15
Lucas, Bob, and Rae went out for breakfast together, and Lucas called Forte to tell him about the day’s plan. Forte thought the information they had was too sparse for a search warrant, but Lucas asked him to spot a friendly federal judge in case they found a bit more.
“If it would help, I could call Smalls and see if he’d talk to the judge. Explain the seriousness of the situation,” Lucas said.
“Also explain the seriousness of getting confirmed by the Senate in case a judge should be nominated for the appeals court,” Forte said.
“He might do that,” Lucas said. “What do you think?”
A long pause. “Call Smalls. He’s a lawyer, right?”
“Yes.”
“Then he’ll be aware that there might be some lines he wouldn’t want to cross . . . when making the request.”
LUCAS CALLED SMALLS on his burner and made the request. Smalls said, “I could do that. In fact, I know a judge down that way who’d probably give you a warrant with what you’ve got right now. Benjamin Park. Nice fellow. I’ll give you a ring after I talk to him.”
“Are you in a safe spot?” Lucas asked.
“I’m so safe that even I don’t know where I’m at,” Smalls said.
When Lucas hung up, Rae said, “Sometimes this inside baseball makes me nervous, speaking of things ethics-wise.”
Bob shook his head. “You know better than that. Almost everything in Washington is inside baseball, ethics-wise. Been that way since the git-go.”
“Didn’t have as many lawyers at the git-go,” she said.
SMALLS CALLED BACK at eleven o’clock, and said he’d spoken with the judge, who agreed to take an expedited look at a search warrant request.
“I believe you’ll get it,” he said.
They drove over to Ritter’s apartment complex in two cars, and Lucas led the way around back, where the truck was still sitting in the carport. They didn’t approach it until one o’clock, when Carl Armstrong and a technician named Jane Kerr rolled into the parking lot.
They all got out, shook hands, and walked as a group to the black F-250. Lucas pointed out the ripples down the right side of the truck, and both Armstrong and Kerr took a look, running their hands over the panels, and Armstrong asked Kerr, “Do you see it?”
“I definitely see it,” she said. “I can feel it, too—at least as good as I see it.”
Armstrong said to Lucas, “We’ve got templates from an undamaged truck just like this one, and when we fit the cutouts over the side of the truck, you’ll be able to see the damage more clearly. We’ll take photos in case we need the evidence.”
“Great,” Lucas said.
“In the meantime . . .” He jogged back to his SUV and pulled out a piece of what looked like white rubber. When he carried it back to the F-250, Lucas could see it was actually a cast made from the truck tire tracks they’d found on the mountainside where the logs had been dumped.
Armstrong squatted next to the truck, held the cast up to one of the tires, and they all bent over to look. “Same tires,” he said. “They come as one of the standard options with the truck, but less than thirty percent are equipped with them. Not definitive, but supportive.”
“Another straw on the camel’s back,” Bob said.
THE SIDES AND FRONT END of the truck bed had been fitted with a steel rack to give it more carrying capacity and better tie-down capability. Kerr walked along the side of the bed with a Sherlock Holmes–style magnifying glass. Halfway down, she stopped, looked more closely, turned to Armstrong, and said, “Carl . . . take a look.”
Armstrong took the magnifying glass to look at what appeared to be nothing at all. He said, “Huh,” and, “You guys want to look?”
Lucas took the magnifying glass, and Armstrong took a mechanical pencil from his pocket and pointed at the truck, and said, “Right at the end of the pencil point.”
Lucas looked, and under the glass could see three or four wispy beige threads clinging to a tiny nick in the steel rail. “What am I looking at?”
“Those look exactly like the threads that were stuck to the padded side of the log. I’ll kiss your ass if they aren’t identical. We need to find as many as we can and collect them; a lab will tell us if they’re the same.”
Bob and Rae both took a look, and Bob said, “That’s the search warrant.”
LUCAS CALLED FORTE. Forte wrote the search warrant application for Ritter’s apartment and the interior of the truck and drove it over to the judge’s chambers. Getting the warrant back to Ritter’s place took three boring hours. Lucas, Bob, Rae, Armstrong, and Kerr hung out in their vehicles in the parking lot, making occasional individual runs out to a Safeway Supermarket for food, drinks, and magazines.
They didn’t need the search warrant to fit the F-250 templates to the side of the truck, so Armstrong and Kerr did that while the others watched and waited. The photography was interesting, in a way, for a while, and then they slipped back into a hot, sweating boredom.
When Armstrong finished, he transferred his photos to a laptop and brought the laptop over to Lucas’s Evoque. With Bob and Rae looking over their shoulders from the backseat, Armstrong ran through the high-res photos on the laptop’s screen, and the impact dent was plain enough—Kerr had been on the other side of the templates with a flash, which fired when Armstrong took the shot, illuminating the space between the templates and the truck.
“It’s what you’d expect if they did what we think they did with the logs,” Armstrong said. “I bet they don’t even know that the truck was damaged.”
