a microwave taco dinner. The bedroom showed a queen-sized bed with a night table holding several more books and magazines, with a reading light hanging over a central stack of pillows.
Lucas stepped around the place, looking without touching, then said to Chase, “There’s nothing really for me, here. This is for your crime scene team. Let’s go see about that recorder.”
* * *
—
THE COUNTY CRIME scene tech had pulled the recorder from under Gibson’s thigh and had bagged it. “There appear to be several recordings,” the tech said. “I assume you want the last folder. The folder appears to have three segments . . .”
“Play it,” Jackson said.
The recording consisted of dictated notes of an interview with the leader of the group called Bellum, a Lawrence Gray, followed by dictated notes of an interview with the White Fist leader Toby Boone.
And at the end, they found a recording of Gibson’s murder.
* * *
—
“COP, PLEASE, C’MON, please, man . . .” Gibson began crying. “I’m not talking to him, I’m not giving him anything, please, man, he came to us, we didn’t go to him. You want to kill somebody, please please, man, kill Davenport, don’t do this. Did Toby send you? I bet Toby doesn’t know you’re here, we’re friends . . .”
A man’s baritone voice:
“Toby knows I’m here. The problem is, you saw Linc, and Linc, well, we can’t have any connections back to Linc, because Linc’s gonna kill himself a senator’s kid. If you’d gotten there two minutes later, we wouldn’t have a problem. But . . .”
“Cop, please. I will not tell a soul. I will not tell Charles. I will not say a word to any . . .”
BAP.
* * *
—
CHASE JUMPED: “Good God!”
Rae: “I don’t think he was present.”
“Man had some balls,” Bob said. “He knew what was coming and managed to record it and leave us some names.”
“Was Cop a name or a profession?” Rae wondered.
“The way he used it, I think it was a name,” Lucas said. “We got three people we’ve got to hit, and right now: Toby, Cop, and Linc.”
Chase said, “I’m aware of Bob and Rae’s skills, because I’ve seen them work, but they’re not enough. I’m calling in one of our SWAT squads, or maybe two of them. I’ll have HVE run Toby Boone, I know we’ve got stuff on him, but we need to run Cop and Linc to see if we can identify them. We need search warrants. This is gonna take a while.”
“We need to have a presence . . .” Jackson said.
“Of course. You’re invited, absolutely,” Chase said.
“We really don’t have a while,” Lucas said. “The school day is already underway, we had one possible shooter this morning. If this Linc’s waiting for school to get out . . . we could have another problem.”
“When I said a while, I meant an hour,” Chase said. “If Charlie sent Gibson to interview Toby Boone, and Gibson saw Cop and Linc there . . . then Charlie has an address for us.”
Lang did have an address, on his old-fashioned Rolodex, in Frederick, Maryland, an hour outside of Washington.
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
Rae drove the Tahoe down Rosemont Avenue in Frederick, Maryland, past Boone Precious Metals and Pawn, which FBI files on White Fist identified as the group’s headquarters. The store was a converted two-story clapboard house remodeled with larger windows above a two-step stone porch; a red LED sign in the window blinked, successively, Gold and Silver and Bought and Sold. A ten-foot-tall orange Gumby, the kind inflated with a shop vac, was dancing outside the house with a banner that read, “Gold, Gold, Gold.”
A detached garage sat behind the house, and, as with Charles Lang’s place, had an apartment or storage area on the second floor above car parking spaces, with a window looking out at the street. The business building, garage, and a surrounding parking lot were set into a heavily treed lot, which made it impossible to see the back of the place—but also provided an approach for the FBI SWAT team.
“Count the doors,” Rae said. “We know there’s one on the side, probably gotta be one in the back, so that’s three on the main house, probably two on that garage, if it really is a garage.”
“Looks like a garage,” Lucas said.
“Could be a meeting space,” Rae said.
“Hadn’t thought of that.”
Bob was inspecting the place with imaged-stabilized Canon binoculars. “It has an air of being sorta old and fucked up, but I don’t think it is. You