6
Joe Rose had a voice that sounded like gravel being shoveled from a truck—too much whiskey, cigars, or both. Lucas only told him he was a U.S. Marshal, that he was investigating an auto accident only peripherally involving Mr. Rose. He didn’t mention either Jack Parrish or Porter Smalls.
Rose told Lucas he lived in Bethesda, Maryland, and that he’d be around all day. “I work at home now.”
Lucas retrieved his car from the valet, followed the GPS through tangled traffic to Bethesda, which was northwest of the District. The distance couldn’t have been more than ten miles but took him almost forty minutes to drive.
Rose lived in what was probably an expensive house, half brick, half white clapboard, of a style that Lucas thought of as confused—it had a bunch of overlapping roofs, a truncated clapboard turret, two single-car garage doors that probably fed the same double-car garage, a cobblestone driveway, and a manicured front lawn. The front door gave onto a tiny covered porch, good only for keeping the rain off visitors while they waited for a ride.
Several black cables led from a telephone pole near the street to the house—power lines, maybe a hardwired phone, maybe cable television/Internet . . . but a couple of more as well, although Lucas didn’t know what function they might serve.
Lucas parked in the driveway, stepped out into a humid, nearly wet heat, and rang the doorbell. As he waited, he looked up and down the street: no people, no cars, nothing moving, not even a cat.
A bedroom community.
THE DOOR OPENED, and a man who was probably Joe Rose stood in the doorway and asked, “Do you have some ID?”
“I do,” Lucas said. He showed Rose his badge and ID card, and Rose stepped back and said, “Come on in. Uh . . . I can’t think of any reason that I would, but should I have a lawyer here?”
Lucas shook his head. “No. The investigation doesn’t involve you in any way, except as a possible source of information.”
Rose was Lucas’s height and build, but older, retirement age, gray-haired, large-nosed, with a pair of inexpensive computer glasses pushed up on his forehead. Close up, his voice sounded even harsher than it had on the phone—an injury of some kind; he hadn’t gotten it singing. He was pale, like an office worker, and freckled, wore tan slacks and a golf shirt, loafers but no socks.
He said, “Okay, I got the time. You know I don’t have a regular job anymore.”
“No, I didn’t know that,” Lucas said, as he followed him into the house and down a hallway. The hallway opened into what had probably been designed as a family room but now was being used as a spacious office, with three separate computer monitors on a library table.
“Yeah, I’m a contract researcher now. You know what’s not on the Internet now?”
“I thought everything was.”
“Nope. There’s tons of government stuff that isn’t—stuff that’s still important but that was recorded before 2000 or so,” Rose said. “Internet people don’t know how to do paper research, courthouse research, so I’m doing fairly well. I’m praying it keeps up, because I can use the money.”
“Cool. You invented your own job,” Lucas said.
“Yup. So . . . what’s up?”
Rose pointed Lucas at a leather club chair and took an identical chair facing Lucas across a fuzzy brown-and-tan rug. Not married, Lucas thought: women generally didn’t allow big fat leather chairs or brown fuzzy rugs in their family rooms.
Lucas: “I’m told you don’t much care for a man named Jack Parrish. I need to know more about Mr. Parrish. About his character.”
Rose responded with a grunt, then asked, “What does that have to do with an auto accident?”
“I don’t want to talk about that,” Lucas said. He softened things with a smile. “I know it’s horseshit, but . . . I can’t right now tie two things together with somebody I don’t know.”
“Got it,” Rose said. He sighed, and said, “Parrish is . . . I mean, calling him an asshole or a sonofabitch doesn’t do the man justice. Even in Washington, he’s something special. And, believe me, we’ve got a glut of assholes around here.”
Rose had worked for the CIA at the same time Parrish had, both as middle managers in “parallel departments,” as Rose put it. “I can’t tell you what we were doing, but it was technical.”
“I saw a file that said Parrish did something with photo interpretation.”
“He did, but . . . let’s just leave it there. If you got that information by seeing a list of his so-called publications, he stole most of those things from his subordinates,” Rose said. “Anyway, he was there for five or six years—I overlapped him on both ends, in terms of employment. During that time, I watched him undermine anyone he thought might someday challenge him—bad personnel reports, that kind of thing. He was an attention junkie and an ass-kisser. What I’m saying is, he stepped on a lot of good people and tried to crawl up the org chart over their bodies. Eventually, people began to catch on, it caught up with him . . . and he got out. Moved over to the Senate as a staff member.”
“Leaving you . . . where?”
