“Shoot, I don’t know anybody who doesn’t think that,” Bacon said. He was a blue-eyed, square-faced, snub-nosed man in a plaid shirt and jeans, who reminded Lucas of an electrician who’d done work on his lake cabin. “I’m not talking about people like me. I mean, I know I’m a right-winger. But I mean like average people. Or teachers. Or lefties. They’re as pissed as we are.”
“This guy isn’t quite like that, though,” Lucas said. “He might make you a little nervous, but you don’t know exactly why. Might look at you a little sideways. Might look stressed, like he can’t relax. Maybe is a bachelor, but maybe divorced and angry about that. Tells you what’s what, and expects you to agree with him and you kind of go along with it, because you get this feeling that you reallydon’twant to piss him off.”
Bacon said, “Huh.” He scratched his nose, looked at his lawyer and then at Chase, and said, “Let me look at that list you’ve been writing down.”
Chase pushed a yellow legal pad across the table, and Bacon scanned it, then asked, “You got a pen?”
Chase slid a pen across to him, and he spent a moment, working down the list. “Kinda surprises me, but there’s more than one like that,” Bacon said. He pushed the list over to Lucas: four names had check marks next to them.
Lucas looked at Chase. “I’ll take these four.”
“What do they do?” Chase asked Bacon. “Do they have jobs? What do you know about them?”
Bacon said he thought Carl Stanley and Rollie Klein had spent time in prison, Klein for robbery, he thought, and Stanley for embezzlement. He’d met both, and both were the kind described by Lucas: they seemed smart, even educated, and maybe a little crazy.
Elias Dunn and Harold Sandberg, he thought, weren’t criminals, but were right-wing, hard-core, smart, and definitely educated. Dunn was an engineer, Bacon thought, but he didn’t know what kind; Sandberg was a moderately unsuccessful inventor. “He makes some money from his inventions, but not too much. He thinks he’s always getting cheated and he’s sort of... out there. But he is smart, and a little crazy, and he does use computers.”
One of the agents went away with the list of four names and came back ten minutes later with addresses for all four men, and printouts of the rap sheets for Klein and Stanley. Bacon was apparently right about Dunn and Sandberg—Dunn had no criminal record at all, Sandberg had been arrested for disturbing the peace during a political demonstration in New York City, but the charges had been dropped.
Klein had once been a minor official at the Port of New York and had been convicted of large-scale theft, misdirecting entire cargo containers of consumer products from Europe to warehouses operated by accomplices, then covering the misdirection with forged paperwork. Klein had claimed that he had nothing to do with the thefts, that he’d been framed by higher-ups at the port, who were cooperating with a New York organized crime family. He refused to roll over on accomplices, claiming that he didn’t have any, because he didn’t commit the crime. He did three years in prison and apparently had been radicalized while he was inside.
Stanley had been convicted of setting up a phony charity that collected money for the ostensible purpose of feeding homeless people in Washington. He may have fed a few, but most of the donated money he simply stole, to feed a gambling habit. He’d done eighteen months in a federal prison. He had an erratic history of political involvement, as a money-raiser and bundler for both Democratic and Republican political campaigns.
“Klein’s a possibility, depending on what happened to him in prison. I don’t like him much, not for shooting a kid. He was a schemer, not a hitter. No history of violence,” Lucas said, scanning the rap sheets the agent had brought back. “He got out two years ago. Maybe somebody could talk to the warden, see what kind of rep he had, who his friends were.”
Chase pointed at one of the other agents, and he said, “I got it.”
“I don’t like Stanley at all,” Lucas said. “He’s a hustler, and a hustler’s not going to make the mistake of murdering a kid. I mean, he might kill somebody, but he’d want an explicit payoff and right now. Not something vague, not something later. Sincewe know who set up the website, we know he hasn’t been offered a payoff.”
“We’ve got nothing on Dunn, not much on Sandberg,” Chase said.
Lucas went back to Bacon: “How’d you meet Dunn and Sandberg?”
“At lectures. You know, you get these retired generals and admirals and so on, they set up blogs and start commenting on world affairs—and they write books and give talks. A lot of them are really, really conservative. You see a lot of the same faces at these things. People ask questions, go back and forth, you get to know who some of the smart ones are. Dunn and Sandberg are smart. Sandberg’s hard-core and he lets you know it. Say if a general seems weak, he’ll tell him to his face. And he gets really, really angry. Dunn doesn’t talk much, but... you get a feeling about him. He could do something. He doesn’t seem angry, but he always asks the toughest questions. Sometimes, even the hard-right guys don’t want to answer.”
“Like what?” Lucas asked.
“Like, ‘What’s your program? You say all this stuff, but what’s your program? What do you want to do?’ Stuff like that. He wants specifics on how somebody will get things done. How they’ll change the world. If the guy starts talking about raising money for candidates or lobbying or linking up websites, Dunn will shake his head and walk away.”
Lucas turned to Chase. “I like that. And I like Sandberg, the angry thing.”
Chase went to Bacon: “If you had to choose one, which would you pick?”
Bacon had to think it over, finally shook his head. “I don’t know. Like I said, there’s something about Dunn that’s spooky. But Sandberg...”
Lucas asked Chase, “Can you get access to their IRS records?”
“Yes. I’ll have to put together some paper, but I could have it this afternoon.”
“Do that, then. Have your analysts look at it.”
“What are you going to do?” Chase asked.
“We’ve got their addresses. I’ll cruise them, take a look. Call me as soon as you get the IRS stuff. I want to know where they work, where their money comes from. I’d like to talk to their employers.”
—
LUCAS CAUGHT A CAB BACKto the hotel, checked the addresses for Dunn and Sandberg. They both lived in Virginia, Sandberg close-in, Dunn farther south. He got in the Cadillac and headed out.
