Silken Prey

by John Sandford

  “Look,” she said. “I want a lawyer. Right fuckin’ now.”

  Jenkins looked at Lucas and lifted his eyebrows. Arrest her? Lucas shook his head; he wasn’t ready for that. He said, “We’ll want to talk to you again. Do not go away. Do not try to avoid us. I’m tempted to arrest you, and put you in jail overnight, but I’m hoping that you understand that we need to know what happened, more than we need to haul in the small fish. You’re a small fish. Do you understand that?”

  She nodded, and said, “Lawyer.”

  Lucas offered to provide one, a public defender, but she said she’d get her own. “Are we done?”

  “Yes. But don’t run—”

  “I’m not going to run, but I want you to take me out of the office,” she said. She looked out through the glass window on Smalls’s office door. “They’re gonna be a little pissed at me.”

  “That’s the least of your problems,” Lucas said. “Come on. We’ll take you out.”

  • • •

  SHE WAS RIGHT: when they walked out of the room, the other volunteers started hissing, and somebody called, “Put her ass in jail.” At the door, Knoedler flashed a finger over her shoulder, and Jenkins laughed and said, “That’s really classy, sweetheart.”

  They saw her into her car, and as she backed out of the parking space, Lucas asked Jenkins, “What do you think?”

  Jenkins shrugged and said, “Don’t think she knew about the porn. But I wouldn’t be surprised if she let Tubbs into the office, late one night, after everybody else had gone home.”

  Lucas nodded. “Maybe. Which would make her a part of it. The thing is, the DFLers swear that they didn’t put her on Smalls, and I believe them because if they did, too many people would have to know about it. I’d find out, and they know that. So, they’re telling the truth. It had to be Tubbs, working alone, or Tubbs working for Grant. We need to keep going back to her, if nothing else breaks.”

  “Maybe give Knoedler limited immunity,” Jenkins said.

  “Don’t want to give her immunity, if she set the trap,” Lucas said.

  Jenkins shook his head: “I gotta tell you: I kinda believed her about that. She got pretty hot about it and that looked real. Besides, she knows we can check.”

  Lucas rubbed his nose and looked after her taillights, two blocks down the street. “Yeah. It did look kinda real,” he said. “Goddamnit.”

  • • •

  HE CHECKED ANYWAY, and Roman, the secretary, said that Knoedler hadn’t been scheduled to work, because even the volunteers were limited to eight hours a day. “But people, you know, are enthusiastic, and they come and go all the time. She could have been here, and I doubt that anyone would have thought it unusual, or even noticed.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Lauren had put together a munchie plate and Kidd was munching on the last of the celery with pimento cheese as he bypassed the privacy option on Taryn Grant’s bedroom security camera.

  The camera was inactive, which meant nobody had walked through the bedroom in the past thirty seconds.

  He was working off a laptop that was, technically, operating out of a Wi-Fi system in the federal courthouse, which was just up the street. He’d taken the precaution of building a repeater into the building several years earlier.

  With nothing moving on the screen, he wandered away from the laptop to look at a landscape he was working on, a view of the Mississippi a few miles above the Coon Rapids Dam. The color of the autumn leaves and the dark river was all accurate enough, he thought, but didn’t work for the painting: and accurate color was not a driving aspect of his work.

  He pulled on a paint-spattered apron, selected a handful of tubes of oil paint, squeezed some paint onto a glass palette, and began mixing color. An hour later, he was still adjusting the color on the river’s surface when the laptop screen flickered to life and Taryn Grant walked into the bedroom.

  Kidd stepped over to the laptop as Grant kicked off her shoes, then unzipped the back of her dress, pulled it over her head, and tossed it on the bed. A slip followed, leaving her in her bra, underpants, and genuine nylon stockings held up with a genuine garter belt.

  She walked off screen to the left, and Kidd said, aloud, “Come back, come back . . .”

  Thirty seconds later, the screen went dead.