FORTE DELIVERED the warrant himself, bringing along four additional marshals. Two of the marshals were left in the parking lot to watch the truck; Armstrong and Kerr began collecting fiber samples from the truck and bagging them for the lab.
Lucas, Bob, Rae, Forte, and the other two marshals went to Ritter’s apartment; the two marshals specialized in searches, the first man computers, the second safes and lockboxes. There was no answer to their knocks, so they showed the search warrant to the apartment manager and ordered her to open Ritter’s door.
She squinted at Lucas, and said, “Hey, you’re the marshal who got lost. You were lying to me when you were here before.”
Lucas said, “Sorry.”
He was lying again.
THEIR SEARCH WARRANT was sharply limited to records, both paper and computer files, and to weapons, since Ritter was suspected in the Douglas Last shooting in the Twin Cities. Last had supposedly been shot with his girlfriend’s gun, a fact not mentioned in the warrant application. The warrant specifically said that they were allowed to search for records that might be hidden in the apartment, which, for practical purposes, meant they could look at everything, but if they found something criminal that was not openly visible, and was not a record or a weapon, it probably wouldn’t make it into court.
Ritter’s apartment smelled of almost nothing, except maybe pasta and kitchen cleaner. He lived a spartan life except in three areas: he had a high-end, high-definition television, which sat in front of a seven-foot couch; he had a high-end stereo system, with a turntable in addition to a CD player, and a load of fashionable vinyl records; and he had lots of guns.
The guns were in a gun safe, as opposed to a real safe, in a closet. It was bolted to the floor, and the locks-and-safes specialist took no more than five minutes to get it open.
Inside were fourteen guns—five rifles, a tactical shotgun, and eight handguns—none of them cheap, in a variety of sizes and calibers. Two of the handguns were equipped with screw-on silencers. The marshal noted the serial numbers on the silencers and checked with the ATF computer records and learned that they were both licensed to Ritter and so were legal.
“That’s a shame,” he told Lucas. “That would have been a nice round federal felony if they weren’t registered.”
They also found about a thousand rounds of ammo for the guns. The apartment had a small, tidy kitchen, with two tables. One table was for eating, the other was a gun repair and reloading station.
RITTER HAD an inexpensive Dell desktop computer and a small multipurpose printer/scanner. The computer had no password. All its software was the standard stuff that came with the machine, plus Microsoft Word and a privacy application called Win/DeXX.
That was it: there were no emails, there was no browser history, there were no documents, there were no cookies. The computer specialist marshal explained that Win/DeXX was a Windows software package that could remove any trace of the computer’s use at the end of each session. Click on the Win/DeXX icon, and whatever you’d been doing was lost to history.
“It all goes to where television pictures go when you turn off the TV,” the marshal said.
Ritter also had three black, two-drawer file cabinets in the office: Rae worked through those, while Bob and Lucas prowled the apartment, trying the common hiding places and plugging a lamp into each outlet to make sure it was operable. Outlet caches were currently fashionable among the crooked.
Lucas found the first useful piece of information: Ritter had a modest selection of clothing, mostly athletic and outdoorsy, including camo cargo pants and jackets, along with a dark suit, suitable for funerals, three sport coats in varied textures and shades of blue, three pairs of gray or black slacks, four pairs of boots, and one pair of black dress shoes.
Lucas was patting down the jackets when he felt something stiff in the inside breast pocket of one of the sport coats. When he pulled it out, it was a plastic hotel key card. On the back was a logo of the Hilton Garden Inn Omaha East/Council Bluffs.
Ritter had been in Omaha.
“Bag that baby,” Bob said.
“Think we can call it a record?” Lucas asked.
“Fuck yeah.”
OF THE SIX file cabinet drawers Rae was working, two drawers were a jumble of office supplies and computer cables, the other four a collection of investment and bank statements and employment and tax records. “I’m looking at it, and he does have some money, about . . . maybe eight hundred thousand dollars in cash and investments, if I’m not missing anything. He seems to spend a lot of time overseas, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he gets free food and housing along with a nice salary that he can’t spend anywhere over there . . . so his investments don’t seem outlandish. You’d need a good accountant to tell you for sure, and I’m not one.”
Sitting on one of the file cabinets was an innocuous framed photo showing Ritter, with two male friends and two women, in what looked like a park. He had his arm around the shoulder of one of the women, who might have been who they’d seen at the Wily Rat nightclub. She was half turned away from the camera, her face obscured, but Lucas could see that she was short and dark-haired.
FORTE HAD LEFT with the computer specialist a half hour after they started the search. The locks-and-safes guy was helping go through the apartment inch by inch when he took a call from one of the two marshals who were at the truck.
He listened for a moment, then said, “Hey, Lucas, Ritter’s down at the truck. He just showed up.”
Lucas took the phone, and asked, “He’s driving the Miata?”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t let him leave,” Lucas said. “We’ll be right down.”
“He’s already parked,” the marshal said. “He’s coming up, and he’s pissed.”
“Walk with him,” Lucas said.
