“Your mind is a fucking garbage dump,” Rae said.
Lucas just ate. Truth be told, the repartee was annoying him, but he didn’t want to pull rank to shut them up. They were Bob and Rae, his friends. Rae picked up on his attitude.
“What are you thinking about, big guy?”
“Linc.”
“That gonna do any good? Thinking about it?”
“What else we got? You oughta try it,” Lucas snapped. Then, “Sorry.”
The repartee stopped and they drove mostly without talking to Lang’s house.
—
WHEN THEY PULLEDinto Lang’s driveway, the man himself walked out on the front porch to meet them. “I can’t talk about Stephen without weeping and it’s embarrassing,” he said. He actually had a black mourning armband pinned to his jacket sleeve, and Lucas wondered if it might not have once had a swastika on it. “His family is asking about when they can get the body...”
“That’ll be up to the medical examiner and the FBI,” Lucas told him. “I suspect it’ll be a few more days. They gotta do chemistry.”
“I’m trying to stay in touch, but there are so many bureaucrats, and nobody wants to tell you anything.” Lang ushered them through the house to his office, slumped behind his desk, and asked, “How can I help?”
“We’re looking for a man named Linc, who Stephen saw at White Fist,” Lucas said. “I don’t know if it’s L-i-n-c or L-i-n-k, but I’ve been assuming it’s short for ‘Lincoln.’ He may be a shooter for one of your alt-right groups, and he’s probably way out there. Have you seen the name?”
Lang sighed and said, “I’ve been fumbling my way throughStephen’s database.” He patted a laptop sitting on his desk. “I don’t know my way around, but I could do a search. I don’t know that name myself. If it’s L-i-n-k, it could be a nickname...”
“Well, let’s look,” Rae said.
—
LANG WAS RIGHT ABOUT FUMBLING: he poked tentatively at the laptop’s keys, but after a couple of minutes, he threw up his hands and said, “There’s no Linc, Link, or Lincoln in this computer, and this is everything we have. I mean, not in the computer, but up in a cloud somewhere, but it looks at the cloud, too, and there’s no sequence of those letters. Anywhere.”
Lucas said, “Damnit.”
“Ask the ANM,” Lang said. “They organize politically, so they’ve got lists. Probably the best lists that exist. A lot of their members would be considered alt-right.”
“There’s a problem with that,” Lucas said. He told Lang that John Oxford had cut himself off from ANM.
Lang said, “Look. He may have taken himself out, but he knows names. A lot of ANM, from what little I know about it, involves face-to-face relationships, and Old John will still know those names. He hasn’t erased his memory. He could find a way to get to one of them, and put out the word, and have somebody call you.”
“Worth a try, I guess,” Lucas said. He wasn’t sure that it was, but he didn’t have much else.
Bob said, “Why don’t we go jack up Toby Boone’s brother? Collect a few names there, jack up some more people.”
“Threaten them,” Rae said. “Make them sweat.”
Lucas was staring at Bob, who asked, “What?”
Lucas scratched his nose, said, “You were almost onto something there, Bob—you just got it exactly backwards.”
“Way to go,” Rae said to Bob.
—
OUT IN THE DRIVEWAY, away from Lang, Lucas called Jane Chase. “I need you to send me the names and addresses of the White Fist members you found, but we only want the names of the married ones, or the ones living with a woman. And preferably those with kids.”
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“Investigate,” Lucas said.
