“Ah, yeah—he runs Heracles. They call him the director,” Forte said. “Anyway, there’s no sign that any names that we know rented a car in Omaha. Probably used phony IDs.”
“They fly into Omaha . . . What’s that? Six hours from the Twin Cities?” Lucas asked.
“I checked on Google Maps. It’s six hours if you pay strict attention to the speed limit. If you let it out, seven miles over the limit, drive straight through, with one gas stop, less than that.”
“Cell phone?”
“Okay, there’s a problem,” Forte said. “Ritter placed a half dozen calls to various people around the D.C. area the day Weather was attacked. There were more calls the day before, and the day after, and every day since, all in the Washington metro area. Of course, everybody but a complete idiot knows that calls can be traced. His phone made the call; we don’t know that Ritter did.”
“You know who he called?”
“That’s where it gets interesting. In the days before and immediately after Weather was hurt, he called only four different guys, including Parrish and Claxson,” Forte said. “Parrish made quite a few other calls, but Claxson, Ritter, and the two other guys didn’t call anyone but Parrish and each other.”
“Tell me that again,” Lucas said.
“They only called each other and Parrish,” Forte said. “We know that if Ritter was the driver in West Virginia, he had at least one other accomplice, because that old lady saw two guys in the black truck. There may have been a third if they had a spotter, and they probably did. Then there’s Parrish and Claxson.”
Lucas: “The other two guys, the accomplices, fly out to Omaha with Ritter and Claxson. They all leave their regular cells behind in Washington and take burners. Parrish uses the regular phones to call all the others to establish alibis. If that’s what happened, we should have the names of the two accomplices, too.”
“Yes, we do,” Forte said. “I’m digging out their records right now.”
* * *
—
FOR THE REST of the afternoon, Forte forwarded records to Lucas, including everything he could find for John McCoy and Kerry Moore, the other two men who were calling Ritter, Parrish, and Claxson around the time of Weather’s auto accident. Like Ritter, both McCoy and Moore worked for Flamma, the Heracles subsidiary. And both had been in elite Army or Marine units before they went private.
Forte found photos of the other two, and Lucas was fairly certain that Moore, an ex-Marine, was the mugger he’d hit in the face.
He called Rae with Moore’s information, including his apartment address in Virginia, and asked them to check him out. “I’m especially interested to know whether he has a black eye or a swollen nose,” Lucas said.
“I’ll go now—I’m looking at his address on my iPad, and it’s only a half mile from Ritter’s. I’ll walk over, see if I can find a place to hang. If Bob’s not seeing anything at Parrish’s place, maybe you ought to switch him over here to keep an eye on Ritter’s.”
Lucas did. By the end of the day, neither Ritter or Moore had shown up at their apartments—but they were young and single, so that wasn’t entirely improbable. At the same time, Rae couldn’t hang out any longer at the Starbucks she’d found, and Bob felt he might be conspicuous if he continued to park and repark on the streets around Ritter’s.
Lucas called them in.
* * *
—
THE THREE OF THEM had a late meal at the hotel, and Lucas laid out what he and Forte had found in the records.
“So they did it,” Bob said. “If we can get this Armstrong guy to say he believes that Ritter’s truck was involved in the West Virginia hit, would that be enough to get a search warrant for Ritter’s apartment?”
“Maybe, if we found the right judge,” Lucas said. “Forte may have some ideas about that.”
Rae was shaking her head. “I have my doubts. We know, but it’s weak on paper.”
“The other problem being, Ritter might have pulled the trigger, both on Smalls and Whitehead, and on Weather, but I mostly want to get the people behind Ritter,” Lucas said. “That looks to me like Grant, Claxson, and Parrish. We’re nowhere near those guys.”
“Rousting Ritter will stir things up,” Rae said.
“Yeah. I’m counting on that,” Lucas said.
* * *
—
WHEN THEY FINISHED DINNER, Lucas called Armstrong in West Virginia: “Can you make it over here tomorrow to look at the truck?”
“Yup. I’ll call my boss right now, and I’ll bring a tech with me,” Armstrong said. “What time do you want me there?”
“How long will it take you to get here?”
“Five hours, if we drive,” Armstrong said. “We could be out of here by seven o’clock, get there about noon.”
“How about flying?” Lucas asked.
“Rather drive,” Armstrong said. “We’d have to drive down to Charleston, wait for the plane, fly for an hour, get a car at the other end, and we’ve got some equipment—it would take almost as long to fly as to drive—and then we’d have to get back.”
“So drive; we’ll plan to look at our guy at noon.”
When he was off the phone with Armstrong, Lucas called Weather, and told her what he’d figured out.
“Good. You learned a lot,” she said. “You’ve got the names of the men who hit me and murdered Last. You’ve always said that knowing was a big deal.”
“It is,” Lucas said. “Now to bag them.”
15
Lucas, Bob, and Rae went out for breakfast together, and Lucas called Forte to tell him about the day’s plan. Forte thought the information they had was too sparse for a search warrant, but Lucas asked him to spot a friendly federal judge in case they found a bit more.
“If it would help, I could call Smalls and see if he’d talk to the judge. Explain the seriousness of the situation,” Lucas said.
“Also explain the seriousness of getting confirmed by the Senate in case a judge should be nominated for the appeals court,” Forte said.
“He might do that,” Lucas said. “What do you think?”
A long pause. “Call Smalls. He’s a lawyer, right?”
“Yes.”
“Then he’ll be aware that there might be some lines he wouldn’t want to cross . . . when making the request.”
* * *
—
LUCAS CALLED SMALLS on his burner and made the request. Smalls said, “I could do that. In fact, I know a judge down that way who’d probably give you a warrant with what you’ve got right now. Benjamin Park. Nice fellow. I’ll give you a ring after I talk to him.”
“Are you in a safe spot?” Lucas asked.
“I’m so safe that even I don’t know where I’m at,” Smalls said.
When Lucas hung up, Rae said, “Sometimes this inside baseball makes me nervous, speaking of things ethics-wise.”
Bob shook his head. “You know better than that. Almost everything in Washington is inside baseball, ethics-wise. Been that way since the git-go.”
“Didn’t have as many lawyers at the git-go,” she said.
* * *
—
SMALLS CALLED BACK at eleven o’clock, and said he’d spoken with the judge, who agreed to take an expedited look at a search warrant request.
“I believe you’ll get it,” he said.
They drove over to Ritter’s apartment complex in two cars, and Lucas led the way around back, where the truck was still sitting in the carport. They didn’t approach it until one o’clock, when Carl Armstrong and a technician named Jane Kerr rolled into the parking lot.
They all got out, shook hands, and walked as a group to the black F-250. Lucas pointed out the ripples down the right side of the truck, and both Armstrong and Kerr took a look, running their hands over the panels, and Armstrong asked Kerr, “Do you see it?”
“I definitely see it,” she said. “I can feel it, too—at least as good as I see it.”
Armstrong said to Lucas, “We’ve got templates from an undamaged truck just like this one, and when we fit the cutouts over the side of the truck, you’ll be able to see the damage more clearly. We’ll take photos in case we need the evidence.”