Silken Prey

by John Sandford

  Quintana cracked a smile. “All right.”

  “What do you want me to do?” Flowers asked, as they turned a corner and saw the lights on the squad cars.

  “Well, given the way you’re dressed, you could ask me if I want them hog-tied,” Lucas said.

  “Don’t take it out on me,” Flowers said. “I’m not the one who . . .”

  “. . . poked the pup,” Quintana said.

  “Shut up,” Lucas snarled, no longer in the mood for humor.

  • • •

  WHEN THEY CAME UP on the lights, the street was full of cops and politicians. Flowers turned on his own flashers, and a cop who started toward them stopped and put his hands on his hips. Lucas, Flowers, and Quintana got out, and the cop waited for them to walk up, and then asked, “Any chance you’re the BCA?”

  “BCA and Minneapolis police,” Lucas said.

  At that moment, Taryn Grant, who was in the street with a half-dozen campaign workers and her security people, came steaming toward them and shrieked, “I knew it was you. I knew it.”

  “Shut up,” Lucas said, but without much snap.

  “This is the last straw.” She was wildly angry; her blond hair had come loose from whatever kind of spray had been keeping it neat, and was fluttering over her forehead. Her campaign manager, Schiffer, took her arm and tried to pull her back, and Grant pulled free.

  Dannon, Carver, and Green had come up behind Grant. Lucas turned to Quintana and said, “Take a look.”

  Quintana, with the unpleasant grittiness of a vice cop, stepped up close to Carver and looked him straight in the face for a long beat; then stepped over to Dannon and did the same thing. Neither man turned away, but they didn’t like it.

  “Who’s this guy, and what does he want?” Dannon asked.

  “I’m a cop,” Quintana said. “You got a problem with that?”

  “I don’t like somebody standing two inches in front of my face breathing onions on me,” Dannon said. “So back off.”

  Quintana did. Carver nodded at Flowers and asked, “Why’s there a cowboy with you?”

  “Lucas might’ve wanted you hog-tied,” Flowers said. “He thought I’d be the guy to do it.”

  Carver stared at Flowers for a minute, then asked, “You in the military?”

  “Yeah, for a while.”

  “Officer?”

  “Yeah.”

  “MP?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I thought so,” Carver said.

  Quintana had stepped over to Lucas and said, in a low tone, “I can’t hardly believe it, but I think it really is that second guy I talked to.” He looked back over his shoulder at Dannon and Carver and said, “The smaller one. He’s got that funny accent—Texas. Like George Bush.”

  Dannon stepped toward them and said, “We gave you those DNA samples.”

  Lucas nodded and squared off with Grant. “We’ve got two days before the election and this whole thing is coming to a boil. We’re watching everybody, because we don’t want anybody else to show up dead: there have been two murders so far. We don’t need a third.”

  “We don’t have anything to do with any murders,” she shouted, and Lucas could see little atoms of saliva spray in the headlights of Flowers’s truck.

  “We can’t take any chances—you could be a target,” Lucas said. “We had no plans to stop you. We were making sure that everybody got home all right.”

  “Fuck you,” she shouted.

  • • •

  LUCAS TOLD SHRAKE and Jenkins to go home, and back in Flowers’s truck, Lucas asked Quintana, “How sure are you?”

  Quintana shrugged. “Hell, Lucas—he sounded like the guy. It’s not like he’s some random asshole and I’m trying to pick him out of a hundred people by the tone of his voice. He’s your suspect, and I can tell you he’s got that accent, and that was right, and his tone was right, and the way the words came out, that’s exactly right. He sounded exactly like the guy on the phone. You say you’re looking for professional killers and you find two professional killers, and then I listen to one of them . . . what are the chances that it’s not him?”

  “Slim and none, and slim is outta town,” Lucas said. “I want you to go back to the office and write this down. A standard incident report and e-mail it to me. I’ll talk to Marion and tell him you’re working with me.”

  “I appreciate it,” Quintana said, and he looked like he did. “In the meantime, I might move out to a motel for a couple of weeks.”

