THEY TOOK THE TAHOE, which had lights and a siren, with Lucas driving, because he more or less knew the way. He briefed Bob and Rae on his interview with Lang and told them about his last conversation with Gibson, in which he ordered him to find the ANM training camp. He didn’t know what kind of research Gibson had done, but now he was dead.
“We’ve got a guy we can go after, a Thomas Aline. Jane might not like it, because they want to use him as a wedge to find out more about ANM, but, he might be a wedge we need to use now.”
The lights and siren on the Tahoe helped, but it still tooktwenty minutes to get to Potomac. At Lang’s house, two Montgomery County patrol cars were parked outside along with a well-used and unmarked sedan that looked like nothing more than a cop car.
They didn’t need much ID; the Tahoe’s lights were still flashing as they turned the corner a block from Lang’s house. A uniformed cop pointed at the curb, they parked, and a plainclothes cop came out of the house to look at them.
“Marshals Service?” The cop was tall, burly, weathered like an addicted golfer—and he dressed like one, in no-wrinkle slacks and a golf shirt, except for the sport coat that covered his gun.
“We were working with Charles Lang and Stephen Gibson on the 1919 investigation,” Lucas told him. “Lang called me, I called the FBI.” A dark SUV, lights flashing, turned the corner, and they all turned to look. “That’s probably them. Her name is Jane Chase and she has some clout. She called you.”
“Anybody else coming?” the cop asked. “CIA, NSA, NC-double A?”
“Could happen,” Lucas said. “Secret Service, maybe ATF.”
“You’re shittin’ me...”
“Not really. The Secret Service and FBI and some local cops busted a guy this morning who was apparently planning to shoot a senator’s son at his grade school.”
“Oh, boy.” The cop glanced back at Lang’s house. “This is tied in?”
“Could be. We don’t know. I got a bad feeling about it.”
The cop’s name was Andy Jackson—“Not the President.” Chase came up, trailed by her assistant, and shook his hand.
“You want to go in?” Jackson asked. “Not much to see excepta dead body, shot once in the forehead, apparently after getting out of his car. The car door is still open, but the garage door is down. It looks like he went to meet somebody at the exit door and was shot where he stood. Probably a .38 or .40-something caliber handgun, judging from the hole. The slug went through his head and into the wall and out the back—the wall’s Sheetrock, and didn’t slow it down much. We’re probably not going to find the slug without jumping through our butts. I’d like to finish with the crime scene stuff before we trample all over it...”
“Finish with the crime scene,” Chase said. “What does Lang have to say? Can we talk to him?”
“Sure. He’s in the main house, Gibson has an apartment over the garage.” Jackson pointed at the garage and Chase turned to look. “Far enough away that Lang says he never heard a thing. Neighbors didn’t hear anything, either, the ones we’ve been able to find.”
“What do you think about Lang?” Lucas asked.
“Don’t tell him I said so, not yet, but he looks okay to me. Shook up, bad. Of course, you could be shook up if you killed somebody, but I don’t think he did. No complicated alibi. He said Gibson went out last night, after work, said he was going to meet some people on a research project. He was talking to some members of a group called White Fist. Lang’s not sure of the time, but he watched a news program until 10:30 or so, and spent some time in the bathroom, washing his face and brushing his teeth and putting on his pajamas, so he thinks he was in bed around eleven. He saw headlights on his curtains before he went to sleep, and that’s the last thing he knew until he got up this morning.”
“He’s sure it was Gibson? The headlights?”
“He assumed it was, but he didn’t look. Not to say that there might not have been somebody in the car with him. But it looks to me like somebody might have either followed him here, or been waiting for him here, and met Gibson at the door.”
Chase: “Was Gibson involved with anyone?”
“Lang says no. He said Gibson had a girlfriend a couple of years back, for a short time, but he hadn’t seen her for a while. We’ll check to see what she has to say: we’ve got a name. We haven’t had time to talk to Lang much—I’ve been here for...” He looked at his watch. “... about fifteen minutes.”
—
“LET’S TALK TO LANG,” Chase said.
On the walk to the main house, Jackson asked, “You think it had to do with Gibson’s research? On these alt-right people?”
“That’s an obvious possibility,” Chase said, “depending on who exactly he was looking at, and how he was going about it.”
“As soon as your crime scene people are done, we need to get up in his apartment and look for a notebook or a laptop or anything else he might have taken notes on,” Lucas said. “We need to check his phone calls, see if there are GPS links that the phone company can help us with.”
“We can do all that,” Jackson said. “There is a laptop up there for sure, and quite a few legal pads.”
“We’d like to be there when you look,” Chase said. “If there’s a link going out to a shooter group—this White Fist sounds interesting—we need to know which one it was.”
“So do we,” Jackson said.
