Silken Prey

by John Sandford

  “Yeah, because they send out a stop order on him, and because of his background, and what they think—that he killed Tubbs and Roman—they include the border people and the airport security, and they report back that his passport left the country, and then crossed the border into Kuwait and then out of Kuwait and into Iraq.”

  “Don’t they take pictures, you know, video cameras of everybody going through the airport?”

  “Sure. But IDs aren’t synced with pictures. They ask for your passport when you check in, but going through security, they only ask for a government ID. This Houston guy shows Ron’s passport to the airlines and the security people, who check him through. The cops look at the security video, and they never see Ron, so they figure he ran some kind of dodge, and got through behind security. It’s easy enough to do. Listen, all kinds of people from this country are carrying all kinds of stuff into Kuwait and then across the border into Iraq. This is a very established deal. . . . This Houston guy, it’s his thing. It can be done.”

  “If you’re sure . . .”

  “It’ll hurt, politically, but once it’s done, we’re really secure,” Dannon said. “We’ll be the only two who know the story. You’re already a senator before the shit hits the fan, another guy goes missing . . . but, if Ron’s passport goes into Iraq, what’s Davenport going to do?”

  “How soon?”

  “Tomorrow,” Dannon said. “We can’t afford to wait. I can’t give Ron a chance to move on me.” He was on his back and Taryn snuggled her head down onto his chest and he stroked her hair. Without Ron, he thought, the future had no horizon. . . .

  • • •

  TARYN WAS PRETTY TIRED of the sex by the time Dannon went to sleep. She listened to him breathe, then slipped out of bed, pulled on a robe, and padded through to the living room, closing the bedroom door behind her, poured some vodka over a couple of ice cubes, sat on the couch, and thought about it.

  Dannon, once he’d gotten rid of Carver, was going to be a problem. She could see it already: he was looking at a permanent relationship. He was looking at love. When she got to Washington, an heiress and businesswoman already worth a billion dollars or so, a U.S. senator . . . any permanent relationship wouldn’t be with an ex–army captain who carried a switchblade in his pocket.

  That their relationship wasn’t going to be permanent would quickly become obvious. Then what? What do jilted lovers do, when they’re men? What do jilted alcoholics with switchblades do?

  Something to think about. Dannon, like Carver, would have to go away. But how? She sat on the couch for another hour, and another two vodkas, thinking about it: and what she thought was, Best to wait until we get to Washington.

  • • •

  THE NEIGHBORHOOD AROUND TARYN’S was quiet and dark and gently rolling. The highest nearby spot was between two pillared faux-plantation manors on five-acre lots, screened from the street by elaborate hedges. From the top of that low hill, any approaching cars could be seen three blocks away.

  Lauren was behind the wheel of Kidd’s Mercedes GL550, a large luxury vehicle and one that fit well in rich neighborhoods. Kidd sat in the passenger seat, looking at a hooded laptop that was plugged into an antenna and amplifier focused on one of the manors. Kidd was riding on the manor’s Wi-Fi; and Lauren, looking over his shoulder, said, “We’re not Peeping Toms.”

  “I’m not peeping, I’m trying to figure out who in the hell that is,” he said, watching the scene in Taryn Grant’s bedroom. “I think it’s her security guy. The only security guy, if we counted right. I can’t find anyone else.”

  “It’s perfect,” Lauren said. “They’re both fully occupied.”

  “You’re scaring the shit out of me,” Kidd said.

  “I’m so excited I’m gonna have an orgasm myself in the next two minutes,” Lauren said. “Trade places. I’m going.”

  Kidd didn’t bother to argue. He got out of the car—no interior lights, they had custom switches, and the switches were off—and walked around to the driver’s side, as Lauren clambered into the passenger seat.

  She was wearing trim, soft black cotton slacks, a silky white blouse, a red nylon runner’s jacket with reflective strips front and back, and black running shoes. She had a thin black nylon ski mask in her pocket. The ski mask could be instantly buried; and no burglar in his or her right mind would be out with a red jacket, a shiny white blouse, and all those reflective strips.