  She had to come back through the bedroom, though, and Kidd pulled a drawing stool over to the laptop bench, sat and waited. Seven or eight minutes later, naked as the day she was born, fresh out of the shower, Grant walked across the bedroom, wiping down her back with a long white terrycloth towel. She was, Kidd thought, a healthy lass.

  As Kidd watched, she tossed the towel on her bed and walked over to a side table, reached behind it, and must have pushed a button or moved a lever—a built-in bookcase on a sidewall smoothly rotated away from the wall. Grant stepped over to the safe and after punching in a string of numbers on the safe’s keypad, she pulled open the heavy steel door and started taking out jewelry cases.

  Kidd turned to the studio and shouted, “Hey, Lauren. C’mere. Quick.”

  Lauren popped into the doorway a minute later, said, “I’ve got to get Jackson . . .” Jackson was at school.

  “Look at this,” Kidd said, pointing at the monitor.

  She looked and a frown line appeared on her forehead and she said, “What is this? Is that Taryn Grant? Kidd, what the heck are you doing?”

  “Hey. Look what she’s doing.”

  Lauren peered at the monitor. “She’s . . . whoa, look at that.”

  Grant had opened one of a half-dozen jewelry cases she’d put on the bed, and tried on a heavy necklace of knotted gold. She looked at herself in the mirror, then took off the gold, dropped it back next to the case, and opened another case. This necklace was smaller, more demure . . . and sparkled with diamonds.

  Kidd tapped a corner of the screen: “She took it out of the safe.”

  “Can we get a look at it? The safe?”

  “I can rewind a bit, look at that corner . . .”

  He stepped back through the recording, to the point that the camera had stopped recording. “The camera triggers on movement, and runs for another thirty seconds.”

  There was a jump, and then the unclothed Grant walked into the screen again, from the left side, and Kidd said, “Yow,” and Lauren said, “Yeah, yow. You are in no way qualified to handle something like that.”

  “That, my little pumpkin flower, holds not a candle to your own self,” Kidd said.

  “Thanks, but to be honest, you’re not qualified to handle me. I have to tone down my whole . . . Okay, here goes.”

  Lauren watched as Grant opened the bookcase, and then the safe.

  “That’s a Robinson Steel-Block,” Lauren said, peering at the safe door. “Can we rerun and get closer on the keypad?”

  Kidd rattled some keys and the corner of the screen that showed the safe shifted to occupy the entire screen; a few more keystrokes and the recording stepped back and showed the bookcase opening. Grant’s hand appeared and she hit the key sequence.

  Kidd said, “Jesus, an eight-number code.”

  “You won’t get into a Robinson with a jackknife,” Lauren said. “Run that again.”

  Kidd ran it again and Lauren said, “I think it was 62649628. Or it could have been 95970960. I’ll need to look at it some more. Is there an alarm when the safe opens?”

  “I’d have to do a little more exploring to figure that out . . . but I doubt it,” Kidd said.

  “Okay. I want to look at the way she pushed that button again.”

  They ran the file a dozen times, and Lauren watched Grant’s arm and fingers as she pushed the button, or moved the lever, that shifted the bookcase. Eventually, she decided that it was a simple button-push, probably wireless, and that the button was mounted on the back of the side table. “You can see that she feels for it, for a second, and then her middle finger pushes it . . . not a slide motion. It’s a button, and she pushes it once: it’s not a coded sequence
.”

  Kidd started the live video again, and Grant, now back in her underpants, garter belt straps hanging loose down her legs, hooked her bra and started trying on the jewelry again, including a lot of colored gemstones.

  “Look at that, I think that’s a ruby,” Lauren said. “My God, the thing’s the size of a drain stopper.”

  Eventually, Grant chose what looked like a multiple string of pearls.

  “The stuff she looked at, the stuff she rejected—assuming it’s all top-of-the-line, and given her money, I’d bet it is—we’re looking at a million bucks with just what we saw. There’s more in the safe. She was looking for the right necklace. She wouldn’t have taken everything out, the rings and bracelets.”

  “I made a million last year,” Kidd said. “We don’t need the money.”

