person behind it, or perhaps two or three—“. . . unless the group is tightly controlled with heavy security, which would suggest that they may be unusually dangerous.”
Lucas skimmed a dozen files, decided the daylight hours would be better spent talking to Coil and Winston. He could always read in the middle of the night.
* * *
—
COIL AND WINSTON lived within a few miles of each other in Virginia. Lucas was somewhat familiar with McLean, where Winston lived, from the case he’d worked the year before. Coil lived on the north side of Arlington, the big Virginia city directly across the Potomac from Washington. Both were expecting calls from him.
The call to Coil went to the personal phone of Senator Roberta Coil, who picked up on the third ring and said, simply, “Yes?”
Lucas introduced himself, said he’d spoken to Henderson and Smalls, and asked if her daughter would be available for an interview that evening. “She is, of course, Marshal. She really doesn’t have much to say about it. I’m sure you’ve read the FBI interview, but I understand you’d like to get a feel for the various personalities yourself.”
“I would,” Lucas said.
“We’re home now. I have a small party beginning at seven o’clock, if we could get it done before then.”
“I’m at the Watergate. I could probably be there in an hour or so,” Lucas said.
“We will wait for you.”
The connection for Winston also went to a parent, his mother, whose name was Mary Ellen, and who said her son was out with friends, making a movie. “I’ll call him. I can have him here whenever you say.”
And he called Lang, again on a personal phone. Like Coil, he answered with a “Yes?” He would be available Monday morning, at his home in Potomac, Maryland. “I hope the FBI people haven’t confused you. You won’t actually be interviewing a Nazi, a white supremacist, an alt-right person. I’m a scholar who studies those groups.”
“I understand,” Lucas said. A little suck-up, then: “I’m pleased that you’re willing to share information with us.”
“Always happy to help the government,” Lang said.
Lucas coughed, and took down his address.
* * *
—
FROM THE WATERGATE garage to the Coil home in Arlington was a fifteen-minute drive, out of the monuments of the District into a leafy, routine-looking fifties or sixties suburban neighborhood now showing its age.
Lucas had worked with a half dozen senators in his time as a marshal and had come to believe that the Senate was a club for the uber-wealthy. Roberta Coil was apparently not one of those. She lived in a nice-enough, but not elaborate mid-century red-brick house set on a bank in north Arlington, with a tuck-under garage and a curling set of flagstone steps leading up to the front door.
The FBI’s background material on her daughter, Audrey, said that Senator Coil and Audrey lived in Arlington, while the senator’s husband, the owner of a grass-development company, stayed at home in Tifton, Georgia. The file noted that the grass involved was for lawns and golf courses, not for smoking.
Lucas parked in the street and climbed the bank to the house and was about to ring the bell when the door popped open. Senator Coil was a tall woman, with an angular face and dark hair. She wore a black dress suitable for a party, and careful, almost bland makeup. She smiled and said, “Marshal Davenport? I’m Bob. Come in. Audrey’s in her room, I’ll call her.”
The house smelled like bakery and Lucas could hear somebody banging around a stove in the kitchen, which was down a hallway off a large and sparsely furnished living room—a room designed for people to stand in, at a party, rather than to lounge in. Coil climbed some stairs and disappeared down a hallway, calling for her daughter.
Lucas perched on a narrow couch, looked around; there were built-in bookshelves and the books themselves, biographies, histories, and the more serious kind of political tomes, appeared to be little used, as if they’d come with the shelves.
* * *
—
“HERE WE ARE.”
Coil reappeared, trailed by a pretty teenager in a loose silky blouse and fashionable denim boy-shorts with a string of oversized buttons on the fly. Like her mother, Audrey Coil was carefully made-up, except for her lipstick, which was bloody red and deliberately overdone, the fake-cheap/hot-sexy but too-expensive-for-you Hollywood look.
Lucas stood up to shake hands with Audrey, nodded at a right-angled couch, and when the women were sitting, sat down again. Looking at Audrey, he asked, “I’ve read