Twisted Prey

by John Sandford

  “No . . . Has she said something? Anything she says will hurt her . . . Did you see me on ’CCO last night?”

  “No, I didn’t know you were on. What’d you say?”

  “Look for it. It’s all over the place,” Smalls said.

  “Just tell me, Senator.”

  Smalls cleared his throat, and said, “Well, I had some news media call me up and tell me that these tree trunks had been found by a U.S. Marshal and had silver paint on them. I assumed the marshal was you.”

  “Yeah, me, and two other marshals, and a West Virginia sheriff and some deputies.”

  “Good, good, lots of witnesses. Anyway, I started getting more calls, and then CNN and a Washington TV station asked me to go down to ’CCO and make a statement for them.”

  “Did you say Taryn Grant was involved?”

  “No, not by name. I did say that I’d experienced this kind of thing in the past, although that was character assassination and this was real assassination, a dear friend being murdered. It didn’t take a genius to put two and two together, which is a good thing, because geniuses are a little thin on the ground in the TV media these days.”

  “Anyway . . .”

  “Anyway, the reporters started asking me if I was accusing Taryn Grant of trying to assassinate me. I told them that it was clear that somebody was trying to assassinate me, but I had no idea who it was. They kept trying to get me to say Grant did it, and I kept tap-dancing.”

  “But you never said it wasn’t Grant.”

  “Of course not,” Smalls said, “because it is.”

  Lucas said, “Well, she just went on TV here and said that you’re senile and that everybody in the Senate knows it; that you were probably drunk when the accident took place, because you’re also quite well known as a secret alcoholic; that you may well be guilty of vehicular homicide, if you were driving drunk; and that you’d sent your pet marshal to try to frame her, and she wasn’t going to stand for it.”

  Long pause. “She didn’t say that,” Smalls finally said. “Not really.”

  “Look at a C-SPAN rerun.”

  “Sounds like one heck of a guilty overreaction to me,” Smalls said.

  “Given the context, that’s not what the news analysts are saying,” Lucas said. He was looking at CNN. “They’re saying that you did everything but flatly accuse her of trying to kill you. How would she overreact to that?”

  “I can’t say I’m sorry,” Smalls said. “It’s out in the open now. Let’s see what happens.”

  “As the ‘pet marshal,’ I wouldn’t be surprised if I got fired,” Lucas said.

  “I would,” Smalls said. “Try to remember which party is in the majority right now. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Tweeter in Chief wades into it.”

  “Oh, shit . . .”

  “Keep pushing, Lucas. You’re doing good. If you or anyone at the Marshals Service needs help, call me.”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS CALLED RUSSELL FORTE, and as he finished dialing, he heard a knock at the door. He walked across the room, took the spitball from the peephole, looked out, and saw Rae’s face. He opened the door, waved Bob and Rae inside—they were still dressed in their workout clothes—and when Forte answered the phone, Lucas asked him, “Have you seen Grant?”

  “Everybody’s seen Grant,” Forte said. “The shit has hit the fan.”

  “That seems to be the general opinion,” Lucas said. “Are we in trouble?”

  “Hard to tell,” Forte said. “I’ve got lines out. There’s a rumor that the FBI might want to talk to us.”

  “Kick us out? Take over the investigation? That’d be all right with me.”

  “Uh . . . I don’t think so. This is becoming the hottest potato in Washington, and you don’t often see the FBI stepping up to intercept hot potatoes. I have gotten a call from the director’s assistant—our director, not the FBI’s—and I’ll be talking with him later this morning.”

  “What should we do here? We were planning to call you about a search warrant for this afternoon.”

  “Hold off on that,” Forte said. “Let’s see what the director has to say, see if anybody else gets into it. I’m sure the director will be talking with the attorney general . . . let’s see what happens.”

  “You’re telling me to lay low.”

  “For a few hours. Go climb the Washington Monument or something. Be a tourist.”

