“Great,” Lucas said.
“In the meantime . . .” He jogged back to his SUV and pulled out a piece of what looked like white rubber. When he carried it back to the F-250, Lucas could see it was actually a cast made from the truck tire tracks they’d found on the mountainside where the logs had been dumped.
Armstrong squatted next to the truck, held the cast up to one of the tires, and they all bent over to look. “Same tires,” he said. “They come as one of the standard options with the truck, but less than thirty percent are equipped with them. Not definitive, but supportive.”
“Another straw on the camel’s back,” Bob said.
* * *
—
THE SIDES AND FRONT END of the truck bed had been fitted with a steel rack to give it more carrying capacity and better tie-down capability. Kerr walked along the side of the bed with a Sherlock Holmes–style magnifying glass. Halfway down, she stopped, looked more closely, turned to Armstrong, and said, “Carl . . . take a look.”
Armstrong took the magnifying glass to look at what appeared to be nothing at all. He said, “Huh,” and, “You guys want to look?”
Lucas took the magnifying glass, and Armstrong took a mechanical pencil from his pocket and pointed at the truck, and said, “Right at the end of the pencil point.”
Lucas looked, and under the glass could see three or four wispy beige threads clinging to a tiny nick in the steel rail. “What am I looking at?”
“Those look exactly like the threads that were stuck to the padded side of the log. I’ll kiss your ass if they aren’t identical. We need to find as many as we can and collect them; a lab will tell us if they’re the same.”
Bob and Rae both took a look, and Bob said, “That’s the search warrant.”
* * *
—
LUCAS CALLED FORTE. Forte wrote the search warrant application for Ritter’s apartment and the interior of the truck and drove it over to the judge’s chambers. Getting the warrant back to Ritter’s place took three boring hours. Lucas, Bob, Rae, Armstrong, and Kerr hung out in their vehicles in the parking lot, making occasional individual runs out to a Safeway Supermarket for food, drinks, and magazines.
They didn’t need the search warrant to fit the F-250 templates to the side of the truck, so Armstrong and Kerr did that while the others watched and waited. The photography was interesting, in a way, for a while, and then they slipped back into a hot, sweating boredom.
When Armstrong finished, he transferred his photos to a laptop and brought the laptop over to Lucas’s Evoque. With Bob and Rae looking over their shoulders from the backseat, Armstrong ran through the high-res photos on the laptop’s screen, and the impact dent was plain enough—Kerr had been on the other side of the templates with a flash, which fired when Armstrong took the shot, illuminating the space between the templates and the truck.
“It’s what you’d expect if they did what we think they did with the logs,” Armstrong said. “I bet they don’t even know that the truck was damaged.”
* * *
—
FORTE DELIVERED the warrant himself, bringing along four additional marshals. Two of the marshals were left in the parking lot to watch the truck; Armstrong and Kerr began collecting fiber samples from the truck and bagging them for the lab.
Lucas, Bob, Rae, Forte, and the other two marshals went to Ritter’s apartment; the two marshals specialized in searches, the first man computers, the second safes and lockboxes. There was no answer to their knocks, so they showed the search warrant to the apartment manager and ordered her to open Ritter’s door.
She squinted at Lucas, and said, “Hey, you’re the marshal who got lost. You were lying to me when you were here before.”
Lucas said, “Sorry.”
He was lying again.
* * *
—
THEIR SEARCH WARRANT was sharply limited to records, both paper and computer files, and to weapons, since Ritter was suspected in the Douglas Last shooting in the Twin Cities. Last had supposedly been shot with his girlfriend’s gun, a fact not mentioned in the warrant application. The warrant specifically said that they were allowed to search for records that might be hidden in the apartment, which, for practical purposes, meant they could look at everything, but if they found something criminal that was not openly visible, and was not a record or a weapon, it probably wouldn’t make it into court.
Ritter’s apartment smelled of almost nothing, except maybe pasta and kitchen cleaner. He lived a spartan life except in three areas: he had a high-end, high-definition television, which sat in front of a seven-foot couch; he had a high-end stereo system, with a turntable in addition to a CD player, and a load of fashionable vinyl records; and he had lots of guns.
The guns were in a gun safe, as opposed to a real safe, in a closet. It was bolted to the floor, and the locks-and-safes specialist took no more than five minutes to get it open.
Inside were fourteen guns—five rifles, a tactical shotgun, and eight handguns—none of them cheap, in a variety of sizes and calibers. Two of the handguns were equipped with screw-on silencers. The marshal noted the serial numbers on the silencers and checked with the ATF computer records and learned that they were both licensed to Ritter and so were legal.
“That’s a shame,” he told Lucas. “That would have been a nice round federal felony if they weren’t registered.”
They also found about a thousand rounds of ammo for the guns. The apartment had a small, tidy kitchen, with two tables. One table was for eating, the other was a gun repair and reloading station.
* * *
—
RITTER HAD an inexpensive Dell desktop computer and a small multipurpose printer/scanner. The computer had no password. All its software was the standard stuff that came with the machine, plus Microsoft Word and a privacy application called Win/DeXX.
That was it: there were no emails, there was no browser history, there were no documents, there were no cookies. The computer specialist marshal explained that Win/DeXX was a Windows software package that could remove any trace of the computer’s use at the end of each session. Click on the Win/DeXX icon, and whatever you’d been doing was lost to history.
“It all goes to where television pictures go when you turn off the TV,” the marshal said.
Ritter also had three black, two-drawer file cabinets in the office: Rae worked through those, while Bob and Lucas prowled the apartment, trying the common hiding places and plugging a lamp into each outlet to make sure it was operable. Outlet caches were currently fashionable among the crooked.
Lucas found the first useful piece of information: Ritter had a modest selection of clothing, mostly athletic and outdoorsy, including camo cargo pants and jackets, along with a dark suit, suitable for funerals, three sport coats in varied textures and shades of blue, three pairs of gray or black slacks, four pairs of boots, and one pair of black dress shoes.
Lucas was patting down the jackets when he felt something stiff in the inside breast pocket of one of the sport coats. When he pulled it out, it was a plastic hotel key card. On the back was a logo of the Hilton Garden Inn Omaha East/Council Bluffs.
Ritter had been in Omaha.
“Bag that baby,” Bob said.
“Think we can call it a record?” Lucas asked.
“Fuck yeah.”
* * *
—