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SEATTLE (Friday, Nov. 30, 2012) — Stan Warren was sitting two blocks away when Mac drove by.
“Now where is he headed?” Warren wondered aloud. He didn’t try to follow him. He had a new appreciation for Mac Davis’ caution. Davis would spot him. Hard to track a paranoid, he thought. No cell phone. Answering machine with no outside pick up commands. Computer wasn’t on except when he was using it; not linked to the Internet at all. Damn guy must physically unhook the wires when he didn’t need to send an email or a fax, Warren thought with exasperation and reluctant admiration. He was still using his own vehicle, however; Warren wondered how long it would take him to ditch that rig for another.
Warren thought of Nick Rodriguez still reading Donnelly’s profile of Davis and getting increasingly closer to a stroke item by item. Warren snorted. He didn’t need to read the file; he knew what Mackensie Davis was the minute he saw him. He wondered what the profilers at Quantico would make of Davis. Sociopath? Paranoid? Killer?
Warren didn’t give a damn about that either. He’d been working this investigation 24-seven for two weeks. Warren knew his subject was dirty, but proving it could be another story. And God knew the man was connected. Warren didn’t know who he could trust, even within the FBI itself. When that kid from Senator Murray’s office disappeared.... Hell, the last known people to see him were FBI agents. He just didn’t know who.
So here he was, sitting on a goddamn street in Seattle, staking out a punk turned Marine turned reporter — a reporter for God’s sake!
He shook his head. He’d tried reporting his concerns to his chief. It hadn’t been particularly useful.
“What do you have really?” the chief had asked, somewhat reasonably. “An aide for a liberal senator asking questions. Not even making allegations, for God’s sake. Howard Parker has an outstanding career—military, CIA, DoD. You don’t get that kind of jacket without having done some missions the public probably shouldn’t know about.”
“The aide’s disappeared,” Warren had argued.
“Probably took a long Thanksgiving break, Stan. Don’t be a paranoid. You got lots of names to get vetted. Move on.”
Warren had shut up.
He knew Parker was connected to practically everyone in town. Or, maybe the right way to put it is that almost everyone in town owed Parker for something, he thought now. And Parker wasn’t the least bit shy about collecting. His jaw tightened at how far-reaching Parker was willing to go to pull in favors he felt he was due.
Warren thought about his own career. He was 47 years old. He’d had a very good career. Navy. Police. FBI training school. Moved up the ranks. A lot of commendations. A lot of respect. The respect mattered. Mattered a lot, when you’re a poor kid from the hills of West Virginia. Mattered to him, mattered to his ma, mattered to his kids.
He’d gone home after his talk with the chief and looked at himself in the mirror. “Won’t look good with a beard,” he told himself. “Best be able to look at myself in the mirror.”
He’d assigned out the other background checks to his team. Assigned out Howard Parker as well, as a matter of fact. Then he came to Seattle. Got into town in time for the attack on Donnelly.
He picked up his cell phone, dialed a D.C. number. “You finished with that background check on Mac Davis?”
“Yeah. Who the hell is he?”
“Someone who wandered into my background check. I got curious,” Warren said. “Give me the highlights.”
The man did.
Warren got out of his car, walked up the street to the house Davis had just left and let himself inside. Davis was indeed an interesting young man, he thought. Let’s see if he finds a bug or two.
He wandered through the house. Mac’s aunt’s house. It had a bohemian edge to it that didn’t belong with what he knew of Mac Davis. A macrame plant hanger, for God’s sake — he hadn’t seen one of those in decades. He smiled. There was interesting art on the walls, originals, not posters. But then Lindy Davis was an art professor. He doubted art professors hung posters of cute kittens on their walls. Probably get denied tenure.
He stopped in front of one painting, done in reds and blacks, and swirls. He liked it. Didn’t particularly know why, but it said something about the world he lived in. He looked at the artist’s signature. Lindy Davis. He frowned. What would an art professor know about his world?
He found the phone, installed a bug. He went upstairs, put another bug in the phone there. He checked out Mac’s computer; it was turned off. And unplugged from the phone jack. He shook his head in bemusement.
He found the locked case under the bed, spotted the pennies. Took them off, set them aside in exactly the order he found them. Looked inside. No Glock. Two semiautomatics. But not the weapon the city cops were asking about. Did that mean it was the murder weapon? Or had Davis decided he should be carrying? Warren carefully closed the box, put the pennies back on the edge. The same pennies in the same spot. He didn’t know if Davis was that paranoid. The pennies were sappy anyway, he thought. Somehow, he’d bet, that it was a ritual not a security device. He frowned, hoping he hadn’t missed something more subtle. Shrugged. Couldn’t be helped now.
He looked around the room. It was two rooms and a bath, really, one used for the office, the second a simple bedroom. The suite was clean, neat, with no frills. Very little personal impact here, Warren thought. A few photos. He looked at them. One of four Marines—God, they looked young, he thought—Davis, Maxim, Brown, and what was the name of the fourth? Blankenship, the one in Saudi. A picture of him and a young black man, Warren made a mental note to find out who that was. Another picture of three women in clothes that reminded him of the 80s. His aunt? His mother?
There were bookshelves. Quite a collection of books, and even more CDs. Warren glanced along the shelves. Journalism, history, military history, and Dean Koontz. He snorted. The CDs covered a spectrum of rap, hip-hop, jazz and R&B. He squinted at the titles and artists, recognizing enough to get a sense of the styles. Getting harder every year to see anything, he thought sourly.
He opened the closet doors. Clothes hung neatly on hangers all facing the same way. Shoes were square with each other. While Davis wasn’t a clothes collector, he most certainly liked his athletic shoes. Warren counted 10 pairs at least.
He was careful not to touch. He could see boxes on the shelf above the closet rod, and wished he dared check them out. He didn’t. He hated neat-freaks — even though his own apartment was almost as tidy as this one — because they noticed when something wasn’t properly in its place.
Well, he’d done what he came to do, he thought as he went down the stairs with light footsteps. The phones were bugged. He had a better sense of the man who lived here, as well as the aunt he lived with.
He stopped again at the painting. Was it a flower, a deep red rose? He didn’t think so. He let himself out of the house. On the sidewalk to his car, it came to him. The painting was about pain. He didn’t know how he knew that, but he was sure. Damn, he thought with surprise. I didn’t know an artist could do that.