“Where I was. I had an obscure job, important but not flashy. At least, I thought it was important, and I was good at it. Then, we had a situation come up . . . uh . . . that I don’t want to talk about yet. Parrish advocated one kind of response, we advocated another. My boss and I went over to SIC—the Senate Intelligence Committee—with some, mmm, documents that suggested that Parrish was bullshitting them on behalf of a faction over at the Pentagon. He and the Pentagon got their way, and what happened later was a goddamn disaster. Too big even for an effective cover-up.”
He looked up at the ceiling, both hands in the air, grinned at Lucas, but leaned forward and whispered, “People died. People who shouldn’t have. Lots of them.”
Lucas: “Who got blamed?”
Rose tapped his chest. “I did. Not for the disaster but for the fact that some of it got out to the press. One of the senators brought the deputy director over for a closed-door meeting, and, the next thing I knew, I was talking to our security people about leaks. Shit, I didn’t even know a reporter. I said so. But they kept after me—this went on for a year—and I got what they called a lateral transfer to a nonsensitive position, pending resolution of the leaking case. I had thirty-three years in, and I said fuck it and retired. When I was going out the door, a pal of mine, higher up the line, took me aside and said that be believed the whole thing was a dirty trick engineered by Parrish, who’d been telling people that I’d been leaking and that me leaking might even have caused the problem—that I’d been leaking before the action, somebody overheard me, and word had been passed to the Syrians . . . Damn lie, every bit of it. I found out later he’d gone to work for the senator who’d been asking the questions.”
“Taryn Grant,” Lucas said.
Rose nodded, and asked, “You want a Pepsi or a beer?” After asking the question, he nodded vigorously, a pantomime nod.
Lucas said, “Yeah, I could use a Pepsi. I haven’t had anything to drink since I left the hotel . . .”
“C’mon, I’ll get you one,” Rose said.
In the kitchen, he opened the refrigerator, took out two Pepsis, handed one to Lucas, and said, “Let’s go out and sit by the pool. I got an umbrella out there.”
Outside, he led the way past the pool to the end of the backyard. “I’m probably overcooking things a little, but I worry about surveillance. Especially since I know what can be done, if they want to do it,” he said. “I doubt anyone’s actually watching me . . . If they are, they wouldn’t be bugging us out here.”
Lucas said, “Okay . . .”
“Anyway, what I don’t understand is, why did Senator Grant jump into this with both feet? Stick a bullshit investigation on me and on my boss? She didn’t have to do that. What would she get out of it?”
Lucas had an answer to that question, but he didn’t say what he thought: that Grant was buying Parrish’s loyalty. Instead, he said, “I need to know the dimension of this . . . disaster. I won’t talk about it to anyone, but I need to know. I will tell you that the matter I’m investigating is extremely serious . . . more so than you can probably imagine.”
Rose looked around the yard, took a hit on his Pepsi, and said, “I don’t even know if you’re really a marshal. You could be spoofing me.”
“You could look me up on the Internet. There’s a lot of stuff there, going back years.”
“I’ll do that,” Rose said. “In the meantime . . . I’m not going to say anything more. We’re talking about federal prison.”
“I don’t think so,” Lucas said. “If all this works out the way I suspect it will, they’d be afraid to go after you.”
“You don’t know,” Rose said. “I don’t believe that they’re afraid of anybody.”
“You’d be wrong about that,” Lucas said.
“Give me your email,” Rose said. “Maybe I’ll get back to you.”
“Tell me one more thing—I’m sure it isn’t classified, but it’s something you’d know,” Lucas said. “Parrish was an active duty military officer, stayed in the Reserve, and is now a major, and he’s moving up to lieutenant colonel sometime soon. Would his service with the Army and the CIA, and now with the Senate, give him access to, you know, people with an ability to do violence?”
Rose squinted at him, licked his lips: “Who’d he get shot?”
“Nobody. But if he wanted to get somebody shot, would he have the connections? I’m not talking about a military shooting, a terrorist shooting, but a civilian shooting here in the U.S. Could he get a couple of names?”
Another hit on the bottle, and a quick nod. “Oh, yeah. In about five minutes. And now I am done.”
Rose refused to say anything more. Lucas left him standing by the pool and walked around the house and out to the street.
THE SECOND, third, and fourth entries on Carter’s list all lived in Virginia, on the other side of the District. He’d get them later in the afternoon, he thought, and could stop at the hotel on the way.
