“Jesus, Parrish, it’s not a small town,” Grant said. “There are three million people in the Twin Cities metro area. Davenport was an agent for the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. They’ve got the technical abilities of the FBI.”
“Still...”
“Still, bullshit. I know a lot about Davenport. He dropped out of law enforcement for a couple of years, invented a computersoftware company, and sold out for something between twenty and thirty million dollars, and he’s now worth maybe forty million. He built that company and sold it in two years, starting with nothing. If you underestimate him, he’ll eat you alive.”
“All right, I get it. If we had a guy who wasn’t as smart and didn’t have the incentive, that would be better for us, right? What if Davenport got mugged and hurt? Not killed, but hurt bad enough to take him out of it. Take him out long enough that the Smalls accident is old news. Antique news.”
Grant leaned back in the office chair, pursed her lips. After a while, she said, “That has some appeal. For one thing, I’d like to see him get hurt. He does have a history as a shooter, though. It’d be dangerous.”
“My guys could pull it off. Abort at the last second, if something doesn’t smell right. They’d rob him, so it’d look just like a mugging.”
She considered for another moment, and said, “Let’s take a look at him first. See what he’s up to, whether it’ll go anywhere. Then we can consider taking him down.”
Parrish nodded. “I’ll have somebody look at his hotel room. Tell your man in Minneapolis I’m on my way.”
—
WHEN PARRISH HAD GONE,Grant closed down the SCIF, found the housekeeper, told her to bring a fried-egg sandwich with ketchup and onions and a glass of Chablis into the breakfast room.
She had homework to do, constituency stuff, boring but necessary. She read through notes from her chief of staff and her issues team, but when the sandwich came, she put the paper aside and ate, peering out into the backyard garden. Three huge oaks, threesmaller hard maples, a Japanese maple specimen that would turn flaming red in September, a ginkgo tree, all surrounded by a rose garden.
She thought about Davenport. She’d told Parrish that she was crazy; and she’d heard that Parrish was a couple of fries short of a Happy Meal himself.
In her mind, there were all kinds of crazy, including a couple of kinds that could be useful if they didn’t take you too far out. A touch of OCD helped you focus obsessively, when you needed to do that. A bit of the sociopath was always helpful in business: you took care of yourself because nobody else would.
Grant was all of that, a little bit of OCD, a little bit of sociopathy... and she thought Davenport was as well. He was surely a sociopath, given his record of killings, she thought. How could he live with himself if he weren’t?
The problem was, he was also seriously intelligent. She wasn’t sure that Parrish appreciated that. Davenport had made that big wad of software cash, but instead of trying to work it, he’d gone back to hunting.
He was nuts, she thought, like she was. He was coming for her.
Something had to be done.
4
Lucas flew early on Monday, a blessedly short flight from Minneapolis into Washington. One of Smalls’s Minnesota aides had dropped a map and a key at his house on Saturday.
He was carrying two substantial bags with him, one with neatly layered summer suits and shirts, underwear, socks, and Dopp kit, as well as a couple of pairs of gym shorts, several heavy T-shirts for workouts, a pair of cross-training shoes, and three burner phones he’d bought at a Best Buy on Sunday.
The other bag, a heavy-duty Arc’teryx backpack, contained his laptop, an iPad, yellow legal pads and mechanical pencils, a compact voice recorder, a Sony RX10 III camera, and all the associated chargers, cables, batteries, and memory cards. The camera was a chunk, and he was tempted to leave it behind, but Weather had bought it for him when he joined the Marshals Service, so he felt bound to take it.
Getting the rental car was a minor hassle, but an hour after he landed, Lucas headed out of Washington in a rented black Range Rover Evoque, with a back window about the size of his hand.
Hot day: the mountains ahead were covered with a blue haze of humidity that shimmered like a gauze curtain above the interstate. The car’s navigation system took him on twisty highways through the mountains and most of the way to Smalls’s cabin.The nav got lost the last two miles, and he went the rest of the way with the paper map.
He was aware that he had driven past the place where Smalls had gone off the road, but he ignored it—he wanted to start from the cabin and experience the drive out as Smalls and Whitehead had.
The cabin sat a hundred feet back from the road, hidden by a screen of trees, which opened to a grassy lawn that spread up a short slope to the cabin. And it was, indeed, a cabin—bronze-colored logs with pine-green-painted steps leading to a front porch. A pickup had backed up the driveway with a flat trailer behind it, and an elderly woman with tight white hair was riding a John Deere lawn mower around the yard. When Lucas got out of the Evoque, she turned the mower off, took off her earmuffs, and asked, “Y’all lost?”
“Not if this is Senator Smalls’s place.”
“It is,” the old woman said. “But he ain’t here.”
“I know. He’s in Minneapolis,” Lucas said. He showed her his marshal’s badge, and said, “I’m a U.S. Marshal, working on a case with Senator Smalls. He gave me a key.”
“You investigating that wreck?” she asked.
“Yeah, checking it out.”
