Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30) - John Sandford Page 0,72
purple as the couch.
“Are you okay?” Lucas asked. “I mean, physically? You don’t look good.”
“I’m completely undone,” Lang said. His mouth hung open. Then, “What am I going to do? Stephen is dead.”
“Do you know who he was talking to the last few days? Where his research was going?”
“I think it must be the ANM who did this,” Lang said. “Stephen found that gun training site for you.”
“Okay, we’ll look at that for sure,” Lucas said. “Who else was he looking into? Any groups with a history? Patriotus?”
“He did talk to Patriotus, to Roland Carr. That seems unlikely to me, that Roland would be involved with a killing. They’re more . . . verbal.”
“Like the Greene Mountain Boys?”
“More like that.”
“What about Forlorn Hope or White Fist?” Lucas asked.
Lang nodded: “He talked to White Fist day before yesterday. He went to their headquarters and talked to Toby Boone. And he went back last night, I think. I told him to be careful—after his first trip there, he said a man who was there with Toby was ‘scary.’ I think . . . an ex-convict.”
Jackson: “Scary?”
“That’s the word he used,” Lang said.
Lucas said to Jackson, “White Fist is prison-based. They’re on our list. The three of us . . .” He nodded at Bob and Rae “. . . were going to look them up. We can still do that. You could send an investigator along, if you want.”
“Maybe a SWAT team,” Jackson said.
“Bob and Rae are SOG,” Lucas said.
“Then you won’t need our SWAT—I’d like to come along, if I can get a break here.” Lang told them that Gibson had been asking about the 1919 website when he approached White Fist and two other groups, one called River Klan and the other called Bellum. River Klan and Bellum were both small, no more than a dozen or so members each, and both were focused on states’ rights issues, Lang said. Both had been present at a violent demonstration in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.
“‘Bellum’ is Latin,” Lang said. “It means, ‘civil war.’”
“Terrific,” said Rae.
* * *
—
CHASE’S PHONE RANG and she walked away to answer it.
Lang asked, “What happens now? What about Stephen’s . . . body?”
Jackson explained the crime scene routine and the body’s removal to a medical examiner, and gave him a timeline. There was a chance that they’d be finished in the garage and the apartment by the end of the day, but they might want to look at it again, depending on the preliminary findings, so it would be sealed for an indefinite time. Gibson’s car would be taken to a secure parking lot where the crime scene techs could scour the interior for DNA.
“We’ll need to interview you about Gibson’s lifestyle,” Jackson said. “We can best do that at the station . . .”
“Do I need a lawyer?” Lang asked.
Jackson shrugged: “That’s up to you. If you haven’t done anything . . .”
Chase came back, had overheard the last comment, and said to Lang, “As a law enforcement official, I hate to say this, but you’d be better off with an attorney present when you’re interviewed. It’s best to have somebody on your side with you, even if you’re totally innocent.”
“Thanks,” Jackson said.
Chase shrugged: “Hey, I’m an attorney.”
She turned to Lucas: “The man they arrested this morning is named William Christopher Walton. They’re sure that’s his real name because they found his fingerprints, taken when he joined the Army twelve years ago. He was discharged after four months as being psychologically unsuitable for military duty. He has no priors of any kind, that we can find. They’re entering his house now, he apparently lives with his mother. They did find a rather unusual letter in his pocket, which refers him to the 1919 site, explains what it means, and suggests that he might want to take action. The letter is smudgy, apparently a Xerox copy of an original. It was still in an envelope addressed to him. Walton’s asked for a lawyer—or as he put it, a white lawyer—so we’re not getting anything from him.”
“Lone wolf,” Lang said. “How are you going to stop that?”
Lucas said to Jackson, “Give us some booties. We need to look at the body and up in the apartment. We really can’t wait all day.” And he asked Lang, “How did Gibson take notes? Did he take them on a laptop, or in notebooks, or a recorder?”
“He had a recorder, a very expensive one. Digital. A lot of the time, though, it