Silken Prey

by John Sandford

  “Focus on our ignorance.” She didn’t quite grasp the concept. She’d never been ignorant.

  “Yeah. Just rewind back before we talked to Tubbs and think what your head was like,” Dannon said. “Then think about the newspaper stories and think about your reaction to them. What you would have thought about them, if you didn’t know what really happened. Then, when the cops come, if they come, you’re confused about it all. A little scared. You ask questions, you suggest answers, you’re all over the place. But basically, ignorant. Just delete Tubbs from your mind. You don’t know him. You never knew him.”

  “I’ll have to think about it, but I can do that,” Taryn said.

  “Of course you can,” Dannon said. “But don’t think about ways to trick them or outsmart them. Just focus on your ignorance. You don’t know anything, but you’re willing to speculate, and you’d like some information from them—to hear what they think.”

  “What about you and Carver?”

  “We can handle it,” Dannon said. “We’ve spent half our lives lying to cops, of one kind or another. Nobody else on the staff knows. Might not be a bad idea for us to stay away completely . . . unless they ask for us.”

  “Let’s do that,” Taryn said. “Maybe you two could start doing some advance security work.”

  “I’ll talk to Ron,” Dannon said. He heard high heels, and said, “Here comes Alice.”

  • • •

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER, TARYN was sitting on the edge of the pool, wearing a conservative one-piece bathing suit. Alice Green, a lithe, handsome woman in her late thirties, relaxed in a chaise, reading the Star Tribune, while the dogs sat at her feet. The dogs were the world’s most efficient burglar alarm. If anyone tried to enter the pool area, the dogs would be looking at them. If Taryn told them to attack, they’d tear that person apart, no questions asked.

  Taryn slipped into the water, shivered, and started swimming laps. The exercise blanked her mind for the first two hundred yards, but after she got into the rhythm of it, she began reliving Tubbs’s visit, and what happened next: not to obsess about it, but to cultivate her ignorance, as Dannon called it.

  The two men had been gone for four hours, altogether, and when they’d come back, muddy and tired, they told a sleepless Taryn that they’d gone way up the Mississippi toward St. Cloud, found a fisherman’s track that led to the river, and carried the body well off the track and buried it deep.

  “Just about killed ourselves out there in the dark,” Carver said. “He’s gone. Put a few concrete blocks on top of him, just in case.”

  “In case of what?” Taryn asked, fascinated in spite of herself.

  “Well . . . body gases,” Carver said. “The ground was a little wet, you wouldn’t want him popping up.”

  A few miles back toward the Twin Cities, they’d detoured down a side road, and threw Carver’s carefully cleaned baseball bat into the roadside ditch. “Couldn’t find it again ourselves, even if we had to,” Dannon said, as they drove away in the dark.

  • • •

  TARYN KEPT SWIMMING, TWENTY laps, thirty, touching the lap counter at the west end of the pool after every second turn.

  She had to think seriously about Carver and Dannon. Dannon was well under control—he’d been her security man for four years, and for all four years had hungered for her. Not just for sex. He was in love with her. That was useful. Carver was cruder. He didn’t want her total being, he just wanted to fuck her. If she wasn’t available, somebody else would do. So her grip on him was more precarious.

  And the problem with Carver was, he was more of an adventurer than Dannon.

  Dannon was happy to handle her security, and was good at it. He read about it, he knew about alarms and randomizing patrols and evasive driving, and all the rest. He took courses. She’d had a lover, a semi-dumb guy as anxious to get into her money as into her pants, and when she was done with him, he wouldn’t go away. Dannon had talked to him, and the guy had moved to Des Moines. No muss, no fuss.

  On the night Tubbs was killed, Taryn had given each of the men a hundred thousand dollars in cash and gold, as a “thank you.”

  Dannon had carefully stashed his in a safe-deposit box. Carver, on the other hand, had asked for a day off. “The money just burns a hole in my pocket,” he confessed. “I’d like to hop a plane for Vegas, if you don’t mind.”