  Kidd started the SUV and they eased on down the hill toward Grant’s house. As they rolled along, Lauren turned the jacket inside out: the lining, now the outer shell, was jet black. She pulled it back on, and was now dressed head to toe in black. A hundred yards out, Lauren said, “I’ll call.” Kidd tapped the brakes—no red flash on the custom-switched brake lights—and when they were stopped, Lauren dropped out and quietly closed the car door.

  Five seconds later, with the hood over her head, she vanished into the woods between Grant’s house and the neighbor’s.

  • • •

  THE GROUNDS WERE PROTECTED by both radar and infrared installations, but Kidd had switched off the alarms on the rear approach, and had fixed the software so that they couldn’t be turned back on without his permission. Lauren had one major worry: that the dogs would be turned loose. If that happened, she was in trouble. She had a can of bear spray, which should shut them down, but she had no idea how effective that would be.

  For the time being, the dogs were in the house—one of them in the living room, where it could see the front hallway and the hall coming in from the garage; and the other outside the bedroom door.

  Inside the tree line, she pulled a pair of starlight goggles over her head. They were military issue, and she’d had to pay nine thousand dollars for them six years before. With the goggles over her eyes, the world turned green and speckled: but she could see.

  She began moving forward, like a still-hunter, placing each foot carefully, feeling for branches and twigs before she put weight down. Long pauses to listen. Fifty yards in, she crossed a nearly useless wrought iron fence. Any reasonably athletic human could slip right over it; Grant’s dogs could jump it with three feet to spare, and a deer would hardly notice it. Once over the fence, she took nearly fifteen minutes to cross the hundred yards to the edge of Grant’s back lawn. By that time, she knew she was alone. She took out her phone, a throwaway, and messaged Kidd, one word: “There.”

  One word came back. “Go.”

  Kidd was back on top of the hill, back on the manor’s Wi-Fi. Nothing inside the house had changed. Grant’s lawn was dotted with oak trees and shrubs, and Lauren stuck close to them as she closed in on the bedroom. There were motion and sonic alarms outside the bedroom windows, but Kidd had them handled. When she was below the windows, she took out a taped flashlight with a pinprick opening in the tape. She turned it on, and with the tiny speck of light, looked at the windows. Triple glazed, wired, with lever latches. Fully open, there’d be a space three feet long and a foot high that she’d have to get her body through. She could do that. . . .

  She pulled back, listened, crept down the side of the house. A light came on in the living room and she froze. Nothing more happened and she felt her phone buzz. She risked a look: Grant moving. She listened, then began to back away from the house, heard a crunch when she stepped in some gravel, froze. Moved again ten seconds later, backing toward the woods.

  From her new position, she could see the lighted living room, and Taryn Grant looking out the window. She was wearing a robe and had what looked like a drink in her hand. A dog moved by her hip, and Lauren thought, Bigger than a wolf.

  The phone vibrated. She was into the tree line, and stopped to looked again: “Dogs may know . . . dogs may be coming.”

  She thought, Damnit, and texted, “Come now,” and began moving more quickly. She crossed the fence, which should give her some protection from the dogs, and made the hundred yards out quickly, but not entirely silently. At the street-side tree line, she knelt, stripped the gog
gles and mask off, stuffed them in her pockets, and then Kidd was there in the car.

  She was inside and pulled the door closed and they were rolling and Lauren looked out the window, toward Grant’s house, but saw no dogs. “She let them out?”

  “I think so—into the backyard, anyway. Didn’t seem like there was any big rush. Maybe she was letting them out to pee.”

  “That’s probably it,” Lauren said. “I never saw them. They didn’t bark.”

  “They don’t bark, not those dogs,” Kidd said.

  “I know.” She took a breath, squeezed Kidd’s thigh. “I haven’t felt like this in years. Six years.”

  They came out of the darkened neighborhood to a bigger street, and Kidd went left. They could see a traffic light at the end of the street, where the bigger street intersected with an even bigger avenue.

  Kidd asked, “What do you think?”

  “Piece of cake,” Lauren said.