  “All right. Smalls told me if you need some support, to call him.”

  “If I need it, I’ll call you to call him,” Forte said. “I’d rather not talk to him directly, at this point. Not being a director.”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS FILLED IN Bob and Rae: “It’s not bad,” he said. “It’s a bureaucratic clusterfuck, but it has the effect of chasing these people out in the open.”

  “There’s no way Grant or Parrish will do anything now,” Rae said.

  “We couldn’t count on them doing anything before,” Lucas said. “They’re operating through Ritter and Heracles. Once all the newspeople start talking about Whitehead being murdered . . . maybe we’ll get a little panic. We could use a little panic.”

  “So what are we going to do?” Bob asked.

  * * *

  —

  NOTHING.

  Spend a day or two as tourists, and let the situation cook, as Forte had suggested. Keep an eye on the news.

  They tried to do that but failed. While Lucas went for a walk around the Capitol, and to look at the White House, Rae went to the National Gallery, and Bob went to find an uncle’s name on the Vietnam memorial, but by one o’clock they were back in Lucas’s room, watching sporadic commentary on the news channels, and a few minutes after that, Gladys Ingram, the lawyer, called Lucas.

  “I’m going to email you a bunch of links. You said this phone was safe?”

  “About as safe as it gets, but, you know . . .”

  “I’m going to give you a string of numbers. You’ll need to write them down.”

  Lucas got his pen and a legal pad: Ingram gave him eighteen random numbers. “That string will open the email I sent to you. If you copy the email with a pen—it’s quite short, but you’ll have to be accurate—you can touch the burn tab, and the email will eat itself. I don’t think, even if they’re listening to us, they could interfere, but if you save the documents instead of burning them, they might be able to get at them later. So print out a paper copy and hold it close.”

  “I’ll do it right now.”

  He did. There were twelve links, and they provided the same information that Kidd had . . . but now flowing from a different source. Lucas copied the twelve out on paper, then burned the email. If any investigator ever asked how he’d come up with all those links, he had an answer.

  At two, Forte called and said, “Me, my boss—you met him, Gabe O’Conner—and a few high-level suits from the FBI want to talk to you.”

  “Where at?”

  “Conference room at the FBI building. They’ll take you to the conference room when you show up, at four o’clock sharp. Bring Bob and Rae.”

  “Gonna be trouble?”

  “Doesn’t feel like it. More like an ass-covering mission.”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS TOLD Bob and Rae that they’d been summoned, and they spent half an hour speculating about what would happen; and, despite the heat and the suffocating humidity, they decided to walk the two miles to the meeting.

  “We need to look professional,” Bob objected. “If we walk, we’ll be all sweaty when we get there.”

  Rae shrugged. “But it’ll sort of let them know we’re not too worried about things. They get all the media, but we’re just as big a deal as they are. Sort of.”

  “So you’re saying we should push them back with offensive body od
or?” Bob asked.

  “Walk?” Rae asked Lucas. “Or drive, and spend an hour trying to find a parking place?”

  “Walk,” Lucas said.

  * * *

  —

  THEY STARTED WALKING by three o’clock, stopped on the way to get Cokes, paused at an Au Bon Pain across the street from the FBI to cool off, and arrived at the building, looking crisp and non-sweaty, although they might not have passed a sniff test.

  “Goddamn building looks like it was built by fuckin’ Joseph Stalin,” Bob grumbled, looking up at the Hoover Building, as they crossed the street.

  “Art history–wise, I would say you are correct,” Rae said.

  * * *

  —

  INSIDE, they found Forte and O’Conner waiting in the lobby with an FBI gofer, who escorted them to an elevator, up a few floors, and fifty yards down a hallway to a conference room. Other than the five of them, and the usual table and chairs, the room was empty.

  “Everybody likes to be last because, that way, we know who’s most important,” O’Conner said. He was a beefy man, in a pale blue suit and white shirt, carrying an old-style leather briefcase. He took a sheaf of papers from the case, and said, “I understand you guys may be asking for a search warrant.”