The first time Lucas had encountered Grant, she’d worked through two ex-military security men, whom she’d paid to kill for her—and one of them she’d bound to herself with the pretense of loving him. Grant would do what was necessary to recruit people she thought she needed—political favors, money, sex—whatever she thought it would take.
If she needed Parrish’s particular kind of expertise, she’d probably bought his loyalty by protecting him from criticism; maybe even saved his job. There was also the prospect of the White House . . .
BACK AT THE HOTEL, Lucas washed his face and went to the laptop, clicked on his email, expecting a note from Weather, and maybe from his daughter Letty, who was in her third year at Stanford. There was nothing from Letty, but he did have a brief note from Weather, with school news, and another email from Rose, hiding behind the name Donald R. Ligny, with a subject line that identified him: “Looked you up on the Internet.”
Scrolling down, Lucas found a Washington Post story about the bombing of a Syrian nerve gas warehouse that turned out to be a souk, or marketplace, instead, with a small school for girls at one end. The Syrians claimed that ninety-four people had been killed, most of them women or children, a claim verified by a religious charity and with photographs. The school had been wiped out.
Under the story, there were six added words:
“We told them. They didn’t listen.”
YEARS BEFORE, Lucas had seen a Tom Clancy movie—he couldn’t remember the name of it, but Harrison Ford was in it. He remembered one scene in particular, in which a British SAS team had wiped out a terrorist training camp someplace in North Africa. The scene had stuck in Lucas’s head because he’d spent his life working murders, murders which had often horrified him. In the Clancy movie, the SAS attack had been monitored by satellite, and a group of CIA suits had casually watched the attack and conducted a running commentary. “There’s a kill,” one had said while leisurely drinking a cup of coffee.
The scene was chilling, as it was intended to be. There were people down there, dead, executed while they slept. They were terrorists, probably deserved what they got, but they were still people, snuffed out in an instant.
The Post story, combined with what Lucas had been told by Rose, reflected the same kind of bureaucratic attitude as the Clancy scene: people more interested in taking care of their operational lives, their political lives, than the fact that a whole lot of people died at their hands.
Parrish and Grant hustling around to shift the blame . . . Forget about the women and children blown to bloody rags in a split second.
LUCAS GOT HIS CAR BACK, and let the navigation system guide him across the Potomac to a neighborhood of neat brick homes and crooked, elderly trees on a blacktopped lane in Arlington, Virginia. Another bedroom community, but at least a hundred years older than Rose’s place in Maryland. Of the three additional names on Carter’s list, Lucas had gotten no answer with two of his phone calls, but the third call had been picked up by a woman named Gladys Ingram. She was a partner in an Arlington law firm, and said she could be home for an hour or so.
“If I’m going to talk to a marshal about anything, I’d rather it not be here,” she said, referring to her office. Lucas looked up the firm, found that it had two dozen partners, and more than eighty associates, and did a lot of lobbying.
Ingram’s car, a silver Mercedes SL550, was parked in the driveway when Lucas arrived. The street was so narrow that he pulled in behind her car to keep from blocking it.
Like Rose, when she came to the door, Ingram asked to see Lucas’s ID.
Unlike Rose, after Lucas’s original call, she’d gone straight to a computer and looked him up on the Internet. There were several hundred references to his time as a cop, with two different Minnesota agencies, and there was a brief note in a Star-Tribune gossip column that he’d moved to the U.S. Marshals Office. There were also a dozen photos taken over a twenty-year span of Lucas at various crime scenes. Not content with that, she’d used a law office code to check his credit rating.
“Okay, if you’re spoofing me, you’ve gone to a lot of trouble to do it,” she said, still standing in the doorway. “I have to say, you’re apparently the richest marshal I’ve ever met.”
“I got lucky with a computer start-up when I was between police agencies,” Lucas said. “You’re the second person I talked to today who worried about being spoofed. ‘Spoofed’ means, like, a fraud or a deception, right?”
“Yes,” she said. She was a gawky woman, with reddish brown hair that barely escaped being mousy. She had brown eyes, looking at him through tortoiseshell glasses, and wore a dress that was conservatively fashionable. Lucas thought she might be forty. “It’s ’Net slang. So, what are we talking about here? You said you were investigating an automobile accident that has nothing to do with me—but that I might have some information about. I don’t know about any automobile accident.”
“Like I said, your information might be important, but it’s . . . peripheral to the accident.”
“What accident?”
“An auto accident involving Senator Porter Smalls,” Lucas said.
“Was there something unusual about it? I thought that was all settled,” she said.