  That had been a Friday night. He’d left Saturday morning and had gotten back Sunday night, most of the money gone. Dannon said later he’d blown it on hookers, cocaine, and craps and felt that he’d gotten his money’s worth.

  So Carver sought risk, while Dannon tried to minimize risk. That made Carver a loose cannon, and given her involvement, she didn’t need any cannons to be loose.

  She thought for a few minutes about what would happen if, for example, Carver tried to squeeze her for money, as Tubbs had. He might suspect that Dannon would come after him, because Dannon was in love with her. But would that frighten him? Could Dannon take him? And if it got all bloody, and somebody tried to make a deal with the police, to trade her in . . . what would happen?

  She had to think about it. Was Dannon loyal enough to take out Carver if she asked him to? Was Carver smart enough to set up a booby trap that would snap on them, if they took him out? Might he already have done so?

  But thinking about it was hard. Ever since Tubbs had gone away, she’d had trouble tracking. But she had to track.

  Because now, she was winning the election, up three points and climbing.

  • • •

  SHE HIT THE COUNTER at the end of the pool, and a big red LED “40” popped up. Forty laps, a thousand yards, a little more than half a mile.

  She climbed out of the pool, and Alice, who’d been watching the counter, was waiting with a towel.

  “You’d have been a good agent,” Alice said. “Smart, terrific condition.”

  “Thank you,” Taryn said. “I’m not sure I could handle the guns. I don’t like guns.”

  “We had a saying in the service,” Alice said. “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. Guns just make it really, really easy.”

  “Too easy, if you ask me,” Taryn said. “When I get to the Senate, I’ll try to do something about that. I always feel bad when I read about people being killed. It’s usually so senseless. You know, ‘The bell tolls for thee,’ or whatever.”

  CHAPTER 5

  When Lucas woke Monday morning, the first thing he did was check the window: blue sky. Excellent. Another good day. People had been talking about bad weather coming in, but he didn’t know when it was supposed to arrive.

  And, thank God, they were through the weekend. Working on a Sunday was a pain in the ass, with everybody gone. Today, there’d be a lot going on: no more matinee movies.

  He’d start with the volunteer who found the porn, he thought as he got dressed. He picked out a medium-blue wool suit that he’d thought would look awful at the time the salesman suggested it, but that had become one of his cool-weather favorites. He tried several ties, finally choosing a red-and-blue check with a turquoise thread in it, which went nicely with his eyes. Black lace-up shoes from Cleverley of London, for which he’d been measured during a European trip two years earlier, finished the ensemble.

  The volunteer’s family, the Hunts, lived in Edina, an affluent Minneapolis suburb. Lucas took the Porsche, because it would feel at home there. He took ten minutes driving across town, and after a few minutes of confusion caused by the Porsche’s outdated navigation system, found the Hunts’ home: another sprawling brick ranch, at the end of a woody cul-de-sac.

  • • •

  BRITTANY HUNT MET LUCAS at the door, her mother a step behind. Lucas was amazed: they looked almost exactly alike, and that was like Doris Day in 1960. Lucas hadn’t yet been born in 1960 to get the full Doris Day effect, but he’d seen her often enough on late-night television. . . .

  “I’m Brittany,” Brittany said, offering her hand in a firm shake. “I’m the one who
outed him.”

  “I’m her mother, Tammy,” her mother said. “Friends call me Tam.” She had perfect white teeth and sparkled at Lucas, and she smelled of Chanel on a Monday morning at home.

  They led the way inside and a sliding door banged shut in the back. A man in an open-necked white shirt and khakis padded through the living room and thrust out his hand and said, “Jeff Hunt.”

  They wound up seated on a semicircular couch in a conversation pit in front of a flagstone fireplace. Lucas said, “So tell me what happened.”

  Brittany told him, and it was exactly what she’d told the St. Paul cops. When she finished—she’d stood by the computer until the cops got there—Lucas turned to Jeff and said, “You called the cops right away?”

