23
McCoy and the other three Heracles employees arrested that evening were interrogated in four separate oversized FBI interview rooms by four separate interrogation teams, with Jane Chase moving among them.
Lucas, Bob, and Rae were not invited to the interrogations themselves, but each of the rooms was equipped with a discreet video camera, and they watched McCoy’s interview on a high-resolution screen in a separate observation room.
McCoy had been checked by a doctor for physical injuries after being decked by Bob, but the doc found only a few developing bruises, and McCoy agreed that he wasn’t badly injured. The interviews were two-part, with the interrogation teams first asking a series of questions, then Bunch and McCoy adjourning to a secure conference room to talk privately.
McCoy was willing to confirm some of the information in the documents hidden by Ritter but volunteered no further information, denying knowing anything about the attack on Smalls and Weather or the related murders of Whitehead and Last. When asked about Ritter’s death, he said, “Everybody knows that the marshal did it—Davenport. Jim was waterboarded and executed because Davenport thought Jim attacked his wife.”
The FBI interrogator said, “Mr. Ritter wasn’t interrogated. He wasn’t waterboarded. He was shot twice, in the heart, a few minutes after talking with Mr. Parrish.”
McCoy: “I’ve seen the autopsy report.”
“So have I. It doesn’t say anything about waterboarding because it didn’t happen,” the fed said. “I don’t suppose those documents were given to you by either Mr. Claxson or Mr. Parrish, the very people who’d have the most to gain from Mr. Ritter’s death?”
McCoy sat back, his tongue trailed across his lips, and he asked, “Parrish? What does Parrish have to do with it?”
The interrogator said, “Give me a minute.” He disappeared out the door, leaving McCoy and Bunch in the interview room. A few minutes later, Chase stuck her head in the door of the room where Lucas was watching with Bob and Rae, and said, “Lucas, we think we could use you in the room with McCoy. We want you to give him your theory of Ritter’s death.”
Lucas nodded. “Sure.”
LUCAS WALKED DOWN the hall to the interview room, where the interrogator was waiting. The interrogator asked, “You get the idea?”
“Yeah. Give him a reason to turn.”
Lucas followed the interrogator into the room, and McCoy looked up, frowned, and said, “Hey!”
Lucas said, “Nice to see you again, John.”
McCoy said, “What?”
“The way you reacted to the FBI guys, I thought maybe you’d taken a lesson from me, outside that tailor shop.”
McCoy shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. You killed Jim.”
Lucas took a chair across the table across from McCoy, and said, “Couple of things. First, you knew who I was. You’ve never seen me before except outside that tailor shop unless you’ve seen some photograph or have been doing surveillance on me. How’d you know who I was when I came through the door?”
McCoy said, “Fuck you.”
Lucas said, “Second, I didn’t kill Jim Ritter. The most likely candidate for that is Jack Parrish. The next most likely candidates are you and Moore, because we know you’re willing to murder people, and Ritter might have looked like the weak link. We were about to pick him up on the assassination attempt on Senator Smalls and the murder of Cecily Whitehead. He knew that, and he was probably looking to Claxson or Parrish for help. One or both of them decided to get rid of him altogether.”
“That’s bullshit. They wouldn’t—”
“Sure they would,” Lucas said. “They’re not soldiers like you guys. They’re weasels. Suits. Bullshit artists. I have a cop friend back in Minnesota who’d call them douchenozzles. They not only would kill Ritter, they’d kill you. I’ll tell you, John, if Mr. Bunch manages to get you bail, I’d stay far, far away from those guys. They’ll kill you in a minute.”
McCoy shook his head, and turned toward Bunch, who shrugged.
Lucas continued. “I think you know all this, by the way. I wouldn’t be surprised if you had a whole bunch of documents and other evidence stashed somewhere to cover you if they start giving you a hard time. Like Jim Ritter did.”
“Jim didn’t—”
“Sure he did. More than a million dollars, and a bunch of documents that are going to hang you and Moore and Claxson. The feds here hate to go to trial without being a hundred percent sure of a conviction. They’ve got you—you’re toast, man—but you might still make a deal for leniency if you help them out.”
“You’re looking for a turncoat.”