  CHAPTER 20

  The next step was not obvious. Lucas had Quintana’s belief that he’d spoken to Dannon on the phone, but that was not proof. Nor would it convince a jury to believe that a crime had been committed, not beyond a reasonable doubt. He needed a scrap of serious evidence, something that he could use as a crowbar to pry Grant, Dannon, and Carver apart.

  He was also bothered by the sporadic thought: What if Tubbs showed up? In most killings, there was some physical indication that violence had been done. With Tubbs, there was nothing.

  • • •

  THE NEXT MORNING he did what he usually did when he was stuck, and needed to think about it: he went shopping. Nothing was so likely to clear the mind as spending money. He idled over to the Mall of America and poked around the Nordstrom store, looking for a good fall dog-walking jacket.

  He didn’t have a dog, but a good dog-walking jacket was useful for a lot of other things. He had the exact specification: light, water-resistant, knit cuffs and waistband, modern high-tech insulation, warm enough for late fall and early winter days. And, of course, it had to look good.

  He’d drifted from jackets to cashmere socks, especially a pair in an attractive dark raspberry color, when his phone rang: Cochran, from Minneapolis Homicide. Both Dannon and Carver had shown up to give DNA samples, and Lucas had sent the samples to Minneapolis.

  “Turk, tell me we got them,” Lucas said.

  “No, we don’t. We got James Clay,” Cochran said. “We got a cold hit from your DNA bank.”

  James Clay? “Who the hell is James Clay?”

  “Dickwad from Chicago. Small-time dealer,” Cochran said. “Moved up here five years ago when he got tired of the Chicago cops busting him for dope. We’ve been chasing him around for the same thing. We got him on felony possession of cocaine, got DNA on that case, he went away for a year. Since then, we’ve caught him holding twice, and both times, it was small amounts of marijuana, so he was cut loose.”

  “Jesus Christ, that can’t be right,” Lucas said. “Roman wasn’t killed by any small-time dope dealer.”

  “Sort of looks that way—of course, it’s possible he was paid to do it, though I doubt anyone would hire him,” Cochran said. “I’ll tell you, the dope guys say he’s exactly the kind of punk you’d want for a killing like this. He thinks the house is empty, goes in, she surprises him, he freaks out, whacks her with his gun, then shoots her, with some piece-of-crap .22.”

  “Aw, man . . . Turk . . .”

  Cochran said, “Listen, Lucas: he’s an old gang member, probably done two hundred nickel-dime burglaries, funding his habit, been shot at least once himself. He’ll steal anything that’s not nailed down. If all this election stuff hadn’t been going on, it’d be exactly who you’d have been looking for.”

  “Is Clay still alive?”

  “Far as we know. He was last night. He was hanging out at Smackie’s,” Cochran said.

  “If he was paid to kill Roman, he’d be dead himself, and we wouldn’t be finding the body,” Lucas said. “He sure as hell wouldn’t be hanging around Smackie’s.”

  “Lucas, what it is, is what it is,” Cochran said.

  “You gonna find him?” Lucas asked.

  “Sooner or later. Sooner, if he goes back to Smackie’s.”

  “We need him right now,” Lucas said. “You know Del?”

  “Sure.”

  “Del knows all those guys. If you don’t mind, I’m gonna go get him and look around town.”

  “Hey, that’s fine with me. If you find him first, give me a call—I’ll do the same, if we find him.”

  Lucas walked out to his car, calling Del as he went. Del picked up and Lucas asked, “Where are you?”

  “In my backyard, looking at a tree,” Del said.

  “Why?”

  “We got oak wilt,” Del said. “We’re gonna lose it.”

  “Look, I’m sorry about your tree, but I need help finding a guy. Right now. I’m going to get some paper on him. Meet me at my place.”

  “Half hour?”

  “See you then.”

  • • •

  LUCAS WAS TEN MINUTES from his house, driving fast. On the way, he called his office, talked to his secretary, told her to call Turk, get the specifics on James Clay, including any photos, and e-mail them to him. “I’ll be home in ten minutes. I need it then,” he said.

  The house was quiet when he got home. Letty was in school, Sam in preschool, the baby out for a stroll with the housekeeper.

