Lucas had three markers pointing at Ritter: his impression of the attacker’s face on the street; Walker’s identification; and the fact that he owned a black F-250. Could be a coincidence, with a little bit of a stretch, but Lucas felt he was on a roll, that Ritter was the one.
Like most of the other people Lucas was trying to find, Ritter lived across the Potomac in Virginia, in what turned out to be a neatly kept condominium complex not far from where the F-250 plates had been stolen. The complex had individual covered parking spaces at the back of the building. Although Ritter’s driver’s license hadn’t included an apartment number, Lucas spotted the black Ford pickup, which did have an associated apartment number; the apartment number apparently included a vacant space beside the pickup.
Lucas parked in a visitor’s lot and walked back to the F-250. There was nobody around in the noon heat, so he walked into the covered parking area and took a close look at the truck.
Smalls had said that his Cadillac had been hit by the passenger side of the attacker’s vehicle, and when Lucas squatted at the back of the truck bed, he thought he could see a subtle distortion in the truck’s sheet metal. He checked the driver’s side for a comparison, and when he came back to the passenger side, the distortion—nothing as clear-cut as a dent or a tear—seemed even more apparent, like a quarter-inch wave in the flow of the metal.
He walked down the side of the truck, to look at it from the front. The same distortion was visible, and the front right headlight cover had a small crack on the right side. He peered in the passenger-side window, but there was nothing visible on the seats. He pulled out a shirttail, used it to cover his hand as he tried all four doors. All four were locked.
The truck had been recently washed, Lucas thought, dragging his shirttail-covered hand across it: it was virtually spotless, and even a heavy forensic examination might have trouble placing it in West Virginia. Still, the truck had been involved in an unusual impact: he wasn’t sure he’d found the truck that had taken Smalls and Whitehead off the road, but he’d found a solid candidate. Proving it would be another problem, a greater problem than simply knowing it.
But what kind of impact would leave both trucks without obvious damage while still being violent enough to knock one truck right off the road? He thought about it . . .
His first thought: what if Ritter and his friends had rigged a lattice of freshly cut tree trunks and hung it off the side of their truck? They would have had to put padding under the trunks, against the side of the truck, to prevent damage, but they’d want the raw timber to hit the Cadillac.
It’d be simple enough. When Lucas was in the Boy Scouts, his troop had built rafts out of dead wood and rope and had floated down the Rum River on them. Hung on the side of a truck, the rafts would have worked well as protection against impact, and, even better, would have left evidence of wood contacting metal.
But who would think of that?
People who thought about killing other people in undetectable ways, Lucas figured. Professionals who were given a problem: knock a car off the road and down a bluff without any metal-on-metal contact. Given that dilemma, the tree-trunk-lattice idea would pop right up.
* * *
—
LUCAS WALKED BACK to the Evoque, cranked it up, pushed the air conditioner to max, and called Carl Armstrong, the West Virginia accident investigator.
“I may have found that F-250,” he said when Armstrong was on the phone. He described the truck’s condition, and asked, “Since you can see there was some impact, but since it’s been washed . . . is there going to be anything there for you?”
“If we can show there’s been an impact, we could question him about when it happened and why it is that the damage was both extensive yet subtle, and whether he reported the accident. That kind of damage would be uncommon—in fact, I’ve never run into anything like it. Be hard to explain.”
Lucas told Armstrong about the tree-trunk-lattice idea, and after a moment Armstrong said, “That seems kinda unlikely. Not to say . . . stupid.”
“I’ve given you an explanation,” Lucas said. “Do you think my idea could result in the kind of damage I’ve seen?”
“Well . . .”—Lucas could visualize Armstrong scratching his head—“it could, I guess. If it was padded on the back side. Maybe something like a good solid rubber mat, that would do it. As far as finding hard forensic evidence . . . Sounds unlikely. For one thing, everything you find driving around eastern West Virginia you’ll find driving around Virginia. Pollen, and all that.”
“Okay. I don’t want to do anything with it now, but I may be calling you to take a professional look, after we’re out in the open on the investigation.”
“Happy to do it,” Armstrong said. “But, really, a lattice?”
* * *
—
LUCAS WALKED AROUND to the front of the condominium complex and went to the glass front door, which turned out to be the first of two doors. He could get inside the outside glass one, but the interior door was locked. There was a phone on the wall, with a sign that boldly said “DIAL 1 + APT. NUMBER,” and, below that, not so boldly, “Dial 1+00 for Management Office.” A domed security camera in the ceiling monitored the door and the phone.
He called the office, identified himself to the woman who answered. “I’ll buzz you in. Take the first left and walk all the way down the hall to the end. We’re the last door on the left.”
She buzzed him in. Inside the door was an enclosed booth for mail, with mailboxes on the outside for the residents and an enclosed area behind them that would allow the mail carrier to insert mail in the open backs of the boxes without needing keys to open them. No camera was monitoring the booth’s door.
Lucas tested the door: locked, but the lock was crappy, and the door rattled in its frame. He continued on into the building, took the first left, walked down to the end of the hall and into the office, where a woman sat at a desk behind a service counter. She looked up from her computer and asked, “What’s going on?”
Lucas flashed his ID and badge at her, said, “I’m a U.S. Marshal. We are trying to talk to Thomas D. Pope, who we understand lives here.”
She looked puzzled, and said, “I know everybody who lives here. There’s no Thomas Pope.”
Lucas said, “Huh? Are you sure?”
“Absolutely positive,” she said. “Are you sure you got the name right?”
Lucas scratched his head. “I got the name right, but I might have the wrong apartment building . . . I’m navigating with a description and don’t have an exact address, as such.”
“You need an address,” the woman said. “There are about a million apartment buildings around here. This is a nice one, but there are quite a few that look like it.”
Lucas rubbed his nose. “Well, shoot, I guess I’m going to have to do it the hard way. Getting an exact address is a little harder than it usually would be, since the guy moves around a lot.”
“I wish I could help you . . .”
“Well, not your fault . . . Have a good day.”
* * *
—
LUCAS WALKED BACK toward the main entrance, but, instead of going out, he passed the elevators and then took a staircase up to the second floor. Hallways stretched in both directions from the landing, burgundy carpet in one direction, blue in the other. Nobody was in the hallway; the complex was white-collar, and residents were at work. If he needed to black-bag Ritter’s apartment, there wouldn’t be a lot of people around, and he saw no security cameras. He went back down the stairs, headed toward the exit.