  “That’s your money, not mine,” Lauren said. “I like to have my own money.”

  “You can be such a silly shit,” Kidd said.

  “Whatever. I’m going to want to look at a few key photos,” Lauren said.

  “Me too,” Kidd said. “Like when she puts on her nylons . . .”

  “Hey . . .”

  “. . . my little rutabaga flower.”

  Lauren patted his chest. “Put that video somewhere safe. I’m late to get Jackson. We’ll talk after he’s in bed tonight.”

  • • •

  KIDD TOLD LUCAS that Lauren had worked as an insurance adjuster, which was true enough: after Lauren called on her rich clients, their insurance needed adjustment. She mostly stole money, for the simple reason that it was . . . money. She’d also steal jewelry, if it was the kind that could be melted or broken down into unidentifiable stones.

  Kidd had once needed to get some information on a man who was peddling defense secrets, and had used Lauren to hit his safe, as a cover for his own break-in. The safe couldn’t be cracked in place: it was too good. So Lauren had simply used a power jack to rip the safe completely out of the wall, had Kidd throw it out the window of the man’s condominium, and had whipped him into carrying the brutally heavy safe, at a fast jog, which was all he could manage, several hundred yards to their car. She’d taken the safe to a machinist friend, who’d cut it open.

  Kidd could feel an incipient hernia when he even thought about that night. . . .

  She hadn’t only stolen for the income, though: she had done it because she liked it, and often because her victims deserved it. The kind of people who were most vulnerable to her were almost always assholes, running some kind of illegal or immoral hustle. She chose them because most would not go to the police. Politicians were a favorite target—no politician had ever called the FBI to report that a hundred thousand dollars in twenty-dollar bills had been taken out of his freezer.

  Lauren also had a taste for cocaine and cowboys, both of which she’d given up when she and Kidd had decided a child would be nice. Not that the taste had necessarily gone away.

  • • •

  WHEN JACKSON was put to bed that night, and Kidd was lying on the living room couch reading deep into George Bellows, a hefty volume produced by the National Gallery of Art, in conjunction with a retrospective exhibition on the American painter, Lauren came in and said, “Move your feet.”

  Kidd sat up and Lauren plopped on the couch and asked, “Why’d you show me that?”

  “You said last week that you were feeling stale. Then when we were over at the Roosavelts’ place, I noticed you casing the place.”

  “I was looking at the new décor, with Suki,” Lauren said.

  “Right.” The Roosavelts had decorated their new eight-thousand-square-foot penthouse with, among other things, a big Kidd landscape, and Kidd and Lauren had gone over to see what the installation looked like.

  “Hey . . .”

  “I need to know what’s going on in your head,” Kidd said.

  “A lot of stuff,” Lauren said. “But to get back to Taryn . . . You think I should crack her house?”

  “No. I want you to think about it,” Kidd said. “All about it. About what would happen if you were caught, about the effect it would have on Jackson and me, and what would happen if you weren’t caught. How would that change things? Or would it change anything?”

  Lauren said, “I don’t know. I don’t know what would happen. But ever since you showed me the video . . . it’s like I’ve got a fever.”

  “You had the fever before then. I could see it. If you hadn’t, I wouldn’t have shown you Grant’s bedroom.”

  “Yeah . . .” She stood up and wandered over to the window and looked out at the river, where it disappeared around the bend and rolled off to the Gulf of Mexico. “Yeah, you’re right. I’ve been looking at places.”

  “I was afraid of that,” Kidd said.

  “I’ve never been caught,” Lauren said, turning back. “I’ve never been printed.”

  “You didn’t have that much riding on it before,” Kidd said.

  “You’re right. I didn’t.”

  “I quit,” Kidd said. “As much as I could, anyway.”

  “You could quit because you never wanted to do it that much—industrial espionage, sneaking around in factories . . . it all seemed so weird,” Lauren said. “You didn’t need it, because you’re basically a painter, not a thief. But I’m basically a thief. That’s what I do. That’s my painting. I’m not basically a housewife.”

  “But nobody’s going to put me in jail for painting . . .”

