“Not that he was all that lightning fast to begin with,” Rae said.
“Our rooms are down the hall,” Bob said, marveling. “Boy oh boy, the Watergate. Do we get one of those minibars?”
“Possibly,” Lucas said, laughing.
In addition to personal duffel bags, they each were carrying a heavy tan canvas duffel stuffed with black rifles, ammo, armor, helmets, and everything else you needed to break down doors and bust gun-crazed fugitives.
“Tell us everything,” Rae said, dropping onto the bed.
Lucas told them about Parrish and Grant, about Heracles and Flamma, about finding the Ford F-250, about the street attack, about checking out Parrish’s and Grant’s houses. “Pulling full-time surveillance on them would be difficult. They’ve got these former military operators hanging around, and there’s no good place to set up.”
He pulled up the addresses on Google Earth so they could check out the streets. “It’s all choked up, there’s no place to watch from where you don’t stand out like a sore thumb.”
They talked about that for a while, and Bob said, “You know, I don’t think we’ll find out much by trailing them around, Grant and Parrish. We need people we can talk to, voluntarily or otherwise. Might be better to figure out who knows about the bad stuff, might be willing to deal, and pick them up and squeeze them.”
Lucas considered that, and nodded. “You’ve got a point. They already know I’m poking around, but they don’t know that I spotted the truck.”
“As far as we know,” Rae said.
“Yeah, as far as we know. They might have been in my room, they sure as hell know I was in that tailor shop, but I never felt them watching me.” Lucas walked around, scratched his head, and said, “Everything is up in the air. I’m almost certain that Parrish was involved in trying to kill Smalls, but that doesn’t meanthat Grant was. Parrish might have wanted to kill Smalls for his own reasons. He wants to ride Grant’s coattails as a senator and maybe someday as president. Did she know what was going to happen? If she did, she’s guilty of murder—”
“You told us that she’s already guilty of murder. Back in Minneapolis.”
“She is, but I couldn’t prove it,” Lucas said. “I don’t want that to happen again. This time, if she’s got her hand in it, I want to nail her.”
Bob said, “Okay, then one of the first things we want to do is not talk like that. We’re doing an investigation, not carrying out a vendetta. You and Rae and me might know that we’re trying to nail her, but that can’t go on the record. We’re looking into what we think might be a crime, a murder, and guess what? Senator Grant pops up, much to our surprise. No way, no how, did we frame her. Never even thought about it.”
“Of course not,” Lucas said. To Rae: “You did say he was smarter than he looks.”
“I also said that wouldn’t be hard,” Rae said.
—
BOB AND RAEwent to check out their rooms, down the hall from Lucas, to wash their faces and use the bathrooms. Fifteen minutes later they were back, talking about how to proceed.
They worried about the Ford truck: it was a key piece of evidence, but not yet a very good one. They had to combine the truck with other evidence if they wanted to get any of it in front of a jury, and they had to do it quickly.
Bob said, “The problem with letting it go is, if Ritter takes it out and deliberately smacks it into another car or scrapes abridge abutment, there goes the evidence. If he managed to do it right, he wouldn’t even have to pay for it—his insurance would cover it.”
“Yeah, I know, but what are we gonna do?” Lucas asked.
“How about if we got your West Virginia cop over there to document it, sometime when Ritter isn’t around,” Rae suggested. “We’d at least have a record of the damage, and somebody official who could testify to it.”
“That might be something,” Lucas said. “Be nice if we could do it somewhere besides his apartment complex. Even if he’s not home, somebody could see us and mention it to him.”
They talked about how that might work and then let it go—they’d make some kind of decision the next day.
“Is there any possibility that Smalls could prod Grant?” Rae asked. “You say he’s already pissing on her. What if he made some kind of statement that hinted he thought she’d tried to assassinate him and wound up murdering Whitehead?”
“That could drive her underground,” Lucas said. “She might freeze out everyone, tell them all to disappear. What we need to do is get her worried, get her moving around, get her trying to fix things. Get her boys more out in the open.”
Bob: “I don’t think we should mess with either Parrish or Grant—not yet. For our sake. Listen, we’re messing with the U.S. Senate here. If that became public, we could lose our jobs.”
Lucas: “But she’s nuts, we need to get at her...”
Bob nodded. “Yeah, we do, but we have to come at it from another direction. We have to beprotectingthe Senate. Somebody tried to off Smalls, right? An assassination attempt. We try to find the assassins. That takes us to Ritter and Heracles, and Heraclestakes us to Parrish, and Parrish works for Grant. We take that to the attorney general, maybe get a look-in from the FBI...”
Rae and Lucas looked at each other, and Lucas said, “He’s right, of course.”
