—
LUCAS TOLD THEM, and the two women listened quietly. “You’re saying they almost killed Weather to move you off the job,” Mattson said.
“Yes. Whether they were trying to kill her or only hurt her bad enough to get me back here, I don’t know,” Lucas said.
“They were willing to kill her, like they were Smalls’s girlfriend,” Letty said. “They killed that Last person in cold blood.”
“That’s right,” Lucas said. To Mattson: “That’s why I need somebody good in here. These guys are professionals. They kill for a living.”
“They’ve messed up a few times,” Weather observed. “Missed Smalls, killed his girlfriend. They tried to mug you but failed . . .”
“Would have worked with you, though, if Last’s mother hadn’t come to see me,” Lucas said. “St. Paul cops said it looked for all the world like a suicide. Like he sat there and finished a bottle of vodka and then shot himself. The gun even belonged to his girlfriend, nobody’s prints on it but his.”
“Interesting,” Flowers said.
Letty said, “Yeah. Almost worth staying for.”
“No, no, no,” Weather said. “You get on back to school. And, Lucas, when are you going back to Washington?”
“That depends on you,” Lucas said.
“They’re letting me out of here tomorrow, I think, if I promise to stay in bed for a couple of more days. Catrin can take me around, Helen can handle the house and the kids . . . you need to take care of this.”
“I’ll wait until you’re home,” Lucas said. “But, yeah—I oughta get back. These people need to be put away.”
“These people need to get shot, is what they need,” Letty said. She and Mattson slapped hands. Flowers only raised his eyebrows.
* * *
—
LUCAS TOOK Mattson aside before he left the hospital: “I need to make sure you’re okay with this.”
“Weather’s a good friend. She helped me a lot after my . . . problem,” Mattson said.
“How about a grand a day?” Lucas asked.
“Lucas, that’s not . . .”
“Yes, it is,” Lucas said. “You’ve taken a leave, I’ve got the money. Is that good?”
“That’s better than good,” Mattson said. “I’d do it for free.”
“I know. It’s nice for all of us that you don’t have to.”
* * *
—
SHE WENT BACK to Weather, and Lucas and Letty walked out of the hospital with Flowers. In the parking lot, Flowers said, “You need anything, let me know. Anything. I can always take some undertime. If Catrin needs somebody to spell her . . .”
Letty got a handful of Flowers’s shirt and pulled him in and kissed him on the lips, and let the kiss linger. “Thank you.”
Lucas said, “Hey . . . Hey! The guy’s practically married.”
“He could still fool around,” Letty said. “I mean, God, it’s like you don’t even live in the twenty-first century.”
“Hey!”
* * *
—
LUCAS FINALLY MADE a call to Rae Givens, told her to jack up Bob. “I’m headed back to Washington day after tomorrow.”
“Ooo. We get to shoot somebody?”
“That could happen,” Lucas said. “Try to pretend you’re not happy about it.”
* * *
—
LUCAS GOT Weather settled at home, watched her for a day until she got annoyed—“I’m unhappy enough about this neck brace that I’m going to take it out on you, and I’m too tired to fight, so go to Washington and fix this,” she said.
Lucas and Letty went to the airport together, Lucas headed east, Letty west, and when they’d gotten through security, they sat at Lucas’s gate until it was time for him to board the plane. She gave him a squeeze when he got in line, and said, “Call me every night and tell me what’s happening. In case I have to come out there . . .”
“I’ll be okay,” he said. “I don’t want you out there under any circumstances.”
Letty could be as cold as anyone Lucas had ever known. She stepped back, and said, “There’s only one circumstance that would take me out there. Think about it.”
He thought about it on the plane. She’d be out to Washington if he were killed. She’d bring a gun. In some ways, she was a typical lighthearted college girl; in other ways, she wasn’t.
Not at all.
* * *
—
BOB AND RAE were waiting when he got in, and they met in Lucas’s room, where he told them all about the accident.
When he was done, Bob said, “This . . . You can’t do this kind of thing out of your hip pocket. They had to do some intel work; they must have had some computer access to spot the drunk . . . If he was living with his girlfriend, he wouldn’t even have an address of his own. How’d they find him?”
“Probation records,” Lucas said. “If they have a good computer guy, he could get into state files . . .”
Rae nodded. “We’ve had that problem on the federal level. The files are designed to provide a fast response to people who aren’t computer jocks. For a serious hacker, getting in there would be child’s play.”
“And we’re dealing with people who probably have access to federal computer systems,” Lucas said.
“The safest bet here would be to make a hard move on Ritter. We know he used a truck once, so I have to believe he was probably there in Minnesota,” Bob said.
“I agree,” Lucas said. “We don’t have enough for an arrest or a search warrant, but we can roust him, impound his truck, get Carl Armstrong to take a look at it. I’ll get Russell looking for a way to put Ritter in St. Paul—run his credit cards, look at airlines.”
“Put this Parrish guy in there, too,” Rae said.
* * *
—
THEY’D MOVE the next morning, they decided. Bob and Rae had been watching Ritter’s truck during the week Lucas was gone. They would continue with that the next day, while Lucas would work with Forte on a computer search of electronic records on both Ritter and Parrish.
When the other two had gone, Lucas called Forte and told him what he wanted to do, and Forte agreed to start pulling all the records he could think of, that might track the movements of the two men during the days before and after Weather was hit.
With that under way, Lucas called Carl Armstrong in West Virginia, to get the latest results on the logs they’d pulled out of the mountainside ditch.
“The news is mixed,” Armstrong told him. “The paint on the logs came from the Cadillac, but we knew that was probably the case. The other side of the logs, the ones that would be on the attack truck . . . we’ve got white canvas fibers. I think they padded the logs, probably to minimize damage to the side of the truck. They must’ve taken the padding with them after they threw the logs in the ditch—we’ve got no paint on the logs themselves.”
“Damnit,” Lucas said.
“Well, you told me they were pros,” Armstrong said. “That sounds professional.”
“Talk to you tomorrow, Carl,” Lucas said.
* * *
—
FORTE GOT BACK with the information that Parrish had probably been in Washington the night that Weather got hit.
“I pulled his credit card charges, and he uses his cards a lot. We have charges for most days leading up to the attack on Weather, on the day itself, and every day since, all around Washington. But Ritter . . . Ritter has MasterCard, Visa, Chase, and Amex cards, but he went dark three days before Weather was attacked and didn’t pop up again until two days later. He doesn’t use his card as much as Parrish, but he uses it every day or two. I couldn’t find any other five-day periods when he didn’t use one or the other. Not when he was in the States.”
“He was trying to avoid anything that would put him in the Cities.”
“I think so. That’s negative proof, not so good for a jury. But now we know,” Forte said. “No airline tickets, no trace of any cars rented in the Twin Cities, but we have George Claxson’s private plane flying into Omaha the first day Ritter goes silent.”
“Who’s George Claxson again?” Lucas asked. The name rang a bell, but he couldn’t place it.