The interrogator sighed, and said, “John, you know, you use words like ‘turncoat,’ which makes you sound like a good guy holding out against a bunch of terrorists. Something admirable. What you’re really doing is, you’re protecting a bunch of murderous criminals.” He leaned across the table, and asked, “Have you ever heard of Inter-Core Ballistics?”
McCoy glanced at his attorney, who said, “Don’t answer if you think it might be a problem. We can talk first.”
But McCoy said, “Yeah, I’ve heard of them, but that’s all. I never had anything to do with them.”
“I believe you,” the interrogator said. He told McCoy about Claxson and Parrish fixing the sale of inferior armor to the military. “That’s the folks you’re protecting, John. There are dead soldiers out there, but these guys made a buck off it. Is that where you’re at?”
“Fuck no. I’m not sure I even believe you.”
“I got the paperwork, if you want to see it,” the interrogator said.
McCoy turned to Bunch. “We need to talk. Again.”
LUCAS WAS WALKED BACK to the viewing room, and Rae said, “You look good on TV. Maybe you oughta be one of those talking heads. Interview the Kardashians and shit.”
McCoy and Bunch were out of sight for fifteen minutes, and when they returned, Bunch said, “We’d like to see some evidence about this Inter-Core company. We’d like to see it tomorrow. We’re done for tonight. No more questions.”
McCoy was taken to a holding cell, and Bunch made arrangements to return in the morning. “We’ll ask for bail, and we hope you will recommend something reasonable,” he said. “If you do that, I expect we’ll be able to provide at least limited testimony about Heracles and its activities, if what you say about this Inter-Core company is correct.”
“We’ll see you in the morning,” Chase told him.
LUCAS, BOB, AND RAE went back to the hotel, had a late dinner, agreed that the investigation was looking up, and headed off to their rooms.
Lucas was on the last ten pages of Hiaasen’s Skinny Dip when he took a call from a clerk at the front desk. “Marshal Davenport, we have a gentleman down here who wants to talk to you. He’s a colonel in the Army—um, a lieutenant colonel.”
Lucas knew only one lieutenant colonel, Horace Stout, whom he’d interviewed about Parrish. Had he told Stout that he was at the Watergate? Maybe. He said to the clerk, “Okay. Give him the room number, send him up.”
Five minutes later, there was a soft knock on the door. Lucas glanced at his watch: almost eleven o’clock. Bob and Rae were the early-to-bed, early-to-rise sort and would already be in bed. The last time Lucas got a nighttime knock, he’d almost gotten shot. The PPQ was sitting in its holster on the nightstand. Lucas slipped it free, got to his feet, and trotted to the door.
Another knock, harder this time.
One good way to get shot, he’d read in a novel somewhere, or possibly an airport survivalist magazine, or maybe he even made it up himself, was to look out the peephole of your hotel room. The killer on the other side, peering back through the hole, would know precisely where your body was and could shoot you through the door.
Sounded more like a novel; not that survivalist magazines were any less fictional.
In any case, he plucked the spitball out of his peephole and looked out. He could see a man’s shoulder, but that was about all.
Leaving the chain on the door, he brought the muzzle of the gun up, cracked the door, and was startled enough to take an involuntary step back: James Ritter was standing there. Lucas had seen the very same James Ritter dead on a slab at the Medical Examiner’s Office. Unquestionably dead. He blurted, “What the fuck . . . ?”
The man showed both hands: empty. “I’m Tom Ritter,” he said. “Jim’s brother. His twin brother.”
Lucas took a moment to absorb that. “Oh, Jesus, you scared the hell out of me.”
Ritter nodded, without smiling. “I understand . . . You Marshal Davenport?”
Lucas was still befuddled: Tom Ritter was an exact duplicate of his brother, and Lucas had never encountered anything quite like it. “Uh, yeah.”
“I need to talk to you.”
“How’d you find me?”
“I asked around Heracles, and some guys there had an idea where you might be. I came over and asked at the front desk. Can I come in?”
“Are you carrying?” Lucas asked.
“A gun? No.”
Lucas took off the door chain and backed away from the door, kept the PPQ pointed to one side but still up. “Yeah, come on. Push the door shut behind you.”
