Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30)(13)

“Jeez, Mom, thanks a lot,” Audrey said. “That totally makes me feel better.”

Lucas looked back at Audrey. “Since you found the photo, you haven’t felt like somebody was watching you?”

“No. Nothing.”

“There was another girl in the photo with you,” Lucas said, going with “girl” since Audrey used the word. “Is there any possibility that she was the targeted one?”

The senator shook her head: “That was Molly McWilliams. Her father owns a liquor distributorship here in northern Virginia. They’re quite well-off, but not political. All the kids on 1919 are children of politicians, so it seems unlikely that Molly would be the target.”

Lucas asked how a predator might locate Audrey and be able to pick her out from all the other students at her school.

Audrey brushed back a hank of auburn hair: “It’s easy. You go to mom’s website and it lists my dad’s name and mine—I’m the only child. Then you look me up on the internet and you find my blog and there I am. All kinds of pictures. I write about school, and parties, and I get kids to give me iPhone snapshots of who’s looking hot, and so on.”

Lucas asked, “Does all this . . . scare you?”

“Scares the heck out of me,” the senator said.

“It’s a little scary,” Audrey said, glancing over at her mother, who nodded. “I now get dropped off by a Secret Service man and go in the back way at school. I only go three days a week—I do assignments at home the other two, which really helps with the blog, you know. I’ve got more time to work on it.”

“Do you miss school?” Lucas asked.

“Yeah, I do, all my friends. I still see them three times a week, though,” Audrey said. “To tell the truth, I’d rather work than go to school, but I know school’s necessary.”

“She does well in school,” Roberta Coil said, smiling. “She’s gotten about three B’s in four years, everything else is A’s. And it’s a tough school.”

“That’s great,” Lucas said. To Audrey: “Have you responded in any way to the 1919 site?”

Another flicker in the eyes, but Audrey shook her head: “No. I’d be scared to. Have you looked at it?”

“I got here a couple of hours ago—I haven’t had time.”

“There aren’t many replies, but they’re all from guys with fake names. One of them is ‘Lizard Shooter.’ Who calls himself Lizard Shooter? And there’s never any replies from the blogger. The people replying ask questions and so on, but there’s never an answer. Blake did a Google search and he says there has been some talk about 1919 on a couple of Nazi websites and there are links . . . that’s about it.”

“Do you know what websites?”

“I don’t, but Blake knows.”



* * *



—

THEY TALKED FOR a while longer, touching on the discovery of the website, but the Coils had no real information about the site itself. Lucas gave them his Marshals Service email address and asked Audrey to send him a link to her website, which she said she’d do immediately.

“I gotta get these guys off my back,” she said, miming a shiver. “They’re cramping my style. You ever try to talk fashion to a Secret Service agent?”



* * *



—

WHEN LUCAS GOT up to leave, Senator Coil asked him to wait a minute, went to the kitchen and came back with two warm oatmeal-raisin cookies in a plastic baggie.

“Smells good,” he said.

“They taste even better. Georgia cookin’,” she said.

“Bye,” Audrey said, and she scrambled up the stairs and out of sight. Roberta Coil looked after her, then touched Lucas’s arm and said, “She’s a good kid. She’s being brave about this, but I’m really not. Do you think I should hide her? I could send her back home.”

Lucas said, “I can’t make that call for you. We don’t know that there’s any threat at all. But we don’t know that there isn’t. With Secret Service coverage, she should be okay. Those guys are good. But, we’re dealing with crazy people with guns and . . . you really don’t know.”

“Why do crazy people have guns?” Coil asked.

“You’d know the answer to that better than I would, Senator,” Lucas said.



* * *



—

AS LUCAS DROVE to Blake Winston’s house—he ate the cookies on the way, and they were excellent—it occurred to him that not only had he discussed fashion with a (former) Secret Service agent, a woman named Alice Green, but that Roberta Coil might even know her.

Green was running for a Virginia seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, had won the Democratic primary, and was leading her Republican opponent with less than two months to go to the election. Green was a clotheshorse, as was Lucas, and they’d spent a few pleasant hours on a campaign bus with Elmer Henderson, reading fashion magazines and exchanging ideas.

On the drive from Arlington to McLean, Lucas passed through a number of housing zones, arriving in the million-dollar-plus zone a few minutes after leaving the Coils’. The size and apparent values continued to climb the farther north he got and the closer to the Potomac. Following his phone’s navigation app down a narrow tarmac lane, he eventually came to a sprawling ultra-modern white stone-and-glass house set in a forest that appeared to go on down to the river.