself, and said, “I’m looking for Mr. Knapp?”
“I’m the housekeeper. What’d he do?”
“Nothing, as far as I know. I’m checking up on somebody Mr. Knapp knows.”
“Huh.” The woman scowled at him, as though judging his genuineness, and finally admitted, “He’s gone off to California on some sort of mission.”
“He’s in the military?”
“No, he’s a preacher. He’s gone off on a preacher mission. Supposed to be back next week, but he paid me in advance for the week after that, too.”
* * *
—
AT THE NEXT HOUSE, a stand-alone ranch-style painted blue and gray in a quiet neighborhood of similar houses and trees and small lawns, he was walking away from the front door when a black five-liter Mustang pulled into the driveway. A thin, rangy, heavily tanned man in a blue Army uniform got out. He had lieutenant colonel’s silver leaves on his shoulders. “Hello?” he called out.
Lucas walked over and identified himself, and the colonel said, “Horace Stout. What can I do for you?”
“I need to talk to you about Jack Parrish.”
Stout grimaced, and said, “Better come inside.”
Stout was single but kept a neat place that included a studio grand piano, a Model M Steinway, in a corner of the living room with a pile of piano music on its closed lid. Lucas said that his wife had a similar model, and Stout said, “That’s what I got out of eleven years of marriage. That and a sick dog, which died last year.”
“Sorry about that,” Lucas muttered.
“Can I get you an orange juice or a vitamin water?” Stout asked. “I don’t keep any alcohol.”
“Juice would be fine,” Lucas said.