—
LUCAS GOT HIS CAR BACK,and let the navigation system guide him across the Potomac to a neighborhood of neat brick homes and crooked, elderly trees on a blacktopped lane in Arlington, Virginia. Another bedroom community, but at least a hundred years older than Rose’s place in Maryland. Of the three additional names on Carter’s list, Lucas had gotten no answer with two of his phone calls, but the third call had been picked up by a woman named Gladys Ingram. She was a partner in an Arlington law firm, and said she could be home for an hour or so.
“If I’m going to talk to a marshal about anything, I’d rather it not be here,” she said, referring to her office. Lucas looked up the firm, found that it had two dozen partners, and more than eighty associates, and did a lot of lobbying.
Ingram’s car, a silver Mercedes SL550, was parked in the driveway when Lucas arrived. The street was so narrow that he pulled in behind her car to keep from blocking it.
Like Rose, when she came to the door, Ingram asked to see Lucas’s ID.
Unlike Rose, after Lucas’s original call, she’d gone straight to a computer and looked him up on the Internet. There were several hundred references to his time as a cop, with two different Minnesota agencies, and there was a brief note in aStar-Tribunegossip column that he’d moved to the U.S. Marshals Office. There were also a dozen photos taken over a twenty-year span of Lucas at various crime scenes. Not content with that, she’d used a law office code to check his credit rating.
“Okay, if you’re spoofing me, you’ve gone to a lot of trouble to do it,” she said, still standing in the doorway. “I have to say, you’re apparently the richest marshal I’ve ever met.”
“I got lucky with a computer start-up when I was between police agencies,” Lucas said. “You’re the second person I talked to today who worried about being spoofed. ‘Spoofed’ means, like, a fraud or a deception, right?”
“Yes,” she said. She was a gawky woman, with reddish brown hair that barely escaped being mousy. She had brown eyes, looking at him through tortoiseshell glasses, and wore a dress that was conservatively fashionable. Lucas thought she might be forty. “It’s ’Net slang. So, what are we talking about here? You said you were investigating an automobile accident that has nothing to do with me—but that I might have some information about. I don’t know about any automobile accident.”
“Like I said, your information might be important, but it’s... peripheral to the accident.”
“What accident?”
“An auto accident involving Senator Porter Smalls,” Lucas said.
“Was there something unusual about it? I thought that was all settled,” she said.
“He’s a U.S. senator. We’re taking another routine look at it,” Lucas said.
“Okay.” She nodded.
Lucas said, “Now, I understand you know a man named Jack Parrish...”
She said, “Oh boy...” then stopped and put two fingers to her lips.
Lucas: “What?”
“Oh my God. Did Parrish try to kill Porter Smalls?”
Lucas, astonished, smiled. “I see why you’re a partner.”
“Well, did he? I mean, Smalls’s accident...” She stopped again, gazing past him at the street, thinking. They were still standing in the doorway, and she suddenly said, “Come in. Come in. This is interesting.”
—
INGRAM’S HOMEwas simply but expensively furnished. One living room wall held a single painting, but it looked a lot like a painting that Lucas had seen at the Minneapolis Institute of Art when Weather made him go to a reception there. He bent to look at the signature: RD.
Ingram, standing behind him, said, “Richard Diebenkorn. Do you know him?”
“I think I saw something by him at the Minneapolis museum,” Lucas said. “Looks nice.”
“Well, yeah!” Her tone suggested that of course it looked nice because it was a fuckin’ masterpiece. “Part of the Ocean Park series.”
“Cool.” Lucas had never heard of the guy, but what else was he going to say? He turned and gazed at her for a few seconds, and asked, “What’s your opinion of Parrish?”
“He’s a bad man,” Ingram said. “You must have gotten my name through the Malone case.”
“I don’t know the Malone case,” Lucas said.
“Then how’d you get my name?”
