“Yeah, they’re up,” Lucas said.
“Fuckin’ Ritter,” Bob said.
—
FORTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER,they pulled into Ritter’s apartment complex, swung around back. No Miata.
“Probably not shot here. The killers wouldn’t have driven it away,” Lucas said.
Forte called. Chase had gotten the crime scene team moving.
—
WHILE THEY WERE WAITINGfor the FBI team to show up, Armstrong called from West Virginia. “You might want to have another hard talk with Ritter,” he said. “We got test results back on the fabric samples from the truck, and they match the fabric samples from the logs exactly. It’s apparently a kind of canvas used for martial arts mats. It’s not common.”
“Well, I’ve got some news about Ritter...” Lucas began.
Armstrong was astonished by the murder, and Lucas told him that the canvas samples were still in play if they could pull DNA out of the truck. “Hang on to that stuff, Carl. We’ll get back to you.”
“I feel like we’re rolling, but I can’t tell if it’s uphill or downhill,” Bob said when Lucas told them about Armstrong’s lab results.
—
THE FBI TEAMshowed up, the manager let them into Ritter’s apartment, while the marshals and Clark stood around in the hall as the team took a preliminary look. An hour later, the team leader, Jake Ricardo, came out, and said, “We can’t find any sign of a shooting in here. I don’t believe he was killed in this apartment.”
No murder scene. The first time the marshals searched the place, they’d been restricted by the warrant—they’d had tospecifically list what they were looking for, and they’d been strictly held to that list because their justification for the search was fairly thin. With Ritter murdered, the FBI team could tear the place apart.
They did that.
The first significant find was two passports, hidden under a carpet edge held down with a strip of double-sided tape. One passport was British, issued to one Richard Carnes, with Ritter’s photo. The other was American, issued to a David Havelock, also with Ritter’s photo.
The second and final good thing was Ritter’s laptop, which was sitting on a coffee table. They couldn’t get into it because it was password-protected. Lucas asked them if they could get the laptop to their computer lab to break the password.
“That’s in a different place, down in Quantico,” Ricardo said.“I’ll call them and see if they can pick it up. What about his cell phone?”
“Haven’t found it,” Lucas said. “We know he had one, because we got the number, and we know some places that it wasn’t.”
“When did he get killed?”
“Probably last night,” Lucas said.
“What service?”
“Verizon.”
“Okay. Verizon will have tracking data for him going back quite a while, and texts going back at least a few days. You gotta get some guys on them.”
“Could you do that?”
“Our people can. Let me call another guy.”
—
HE DID THAT,and then called the computer specialist at Quantico, whose name was Roger Smith. “I live up near where you are,”Smith said. “I could stop by on the way home, take a look. If I can’t do anything, I could bag it and bring it to the lab first thing in the morning.”
“That’d be great,” Lucas said.
“In the meantime, look for the password. Could be written anywhere, if he actually wrote it down. Which he probably didn’t. Probably his mom’s middle name.”