  He went into the study, brought up the computer, checked his e-mail, found a bunch of political letters pleading for money, and a file from his secretary. He opened it, found four photos of James Clay along with Minneapolis arrest records and a compilation of Chicago-area arrests from the National Crime Information Center.

  Clay had somehow managed to make it to thirty-one, despite a life of gang shootings, street riots, drugs, knife fights, beatings, burglaries, and strong-arm robberies. His last parole officer wrote that there was no chance of rehabilitation, and that the best thing anyone could hope for was that Clay would OD. He sounded pissed.

  The photos showed a light-complexioned black man with cornrows, a prison tattoo around his neck—ragged dashes and a caption that said, “Fill to dotted line”—and three or four facial scars, along with a nasty jagged scar on his scalp. A photo taken from his right side demonstrated the effects of being shot in the ear with a handgun with no medical insurance. Some intern had sewn him up and sent him on his way, and now his ear looked like a pork rind.

  Lucas was reading down the rap sheet when Del knocked on the door. He walked through the living room to the front door and let him in: “What kind of shape are you in at Smackie’s?”

  “They won’t buy me a free beer, but they know me,” Del said. He was dressed in jeans, a dark blue hoodie, and running shoes. “Is that where we’re going?”

  “Yeah. To start with.” He picked up all the paper on Clay and thrust it at Del. “I’ll drive. You read.”

  They took Lucas’s Lexus SUV, which had gotten a little battered during the last trip to his Wisconsin cabin, when a tree branch fell on the hood. Lucas couldn’t decide whether to get it fixed, or wait until he was closer to trading it in. Something else to think about.

  On the way up Mississippi River Road, headed to Minneapolis, Lucas filled Del in on the problem. Del was reading Clay’s sheet, and said, “The name sounds familiar, but I don’t know the guy. Any reason to think that he might be holed up somewhere, with a gun?”

  “Turk apparently went in to Smackie’s looking for him, so if he had any friends there, somebody might have told him to start running. If he gets down to Chicago, it could be a while before we find him.”

  “I see his mother lives here,” Del said. “There’s a note on the probation report.”

  “I hate that. The mothers always turn out to be worse than the children,” Lucas said. “You remember that one mother, those two brothers—”

  “I heard about it. Shrake thought it was fun.”

  �
�Sort of was, I guess,” Lucas said. “Especially when he fell off the roof into that thornbush. He was crying like a Packers fan at the Metrodome.”

  They crossed the Marshall/Lake Bridge into south Minneapolis, and four minutes later left the car on the broken tarmac of the Pleasure Palace Bar & Grill parking lot. An “A” had fallen off the sign over the bar’s door, so it now said “Ple sure Palace,” but it didn’t make any difference, because everybody who was nobody called it Smackie’s.

  The bar was painted Halloween colors of black and orange, supposedly because it was once all black, and when the new owner decided to paint over the flaking black concrete blocks, he ran out of orange halfway through; either that, or got tired of doing the work. The bar had two long, low, nearly opaque windows decorated with neon beer signs and stickers from various police and fire charitable organizations.

  Del led the way inside. Smackie’s was dark, and smelled like boiled eggs floating in vinegar, and maybe a pickled pig’s foot. Fifteen men, and four women, half of them black, half white, were scattered down a dozen booths, looking at beers or the TV set mounted in a corner or nothing at all. A bartender was leaning on the back of the bar, eating an egg-salad sandwich. As they came up to the bar, he swallowed and said, “Del.” Nobody else looked at them, because Lucas was so obviously a cop.

  Del said, “I didn’t know you were back.”

  “Almost a month,” the bartender said.

  Del said to Lucas, “He had a hernia operation.”

  “Fascinating,” Lucas said. He pulled out a picture of Clay. “You seen this guy?”

  The bartender took another bite of the sandwich, chewed, then said, through the masticated bread and egg, “Yeah, the Minneapolis cops already been here. They’re looking for him, too. He was here last night, pretty late, then he went away. Haven’t seen him since.”

  “Does he live around here?” Lucas asked.

  “Every time I’ve seen him, he was walking, so probably around here somewhere. The Minneapolis cops were asking if his mother comes in here.”