Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30) - John Sandford Page 0,8
agreed that it really wasn’t any kind of a problem at all. A desk clerk with a tennis player’s tan and perfect white teeth told Lucas that a car was waiting in the hotel parking garage and should he summon it?
“I’ll call,” Lucas said, and headed up to his room.
He unpacked, hung another suit and two sport coats in the closet, with five shirts, washed his face and hands, and called for the car, which turned out to be a Music Express limo—and he thought, as he climbed into the backseat, there’d be no government record of this pickup. The driver took him through a Starbucks on E Street, where Lucas got a blueberry muffin, a hot chocolate, and a Washington Post. A quick look at the Post suggested nothing that Henderson might want to talk to him about.
* * *
—
LUCAS HAD THE DRIVER drop him three blocks from the Senate Office Building and tipped him twenty bucks for his wait and the ride. The driver and limo would hover during the meeting and pick him up afterward.
The day was warm with an icy-bright-blue sky overhead, a good September midday in Washington, DC, heading toward a high in the low 80s. As he walked along Constitution Avenue, still sipping on the hot chocolate, the Post rolled and tucked under his arm, a couple of women smiled at him; or perhaps at his suit. Anyway, he smiled back. Joggers were out in force, and young women pushing strollers and boys with dogs.
One of the nannies tracked him with her eyes as they passed, and nodded.
Maybe, he thought, he wasn’t looking that bad.
* * *
—
THE RUSSELL SENATE Office Building did look bad, like America’s largest old post office, the aging limestone façade now resembling poorly laid concrete block. Lucas checked through security, where he was met by one of Henderson’s staffers, the security process eased by the fact that Lucas’s .40-caliber Walther PPQ was back in the hotel safe.
The staffer, whose name Lucas thought was Jaydn, or possibly Jared or Jordon or Jeremy—he didn’t quite catch it—and who was wearing jeans, a nubby white-cotton shirt open at the throat, and cordovan loafers (no socks), led him through the building to Henderson’s office and then to the inner office, where Henderson was waiting with the other Minnesota senator, Porter Smalls, and an FBI agent named Jane Chase.
As Lucas was ushered in, Henderson looked at the aide and said, “Hey, Jasper, thanks—I’ll catch you later.”
In other words, “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass.” When Jasper was gone, they all shook hands and Lucas asked, “If Jane’s here, why am I?”
“We’ll explain that,” Smalls said. “Jane’s here to outline what the FBI has done so far and why they can’t do much more.”
“Why can’t you do much more?” Lucas asked Chase, as they all settled into chairs.
“Because no crime has been committed,” Chase said. “Not yet.”
“And because word of what was going on would inevitably leak, even with Jane’s thumb in the dike,” Henderson added.
Henderson was a tall, slender, fair-complected man, with longish blond hair and blond eyebrows, who’d hoped that the vice presidency might be a stepping stone to the top job. He and the presidential candidate had lost their race, although they’d won the majority of the popular vote. He was a Democrat, and liberal even for that party.
Porter Smalls’s stature reflected his name: he was short, five-seven or five-eight, thin, white-haired, and tough as a lugnut. He was a Republican and extremely conservative, though he and Henderson were longtime friends, going back to their wealthy childhoods in Minnesota. Lucas had worked with both of them.
Jane Chase was an FBI bureaucrat, an effective one. She’d been shot in the leg the last time Lucas had been in DC. She was middle-sized, outfitted in a navy pantsuit, carefully coifed and dressed, attractive but not cute—didn’t want to get above yourself in the federal bureaucracy—and very smart.
Lucas: “Okay. What’s going on?”
* * *
—
HENDERSON AND SMALLS looked at Chase, who said, “I trust nothing here is being recorded. Or noted. Even on paper.”
“Absolutely not,” Henderson said. “Say what you think.”
Chase turned to Lucas: “Senator Roberta Coil—”
“Never heard of her,” Lucas interjected.
“—of Georgia, has an ambitious seventeen-year-old daughter named Audrey who runs her own blog called Young’nHot’nDC. She has several sponsors who pay her to hustle their products—cosmetics, lingerie, yoga togs, fighter jets, and so on.”
“Fighter jets?” Somehow, fighter jets seemed out of place on the list of sponsors.