Like his brother, Ritter was short, muscular, tanned, and dressed in outdoor clothing—a long-sleeved blue cotton shirt, covered by a blue linen sport coat, tan nylon/cotton cargo pants, and light hiking boots. Lucas began to pick up some differences: James Ritter had a scarred face from a shrapnel wound, Tom Ritter didn’t but carried the same military look.
LUCAS SAID, “Take off your jacket before you come in.”
“I don’t carry a gun. Not in the States.”
Lucas said, “Take your jacket off anyway.”
Ritter did, stepped into the room, nudged the door closed with his foot, and did a pirouette so Lucas could see that he didn’t have a gun holstered at the small of his back. “I’ve got some questions, and I might have some information you need,” he said, when he was looking at Lucas again.
Lucas had backed up to the desk. He said, “Sit on the bed. I’ll take the chair.” Sitting on the bed would make a hidden gun harder to get at. Lucas sat on the edge of a hard-seated office chair. Ritter might well have been a computer programmer, or a life insurance salesman, but he didn’t look like that. You had to have experience as a cop to notice he bore the wound-spring look of a man who could hurt you.
When Ritter was sitting on the bed, his jacket across his lap, Lucas asked, “Who told you where to find me?”
“I’ve got a story about that,” Ritter said. He was younger than he looked, Lucas thought: the tan put on a few years and some wrinkles, but Ritter was not yet thirty-five.
“I’m listening,” Lucas said.
“I’m an Army officer, Third Stryker Brigade Combat Team, Second Infantry Division, in Afghanistan. I was granted leave to bury my brother.”
“That’s . . . rough. Maybe even rougher with a twin.”
“Yeah, it is. Hard even to explain how rough it is. It’s like you lost a leg. Non-twins wouldn’t understand,” Ritter said in his quiet voice. “The people over at Heracles say you shot him.”
“I know what they’re saying. It’s horseshit. Your brother was our best way into our case. I don’t want to sound . . . insulting . . . but he was small fry. The last thing we wanted was him dead. The people who killed him are responsible for murdering three people now—two of them completely innocent. The third was your brother.”
Ritter watched Lucas for a minute or two, judging him, and asked, “What do you know about waterboarding?”
Lucas said, “Nothing. I was going to look it up on the Internet tonight, but I forgot. We were told by a source that Heracles is passing around some fake autopsy papers that say he was waterboarded, but he wasn’t. If you check with the ME, the medical examiner, he’ll tell you so. Heracles was trying to convince people that I killed Jim.”
“But you were pissed about what happened to your wife, and you’re working for Senator Smalls . . .”
Lucas nodded, and said, “Yes. I’m more than pissed about my wife, I’m . . . if I was sure I found a guy involved in that, he might fall down a couple of flights of stairs. But I wouldn’t kill him. I wouldn’t kill him especially if it was your brother. Like I said, he was about our only entry into the case, but he was nowhere near the top of the food chain.”
ANOTHER BIT OF SILENCE, then Ritter asked, “If you didn’t kill Jim, do you have any idea who might have? Specific names? Anything at all?”
Lucas said, “I’m not ready to talk about that—we’ve got an ongoing investigation.”
Ritter looked around the room, appraising it as if for ways to defend it, and said, “I looked you up on the Internet. You’re a rough guy, huh?”
“I have my moments,” Lucas said. “What are we talking about here?”
Ritter said, “I was passing through Kuwait when I heard about Jim and caught a flight back home. I’ve got fourteen days. You gonna find the killer in that time?”
“I could if I could get some leverage on somebody involved,” Lucas said. “Now, tell me how you knew where to find me . . . or even what my name is?”
“I called some people. I went over to Heracles Personnel. I guess you’ve already been looking at them.”
“Yes, we have,” Lucas said.
“I know people at Heracles, ex-Army guys, friends of Jim—and tapped into the rumor mill. Word is, some guys have been involved in questionable actions here in the States. I’ve got names, not easy to get, but I’m . . . trusted, to a certain extent.”