  “Stay in touch,” Lucas said to Quintana, as Flowers pulled away from the curb. “I don’t want to wonder what the hell happened to you.”

  Flowers asked, “We’re going to Hampshire and Thirtieth?”

  “Yeah, if we can find it.”

  Lucas called up the Google Maps app on his iPhone, and fifteen minutes later they pulled to the side of the road, houses on one side, a park on the other. Dark as tar on the park side.

  Flowers got a flash and Lucas dialed the phone. They walked up and down the road, and then Virgil heard it buzzing down in the weeds. It took a minute or so and a couple of calls to find it. Flowers bagged it and handed it to Lucas.

  “Have them check the battery,” Flowers said. “They probably had to pull an insulating tab off. Maybe they forgot to wipe it.”

  “Fat chance,” Lucas said. “But I’ll do it anyway. I’m pulling on threads, ’cause threads are all I’ve got.”

  CHAPTER 19

  Taryn fixed herself a lemon drop, with a little extra vodka, as soon as she was back in the house; Dannon helped himself to a bottle of beer, Schiffer had a Diet Pepsi, Carver poured a glass of bourbon, Green got a bottle of Evian water. Schiffer said to Taryn, “All right, enough is enough, if you want to call the governor in the morning, go ahead and do it. But right now we’ve got more important stuff on the table.”

  “He thinks we killed somebody,” Taryn shouted at her. “He thinks—”

  “You know you didn’t, so he’s got no proof. You gotta keep your eye on the ball,” Schiffer shouted back, the two women face-to-face. “We’ve got one more day of campaigning. We can still lose it.”

  Taryn looked at her over the glass, then asked, “Where are we?”

  The media woman, whose name was Mary Booth, stepped up: “While you were up north, we’re seeing a new Smalls ad. It ran prime time, Channel Three at seven o’clock, it’s been on ’CCO and KSTP. We’d bought out the KARE slots so it wasn’t there.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, what is it?” Taryn asked.

  “Well, all that neutrality thing is done with. He knows there’s no time left, so he dropped the bomb—he says you planted the porn on him,” Booth said. “He doesn’t come right out and say the words, but he talks about the Democrats and opposition dirty tricks, and he gets angry. I’d say it’s quite effective.”

  “Let’s see it,” Schiffer said.

  They gathered around the living room TV and the media woman plugged a thumb drive into the digital port and brought the advertisement up: Smalls was dressed in a gray pin-striped suit, bankerish, but with a pale blue shirt open at the collar. He was in his Minnesota Senate office, with a hint of the American flag to his right, a couple of red and white stripes—not enough of a flag display to invite sarcasm, but it was there.

  He faced the camera head-on and apparently had been whipped into a bit of a frenzy before they started rolling, because it was right there on his face: “. . . spent my entire life without committing an offense any worse than speeding, and now the Democrats and the opposition plant this dreadful, disgusting pornography on me, and yes, my fellow Minnesotans, they still think they’re going to get away with it. They’re still pretending to think that I might have collected this . . . crap, even though they know the name of the man who did it, a longtime Democrat dirty trickster named Bob Tubbs. They’re laughing up their sleeves at all of us! Don’t let them get away with it! This is not the way we do these things in Minnesota.”

  When he finished, Schiffer said,
“Not bad.”

  Taryn was on her second drink: “What do we do?”

  “We bought a lot of time tomorrow afternoon and evening. We can pretty much blanket the state. Mary, Sandy, and Carl will write a new advertisement overnight in which you are warm and understanding—but also a little angry. Maybe we’ll say something about how we have to be rational and careful . . . hint that he’s a little nuts. I’ll call you in the morning about wardrobe. I’m thinking maybe something cowgirl, maybe . . . what’s the name of that stables you ride at?”

  “Birchmont,” Taryn said.

  “Get you out there in jeans and a barn coat, the one you wore out to Windom, and a jean jacket, cowboy boots . . . let your hair frizz out a little . . . and we do something along the lines of, ‘We don’t know where the porn came from, and if we find out, no matter who put it out there, we will support any prosecution. In the meantime, let’s turn back to the serious issues in this campaign. . . . ’”

  As she was talking, outlining a possible quick advertising shoot, Booth’s phone rang and she pulled it out and looked at it, while still listening to Schiffer. She saw who was calling and declined the call, but then a second later, a message came in, and she looked at it, and interrupted Schiffer to say, “I gotta take this,” and stepped away.

