“I wasn’t going to get anything from being Mr. Nice, and we don’t have enough to bust him yet, so... a push never hurt.”
—
AS THE SEARCHwound down, Lucas walked around the building and found Armstrong wrapping up his inspection of the truck. Kerr was working on Ritter’s other vehicle, a fire-engine-red Mazda MX-5 Miata. A very nice car, Lucas thought; a driver’s car, probably even more than a Porsche, at about one-fourth the price.
The interior of the truck hadn’t produced anything. It did have a GPS, but all the history had been wiped clean. That was evidence of a kind but not useful.
“We got enough threads to braid a string,” Armstrong said, “but only from the right side. I think we’ll be able to produce some hard evidence that the fabric is identical to the fabric that was used to pad the logs.”
“How soon will we know?”
“I’ll squeeze the lab guy. I’ll know something tomorrow, but we can go after DNA to nail it down, and that’ll take a few days... or even a couple of weeks.”
“Would it speed things up if a U.S. senator called and asked about it?”
“For sure,” Armstrong said.
—
THERE WAS NOTHING IN THE MAZDA.
Bob had come along with Lucas, and said, “I gotta believe that the guy has a laptop. Everybody has a laptop, including Ritter. Nothing in his hands when he got out of the Miata, nothing in the car. I wonder where he ditched it?”
Lucas looked around the parking lot. The lot, behind theapartment house, wasn’t visible from the street. Ritter hadn’t pulled in and pulled back out because somebody would have noticed a bright red sports car coming and going without stopping.
“Wouldn’t have had a chance to throw it out the window,” Lucas said. “Wonder if somebody tipped him off that we were here?”
“Mrs. Snyder?” Snyder, the apartment manager.
“We warned her. And she struck me as a woman who knew when to stay warned.”
“Well... look at all those windows,” Bob said, and they both looked up at the back of the apartment complex. “We know Ritter’s got a girlfriend, and if she lives up there, she might have given him a ring.”
“Probably what happened,” Lucas agreed. “I’ll ask Snyder; maybe she’d know something about a relationship.”
“Be nice if we could find a laptop,” Bob said. “The computer guys might be able to find out if it was used in either Omaha or Minneapolis even if the messages were erased.”
—
RAE CAME AROUND,and asked, “What’s next, boss?”
“We get the truck towed to the Arlington impound lot. We have the names of four people probably involved in hitting Weather, and those four are also probably involved in the Smalls attack,” Lucas said. “Tomorrow, we’ll track them down. Keep the pressure up.”
16
Ten o’clock was a good time for a raid, even if this wasn’t exactly a raid. At ten o’clock, the employees who were running late should be at the office, but it was too early for lunch.
Rae had filled out the return on the James Ritter search warrant the night before, and Forte would file it. There wasn’t much to report, although the hotel key card was seized as documentary evidence in the case.
Lucas, Bob, and Rae walked out into a bright blue day and hit the greasy spoon at nine o’clock, talked about what they would do that morning, and a few minutes after ten rolled into the parking lot at Heracles’s Virginia headquarters, in an area called Crystal City. Airliners were landing nearby, and Lucas thought they might be close to Reagan National Airport.
Heracles was only one of a half dozen tenants of a nondescript fifteen-story, green-glass cube that just as easily could have been a parking structure as an office building. The parking lot, landscaped with relentlessly green, unidentifiable bushes as nondescript as the building itself, was two-thirds full. An overweight guard in a dull-gray uniform was patrolling the parking lot, and when they pulled into visitor’s slots, he walked over and asked Lucas, “Do you have an appointment here?”
“No, but we do have business here,” Lucas said, holding up his ID. “We’ll be speaking to some of the tenants.”
“No problem, bub,” the guard said. “I’d make sure nobody stole your hubcaps, if you had hubcaps.”
“Keep an eye on the wheels, then,” Rae said.