“He’s a U.S. senator. We’re taking another routine look at it,” Lucas said.
“Okay.” She nodded.
Lucas said, “Now, I understand you know a man named Jack Parrish . . .”
She said, “Oh boy . . .” then stopped and put two fingers to her lips.
Lucas: “What?”
“Oh my God. Did Parrish try to kill Porter Smalls?”
Lucas, astonished, smiled. “I see why you’re a partner.”
“Well, did he? I mean, Smalls’s accident . . .” She stopped again, gazing past him at the street, thinking. They were still standing in the doorway, and she suddenly said, “Come in. Come in. This is interesting.”
INGRAM’S HOME was simply but expensively furnished. One living room wall held a single painting, but it looked a lot like a painting that Lucas had seen at the Minneapolis Institute of Art when Weather made him go to a reception there. He bent to look at the signature: RD.
Ingram, standing behind him, said, “Richard Diebenkorn. Do you know him?”
“I think I saw something by him at the Minneapolis museum,” Lucas said. “Looks nice.”
“Well, yeah!” Her tone suggested that of course it looked nice because it was a fuckin’ masterpiece. “Part of the Ocean Park series.”
“Cool.” Lucas had never heard of the guy, but what else was he going to say? He turned and gazed at her for a few seconds, and asked, “What’s your opinion of Parrish?”
“He’s a bad man,” Ingram said. “You must have gotten my name through the Malone case.”
“I don’t know the Malone case,” Lucas said.
“Then how’d you get my name?”
“I can’t tell you. I got it from a confidential source who’s involved with the government. If you say there’s a Malone case, that could be where she got it.”
“Hmph. She, huh? I’ll think about that. Anyway, the Malone case involved one of my clients, Malone Materials. Malone lost a military procurement bid to another company and didn’t understand why since the other company had no expertise in the required area, which involved retrofitting certain military vehicles with lightweight side-panel armor as protection against improvised explosive devices. We sued. There was never any absolute proof, but it became quite clear to me and others who were handling the case that Parrish had been involved in discussions between the Army procurement people and a number of members of both the House and the Senate. Their discussions ended with the other company, Inter-Core Ballistics, getting higher procurement grades despite its lack of experience and markedly higher prices for the panels. I believe money changed hands in a variety of ways, and some of it stuck to Parrish’s hands and probably the hands of some members of the procurement team. A good bit probably wound up in reelection funds.”
“Bribes,” Lucas said.
“Not only bribes—but bribes that channeled money to a company with no experience in a mission critical manufacturing operation and so risked the lives of American troops,” Ingram said.
“That’s . . . ugly,” Lucas said. “Parrish seems to be doing quite well in his continuing military career. In the Army Reserve.”
“I didn’t know that, but, now that I do, I’ll ask around. Do you really think that he tried to kill Smalls?”
“That’s a conclusion you jumped to.”
“Don’t bullshit me, Davenport, it won’t work. I saw your face when I mentioned the Smalls accident.” She turned away, thinking, snapped her fingers, turned back, and said, “Got it: Smalls and Taryn Grant. Parrish now works for Grant. That is very, very, interesting. Very.”
“Don’t jump to more conclusions . . . And don’t try to use that,” Lucas said.
“I don’t think I’m jumping to anything,” she said. “You’ve got something about the accident, don’t you? What is it? I’d love to get something good on Parrish and/or Grant.”
Lucas said, “Miz Ingram, let me suggest you forget about all these . . . speculations. I’m afraid if you go somewhere with them, somebody might come to your nice brick house and hurt you.”
“Really.” Skepticism, not a question.
“Really,” Lucas said. “Listen, we’re looking at a . . . at a bare possibility. The most likely thing that happened in the Smalls accident is that he and the driver both had a little to drink, she lost it and went off the road. We need to check, and that’s what I’m doing. I’ve gotten the impression from . . . other people . . . that Parrish is a dangerous guy. If you try to stick it to him, or he thinks you will, you could have a problem.”
“I will take that under advisement,” she said.
“Sit tight for a couple of weeks—that’s all you have to do,” Lucas said. “By that time, I’ll have figured out whether Parrish was involved in the accident. If he was, I’ll handle it. If he wasn’t, I’ll let you know. No point in taking risks that you don’t have to.”
“I will take that under advisement as well,” she said. “Boy—Taryn Grant and Jack Parrish. That’s a mix ’n’ match, huh?”
“They actually—” Lucas cut himself off.
