Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30) - John Sandford Page 0,38
for you.”
“I’ll pull him back. I apologize, but I find this whole episode rather fascinating and I couldn’t help myself.”
“Well, help yourself. Make him go away.”
* * *
—
BACK AT THE WATERGATE at eleven o’clock, Lucas decided he didn’t want to read any more of the FBI files, which left him nothing to do, except go shopping. He got the Cadillac and drove over to N Street, to Figueroa & Prince, a custom tailor shop where he’d spent a few thousand dollars on previous trips.
His sales clerk was named Ted, who brightened when he saw Lucas coming through the door. “Lucas! I was thinking of you only yesterday. You won’t believe what we got in from Italy. It’s the finest piece of wool I’ve seen this year and just right for Saint Paul in the winter.”
Lucas spent two hours in the shop—it was a fine piece of wool, an absolutely perfect shade of blue to chime with his eyes—and after picking out three neckties and three shirts that would go with it, he was in the back of the store, being measured by Jim the Tailor, who said, “For you, we’ll have it in three weeks. Your measurements have changed, though. You’ve lost weight. Will you get it back or are you slimming down?”
“I’ll get it back: best go with the old measurements.”
“So it wasn’t a diet?”
“No, I got shot last spring.”
“See, don’t do that . . .”
* * *
—
ANOTHER TAILOR CAME THROUGH, nodded at Lucas, and asked, “You on a case?”
“Yeah, I’m trying to chase down some right-wingers. No big deal.”
“That 1919 thing? The SS?”
Lucas nodded. “That’s the one. You saw it on TV?”
“Yeah, the girl is on CNN. She’s a cutie.”
Lucas: “What girl?”
“You know, the high school kid who uncovered the whole thing. She’s on right now.”
“Oh, boy.” Lucas stepped off the box he was standing on, and asked, “Where’s your TV?”
“Back in the fabric room.”
Lucas followed the tailors back, where a small television sat on a shelf among bolts of fabric. A card table and four metal folding chairs were crowded into an aisle between racks of cloth, apparently used for lunch breaks. On the TV, Audrey Coil was shown comfortably ensconced in a guest chair on the CNN news set, while the talking head was saying, “It takes a brave girl . . .”
Lucas stopped listening and called Chase. “Are you watching CNN?”
“Oh, no. Somebody got shot?”
“Not yet. I may go over and shoot Audrey Coil as soon as she gets off the set. She’s up there now, spilling her guts.”
“Oh . . .”
“Go ahead and say it,” Lucas said.
“That little bitch, I’ll wring her neck.”
CHAPTER
SEVEN
Chase’s assistant, a young man named Donald, met Lucas in the Hoover Building at two o’clock and took him to a conference room that had a seventy-plus-inch television screen hung from one wall. The screen was connected to a chunky black laptop computer.
“Ms. Chase is trying to get on top of the Audrey Coil situation,” Donald said. He was a pale man with reddish hair, dressed in a blue suit, white shirt, and burgundy necktie, the suit precisely the wrong shade of blue; altogether, his outfit had the grace you’d expect from a one-man band in a vaudeville show. Lucas decided he would have a personal conversation with Donald before he left. “I don’t know what’s happening there. Based on what you gave us, I doubt we’ll find your man from the ANM, because there are so many possibilities, but we can try. A runner, possibly a competitive runner at some point, white, thin, tall, perhaps a current or former government worker, possibly ex-military who may have expressed political sentiments and has contacts in the intelligence community. We included your height and weight estimates with hair and eye color.”
“That’s about all I got,” Lucas said.
Donald plugged a thumb drive into the computer, handed Lucas a remote control, and said, “What will happen now is that you can click between pages. There are forty headshots per page, and almost two hundred pages. That’s eight thousand headshots. You will get through them surprisingly quickly . . . a few seconds per page, most of the time. Probably less than an hour to get through all of them, if you don’t spot him. If you see a possible, note down the number on the headshot and the page.”
He handed Lucas a legal pad and a pen.
One of the chairs was a worn leather recliner and Lucas took it. Donald brought the computer up, opened the