RITTER WAS at the door five minutes later. He was a bit shorter than average, but muscular, dark-haired, dark-eyed, dark-complected, with three parallel white scars on one side of his face that might have been inflicted by a woman’s fingernails or, in Ritter’s case, shrapnel. He was wearing a black T-shirt, tan cotton/nylon cargo pants, light hiking boots, and a black ball cap.
He picked out Lucas as the main fed, demanded, “What the hell is going on?”
Lucas said, “We believe you may be involved in the attempted assassination of Senator Porter Smalls that resulted in the murder of Mrs. Cecily Whitehead. We’re looking for evidence in that case.”
Ritter nearly did a movie double take. “What the fuck you been smoking, man?”
“Don’t smoke,” Lucas said. “We have a lot of questions for you.”
Ritter reached down to one of his cargo pockets, and it was Lucas who reacted, moving a hand toward his side. Ritter froze, then said, “Wallet.”
Lucas nodded, and Ritter extracted a trifold wallet from his pocket, took a card out, and handed it to Lucas. “I might ask a question or two myself, but I’m not going to answer any, not without an okay from my lawyer. That’s my lawyer’s name, address, and direct phone number. I’m going to call him now, unless I’m under arrest.”
“Not yet,” Lucas said, “but you will be. Go make your call.”
“Can I leave the apartment to make the call?”
“Yes. You’re free to go, but our search warrant covers your vehicles, so you can’t take those until we’re done with them. If we find any evidence pertinent to the case, the cars will be impounded.”
“Goddamnit, that’s not right,” Ritter said. “Do I get reimbursed for the cost of a rental car?”
“I wouldn’t hold your breath,” Lucas said.
Ritter said, “There are two pistols in the safe with suppressors. Both are registered with the ATF.”
“We know,” Lucas said. “That was a disappointment.”
Ritter held Lucas’s eye momentarily, and said, “I’ll remember you.”
“I think you already met my wife,” Lucas said. And Ritter blinked.
RITTER TURNED AND LEFT.
Ritter had committed at least one murder, and probably two, but he wasn’t a professional or career criminal—he was essentially a soldier, a guy who killed people under orders, or even of his own volition, but who didn’t have to worry about prosecution.
Stupid crooks would have reacted to Lucas’s comment about Weather, but a professional would have allowed a puzzled wrinkle to appear on his forehead. Ritter had blinked; it was called a tell by poker players, and, as far as Lucas was concerned, it was as good as an admission of guilt.
Couldn’t take it to a jury, but it was there.
Rae eased up, and said, “Decided to go with Mr. Subtle, huh?”
“I wasn’t going to get anything from being Mr. Nice, and we don’t have enough to bust him yet, so . . . a push never hurt.”
AS THE SEARCH wound down, Lucas walked around the building and found Armstrong wrapping up his inspection of the truck. Kerr was working on Ritter’s other vehicle, a fire-engine-red Mazda MX-5 Miata. A very nice car, Lucas thought; a driver’s car, probably even more than a Porsche, at about one-fourth the price.
The interior of the truck hadn’t produced anything. It did have a GPS, but all the history had been wiped clean. That was evidence of a kind but not useful.
“We got enough threads to braid a string,” Armstrong said, “but only from the right side. I think we’ll be able to produce some hard evidence that the fabric is identical to the fabric that was used to pad the logs.”
“How soon will we know?”
“I’ll squeeze the lab guy. I’ll know something tomorrow, but we can go after DNA to nail it down, and that’ll take a few days . . . or even a couple of weeks.”
“Would it speed things up if a U.S. senator called and asked about it?”
“For sure,” Armstrong said.
THERE WAS NOTHING IN THE MAZDA.
Bob had come along with Lucas, and said, “I gotta believe that the guy has a laptop. Everybody has a laptop, including Ritter. Nothing in his hands when he got out of the Miata, nothing in the car. I wonder where he ditched it?”
Lucas looked around the parking lot. The lot, behind the apartment house, wasn’t visible from the street. Ritter hadn’t pulled in and pulled back out because somebody would have noticed a bright red sports car coming and going without stopping.
“Wouldn’t have had a chance to throw it out the window,” Lucas said. “Wonder if somebody tipped him off that we were here?”
“Mrs. Snyder?” Snyder, the apartment manager.
“We warned her. And she struck me as a woman who knew when to stay warned.”
“Well . . . look at all those windows,” Bob said, and they both looked up at the back of the apartment complex. “We know Ritter’s got a girlfriend, and if she lives up there, she might have given him a ring.”
“Probably what happened,” Lucas agreed. “I’ll ask Snyder; maybe she’d know something about a relationship.”
“Be nice if we could find a laptop,” Bob said. “The computer guys might be able to find out if it was used in either Omaha or Minneapolis even if the messages were erased.”
RAE CAME AROUND, and asked, “What’s next, boss?”
“We get the truck towed to the Arlington impound lot. We have the names of four people probably involved in hitting Weather, and those four are also probably involved in the Smalls attack,” Lucas said. “Tomorrow, we’ll track them down. Keep the pressure up.”