Lucas took off the door chain and backed away from the door, kept the PPQ pointed to one side but still up. “Yeah, come on. Push the door shut behind you.”
Like his brother, Ritter was short, muscular, tanned, and dressed in outdoor clothing—a long-sleeved blue cotton shirt, covered by a blue linen sport coat, tan nylon/cotton cargo pants, and light hiking boots. Lucas began to pick up some differences: James Ritter had a scarred face from a shrapnel wound, Tom Ritter didn’t but carried the same military look.
* * *
—
LUCAS SAID, “Take off your jacket before you come in.”
“I don’t carry a gun. Not in the States.”
Lucas said, “Take your jacket off anyway.”
Ritter did, stepped into the room, nudged the door closed with his foot, and did a pirouette so Lucas could see that he didn’t have a gun holstered at the small of his back. “I’ve got some questions, and I might have some information you need,” he said, when he was looking at Lucas again.
Lucas had backed up to the desk. He said, “Sit on the bed. I’ll take the chair.” Sitting on the bed would make a hidden gun harder to get at. Lucas sat on the edge of a hard-seated office chair. Ritter might well have been a computer programmer, or a life insurance salesman, but he didn’t look like that. You had to have experience as a cop to notice he bore the wound-spring look of a man who could hurt you.
When Ritter was sitting on the bed, his jacket across his lap, Lucas asked, “Who told you where to find me?”
“I’ve got a story about that,” Ritter said. He was younger than he looked, Lucas thought: the tan put on a few years and some wrinkles, but Ritter was not yet thirty-five.
“I’m listening,” Lucas said.
“I’m an Army officer, Third Stryker Brigade Combat Team, Second Infantry Division, in Afghanistan. I was granted leave to bury my brother.”
“That’s . . . rough. Maybe even rougher with a twin.”
“Yeah, it is. Hard even to explain how rough it is. It’s like you lost a leg. Non-twins wouldn’t understand,” Ritter said in his quiet voice. “The people over at Heracles say you shot him.”
“I know what they’re saying. It’s horseshit. Your brother was our best way into our case. I don’t want to sound . . . insulting . . . but he was small fry. The last thing we wanted was him dead. The people who killed him are responsible for murdering three people now—two of them completely innocent. The third was your brother.”
Ritter watched Lucas for a minute or two, judging him, and asked, “What do you know about waterboarding?”
Lucas said, “Nothing. I was going to look it up on the Internet tonight, but I forgot. We were told by a source that Heracles is passing around some fake autopsy papers that say he was waterboarded, but he wasn’t. If you check with the ME, the medical examiner, he’ll tell you so. Heracles was trying to convince people that I killed Jim.”
“But you were pissed about what happened to your wife, and you’re working for Senator Smalls . . .”
Lucas nodded, and said, “Yes. I’m more than pissed about my wife, I’m . . . if I was sure I found a guy involved in that, he might fall down a couple of flights of stairs. But I wouldn’t kill him. I wouldn’t kill him especially if it was your brother. Like I said, he was about our only entry into the case, but he was nowhere near the top of the food chain.”
* * *
—
ANOTHER BIT OF SILENCE, then Ritter asked, “If you didn’t kill Jim, do you have any idea who might have? Specific names? Anything at all?”
Lucas said, “I’m not ready to talk about that—we’ve got an ongoing investigation.”
Ritter looked around the room, appraising it as if for ways to defend it, and said, “I looked you up on the Internet. You’re a rough guy, huh?”
“I have my moments,” Lucas said. “What are we talking about here?”
Ritter said, “I was passing through Kuwait when I heard about Jim and caught a flight back home. I’ve got fourteen days. You gonna find the killer in that time?”
“I could if I could get some leverage on somebody involved,” Lucas said. “Now, tell me how you knew where to find me . . . or even what my name is?”
“I called some people. I went over to Heracles Personnel. I guess you’ve already been looking at them.”
“Yes, we have,” Lucas said.
“I know people at Heracles, ex-Army guys, friends of Jim—and tapped into the rumor mill. Word is, some guys have been involved in questionable actions here in the States. I’ve got names, not easy to get, but I’m . . . trusted, to a certain extent.”
“They weren’t questionable actions, Colonel,” Lucas said. “The first attack was an attempted assassination of a U.S. senator and the murder of a completely innocent woman. The guys who did it, including your brother, I’m sorry to say, knew what they were doing—that they’d kill her along with the senator. The second attack was an effort to get me, personally, off their backs. They did it by going after my wife—and by the cold-blooded murder of an innocent man. Do you know about all of that?”
“Yeah, I was told about it, and I read a newspaper story.” Ritter put his jacket aside and stood up, looked around the room again, and Lucas said, “Sit back on the bed,” and he did, but asked, “Why?”
“Because if you have a hideout gun, it’ll be harder for you to get at.” Lucas had put the PPQ on the desktop, letting his hand rest a couple of inches away.
“You’re nervous.”
“Shouldn’t I be?” Lucas asked.
“Maybe, I guess. The guys you’re looking at, they’re the real thing. They’ve all been over in the sandbox both as military and as private contractors. If you get in their way, they’ll flat put a hole in your head. But I’m not one of them.”
“That’s comforting.”
Ritter looked down at his thighs, rubbed his nose, looked up, and said, “Look, a guy named Claxson . . . You’re looking at him?”
“Yes.”
“He told me you were probably the one who killed Jim, and he told me why—your wife. Said Jim was waterboarded and then executed . . . that sounded funky to me. I should tell you that after I talked to Claxson, I cornered the medical examiner, and he said there was nothing to indicate that Jim had been waterboarded or tortured in any way, that nothing like that had been put in the autopsy report. But the report Claxson showed me specifically mentioned the waterboarding. I asked myself why that would be.”
“Claxson wanted you to come after me.”
“That’s why I came up here empty-handed, no gun. I wanted to hear what you had to say.”
“Then you probably know who killed him,” Lucas said. “And why.”
“I’m not sure about the why. He wouldn’t have talked.”
Lucas thought about it, and said, “Because he’d become a problem. If your friends at Heracles are up to date, they’d know—and you probably now know—that we found some logs out in the countryside in West Virginia. They were used to protect the side of your brother’s truck when they pushed Smalls’s Cadillac off the road and almost over a bluff. If it had worked, it would have looked like Whitehead and Smalls accidentally ran off the road, hit a bunch of trees, and landed in the river. It’s a fuckin’ miracle that Smalls didn’t die along with Whitehead. If he had, there would have been nobody to talk about a second vehicle.”
Ritter said, “You’re saying it was a good plan, should have worked, but the targets caught a break?”
“Yes,” Lucas said. “Their problem—your brother’s problem—was, we’d located his truck. You could see the damage where the logs had been tied to the side, and some other forensic evidence that was convincing. If we got him for murder—and we were about to do that—maybe he’d give up the other people involved in return for leniency. We’re more interested in those other people than we were in James . . . Jim . . . He was the trigger. He was paid. We want the people who hired him.”