—
ARMSTRONG ARRIVED in a pickup with two crime scene investigators. The sky had cleared, and the three men carefully peeled the plastic off the logs. Armstrong looked at the paint scrapings, comparing them to a piece of metal taken from Smalls’s Cadillac. After a moment, he muttered something to himself, stood up, and walked over to Lucas, Bob, and Rae.
“If that paint didn’t come off the Caddy, I’ll eat the logs. We need to take paint samples and transport the logs. You said there were some tracks that might be associated?”
They showed him the tracks, and the two CSI guys went to work with lights, cameras, and tape measures, eventually clipping the vegetation in the tread marks and making casts with a beige-colored liquid that quickly solidified.
As the sun dropped toward the horizon, the logs were wrapped in plastic padding and loaded one by one onto the pickup and tied down, with red flags hanging from the exposed ends sticking out of the back of the truck. Armstrong asked Lucas, “What about the truck? When can I look at it?”
“Day after tomorrow, probably,” Lucas said. “We’ve got some prep work to do.”
“So do I,” Armstrong said. “I need to measure the logs and see what kind of impact marks they’d leave on an F-250 if they were used the way we think they were . . . although they were probably well padded. The formal lab results on the paint will take a while. And we need to go over the logs inch by inch to see if there’s even a speck of black paint.”
“When we decide to officially look at the truck, we’ll call,” Lucas said.
* * *
—
THAT NIGHT, Lucas walked over to Kitten Carter’s apartment complex and took an elevator to the fourth floor. She was standing in the hallway and waved at him when he stepped off the elevator.
Carter lived in a two-bedroom unit, with the second bedroom converted into a compact, messy office with a desk and two visitor’s chairs. Lucas saw the office as he walked by, but Carter pointed him into the living room and asked him if he’d like a glass of wine or a bottle of water. He took water, and she asked if he wanted bubbly or still, and he took bubbly. When they finally sat down to talk, he told her about finding the truck.
“Then we’ve got . . . something? What do we have?”
“We’ve got one end of the string,” Lucas said. “If we find black paint on the logs, we could pick up Ritter. But I don’t think they’ll find any—I’ve looked at that truck and I didn’t see a single scrape or mark of any kind. So we get Armstrong over here to go over the truck, we roust Ritter, but we don’t take him yet. Let’s see if we can create some cracks in their team.”
“How?”
“Do you know anybody at the Post, or one of the major TV stations, who you could talk to off the record? Who would never give you up?”
She nodded. “Yes. Of course. I can always feed them a tip, if you can tell me what to say.”
“I need you to give them the names of a couple of people. Russell Forte, over at the Marshals Service—and the sheriff we worked with—and Carl Armstrong in West Virginia. None of them might give much up, but if you give a good reporter a few details, he’ll be able to pry a few more facts out into the open. Especially if he talks to the sheriff.”
“Give me the details. In one minute.” She got off the couch and went into her office and came back with a legal pad. “Okay. I want to make sure I get this right.”
“Investigators from the Marshals Service found four logs with paint on them that match the paint from Senator Smalls’s Cadillac. That’s now being confirmed in a crime scene lab . . .”
He gave her the name of the sheriff and the deputy who found the logs, and Forte’s name and phone number. He added, “Marshals Service investigators have reported to their superiors that they have a lead on the truck, based on video taken the day before the murder and assassination attempt.”
“When should I feed it to them?”
“Depends on who you’re going to give it to,” Lucas said.
“Depends on when you want it out. I can give it to a friend at WJZ and have it on the air tomorrow night, or to a woman at the Post, who’d put it up the next morning . . . or both.”
“Let’s go with both,” Lucas said. “We don’t want them to miss it. Make sure you’re totally off the record.”
“What are you going to do?”
“We’re going to look for reaction . . . We’re gonna hope for one.”
* * *
—
THE NEXT DAY wasn’t quite a waste. Ritter’s truck remained parked at his apartment, with the empty space next to it. Lucas did see Ritter, arriving back at his apartment at five-fifteen in the afternoon, driving a sporty red Mazda Miata. He left again at seven o’clock and drove a mile or so to a cocktail lounge called the Wily Rat, with Lucas following behind, and with Bob, who’d been about to take over the watch from Lucas, trailing in the Tahoe.
Ritter parked and walked toward the nightclub’s entrance. Before he got there, a short, slender woman came out, looked both ways down the sidewalk, and spotted Ritter walking toward her. She trotted over to him, put her hands on his shoulders, jumped up and wrapped her legs around his waist. Ritter kissed her, and they spoke for a minute. Then she jumped down, and they walked into the club.
Bob followed them inside a few minutes later, got a beer, watched for a while, walked back outside, and told Lucas, who was waiting in the parking lot, “They’re getting burgers and beers. Met some people in there, look like military folks. Yakking it up.”
“Not much, then.”
“Not yet. My turn to watch them. Do you want me to follow them home?”
“Be nice to know who the woman is,” Lucas said.
“I’ll see if I can spot her car, get her plates.”
“Okay.” Lucas yawned. “I’m going back to the hotel. Kitten said there’ll be something on TV tonight about the assassination attempt, so . . . you might see something from Ritter. If anything happens, call. Gonna get up early. We should see something in the papers tomorrow, for sure, and all over TV.”
11
Taryn Grant didn’t see the original broadcast about the assassination attempt on Porter Smalls, but her chief of staff picked up an echo on CNN. Mabel Tate was at first bemused with the report, which was more than a little vague. Then, recalling the controversy surrounding her boss’s initial election, and with the news reports’ reminder that a woman had been killed, bemusement shifted to concern, and she called Grant at home.
Grant did not like to be called at home with anything less than end-of-the-world problems. She had a date that night with an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury (Legislative Affairs), who was on temporary career-building loan to the Treasury from JPMorgan Chase. She hoped to impress him with the plight of hapless billionaires facing unfair tax burdens.
He was a sleaze, she knew, the kind of government official who owned a specialized high-riding electric razor that kept him in permanent three-day-beard mode, and who wore custom silk dress shirts open at the throat to show off the mat of chest hair beneath, but . . .
He had his uses.
Grant definitely favored men who had uses.
* * *
—
WHEN HER PHONE RANG, she picked it up, saw “Tate” on the screen, and asked, “What?”
“Have you been watching the news?” Tate asked.
“Are we bombing somebody?”
“I wouldn’t call you for that,” Tate said. “This might be worse.”