Chase shrugged: “Hey, I’m an attorney.”
She turned to Lucas: “The man they arrested this morning is named William Christopher Walton. They’re sure that’s his real name because they found his fingerprints, taken when he joined the Army twelve years ago. He was discharged after four months as being psychologically unsuitable for military duty. He has no priors of any kind, that we can find. They’re entering his house now, he apparently lives with his mother. They did find a rather unusual letter in his pocket, which refers him to the 1919 site, explains what it means, and suggests that he might want to take action. The letter is smudgy, apparently a Xerox copy of an original. It was still in an envelope addressed to him. Walton’s asked for a lawyer—or as he put it, a white lawyer—so we’re not getting anything from him.”
“Lone wolf,” Lang said. “How are you going to stop that?”
Lucas said to Jackson, “Give us some booties. We need tolook at the body and up in the apartment. We really can’t wait all day.” And he asked Lang, “How did Gibson take notes? Did he take them on a laptop, or in notebooks, or a recorder?”
“He had a recorder, a very expensive one. Digital. A lot of the time, though, it wasn’t possible to take notes. He had a lavalier microphone that he could put inside his shirt, with a wire to the recorder, but he rarely tried to do that. Getting caught would be... disastrous, in some cases. Like with White Fist, you wouldn’t want to risk it. What he usually did—he had a very good memory—he’d interview people and then drive around a block and get his recorder out and talk into it. That’s what he probably did yesterday. I doubt that he would have transcribed anything, getting home when he did. He was an early-to-rise fellow. If he needed to transcribe anything, he would have waited until this morning.”
“We need to listen to that recorder,” Lucas said to Jackson.
“And look at his computer,” Chase said. To Lang: “Do you know if it’s password-protected?”
“Of course it is, but I happen to know the password,” Lang said. “I’ll have to write it down for you. It’s complicated, it’s one of those super-strong ones you can get generated on the internet.”
“Please do that,” Chase said.
Lang said, “I will. Oh, I do want to call my attorney.” He nodded at Chase and said, “Thank you for that, young lady.”
They got the password from Lang and as they walked away to the apartment, Chase muttered, “Nazi nincompoop.”
“About that password,” Lucas said.
“I’ve got it...”
“Looks quite a bit like the password to the 1919 site.”
Chase stopped in her tracks, looked at the slip of paper in her hand. “Now that’s a thought.” She looked back at Lang’s house. “Charles Lang is exactly the kind of person who’d love to have some power over a senator.”
—
LUCAS,CHASE,BOB, and Rae followed Jackson out to the garage, where a crime scene technician was pulling on a pair of Tyvek overalls. Somebody had run up the garage overhead door, and even standing back, they could see Gibson’s body on its side, with a puddle of blood around his head. He had the sudden-shot, rag-doll look, collapse and complete relaxation, his tongue partway out of his mouth, his eyelids half open, reddish streaks under the skin of his face, where gravity was pulling blood down through his flesh.
Lucas took a step closer, squatted, as the crime scene guy said, “Not too close,” and looked at the bullet hole in Gibson’s face. No sign of a fight, no abrasions on his hands that Lucas could see. He’d simply been shot.
Lucas said, “There’s no powder penetration in the skin around the bullet hole. The shooter might have used something to muffle the shot, a towel or something.”
The crime scene guy squatted next to Lucas and said, “Look, there on his chest. See that white stuff? Looks like little specks of fabric. I think you’re probably right. We’ll bag it.”
“Huh.”
“And right there, by his hip, by his other hand...”
Lucas could see a black cord. He and the crime scene guyboth edged around to the other side of the body, and they could see a thin plastic box under Gibson’s hip, like a cell phone, but too thick to be a phone.
“His recorder,” Lucas said. “We gotta pull that out of there. Right now.”
“That could be a problem,” the crime scene guy said. “We could lose some evidence.”
—
LUCAS CALLED JACKSON OVER, pointed out the plastic box, and after a brief argument with the crime scene guy, Jackson agreed they should pull the recorder, but should give the tech time to process the area right around it.
“Let’s go look at the apartment, then,” Lucas said.
Chase, who’d been watching from the driveway, said, “We’ve got a crime scene team on the way. They’ll help process the apartment. Since the murder happened here, we’ll mostly be talking about looking at his records, at his notebooks and computer and recordings and all that.”
The apartment, connected to the garage area by an interior stairs, was fairly large and an extremely efficient work space. What normally would have been a living room was more like a working library, with a long center table covered with notebooks, papers, and magazines; the walls were lined with overflowing bookcases, one section filled with military thriller fiction, but most of it was packed with nonfiction war and political histories. An odd-shaped musical instrument case sat against a wall, next to a music stand; somebody later told Lucas that the case contained a rare and expensive oud.