“They weren’t questionable actions, Colonel,” Lucas said. “The first attack was an attempted assassination of a U.S. senator and the murder of a completely innocent woman. The guys who did it, including your brother, I’m sorry to say, knew what they were doing—that they’d kill her along with the senator. The second attack was an effort to get me, personally, off their backs. They did it by going after my wife—and by the cold-blooded murder of an innocent man. Do you know about all of that?”
“Yeah, I was told about it, and I read a newspaper story.” Ritter put his jacket aside and stood up, looked around the room again, and Lucas said, “Sit back on the bed,” and he did, but asked, “Why?”
“Because if you have a hideout gun, it’ll be harder for you to get at.” Lucas had put the PPQ on the desktop, letting his hand rest a couple of inches away.
“You’re nervous.”
“Shouldn’t I be?” Lucas asked.
“Maybe, I guess. The guys you’re looking at, they’re the real thing. They’ve all been over in the sandbox both as military and as private contractors. If you get in their way, they’ll flat put a hole in your head. But I’m not one of them.”
“That’s comforting.”
Ritter looked down at his thighs, rubbed his nose, looked up, and said, “Look, a guy named Claxson . . . You’re looking at him?”
“Yes.”
“He told me you were probably the one who killed Jim, and he told me why—your wife. Said Jim was waterboarded and then executed . . . that sounded funky to me. I should tell you that after I talked to Claxson, I cornered the medical examiner, and he said there was nothing to indicate that Jim had been waterboarded or tortured in any way, that nothing like that had been put in the autopsy report. But the report Claxson showed me specifically mentioned the waterboarding. I asked myself why that would be.”
“Claxson wanted you to come after me.”
“That’s why I came up here empty-handed, no gun. I wanted to hear what you had to say.”
“Then you probably know who killed him,” Lucas said. “And why.”
“I’m not sure about the why. He wouldn’t have talked.”
Lucas thought about it, and said, “Because he’d become a problem. If your friends at Heracles are up to date, they’d know—and you probably now know—that we found some logs out in the countryside in West Virginia. They were used to protect the side of your brother’s truck when they pushed Smalls’s Cadillac off the road and almost over a bluff. If it had worked, it would have looked like Whitehead and Smalls accidentally ran off the road, hit a bunch of trees, and landed in the river. It’s a fuckin’ miracle that Smalls didn’t die along with Whitehead. If he had, there would have been nobody to talk about a second vehicle.”
Ritter said, “You’re saying it was a good plan, should have worked, but the targets caught a break?”
“Yes,” Lucas said. “Their problem—your brother’s problem—was, we’d located his truck. You could see the damage where the logs had been tied to the side, and some other forensic evidence that was convincing. If we got him for murder—and we were about to do that—maybe he’d give up the other people involved in return for leniency. We’re more interested in those other people than we were in James . . . Jim . . . He was the trigger. He was paid. We want the people who hired him.”
“He wouldn’t have given up anyone,” Ritter said. “Jim was loyal to his pals. Almost pathologically loyal. It was about all he had left, after his time in the military and with Heracles. He’d gone to jail, before he’d let a friend down. Or died.”
“But would all of those people have known that? They are not the kind of people who think in those terms . . . Not people like Parrish or Claxson. They take care of themselves.”
“Claxson . . . if he had to make a choice between himself and his own kids, if he had any, his kids would be dead meat,” Ritter said.
Lucas poked a finger at him. “Exactly. Those are the guys we want. We’ll take the triggers, too, but they’re not the ones who are driving this thing, the assassination attempt.”
“Do you know the other people involved in these . . . actions?”
“I think I do,” Lucas said. “I think there were two more triggers, two more managers, and somebody who pulls the whole train.”
“Would that be Senator Grant from Minnesota?”
Lucas tipped his head. “Where are you getting this?”
“Like I said, I know these guys, and they know me and trust me. When I was fishing around, I heard all kinds of things. You couldn’t take any of it to court; it’s all rumor, but rumors from guys who are professional intelligence operators, and their rumors are better than most. There are some hints that if things work out, Heracles could have its own office at the White House.”
THEY LOOKED at each other, then Lucas took his hand away from the PPQ and rubbed the back of his neck, and asked, “How far can I trust you? To hear what I have to say and not spread it around? Even if it’ll help you understand what happened to Jim.”