  “That Times critic might,” Lauren said. “He said you were a throwback to a bygone era and that your prices were absurd for something as old-fashioned as paintings.”

  “I’m trying to be serious,” Kidd said. “About everything. That’s why I showed you the video. I want you to think about your life.”

  She turned away from him and bobbed her head. “All right. I’ll do that. I will do that, Kidd.”

  • • •

  THEY TALKED for two hours. Lauren was mostly right—Kidd was basically a painter, but there was one spot in his heart that would never go away, reserved for the beauty of computers and their languages.

  Much later that night, Kidd was back in the studio when a computer chirped at him. He went over and looked at it. Military records depository. He touched a key and the computer on the other end hesitated. “Open sesame,” Kidd said, feeling the rush.

  The army’s computer opened up.

  CHAPTER 15

  Lucas was lying on a couch reading the Steve Jobs biography, which he’d been meaning to do for a long time, when his cell phone rang. He looked at the screen, which said it was two minutes after eleven o’clock, and “Caller Unknown.”

  “Hello?”

  “Don’t say anything. This is a wrong number. Look at your e-mail. Don’t call me back before tomorrow night.”

  Click. Kidd was gone; the call had lasted six seconds.

  • • •

  LUCAS GOT OFF the couch and padded back to his study, sat down at the computer, and brought up his e-mail. He had incoming mail from the military records depository.

  He clicked on it, and found two PDF documents. He clicked on the first and found a thirty-page document on Ronald L. Carver, Sgt. E-8 U.S. Army, marked “Secret.” Lucas had never been in the army, and thought E-8 was a rank, but wasn’t sure. He went out on Google to check: E-8 was a master sergeant.

  The document was a mass of acronyms and it took him an hour to work through the thirty pages, going back and forth to Google, searching for definitions, making notes on a yellow legal pad.

  Weather stuck her head in and said, “You’re not coming to bed?”

  “Not for a while.” She was up late; not working in the morning. “Something came up.”

  “Don’t drink any more Diet Coke or you’ll be up all night.”

  She went away and Lucas went back to Carver. Scanning the document, he’d figured that Carver had spent three years in Iraq and two more in Afghanistan. He had a Silver Star and a Bronze Star for bravery under fire, and had been wounded a
t least twice, with two Purple Hearts. Neither wound had been serious. Both had been treated in-country, and he’d returned to active duty in less than a month, in each case.

  Then something happened, but Lucas couldn’t tell what it was. Carver had been reprimanded—exact circumstances unspecified—and very shortly afterward had been honorably discharged.

  Reading through the document a second time, he determined that Carver had been through a number of high-level training courses: he was a Ranger, he was parachute qualified, he’d taken a half-dozen courses in anti-insurgency warfare, and had spent a lot of time on “detached duty” in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

  Working through military sites he found through Google, he determined that Carver had made the master sergeant rank about as quickly as was possible. Then he was out.

  Lucas leaned back in his chair and processed it. He thought Carver had probably been some sort of enlisted-ranks combat specialist, what the Internet military sites called an “operator.” Lucas suspected that he’d killed a lot of people—his training all pointed in that direction.

  But the reprimand could cover a lot of territory. Carver, he thought, might very well have killed either the wrong person, or too many of them. With Carver’s medals, experience, and training, Lucas thought it unlikely that he’d been kicked out for rolling a joint.

  • • •

  IN A LOT OF WAYS, the records for Douglas Damien Dannon were parallel to Carver’s. Dannon had been in the military for six years, leaving as a captain, honorably discharged. There was nothing in the records to indicate that he’d been pushed out.

  Like Carver, he’d spent most of his service time in either Iraq or Afghanistan. He’d won the Bronze Star for bravery under fire, had been wounded by a roadside bomb during the initial invasion of Iraq. After a couple of years as an infantry lieutenant, he’d been assigned to a mobile intelligence unit, and then later, to an intelligence unit at a battalion headquarters. Lucas wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, and spent some time looking up words like battalion, company, brigade, and division.