—
LUCAS WATCHED SOME FOOTBALL, went to bed, and was actually up and moving when Chase called the next morning.
“Guess what?”
“From your tone, I guess he wasn’t the guy,” Lucas said.
“Two steps forward, one step back,” Chase said. “We have a connection, just not Sutton. Remember when I said we had blood on the door of Rachel Stokes’s house that probably didn’t come from her or her brother? Like somebody else had been shot?”
“I remember.”
“Well, the science guys got a match—DNA from the blood on the door matches DNA from the cheekpiece on the rifle we found under the cemetery shack. Whoever killed the Stokesesalso shot the kid; the killer must’ve gone to the house specifically to get the gun, and then killed the Stokeses to eliminate witnesses.”
“How does that eliminate Sutton? You couldn’t have done DNA... Oh. Wait. You already had it. Sutton was typed when he was convicted of that ag assault charge.”
“Yup. We’ll re-do him, but I think he’s out of it.”
“Well, at least we got him on a gun charge and resisting arrest,” Lucas said. “That’ll put him away for a while.”
Long silence.
Lucas repeated, “That’ll put him away for a while.”
“About that...”
“Ah, shit.”
“Look, we’re really worried about these alt-right groups and all the guns. Turns out Sutton and Lacey are involved in three or four of them. They can give us some real insight into their operations and the membership. Lacey has a federal job that she’s scared to death she’s about to lose, andwilllose, if we charge her with assaulting a federal officer. We think, you know, if we don’t charge them... they could be really useful in this alternate modality.”
Lucas: “You said, ‘alternate modality.’ I mean, Jesus, Bob nearly got his fuckin’ head cut off. You at least ought to use real words.”
“Well, you know. I’m a fed,” Chase said. “Sometimes I can’t help myself.”
“Sometimes that excuse wears a little thin.”
“Suck it up, Lucas. Listen. I know you tend to sleep in,” Chase said. “Are you up and around?”
“Yes. I’m getting dressed.”
“I’m about a mile away. Meet me in the restaurant in ten minutes.”
—
LUCAS’S BRAIN USUALLYwasn’t fully working for an hour or so after he got up, especially when he got up early; Chase, on the other hand, was a lark, bright and cheerful at the crack of dawn, every hair in place, looking good in a raspberry jacket, dark blouse with navy slacks and matching shoes and a purse designed to hold a .40 caliber handgun, which she’d begun carrying when she found out that it impressed other federal suits.
Lucas was drinking a Diet Coke with pancakes when she arrived. She was one of those women that waitresses seemed commanded by, and as she slid into the booth opposite Lucas, one rushed over to get her order of a cup of coffee and toast, plain, no butter.
“We need to talk about the letters,” she said. “Actually, let me restate that.Ineed to talk about the letters. You need to listen.”
“You find something on them?”
“Yes. Letters. And words and sentences and paragraphs. We’ve had our analysts looking at them.”
“You’ve got analysts for everything, don’t you?”
“Yes. Now, be quiet,” Chase said. “Nobody we’ve arrested or looked at, with two or possibly three exceptions, could have written those letters. And, the letters are all absolutely identical in content—and by that I mean, the original text, type fonts, spacing. For instance, the writer always puts two spaces after a period, which means he probably learned to type on a typewriter,rather than a keyboard. There are at least three iterations. We have one copy-machine version that is perfectly straight on the page, one copy-machine version that is crooked, and one copy-machine version that has a smudge on a word at the bottom of the page, as if maybe somebody got a bit of spit on it, or maybe was reading it while eating breakfast and got some milk on it, or maybe...”
“I get the idea,” Lucas said. “All copied, but different.”
