“Well, I’m not anyway,” Rae said. “Lucas is the one who quoted the fruity poem.”
—
THE CIGARETTE SMOKERwas fieldstripping his Marlboro, as they walked up the driveway, and he snapped the filter into a hydrangea bush. “This is an FBI undertaking,” he said, carefully checking them out. “I suspect you know that.”
“U.S. Marshals,” Lucas said. “Jane Chase should have cleared us through.”
“If you’re Davenport, Matees, and Givens, she did.” He looked at his watch. “She should be here in the next few minutes.”
—
THE IMPRESSIONLucas had of Claxson’s house was rugs and cigars. A thin odor of smoke hung in the entry hall like a signal of masculinity, a dozen oriental carpets in a variety of sizes spotted the russet-colored plank floors like high-dollar islands. The place had been done by a decorator apparently told to make it into a British men’s club, with everything but spittoons.
“Wooden boxes,” Bob said, and when Lucas looked around, he noticed lots of antique boxes.
“And mirrors,” Rae said.
There were a dozen FBI agents inside the house, slowly taking it apart. They were mostly looking for documents but hadn’t had much luck. A Bureau locksmith had failed to open a wall safe in the study—the house, naturally, had a study, two walls of bookcases, an oil portrait of a woman on a third wall, and the requisite cut-stone fireplace on the fourth. The safe was hidden in one side of the fireplace.
A tech bypassed the password on a Dell computer, but except for routine business docs—more bank statements—all documents were encrypted, everything else cleaned out by the same Win/DeXX program that they’d found on Ritter’s desktop.
They’d taken Claxson’s iPhone when they arrested him, and now they found a second phone in one of the many wooden boxes. The same tech said, “The phones are locked. No can go there. Six digits, four chances, a million possibilities.”
One of the agents told Lucas, “He’s like the Ritter guy—he’s got a safe-deposit box somewhere, under a false identity, with all the good stuff.”
Bob said, “We found Ritter’s safe-deposit keys in the sink trap in the bathroom.”
“Already looked there,” the agent said.
An agent clumped up the basement stairs, holding four black rifles by their slings. Rae asked, “Full-auto?”
“These are,” the agent said. “He’s got seven gun safes down there, thirty-five rifles of various kinds, twenty-two pistols.”
“He’s an arms dealer,” Lucas said. “He’ll have got permits for everything.”
—
CHASE SHOWED UPa few minutes later, got a quick briefing from the agent heading up the search. To Lucas, she said, “Not much at his business, either. They were careful about documents. I suspect that the stuff we got from Ritter was emailed to him as encrypted documents, but after decrypting, Ritter broke security and printed it, instead of wiping it clean, and hid it as insurance.”
Lucas said, “We talked to Claxson’s PA when we went to his office the first time... older woman, maybe ready to retire. Any chance of getting her here?”
“What for?”
“So Bob, Rae, and I can intimidate her. Bet she knows his phone code.”
Chase gazed at Lucas, said, “We have her. Haven’t arrested her, but we’ve detained her. I could bring her here... to answer questions about his lifestyle and so on. She’s already intimidated.”
“Park her in the parlor, let her sweat, and then we’ll drop in on her.”
“I’ll make the call,” Chase said.
—
THE PA’S NAMEwas Helen Oakes. Lucas, standing at a front window, watched her walking up the driveway two steps ahead of her FBI escort. She was wearing a conservative gray suit, and he remembered that she was wearing gray the first time they’d seen her: not a woman given to flamboyance.
Bob and Rae were watching an FBI search team guy rolling up rugs, and Lucas called to them: “She’s here. Let’s get out of sight.”
They hurried into the study, and Chase met Oakes at the front door and took her to the living room.
