Bunch said, “Ask. We’ll decide whether he should answer.”
Lucas asked McCoy, “Do you know, or have you seen, a woman known either as Suzie or Carol Ruiz?” He described her, and McCoy said, “I’ve seen a woman who George called Carol who looks like that, but I don’t think that’s her real name. I think it’s fake, and somebody told me she’s a NOC, a chick with a non-official cover working for the CIA or somebody else, I don’t know who.”
Bob asked, “You think she’d know where to get a silenced submachine gun?”
McCoy shook his head. “I don’t know, I might be able to, but I’d have to dig around for a while, and I’m not sure I could. I was more of a meat-and-potatoes, M16 kinda guy.”
Rae asked, “Would this chick have been hanging out with Jim Ritter?”
McCoy thought for a minute, said, “Yes, she did. I think they were—what do you call it?—an item? For a long time. Jim said she was a girl he could trust. I saw them once over at the Last Minute Grill, by the airport. I didn’t interrupt. I figured Jim was flying out, they were saying good-bye, but I was wrong. She was the one flying out . . . and they might have been worried, the way they were holding on to each other.”
Lucas said, “Huh.”
“I’ll tell you one other thing,” McCoy began, but Bunch put a hand on his arm, and asked, “You’re sure?”
“Shouldn’t be a problem,” McCoy said. “Maybe get a few more brownie points. I speak some Arabic. She speaks perfect Arabic. The one time I saw her at Heracles, she was talking to this Syrian guy like they were old friends, and, I’m telling you, I thought she was Syrian.”
Lucas had nothing more to ask, but he said to McCoy, “We’ve tracked the phone that Claxson used to call you boys on your way into the Twin Cities to hit my wife and murder Last. If I were you, I would sign anything that Mr. Lapham gives you, because, if you don’t, you’re looking at thirty years in Stillwater Penitentiary after the feds get done with you.”
McCoy gave him a sullen look, shuffled his feet, and said, “You ain’t from the Chamber of Commerce, huh?”
* * *
—
THEY WERE GETTING toward dinnertime, and Lucas, Bob, and Rae went back to the hotel, agreed to work out for a while and go to dinner together. When he was back in his room, Lucas called the number that Tom Ritter had given him.
“Marshal Davenport . . . I’ve only got a minute. We’re filling out papers to get Jim buried at Arlington. Lots of paperwork. It takes forever.”
“I’m calling about Jim’s girlfriend . . . Suzie. I’m now told that she might also go under the name of Carol Ruiz, and she might work for the CIA or some other agency and speaks perfect Arabic. Does that still sound like her?”
“Maybe,” Ritter said after a bit. “I only saw her that one time. We were at a party, all military or ex-military people who worked in the Middle East. Jim invited me to come along. I didn’t hear Suzie speak Arabic, but there was a minute where a couple of guys were speaking Arabic, and she suddenly looked at them, and I got the impression she knew what they were talking about.”
“Know where I could find her?” Lucas asked. “I need to talk.”
“No, I don’t,” Ritter said. “I could ask around.”
“I’d appreciate it. She’s been seen at Heracles, so people there know her.”
“All right, I’ll ask. Should I give her your phone number?”
“Yes. I was on the wrong end of that submachine gun, so she probably wouldn’t want to meet me at McDonald’s.”
“Why do you want to talk?”
“I want to find out if she was hired to shoot me up or if she did it because she bought Claxson’s line of bullshit about me torturing and shooting Jim, if she tried to kill me because she loved Jim.”
“I’d like to know that answer myself,” Ritter said. “I’ll start making some calls.”
* * *
—
AFTER DINNER, Bob needed to catch up with people on the Internet, and Lucas and Rae got Lucas’s car and drove across the river to a Barnes & Noble bookstore they’d seen while driving around Arlington.
“I’m getting tired of the ’Net,” Lucas said, as they crossed the river. “You can’t separate the facts from the bullshit anymore. The constant carping drives me nuts . . . Did I ever tell you that I supervised the construction of our house?”
“Never did,” Rae said.
“Well, I did, and it was interesting,” Lucas said. “Sometimes I wish I’d become an architect. I used to go out on the ’Net for tips, on this one particular building site. I still check it sometimes. The last time I looked, there was this flame war about politics. At a construction site. I mean, why? Is there a difference between a left-wing and right-wing two-by-four?”
“I made the mistake, commenting on a story on the Wall Street Journal’s site, of mentioning that I’m black,” Rae said. “I started getting that ‘you people’ shit. Can’t avoid it.”
The bookstore was located in a California-style outdoor shopping center. After they parked, they got cups of coffee at Starbucks and split up to look at books. Since he was living in Washington temporarily, Lucas browsed the politics section and wound up with Dark Money by Jane Mayer, then hit the magazine rack, while he waited for Rae to finish browsing.
They were back at the Watergate by nine o’clock. Lucas had finished the Hiaasen book, and set it aside to ship home, and had started the Mayer, when the call came in from an unknown number.
A woman with a light soprano voice: “This is Wendy.”
“Wendy who?”
“Suzie . . . Carol. What do you want?”
“I didn’t shoot Jim Ritter,” Lucas said.
“Then who did?” The question was as much a confession that she was the hotel shooter as he was likely to get, Lucas thought. She continued. “Don’t bother scrambling your tech guys—I’m talking to you on an old burner. I’ll throw it in the garbage as soon as I take the battery out.”
“I understand that you’re one of the people who knows all about that kind of thing—burners and taking out batteries,” Lucas said.
She didn’t reply to that. Instead, she repeated, “Who shot Jim? Specifically?”
“I have several suspects,” he said. “And, by the way, I don’t have any techs looking for your phone.”
“I forgot, you’re a marshal, you don’t do tech. Anyway, if you think Jim was shot by Moore or McCoy, you’re wrong.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“Absolutely. Put it this way: those guys risked their own lives to keep Jim alive, and he did the same for them. After that, they’re not going to shoot him in cold blood.”
“Tom told me the same thing,” Lucas said. “Did Tom tell you that Claxson bullshitted him on the waterboarding thing?”
“Yes. Claxson lied to me, too. If it’s a lie,” she said.
“It is.”
“You think he did it?”
“No. We don’t think it was Claxson himself. Although I think Claxson could have set it up.”
“Parrish, then.”
“I’m not sure. Do you know Parrish?”
“Yes. If he did it, it was because he was told to do it. Parrish is a bullshit artist, a fixer. He might be able to do it, if you squeezed him hard enough, but he wouldn’t like it. He wouldn’t want to. Not because he’d be killing somebody, but because he might get caught. Or might fuck it up and get shot himself.”
“Okay.”
“That leaves Senator Taryn Grant.” Lucas didn’t say anything, and after six or eight seconds Wendy said, “You’re a U.S. Marshal, so you don’t want to say that.”
“It’s complicated,” Lucas said. “Did you look her up?”
“Yes, and I looked you up, too. You think she was involved in some murders in Minneapolis, but you weren’t able to get her on that. Senator Smalls thinks she tried to assassinate him. You think Jim was one of the people in on that silly fuckin’ stunt.”
“Jim was involved, for sure,” Lucas said. “He was one of the triggers, but he wasn’t doing it for himself. His orders came from someone else, and since he worked for Claxson . . . But what would Claxson get from killing Smalls? Nothing that I can figure out. We need to find somebody who needed to get rid of Smalls.”