  “Depending on how this comes out,” Lucas said.

  “I can tell you that in advance. You’re to be cautiously aggressive. Or aggressively cautious. I’ve been told that the FBI is not anxious to get involved until they figure out who’s the fall guy. There are several possibilities, including you three.”

  “Great,” Rae said.

  “The thing is, if you pull this off and prove there was an assassination attempt, it’ll be a big feather in our cap. If you screw it up, then . . .” O’Conner was about to go on, but the door popped open, and a half dozen suits walked in—three men, three women—and everybody shook hands with everybody else.

  * * *

  —

  THE MEETING took an hour. Lucas outlined the investigation, starting with the request from Smalls to finding the suspect truck to discovering the logs. He concluded by saying that the West Virginia accident investigators were looking at the paint sample with several different machines that he didn’t understand and would provide solid evidence that the paint came from Smalls’s Cadillac.

  One of the feds said to Lucas, “We understand that you have a close relationship with the senator.”

  “We’re not exactly friends, but I worked on an investigation that involved the Smalls–Grant Minnesota election two years ago, when Grant won Smalls’s Senate seat,” Lucas said. “He remembered me from then, asked me to work on this problem. I consulted with my superiors at the Marshals Service, and they concluded that the request was legitimate and that I could go forward with it.”

  Forte added, with a smile, “Seeing that it was Senator Smalls, and that the Republican caucus voted to restore the seniority he held before his defeat by Senator Grant.”

  “We’re not, uh, affected by the influence of a single senator,” one of the FBI suits said.

  O’Conner said, “Really?”

  The suit nodded, and said, “Yes, really,” but nobody really believed him. He didn’t even believe himself.

  “Not even a senator who was the victim of an apparent assassination attempt . . . ?”

  Another suit, this one a woman named Jane Chase, jumped in. “This isn’t the time or place to debate questions of influence.” She turned to Lucas. “You have a good deal of experience as a homicide investigator for the Minneapolis Police Department and the Bureau of Criminal Investigation.”

  “Bureau of Criminal Apprehension,” Lucas corrected. “Yeah. Overall, I was the lead on about ninety murder cases, give or take, over twenty-five years or so. Most of them were straightforward enough, but some were . . . intricate. I’ve worked closely with a couple of your agents.”

  She nodded. “We know. Deputy Director Mallard vouches for you and recommends that we step back and allow the Marshals Service to lead on this investigation.”

  “Nice of him,” Lucas said. And, “He’s a smart guy.”

  “Yes, he is,” Chase said. She looked around the table at the rest of the suits. “Does anyone have a problem with allowing Marshal Davenport and his colleagues to lead this investigation, at least for now?”

  One of the men said, to Lucas, “You’ll need to be cautiously aggressive. But aggressive.”

  All the feds nodded, and O’Conner said, “Listen, guys, thanks for the support. We think we’ve got an edge on this thing . . .”

  Lucas held up a finger. “I have a couple more things. I was hoping I could get some FBI help. It wouldn’t be anything you’d have to go public with at all . . . unless you wanted to.”

  They all knew what that meant: if credit and congratulations were being handed out, the FBI could get in the front of the line. If it were hellfire and damnation instead, they could pass and pretend they were in the cafeteria, buying Ding Dongs, when the trouble started.

  “Go ahead and talk,” Chase said, clicking her iPhone to look at the time without sneaking the move. In other words, I’m busy and also I’m the one in charge here.

  Lucas outlined the problem with the vehicle armor provided to the Army by Inter-Core Ballistics and the problems with the bidding process. He also gave them the Internet links that demonstrated the problems.

  “I think you’ll find widespread corruption involving the bids—Army officers and enlisted men, a high-ranking Senate aide, a military contractor who also provides mercenaries to the countries we’re involved in . . . all of that. Even worse, the products they provided, products that were supposed to protect our military people, had already been proven inferior,” he told the agents.

