OF THE SIX file cabinet drawers Rae was working, two drawers were a jumble of office supplies and computer cables, the other four a collection of investment and bank statements and employment and tax records. “I’m looking at it, and he does have some money, about . . . maybe eight hundred thousand dollars in cash and investments, if I’m not missing anything. He seems to spend a lot of time overseas, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he gets free food and housing along with a nice salary that he can’t spend anywhere over there . . . so his investments don’t seem outlandish. You’d need a good accountant to tell you for sure, and I’m not one.”
Sitting on one of the file cabinets was an innocuous framed photo showing Ritter, with two male friends and two women, in what looked like a park. He had his arm around the shoulder of one of the women, who might have been who they’d seen at the Wily Rat nightclub. She was half turned away from the camera, her face obscured, but Lucas could see that she was short and dark-haired.
* * *
—
FORTE HAD LEFT with the computer specialist a half hour after they started the search. The locks-and-safes guy was helping go through the apartment inch by inch when he took a call from one of the two marshals who were at the truck.
He listened for a moment, then said, “Hey, Lucas, Ritter’s down at the truck. He just showed up.”
Lucas took the phone, and asked, “He’s driving the Miata?”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t let him leave,” Lucas said. “We’ll be right down.”
“He’s already parked,” the marshal said. “He’s coming up, and he’s pissed.”
“Walk with him,” Lucas said.
* * *
—
RITTER WAS at the door five minutes later. He was a bit shorter than average, but muscular, dark-haired, dark-eyed, dark-complected, with three parallel white scars on one side of his face that might have been inflicted by a woman’s fingernails or, in Ritter’s case, shrapnel. He was wearing a black T-shirt, tan cotton/nylon cargo pants, light hiking boots, and a black ball cap.
He picked out Lucas as the main fed, demanded, “What the hell is going on?”
Lucas said, “We believe you may be involved in the attempted assassination of Senator Porter Smalls that resulted in the murder of Mrs. Cecily Whitehead. We’re looking for evidence in that case.”
Ritter nearly did a movie double take. “What the fuck you been smoking, man?”
“Don’t smoke,” Lucas said. “We have a lot of questions for you.”
Ritter reached down to one of his cargo pockets, and it was Lucas who reacted, moving a hand toward his side. Ritter froze, then said, “Wallet.”
Lucas nodded, and Ritter extracted a trifold wallet from his pocket, took a card out, and handed it to Lucas. “I might ask a question or two myself, but I’m not going to answer any, not without an okay from my lawyer. That’s my lawyer’s name, address, and direct phone number. I’m going to call him now, unless I’m under arrest.”
“Not yet,” Lucas said, “but you will be. Go make your call.”
“Can I leave the apartment to make the call?”
“Yes. You’re free to go, but our search warrant covers your vehicles, so you can’t take those until we’re done with them. If we find any evidence pertinent to the case, the cars will be impounded.”
“Goddamnit, that’s not right,” Ritter said. “Do I get reimbursed for the cost of a rental car?”
“I wouldn’t hold your breath,” Lucas said.
Ritter said, “There are two pistols in the safe with suppressors. Both are registered with the ATF.”
“We know,” Lucas said. “That was a disappointment.”
Ritter held Lucas’s eye momentarily, and said, “I’ll remember you.”
“I think you already met my wife,” Lucas said. And Ritter blinked.
* * *
—
RITTER TURNED AND LEFT.
Ritter had committed at least one murder, and probably two, but he wasn’t a professional or career criminal—he was essentially a soldier, a guy who killed people under orders, or even of his own volition, but who didn’t have to worry about prosecution.
Stupid crooks would have reacted to Lucas’s comment about Weather, but a professional would have allowed a puzzled wrinkle to appear on his forehead. Ritter had blinked; it was called a tell by poker players, and, as far as Lucas was concerned, it was as good as an admission of guilt.
Couldn’t take it to a jury, but it was there.
Rae eased up, and said, “Decided to go with Mr. Subtle, huh?”
“I wasn’t going to get anything from being Mr. Nice, and we don’t have enough to bust him yet, so . . . a push never hurt.”
* * *
—
AS THE SEARCH wound down, Lucas walked around the building and found Armstrong wrapping up his inspection of the truck. Kerr was working on Ritter’s other vehicle, a fire-engine-red Mazda MX-5 Miata. A very nice car, Lucas thought; a driver’s car, probably even more than a Porsche, at about one-fourth the price.
The interior of the truck hadn’t produced anything. It did have a GPS, but all the history had been wiped clean. That was evidence of a kind but not useful.
“We got enough threads to braid a string,” Armstrong said, “but only from the right side. I think we’ll be able to produce some hard evidence that the fabric is identical to the fabric that was used to pad the logs.”
“How soon will we know?”
“I’ll squeeze the lab guy. I’ll know something tomorrow, but we can go after DNA to nail it down, and that’ll take a few days . . . or even a couple of weeks.”
“Would it speed things up if a U.S. senator called and asked about it?”
“For sure,” Armstrong said.
* * *
—
THERE WAS NOTHING IN THE MAZDA.
Bob had come along with Lucas, and said, “I gotta believe that the guy has a laptop. Everybody has a laptop, including Ritter. Nothing in his hands when he got out of the Miata, nothing in the car. I wonder where he ditched it?”
Lucas looked around the parking lot. The lot, behind the apartment house, wasn’t visible from the street. Ritter hadn’t pulled in and pulled back out because somebody would have noticed a bright red sports car coming and going without stopping.
“Wouldn’t have had a chance to throw it out the window,” Lucas said. “Wonder if somebody tipped him off that we were here?”
“Mrs. Snyder?” Snyder, the apartment manager.
“We warned her. And she struck me as a woman who knew when to stay warned.”
“Well . . . look at all those windows,” Bob said, and they both looked up at the back of the apartment complex. “We know Ritter’s got a girlfriend, and if she lives up there, she might have given him a ring.”
“Probably what happened,” Lucas agreed. “I’ll ask Snyder; maybe she’d know something about a relationship.”
“Be nice if we could find a laptop,” Bob said. “The computer guys might be able to find out if it was used in either Omaha or Minneapolis even if the messages were erased.”
* * *
—
RAE CAME AROUND, and asked, “What’s next, boss?”
“We get the truck towed to the Arlington impound lot. We have the names of four people probably involved in hitting Weather, and those four are also probably involved in the Smalls attack,” Lucas said. “Tomorrow, we’ll track them down. Keep the pressure up.”
16
Ten o’clock was a good time for a raid, even if this wasn’t exactly a raid. At ten o’clock, the employees who were running late should be at the office, but it was too early for lunch.
Rae had filled out the return on the James Ritter search warrant the night before, and Forte would file it. There wasn’t much to report, although the hotel key card was seized as documentary evidence in the case.
Lucas, Bob, and Rae walked out into a bright blue day and hit the greasy spoon at nine o’clock, talked about what they would do that morning, and a few minutes after ten rolled into the parking lot at Heracles’s Virginia headquarters, in an area called Crystal City. Airliners were landing nearby, and Lucas thought they might be close to Reagan National Airport.
Heracles was only one of a half dozen tenants of a nondescript fifteen-story, green-glass cube that just as easily could have been a parking structure as an office building. The parking lot, landscaped with relentlessly green, unidentifiable bushes as nondescript as the building itself, was two-thirds full. An overweight guard in a dull-gray uniform was patrolling the parking lot, and when they pulled into visitor’s slots, he walked over and asked Lucas, “Do you have an appointment here?”