  Taryn was saying . . . “You don’t think they’ll mock me for the cowboy outfit?”

  “They won’t have time to, and it’ll look really down-home and honest,” Schiffer was replying . . .

  . . . When Booth came back and said, “Oh my God, the Pioneer Press is on the street with a front-page story that says this dead woman, the woman that got murdered, had a long affair with Smalls and that the police are investigating a possible domestic motive for her murder.”

  They were all struck silent for a moment, then Taryn said, “Davenport said they had a personal conflict. He didn’t say they had an affair.”

  Schiffer said, “Whatever, this could do it for us. It’ll play right through Election Day. I still think the horse thing will work for us. Maybe we’re a little more sympathetic about Smalls’s problems.”

  Taryn finished the second drink and said, “While still hinting that he’s nuts . . . let’s do it. This is all so ludicrous that we shouldn’t let anything go.”

  Schiffer raised her voice and said, “All right, everybody, let’s clear out. Mary, you get the guys and get going on the ad. You can sleep tomorrow night. Everybody else . . . Taryn, I’ll call you at nine o’clock. I’ll cancel the Channel Three thing, that was the only morning show . . .”

  • • •

  AS SCHIFFER WAS PUSHING everybody out, Taryn tipped her head at Dannon, saying, “Follow me,” and drifted back to the bar. Dannon followed and she said, quietly, “Who’s got the overnight?”

  “Barry.”

  “Send him home. You and I need to talk. Carver’s going to be a problem.”

  Dannon sighed, pulled a bottle of lemon water out of the refrigerator and poured his second drink over a couple of ice cubes. “Did he say something to you?”

  “Yeah. When people clear out . . .”

  “Okay,” Dannon said.

  He started back toward the group in the hallway, and she caught his sleeve and said, “One other thing. I’m so . . . angry, confused, cranked up . . .”

  “It’s been unreal . . .” Dannon began.

  “And I really need something that David doesn’t have, to mellow me out. . . . I’d like to see you back in the bedroom. You know. Send Barry home.”

  • • •

  DANNON HAD UNUSUAL SKILLS in the area of death and dismemberment, but he was like anyone else when it came to sex. He’d slept with twenty women in the past twenty years, but had never really desired one. He’d wanted the sex, but hadn’t been particularly interested in the package that it came in.

  Taryn was an entirely different thing. He’d wanted her from the first week he’d known her. He’d seen her naked or semi-naked two hundred times, out in the pool, so that was no big thing, but seeing her naked when he was finally going to consummate that years-long desire was an entirely different thing.

  As soon as the words “bedroom” came out of her mouth, he began to sweat: you know, would everything work? He kicked Barry out, made himself do all the checks, and had another beer, thinking that the alcohol might lubricate the equipment.

  He needn’t have worried: he walked back to the bedroom with the fourth drink in his hand, and as he walked in, she was coming out of the bathroom, naked except for her underpants, which were no more than a negligible gossamer swatch the size of a folded hankie, and she said, almost shyly, “I’ve been waiting . . .”

  And then he was on her, like a mountain lion, and the equipment was no problem at all. He couldn’t remember getting out of his clothes, didn’t remember anything until she screamed, or moaned, or made some kind of sound that seemed ripped out of her, and she began patting his back and saying, “Okay/okay/okay/okay.”

  And it was okay for about ten minutes of stroking her pelvis, stomach, breasts, rolling her over, stroking her back and butt, and rolling her again and then they were going once more and he blacked out until he heard once more that scream/moan and “Okay/okay/okay . . .”

  He collapsed on top of her, lying there sweaty and hot, until she said, “Whew,” and “We should have done this years ago.”

