Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30) - John Sandford Page 0,24

. .

Randy Stokes came into the room carrying a bowl and a spoon and said, “Hey, El . . .”

Dunn yanked on the pistol stock, but the sight hung up in the fabric of his Jockey briefs and in his haste he’d already slipped his finger into the trigger guard and when he yanked on the gun, his finger yanked on the trigger and he fired a shot between the cheeks of his butt and into the floor, and the noise was terrific and Rachel’s mouth dropped open and her eyes widened and then the pistol was up and Dunn shot her in the face and she went down.

Stokes threw the bowl past Dunn’s head and turned to run and Dunn shot him twice in the back, then stepped over Rachel’s body and put the pistol close to the back of Stokes’s head and fired another shot.

When he turned back, he found, to his real horror, that his slug had hit Rachel in the jaw and had come out the back of her head, and she was still alive and aware, looking up at him in fear and trying to back-crawl away, like doing a backstroke, and she gurgled something and he stepped closer and said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry” and shot at her head and missed, though he was only four feet away. He put the pistol right at her forehead then, and her eyes tried a final plea and then went calm, accepting, and he pulled the trigger again, and then she was gone.

He’d dropped the plastic art tube, and he picked it up and turned away from the bodies. Dunn had no idea of how many times he’d fired the gun, but it seemed like a lot. And he hurt. His butt hurt, and he reached back to feel it, and his hand came away bloody. He stumbled toward the door, and out, to his truck, and he climbed into the driver’s seat, and then thought, DNA.

He fumbled in the backseat pocket and found an LED flashlight, climbed back out of the truck and looked for blood on the ground. He found nothing. The blood seemed restricted to his underwear and an orange-sized spot on the seat of his pants.

His buttocks were on fire; but a hand check seemed to indicate that he had only creased the skin on both cheeks, and had never actually poked a bullet hole in himself.

He didn’t want to revisit the horror inside the house, so he got back into his truck and drove home.

He was all right, he thought. He needed some bandages, he needed some antiseptic, but he was all right. His blood-spotted clothing would go into a wood-burning fireplace, and the ashes scattered in the woods.

He was all right: except for nightmares that would last for the rest of his life.

CHAPTER

FIVE

After a nine o’clock breakfast Monday morning, as Elias Dunn was working toward the murders of Randy and Rachel Stokes, Lucas drove to Potomac, Maryland, where Charles Lang lived in a newer but traditionally styled stone-and-timber house, off Bentcross Drive, set among mature oaks and a screen of lower pines.

Two granite pillars flanked the driveway entrance, and the long blacktopped driveway led to a detached garage eighty or a hundred feet from the house itself. The house side of the driveway was edged with a knee-high granite wall. The wall looked nice, but it occurred to Lucas, who’d seen a similar driveway at the home of a powerful intelligence officer in Mexico, that it also worked as a security feature: you couldn’t get a car or truck close to the house—or a car or truck bomb.

Lucas parked at the garage and walked through a four-foot-wide slot in the granite wall, up to the house. Before he had a chance to ring the doorbell, the door opened and a tall slender man, with a neat Vandyke beard, perhaps thirty-five, opened the door and asked, “Marshal Davenport?”

Lucas nodded and said, “Yes.”

“I’m Charles’s assistant. He’s in the den.”

Another assistant, Lucas thought—it must be a Washington thing.

The assistant backed up and Lucas followed him inside. Once past the entry, he found himself in an expansive living room decorated with eighteenth-century British hunting prints and paintings, mounted on pale blue plaster walls; a six-foot grand piano sat in a corner, half the size of the piano at the Winstons’ house. There was no sheet music in sight, but a crystal vase sat on the piano top, filled with yellow and pink bell-shaped flowers; the