“I wouldn’t tell a soul,” Ritter said. “I mean that: nobody would hear a word from me, of what was said in this room.”
Lucas looked at him for a couple of beats, and Ritter added, “Look, I went to the Academy. I’ll be a general someday, if I don’t screw up, and so far I haven’t. Jim didn’t finish college, joined the Army, took an entirely different path. He wound up with Delta. He was over there way too long, maybe killed too many people, including, you know, civilians. Women. Kids. His circle got too tight; he’d die for the people in the circle, but, outside it, he didn’t give a shit about anything. That pushed him out of the Army. He killed one too many people who didn’t actually need it. The Army gets fussy about stuff like that.”
“So he signed up with Heracles?”
“Yes. And he went right back to killing. I guess he was a bad guy, in the end, but he was my brother. And he was close with the Heracles operators—the operators, the guys around him, not the managers. If you told them to kill him, they were like Jim: they wouldn’t do it. They might kill the guy who asked.”
Lucas shifted in the chair. “That’s interesting.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes. I need to find somebody who knows what happened, or has a good idea about what happened, but would be loyal to Jim.”
Ritter nodded. “Now, tell me the truth: did Senator Grant buy these hits?”
Lucas said, “I can’t prove it, but I believe so. I believe she worked through Parrish, who is one of her aides and works with the Senate Intelligence Committee.”
Ritter shook his head in disgust. “Parrish is tight with Claxson. I can give you names of people who can tell you that, if they decide to, people who work with Heracles but were close to Jim.”
“That would be a great help, if we ever get to to a trial,” Lucas said.
“Are you going to get Grant?”
“If somebody gives her up.”
“That’s the only way?”
“That’s it,” Lucas said.
“Well, shit.” Ritter grunted, slapped his thighs, and said, “I’m going to stand up now. I don’t have a hideout gun—or whatever you cops call them. I’m leaving.”
“Where are you going?”
“I’m in a BOQ over in Arlington, but I’m moving to a motel tomorrow. My parents got here from Nebraska this afternoon . . . They’re falling apart . . . My mother is . . . My father’s mostly taking care of my mother. I’m trying to take care of both of them.”
“I understand. Let me give you an email,” Lucas said. “I need a secure email from you, if you have one.”
“Of course I have one,” Ritter said. “Not even the Army knows about it.”
WHEN THEY’D EXCHANGED emails and cell phone numbers, Lucas asked, “When will you be talking with your friends again? Over at Heracles?”
“I’m going out to lunch with a couple of them tomorrow,” Ritter said. “We’re all talking about what happened to Jim. People are worried about Heracles and what’s going on there. They’re worried that if there’s trouble, some of it will stick to them. Word is, some of them have already split. Left the country.”
“Will you call me if you hear something?” Lucas asked. “I don’t know what your situation is over there. I don’t want you to get hurt.”
“I’m not ready to sign up as a spy—and I really don’t want to talk to the FBI. I’m talking to you because in the stuff I read, those newspaper stories from Minnesota, you sounded like a guy I could deal with. If the FBI gets involved, if they detain me on suspicion of anything, I’m not going to get my stars. I’m not going to make colonel. My career will be over. So I’ve got to be careful.”
Lucas nodded, observing Ritter’s escalating intensity. “If these guys go after Smalls again, how would they do it?”
“I don’t know.” Ritter threw up his hands. “They could do it a million different ways. I know a SEAL who specialized in snatching Arab terrorists off their tea stools, hurting them bad enough that they couldn’t resist, or trigger a bomb hidden in a vest, while the rest of his team covered him. He could put a man on the floor, with broken bones, in two seconds—literally. Two seconds. I saw him do that. There are all kinds of techniques—they could run Smalls off the road again; they could break his neck and throw him down the stairs in his home; they could kill him with alcohol poisoning or an overdose—and never leave a mark on him. They all have some level of sniper training. Jim wasn’t the best at it because, basically, he wasn’t a sniper, but he could put a .338 through your chest at a thousand meters, if he had time to think about distances and angles and it wasn’t too windy. There are guys at Heracles who are snipers, and they work at it all the time. They like sniping way better than sex . . . If you were sitting at a desk by a window, they could hit you from a mile out.”