  There were glances around the table, and Chase said, “That would be something we could be interested in. But what’s in it for you?”

  “If you could take a quick look at this, and ask some questions that would get back to Heracles . . . that might provide me with a bit of leverage,” Lucas said. “I could explain that I could come talk with you about who at Heracles gets hurt.”

  Chase pushed out her lower lip, more glances were exchanged, and she said, “I can’t green-light you implicating us directly in any kind of a deal, but I would be willing to keep you up to date on what we might find . . . regarding Heracles.”

  “I seriously appreciate that,” Lucas said. “Seriously.”

  “Seriously,” she repeated, and, “If you lie about a deal, of course there’s nothing illegal about that.”

  “Right,” Bob said. “We know that. We do it all the time.”

  Chase eye-checked Bob, looking for possible cynicism, but Bob’s face was as innocent as the moon’s. She turned backed to Lucas. “Was there something else?” she asked.

  Lucas fished a thumb drive out of his pocket and slid it across the table to the woman, who didn’t immediately touch it. “This is a video. I’ve seen—you know, on television—that you guys are good with photo enhancement. We think this is a video of the truck that hit Senator Smalls. We can see the plates, but the faces of the men inside are obscured by reflections off the windows. And they’re wearing sunglasses. But if we could get a peek, get anything . . .”

  Chase nodded. “We’ll take a look.”

  Back on the street, Rae said, “Suits, but not uninteresting suits. We might actually get something done.”

  “If they can find a way to cover their asses while they’re doing it,” Bob amended.

  O’Conner asked, “You’re friendly with Deputy Director Mallard?”

  Lucas said, “Yeah. We worked a couple of cases together, and we did okay.”

  “I’d like to hear that story sometime,” O’Conner said. “The rumor is, Mallard has the AG’s balls in his pocket.”

  “Since the AG’s a woman, that would be unusu
al,” Rae said.

  “You obviously haven’t met our beloved attorney general,” O’Conner said. To Lucas, as they waited for a car to arrive for O’Conner and Forte: “Remember: Aggressively cautious.”

  Forte: “Or cautiously aggressive. Try not to get them confused.”

  13

  Weather Karkinnen, Lucas’s wife, was driving her dark blue Audi A5 convertible, the top down, in the soft summer evening, but with the windows up because she didn’t want to tangle her freshly coifed hair.

  A bag of groceries sat beside her on the passenger seat, as she drove home from the Lunds supermarket on the Ford Parkway in St. Paul. She was a small woman, her shoulder reaching barely to the bottom of the car’s side window. She enjoyed the curvy ride down Mississippi River Boulevard; the A5 wasn’t a hot car, but it was very driveable.

  Weather was thinking about her kids, Sam in particular. Sam was in elementary school, and, unfortunately for a kid enrolled in school in these modern times, engaged in the occasional fight. He wasn’t a bully—all the teachers said so—but he was the kid who stood up for the picked-upon, a role he may have enjoyed too much, according to those same teachers. Lucas had talked to him about it, and needed to talk to him more about it, she thought.

  Weather caught a boy on a skateboard in her headlights, carefully arced around him, and continued on down the street to Randolph, still thinking about Sam, and . . .

  WHAM!

  She never saw it coming.

  * * *

  —

  THE AUDI WAS BROADSIDED by an elderly Toyota Tacoma, accelerating out of the intersection of Randolph and Mississippi River Boulevard. The A5 jumped three feet sideways, the door crushing inward, all the air bags firing simultaneously.

  Weather’s head collided with the passenger-side window as it shattered, shards of glass sliced into her scalp, and then her head ping-ponged to the left, but she wasn’t aware of that because consciousness had left the building. The violence torqued her neck, and the smashed-in door broke her arm and drove her elbow into her ribs, cracking several, sending the broken end of one of them into her right lung.