  • • •

  THEY TALKED FOR A WHILE, this and that, the campaign and Schiffer and Carver and Alice Green . . . Dannon told her for the first time why he and Carver were so casual about the DNA check: there was no DNA from Tubbs, because the cops didn’t know where to look for it, and there was none with Helen Roman, either, because great care had been taken. “Besides, our DNA profiles are already in the army and FBI files. When there’s a chance that some suicide bomber is going to blow you into hamburger, the army wants to be able to identify the scrap meat. We’ve all got DNA profiles.”

  Taryn said, “Ah: so it didn’t make any difference.”

  Taryn rolled out of bed and went to a side bar, pulled open the top drawer, and took out a bottle of vodka, two or three drinks down from full. She asked, “You want more water?”

  He said, “Sure.”

  She got some ice from the bar’s refrigerator and poured the water over it, and made another lemon drop for herself, with enough lemon to bite, brought the drinks back to the bed and put his cold glass on his belly below his navel. He said, “Jesus, cold,” and picked it up, and she laughed, almost girlishly, rolled onto the bed next to him, careful with the drink, and said, “Carver.”

  “What’d he say to you?” Dannon asked.

  Taryn rolled toward him, one of her breasts pressing against his biceps; she wetted a finger and circled one of his nipples in a distracted way, and said, “This afternoon, before we went over to that school, he said that he hadn’t signed up for all this. That’s what he said, ‘signed up.’ I asked what that meant, and he said that he hoped I’d be more grateful than I had been so far. I said that I would be, that if he’d hold on until I was in the Senate, I could take care of him in a lot of ways: money, another army job, get his record wiped out, whatever he needed. He said, ‘Money’s good,’ and said we could talk about the other stuff, then he asked when he’d get a down payment.”

  “What’d you say to that?”

  “I said too much stuff was coming down right now: that I assumed he’d want a big brick of cash that he wouldn’t have to pay taxes on, but even for me, it takes a while to get cash together. Almost nobody uses it anymore, except dope dealers, I guess.”

  Dannon said, “Got that right. I can’t remember the last time I saw somebody buying groceries for cash, except me.”

  “He said, ‘Well, better get on that. I’m gonna need a big chunk pretty soon. I got a feeling that when everything settles down . . . my services might not be needed.’ I said, ‘You’ve got a job as long as you want it, and you’ll get paid as much as you need.’ He laughed and said, ‘I kinda don’t think
you know how much I need.’”

  Dannon said, “That’s the problem with Ron. He’s hungry all the time—more pussy, more dope, more money. There won’t be an end to it.”

  “I know, but I don’t know what to do about it.”

  Dannon said, “Ron and I . . . he was enlisted, I was an officer. We’re not natural friends. I’m not being arrogant here, lots of the enlisted guys are sharp as razors: but that’s the way it is. He doesn’t think, except tactically. How exactly to do one thing or another. He thinks three days down the road, but not three months or three years. He’ll get us in trouble, sooner or later.”

  Taryn said nothing, waiting, watching Dannon think.

  He said, finally, “There’s something else.”

  “What?”

  “I’m kinda worried that from Ron’s perspective, I’m the problem,” Dannon said. “He’ll figure he can handle you. But you and me together . . .”

  “You actually think . . . he might come after you?”

  “I think it’s inevitable,” Dannon said. “It’ll occur to him pretty soon. After it does, he won’t wait. That’s the three-days-thinking problem again. He’ll think about it, then he’ll move.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “I think he has to go away,” Dannon said.

  “You mean . . . someday?”

  “No. I mean right away. I know it’ll be a political problem, but . . . I know this guy down in Houston. For ten thousand dollars, he’ll fly Carver’s passport to Kuwait. He’s got a deal with one of the border people there.”

  “I don’t understand,” Taryn said, though she had an idea about it.

  “Simple enough. Ron goes away. I FedEx his passport and ten grand—I’ve actually got the cash in my safe-deposit box—”

  “I’ll pay you back.”

  “I got this. My guy in Houston flies the passport to Kuwait and walks it across the border into Iraq. We call up this Davenport guy, say that we’re worried because Ron didn’t show up for work on Wednesday and he doesn’t answer his phone. We don’t know where he’s gone.”

  “And Davenport thinks it’s possible that he’s run for it.”