“What should we do here? We were planning to call you about a search warrant for this afternoon.”
“Hold off on that,” Forte said. “Let’s see what the director has to say, see if anybody else gets into it. I’m sure the director will be talking with the attorney general . . . let’s see what happens.”
“You’re telling me to lay low.”
“For a few hours. Go climb the Washington Monument or something. Be a tourist.”
“All right. Smalls told me if you need some support, to call him.”
“If I need it, I’ll call you to call him,” Forte said. “I’d rather not talk to him directly, at this point. Not being a director.”
* * *
—
LUCAS FILLED IN Bob and Rae: “It’s not bad,” he said. “It’s a bureaucratic clusterfuck, but it has the effect of chasing these people out in the open.”
“There’s no way Grant or Parrish will do anything now,” Rae said.
“We couldn’t count on them doing anything before,” Lucas said. “They’re operating through Ritter and Heracles. Once all the newspeople start talking about Whitehead being murdered . . . maybe we’ll get a little panic. We could use a little panic.”
“So what are we going to do?” Bob asked.
* * *
—
NOTHING.
Spend a day or two as tourists, and let the situation cook, as Forte had suggested. Keep an eye on the news.
They tried to do that but failed. While Lucas went for a walk around the Capitol, and to look at the White House, Rae went to the National Gallery, and Bob went to find an uncle’s name on the Vietnam memorial, but by one o’clock they were back in Lucas’s room, watching sporadic commentary on the news channels, and a few minutes after that, Gladys Ingram, the lawyer, called Lucas.
“I’m going to email you a bunch of links. You said this phone was safe?”
“About as safe as it gets, but, you know . . .”
“I’m going to give you a string of numbers. You’ll need to write them down.”
Lucas got his pen and a legal pad: Ingram gave him eighteen random numbers. “That string will open the email I sent to you. If you copy the email with a pen—it’s quite short, but you’ll have to be accurate—you can touch the burn tab, and the email will eat itself. I don’t think, even if they’re listening to us, they could interfere, but if you save the documents instead of burning them, they might be able to get at them later. So print out a paper copy and hold it close.”
“I’ll do it right now.”
He did. There were twelve links, and they provided the same information that Kidd had . . . but now flowing from a different source. Lucas copied the twelve out on paper, then burned the email. If any investigator ever asked how he’d come up with all those links, he had an answer.
At two, Forte called and said, “Me, my boss—you met him, Gabe O’Conner—and a few high-level suits from the FBI want to talk to you.”
“Where at?”
“Conference room at the FBI building. They’ll take you to the conference room when you show up, at four o’clock sharp. Bring Bob and Rae.”
“Gonna be trouble?”
“Doesn’t feel like it. More like an ass-covering mission.”
* * *
—
LUCAS TOLD Bob and Rae that they’d been summoned, and they spent half an hour speculating about what would happen; and, despite the heat and the suffocating humidity, they decided to walk the two miles to the meeting.
“We need to look professional,” Bob objected. “If we walk, we’ll be all sweaty when we get there.”
Rae shrugged. “But it’ll sort of let them know we’re not too worried about things. They get all the media, but we’re just as big a deal as they are. Sort of.”
“So you’re saying we should push them back with offensive body odor?” Bob asked.
“Walk?” Rae asked Lucas. “Or drive, and spend an hour trying to find a parking place?”
“Walk,” Lucas said.
* * *
—
THEY STARTED WALKING by three o’clock, stopped on the way to get Cokes, paused at an Au Bon Pain across the street from the FBI to cool off, and arrived at the building, looking crisp and non-sweaty, although they might not have passed a sniff test.
“Goddamn building looks like it was built by fuckin’ Joseph Stalin,” Bob grumbled, looking up at the Hoover Building, as they crossed the street.
“Art history–wise, I would say you are correct,” Rae said.
* * *
—
INSIDE, they found Forte and O’Conner waiting in the lobby with an FBI gofer, who escorted them to an elevator, up a few floors, and fifty yards down a hallway to a conference room. Other than the five of them, and the usual table and chairs, the room was empty.
“Everybody likes to be last because, that way, we know who’s most important,” O’Conner said. He was a beefy man, in a pale blue suit and white shirt, carrying an old-style leather briefcase. He took a sheaf of papers from the case, and said, “I understand you guys may be asking for a search warrant.”
“Depending on how this comes out,” Lucas said.
“I can tell you that in advance. You’re to be cautiously aggressive. Or aggressively cautious. I’ve been told that the FBI is not anxious to get involved until they figure out who’s the fall guy. There are several possibilities, including you three.”
“Great,” Rae said.
“The thing is, if you pull this off and prove there was an assassination attempt, it’ll be a big feather in our cap. If you screw it up, then . . .” O’Conner was about to go on, but the door popped open, and a half dozen suits walked in—three men, three women—and everybody shook hands with everybody else.
* * *
—
THE MEETING took an hour. Lucas outlined the investigation, starting with the request from Smalls to finding the suspect truck to discovering the logs. He concluded by saying that the West Virginia accident investigators were looking at the paint sample with several different machines that he didn’t understand and would provide solid evidence that the paint came from Smalls’s Cadillac.
One of the feds said to Lucas, “We understand that you have a close relationship with the senator.”
“We’re not exactly friends, but I worked on an investigation that involved the Smalls–Grant Minnesota election two years ago, when Grant won Smalls’s Senate seat,” Lucas said. “He remembered me from then, asked me to work on this problem. I consulted with my superiors at the Marshals Service, and they concluded that the request was legitimate and that I could go forward with it.”
Forte added, with a smile, “Seeing that it was Senator Smalls, and that the Republican caucus voted to restore the seniority he held before his defeat by Senator Grant.”
“We’re not, uh, affected by the influence of a single senator,” one of the FBI suits said.
O’Conner said, “Really?”
The suit nodded, and said, “Yes, really,” but nobody really believed him. He didn’t even believe himself.
“Not even a senator who was the victim of an apparent assassination attempt . . . ?”
Another suit, this one a woman named Jane Chase, jumped in. “This isn’t the time or place to debate questions of influence.” She turned to Lucas. “You have a good deal of experience as a homicide investigator for the Minneapolis Police Department and the Bureau of Criminal Investigation.”
“Bureau of Criminal Apprehension,” Lucas corrected. “Yeah. Overall, I was the lead on about ninety murder cases, give or take, over twenty-five years or so. Most of them were straightforward enough, but some were . . . intricate. I’ve worked closely with a couple of your agents.”
She nodded. “We know. Deputy Director Mallard vouches for you and recommends that we step back and allow the Marshals Service to lead on this investigation.”
“Nice of him,” Lucas said. And, “He’s a smart guy.”
“Yes, he is,” Chase said. She looked around the table at the rest of the suits. “Does anyone have a problem with allowing Marshal Davenport and his colleagues to lead this investigation, at least for now?”