“Porter Smalls called.”
“This sounds exactly like the woman who attacked you at the hotel,” Chase said, the excitement riding close beneath her dry tone. “Do you know anything at all about her?”
“No. I eventually got three different possible names for her, from the Heracles people, but I doubt any of them were real.”
“This is going to cause endless trouble,” Chase said. “The Senate’s going totally insane and we’re right in the bull’s-eye.”
“Jane, some advice: stay away from it. Find something else to do,” Lucas said. “You won’t find this woman. She apparently worked with Heracles, and for the CIA, and is probably back in Iraq, or Syria, or one of those places, by now. If she belongs to the CIA, do you think they’ll give her up as the person who assassinated a senator?”
She thought for a second, then said, “It does sound unlikely.”
“And when the Senate starts looking for an FBI scapegoat, you don’t want to be the one standing there with your dick in your hand.”
“Certainly not,” she said, tempted to laugh at his metaphor.
“Now that that’s settled, give me a few details.”
She told him the same story he’d gotten from Smalls, with a couple of extras. “The crime scene team recovered the bullet. It’s a 300-grain .338 slug, fired from a .338 Norma Magnum. She was hit very precisely. The assassin was shooting from an attic window in an adjoining house. She shot from a stack of books sitting on top of a table; she was sitting in an old wooden chair. She either didn’t eject the brass or she picked it up.”
“I don’t know the gun—is it an exotic?”
“Couldn’t get one across the counter at Walmart, but you could probably order one there,” she said. “So it’s uncommon but not exotic. We’re trying to trace all sales, but there’ll be a whole bunch of them, and secondary sales and trades... It’s impossible.”
“Once again: stay away. This is a professional job. You won’t get her,” Lucas said.
“And I certainly don’t want to be standing there with my dick in my hand.”
“Atta girl.”
When he hung up, Weather said with a certain tone in her voice, “Sounds like the two of you got pretty close.”
Lucas nodded. “Yeah... If we were living in Baghdad, I’d probably make her my second wife.”
Weather kicked him in the calf, said, “Oh, sorry, I slipped.”
—
LUCAS HAD BEEN HOMEfor two weeks. In that time, the FBI had torn Heracles to pieces, and it appeared that the company was about to be indicted on dozens of charges, from illegal weapons trafficking to illegal contacts with foreign terrorist groups, having provided both material and training support. The blight had spread to othercontactor companies as well. The operators turned by FBI investigators had worked with several of those companies in addition to Heracles, and with criminal charges hanging over them, they were eager enough to take deals in return for information.
Lucas didn’t have a clear idea of how it all worked. The FBI was a swamp, and unless you were in it, it was impossible to tell precisely who was doing what. He’d called his friend Deputy Director Louis Mallard to ask a few questions, and it appeared that Jane Chase was right in the middle of it all.
—
JOHN MCCOYgave up everything he knew about Heracles but admitted to no knowledge of murder. He took a plea deal and would spend two years in a minimum security federal prison, which Lucas knew he could do standing on his head. Nobody had heard anything of Kerry Moore. Some thought he’d been murdered, like Jim Ritter; others thought he’d run. When asked, McCoy shook his head, but one perceptive interrogator thought he might have looked amused.
—
AN FBI CRIME SCENE CREWdetected tiny pieces of copper in the walls of Jack Parrish’s kitchen and matched them to the bullet fragments taken from Jim Ritter’s body.
—
SENATOR SMALLSasked around quietly, a few friends, and told Lucas, “You know what? I can’t find anybody who talked to her halfway through the party, only at the beginning and at the end.”
“Toldja,” Lucas said.
—
LATE THAT NIGHT,on the same day that Taryn Grant was found dead, Lucas took a third call. There was a whistling sound in the background, and when Lucas asked about it, Tom Ritter told him it was satellite noise.
