Grant had a mansion, as was fitting for a billionaire, while Parrish lived in a town house. Lucas pulled out his iPad and entered Parrish’s address: it popped up on Zillow, which showed it sold three years earlier for $1,450,000. Three bedrooms, three baths, “close to M Street shopping.”
Not bad for a guy who’d never worked for anything other than the federal government and maybe two or three years at a private business, Lucas thought. It would be interesting to see if he had a mortgage and, if so, how large it was.
In the meantime...
He drove over to M Street to see if that was a big deal—and it was, he supposed. It was like Madison Avenue meets GreenwichVillage, mixing high-end clothing boutiques with burger joints, bars, and yuppie-oriented bicycle shops.
He got a decent burger, drank a couple of Diet Cokes, watched the Washington women walking by, almost all of them clutching cell phones. He asked the waiter where he might buy a book. The waiter had no idea, but a woman who overheard the question told him there was a used-book store three blocks down the street.
He spent a half hour browsing there, found a Carl Hiaasen hardcover novel,Skinny Dip, selling for $5.98, bought it and took it back to the hotel.
—
HE’D LEFTthe burner phone in the closet safe, and when he checked it he found a call from Kidd that had come in twenty minutes earlier. He called back, and Kidd said, “Okay, it’s as bad as you thought. I’ve got some ways to check on information... that most people wouldn’t be able to use. The information is public, and it’s out there, so I worked backward through a lot of it.”
“I don’t know what that means,” Lucas said.
“It means that after you find some information, after you know what you’re looking for, you can usually find some other way to get to it. Something you could have at least theoretically gotten to. For example, if you know that a company did X, you can often find references to X as the nine hundredth entry on a Google search. Nobody looks for it there—it would take forever. But if you know it’s there and you’ve got specific search terms...”
“Got it,” Lucas said. “So what was nine hundredth on the list?”
“The guys who run Heracles and Flamma invented Inter-Core Ballistics after the Army began looking for bidders on thearmor panels. When they won the bid, they paid another company down in Florida, Bishop Composites, to make the armor. Inter-Core was the middleman on the deal. When I looked up Bishop, it turns out that their stuff had failed earlier tests for shrapnel resistance. They recycled their product through Inter-Core, and, this time, they passed the tests.”
“Was it different armor or the same?”
“As far as I can tell, it appears to be identical. Let me make that a little stronger: itwasidentical. After they failed the earlier tests, they were stuck with a lot of the plate, so they gave Inter-Core a cut-rate price. Bishop looks to have sold around thirty-five million in plate, and, from looking at their financial statements, it appears that Inter-Core took about twenty percent of that.”
“Twenty percent? Seven million for doing nothing?”
“Not for doing nothing: Inter-Core had to fix the deal.”
“Tell me how I get to that,” Lucas said.
—
KIDD DID,with explicit directions of where and how to search legally. Lucas understood most of what he found, although only a forensic accountant could pull it all together. He thought about it, and called Gladys Ingram.
“Marshal Davenport,” she said. “Nice to hear from you. How’s the investigation going?”
“After you told me about your Malone Materials lawsuit, I went looking for information about Inter-Core Ballistics and found that it tied in to my investigation. I’d like to pass some computer links to you. You probably have much better information resources than I do, so I thought... you could take a look, and if you found anything interesting, you might pass it back to me.”
“Sure. We still represent Malone, and I have an intern who was born with a silver computer in her mouth... What’d you find?”
Lucas gave her a few of Kidd’s key discoveries—she’d find the rest herself, or her intern would. Then, Lucas hoped, it would appear that the information was flowing from her to him rather than from him to her.
When she had Lucas’s notes, Ingram said, “I’m impressed. I see why you made money on the Internet.”
“Yeah, well, it isn’t all that hard,” Lucas said modestly. “If I had more time, I think I could probably find even more... Anyway, get back to me.”
“I will.”
“And soon.”
“Yes.”
9
Parrish was let into Grant’s house by a housekeeper who told him that Taryn Grant was in her “study”: the SCIF in the basement.