“Okay. But be careful. If you hear anything operational, call me right away. I’ve got some hard-core guys here myself, and I can get more if I need them.” He thought for a moment, and added, “If you hear any more about Jack Parrish, he could be key. Or John McCoy. Or Kerry Moore. And Claxson, of course.”
“I know those names, McCoy and Moore, from asking around. They’re the ones, huh?”
“Yup, I think so.” He almost told Ritter that four Heracles operators, including McCoy, had been arrested, but he didn’t trust the man quite that much. Instead, he said, “One more thing. Jim apparently had a girlfriend—or a girl he was friendly with anyway—slender, very good shape. She knows how to get a rare concealable submachine gun, and knows how to use it and isn’t afraid to. Looks, to me, like a pro.”
“What’d she do?” Ritter asked.
Lucas told him about the shooting in the hallway, and Ritter said, “Oh, jeez, that was her? It’s all over the news . . . They say nobody was hurt, though.”
“No, but she scared the shit out of quite a few people, including me.”
“I can’t tell you much about her. I’ve met her, once, and she didn’t want to talk to me. I think she and Jim were in bed together, but she didn’t want people to know it.”
“What’s her name?”
Ritter shook his head. “She was introduced to me as ‘just Suzie.’ Jim seemed to like her—a lot. Like marriage a lot. Made me happy, made me think we were getting him back, so I pried. I can’t swear to any of this, but I believe she’s covert CIA, the division called SAD/SOG. Special Activities Division/Special Operations Group, which is their paramilitary wing.”
“They have women working with them? Combat types?”
“My understanding is, they do. I know Suzie spoke fluent Arabic. You know how cool that would be, a small woman speaking perfect Arabic, dressed in a niqab, with a gun in her underpants? She could go anywhere, and nobody would pay any attention to her. I suspect that’s what she did, and maybe still does.”
“Tried hard to kill me,” Lucas said.
“Then you are a lucky man,” Ritter said. “Those folks don’t miss much.”
“She had some bad intelligence,” Lucas said, “but it was goddamn close.”
WHEN RITTER WAS GONE, Lucas got out his laptop and wrote a long report to Russell Forte about the interview, saved it but didn’t send it. Forte might be worried about possible illegalities being sheltered by the Marshals Service, and Lucas didn’t want to get involved in that argument.
Not yet.
WITH THE REPORT SAVED, he settled back on the bed, dimmed the lights, and closed his eyes. There were several tangled thoughts stalking around his mind, and he needed to get straight with them.
Tom Ritter had emphasized how dangerous the Heracles operators could be. He’d also talked about how loyal they were to each other—not so much to the managers but to fellow operators.
Yet, something was going on—Jim Ritter had been killed, and Kerry Moore had disappeared. Either Claxson—the guy with two loaded pistols on his desk—or Parrish could have killed them. Or—a new thought—so could have Taryn Grant.
Grant might be unlikely, he thought after some consideration. Whoever killed Ritter picked him up and threw him in a dumpster, and Ritter, a muscular man, had probably weighed a hundred and eighty pounds. Grant would have wanted to move him quickly, out of a car and into the dumpster, but he was too heavy for one woman alone. Lucas doubted Grant would have exposed herself legally to direct involvement in a murder. And even if she had commissioned the killing, somebody else had probably carried it out.
If you bought Tom Ritter’s feelings about personal loyalty, the killer wouldn’t have been McCoy or Moore. If it were neither of them, it would have been Parrish or Claxson, or perhaps some third party Lucas didn’t know about yet.
And here was the big problem: whoever it had been, Lucas could see no clear route to implicate Taryn Grant. None of the major actors would see any benefit in selling her out. To do so, they would have to admit they had been conspirators in murder. Even that might not be enough to get her.
Further, Grant’s money would be available to fund the best possible legal defenses for her associates. If she had a real shot at the presidency, there was a possible pardon downstream for those associates, if worse came to worse.
If what he feared came to pass, getting Taryn Grant might not be possible.
Not in the ordinary way.