“Other than myself? The Minneapolis Institute of Art. Weather’s a big deal over there, I understand,” Kidd said.
“I will give a thousand dollars to the institute if you can dig up some stuff on the Internet and tell me how I could have done it myself,” Lucas said.
“What’s it all about? That you have to use a burner to even ask me the question?”
“It’s about a murder and an assassination attempt...”
Kidd had helped Lucas with the original investigation of Taryn Grant. Like Lucas, he believed that Grant was a murderer and that she had gotten to the Senate through a murderous political trick. Lucas explained about the accident, and what he’d found about Ritter, and told him about Jack Parrish and Heracles.
“I, uh, would have a hard time explaining how I came up withthe connection between Ritter and Flamma,” Lucas said. “I need to be able to make the connection on the ’Net. You know, like I did some research, and there it was. I need it quick.”
Kidd said he’d start looking. “I’d like to see you get Grant. She’s your basic fascist thug, but with great tits,” he said.
From the background, Lucas heard Kidd’s wife, Lauren, shout, “Hey! I’m standing right here.”
“Call me at this number,” Lucas said. “Don’t use my regular one. I worry about being tracked.”
“As you should,” Kidd said. “Give me an hour or two.”
—
LUCAS SPENT AN HOURputting together an email to Forte, explaining how he’d tracked Ritter, leaving out the part about stealing the bank statement. He saved the email to his laptop but didn’t send it. He went back to the bed, closed his eyes, and thought about the case.
So far, he had nothing on Grant or Parrish. They were the ones he needed to get to. If he could nail Ritter for the murder of Whitehead, he could talk to the West Virginia cops about a prosecution. Looking at life in a West Virginia prison would be a powerful incentive to talk about Grant and Parrish.
Of course, Ritter might be one of those hard-nosed stoics who’d take pride in not talking, who’d go to prison first.
—
KIDD CALLED BACK.
“You said you already knew about Heracles. If you look at the company’s incorporation papers—I’ll send you a link—you’llfind the list of officers. If you run the officers, you’ll see that they’re also the officers of two other companies, Flamma Consultants and Inter-Core Ballistic Products.”
“Wait—there’s a direct connection among Heracles, Flamma, and Inter-Core?”
“Not technically direct, but, yeah, they’re all run by all the same people.”
“Kidd... this is serious shit. I’m throwing an extra ten dollars at the museum.”
“Thanks, ol’ buddy. Anyway, if you run Flamma Consultants, you’ll find an online article published in last September’sCombat Tech Reviewmagazine called ‘CanCan Dancers.’ In the gun world, suppressors—silencers—are called cans. In that article, you find a picture of Ritter and a couple of other guys all geared up, testing some big-bore silencers at a rifle range in Virginia... and Ritter is ID’d as an employee of Flamma. That’s how you tied them together.”
“Excellent,” Lucas said. “I owe you.”
“Actually, you owe the museum. A thousand and ten dollars. The original Flamma, by the way, was a famous Roman gladiator, which fits with the whole HeraclesWe read the classicsthing. Oh, and let me encourage you to look at that magazine article. Ritter was testing that silencer on an M2010 sniper rifle, which is like a .300 Winchester Magnum and has an effective range of twelve hundred meters. In other words, they can shoot you in the back from more than half a mile away.”
“Thanks for the tip,” Lucas said, “I’ll go hide under the bed. Listen, this Inter-Core Ballistics... I met this lawyer out here who told me an interesting story about a Pentagon bid...”
He told Kidd what Gladys Ingram told him about a company that had outbid her client on a contract for lightweight side-panel armor for military vehicles. Lucas was checking his notes as he described his meeting with Ingram: “Her client was Malone Materials. If you could check around and see what happened with that particular lawsuit...”
“I hate that kind of shit. Good guys die because of it,” Kidd said. Lucas knew Kidd had served in an unusual military unit as a young man. “I’ll get back to you—I’ve got extensive resources at the Pentagon. You go hide under the bed.”
Rather than hiding under the bed, Lucas called up the text for the email to Forte, added the information about Flamma, which he supposedly found himself on the Internet, and sent it off.
—
GRANT AND PARRISH:time to look at where they lived.
He got his jacket and went back out, spent the afternoon cruising their houses, which weren’t far apart, in Georgetown.