“Are well suited to each other, that’s what you were about to say,” Ingram said. “I don’t know much about Grant, but I do know about the controversy when she was elected. Were you involved in that investigation?”
“I led it; for the state,” Lucas said.
“Now you’re a federal marshal. There wasn’t any political influence involved in that, was there?”
Lucas shook his head. “I didn’t know you were a trial attorney.”
“So, I’m starting to see it. U.S. senator gets jobbed by an opposition candidate, who takes his seat. He gets himself elected again and immediately begins peeing on his opponent’s shoes—or, in Grant’s case, her Christian Louboutin pumps. Grant is a murderous witch who lands on the Senate Intelligence Committee, where she connects with a hustler who has ties both to the military and the CIA and does her a favor by trying to kill the U.S. senator who’s peeing on her presidential chances. Smalls, who has used his influence to get the man who saved his bacon an appointment as a federal marshal, gets the marshal to investigate the witch,” Ingram said, finally taking a breath. “Man, is this a great country or what?”
LUCAS SAID he’d stay in touch, and Ingram said, “Oh, do. I’m fascinated.” Back in his car, he tried to call the other two people on the list and again got no answer, so he headed back to the hotel.
After leaving his car with the valet, he was walking through the lobby when the security chief, who he’d met when he was checking in, flagged him over. He’d learned the man’s name was Steve Schneider.
“Did you . . . have a friend in your room? A male friend, maybe another marshal?” Schneider asked.
“A friend? No . . . what happened?”
“One of my guys was doing routine floor checks and he heard a door close. A guy was coming down the hall, and my guy got the impression he’d come out of that stub hallway to your room. There was no reason to stop him, so he went on his way. There’s nobody in the other room on that hall. I thought I should mention it.”
“Thanks. Any sign he’d actually been inside my room?”
“No, no. We would have stopped him if we thought he had been,” Schneider said.
“Can I talk to your guy?”
“Sure. I think he’s down in the parking structure, if you want to wait in the bar . . .”
LUCAS GOT A DIET COKE, and Schneider and his guy showed up five minutes later. The second security man was named Jeff Toomes, white-haired with a ruddy face, in a gray suit—an ex-cop, Lucas thought.
“There wasn’t any reason to stop him, at first,” Toomes told Lucas. “What happened was, I was doing my checks, and I came out of the stairwell and started toward the hallway that goes to the rooms. I heard a door close as I turned the corner and there was a guy walking toward me. I’d say six feet, maybe a half inch either way, close-cut brown hair, brown eyes. Looked to be in very good shape. Clean-shaven, decent pale blue summer suit, polished lace-up shoes. If he was carrying a gun, it would have been in the small of his back—no gun sag on the sides, and the suit wasn’t cut for a shoulder rig. I suppose he could have had an ankle wrap, but who has those?”
“And he was by my room,” Lucas said.
“That’s what I realized as I was walking by. I think he had to come out of your hallway. There’s only two rooms down there, and when I checked later I found out there’s nobody checked into the other one.”
Lucas said, “You heard the door actually close.”
“Yes. Another thing . . . you’re on four, and I realized that I didn’t hear the elevator bell, the one that rings when the doors open. I went back: I was going to see what room he was in or who he was visiting, but he was gone. He had to have taken the stairs. That’d be unusual, unless you were in a hurry. I called Steve, but nobody saw him again. He would have gotten lost in the lobby.”
“He’d have been in a hurry because he’d been surprised by a guy he recognized as security.”
“The thought crossed our minds,” Schneider said.
Lucas said, “Well, hell.”
SCHNEIDER CAME UP to the room with him. Lucas popped the door, and they both eased inside. Lucas looked at his luggage and briefcase, but nothing seemed out of place, missing, or added. Schneider tipped his head toward the door, and Lucas followed him into the hall.
“I know a guy who could sweep it for you,” Schneider said. “Or, better, I could move you across the hall but leave you registered in this room.”
“Let’s do that,” Lucas said. “Then if somebody else shows up, I’ll actually be behind them. I might even hear them going in.”
“If you shoot somebody, try not to hit any guests,” Schneider said. “Unless it’s an old lady with a mink hat carrying a rat.”
“A rat?”
“Okay, a Chihuahua. That’d be Mrs. Julia Benson, grass widow. She lives here. Eighteen thousand a month, and she doesn’t care—she likes servants. I’m apparently one of them. Biggest pain in the ass in the building. I wouldn’t want you to kill her, but wounding her a little would get you some free drinks.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Lucas said.