  “Instantly,” he said. “First of all, you can’t let people get away with this kind of stuff. Second of all, I was worried about Brit. What if he’d come back and found her standing there, with that stuff on the screen? I mean, this is the end of everything for him. What if he’d gotten violent?”

  “I don’t understand why they haven’t arrested him yet,” Tam said. “He’s such a monster. I mean, children.”

  “There are some questions,” Lucas said. “But unless something changes, it looks like the Hennepin County attorney is planning to take it to the grand jury next week, unless the attorney general takes it away.”

  “The AG is gonna run for governor, and he’d love to bag Smalls, so I bet he takes it,” Jeff said. Jeff was yet another attorney. “If he does, it’ll go to a grand jury for sure. If he loses the case, he can blame the grand jury for the indictment. If he wins, who cares about the grand jury?”

  Lucas said, “Well . . .”

  • • •

  THEN BRITTANY CHANGED EVERYTHING.

  “What a weird summer,” she said. “Child porn on Porter’s computer and then Bob Tubbs vanishes.”

  Lucas looked at her for a moment, then said, “Bob Tubbs? What did Bob Tubbs have to do with this?”

  “Well, nothing,” she said. “But, you know, he was around. You ever met him? Big tall blond guy? He used to call me chica, like the Mexicans do.”

  “He worked for Smalls?” Lucas asked.

  She shook her head. “I don’t know the details, exactly, but he was a lobbyist for the Minnesota Apiary Association.”

  “You mean, archery?” Jeff asked.

  “No, apiary, Daddy. You know, honey bees. There was some kind of licensing thing going on,” Brittany said. “The state was going to put on a fee, and some of the bee guys said they wouldn’t bring their hives into Minnesota if that happened, and Tubbs thought that the bees were interstate commerce and so only the feds were allowed to regulate it. Or something like that. I don’t know. I wasn’t interested enough to follow it. But Bob was around.”

  “What about Bob?” Tam asked Lucas.

  Lucas said, “He’s one of our local political operators. He disappeared . . . what, it must have been Friday night?”

  “Same day the porn file popped up,” Jeff said.

  “I’m not sure that’s right, though,” Lucas said. “I just heard about it from a St. Paul cop. Tubbs’s mother claims he’s been kidnapped. A couple people have said he might be on a bender somewhere. He did that once before—vanished, and turned up a week later in Cancún, dead drunk in a hotel room. But, I guess he hasn’t been using his credit cards, doesn’t answer his cell phone, his passport was in his desk, and his car is sitting in his parking garage.”

  “Boy, that doesn’t sound good,” Jeff said.

  Lucas looked at Brittany. “How’d you even know about him?”

  “It was in the paper,” she said. “This morning. People are looking all over for him.”

  Tam’s hand went to her throat: “You think . . . dead?”

  “Don’t know,” Lucas said. “My agency isn’t involved. It’s just, you know, what I hear.”

  • • •

  WHEN LUCAS LEFT, ten minutes later, Brit, Tam, and Jeff came out on the porch to wave good-bye. He waved, and sped back to St. Paul.

  As Lucas was on the way to his office, ICE called and told him that she had the copy of Smalls’s hard drive. “Got everything, gonna take you six months to read it. There’s about a million e-mails. And old albums. He’s got every Bowie album ever made.”

  “Let’s try not to judge,” Lucas said. “Anyway, I’m not going home, I’m coming there. Wait for me.”

  When Lucas got to the St. Paul police parking lot, he found her waiting in a black six-series BMW convertible. She handed Lucas a hard drive about the size of a paperback and said, “Who do I bill?”

  “Send it to me personally,” Lucas said. “I’ll get it back later. Anything happen out of the ordinary?”

  “Purely routine,” she said. “Tell Kidd that it was Windows 7 . . . not that he won’t know.”

  She didn’t ask if she could come along, to visit with Kidd.

  • • •

  WHEN SHE WAS GONE, Lucas went inside, badged his way back to the homicide unit, and found Roger Morris peering at a brown paper bag with a small grease stain at one end.

  “Is that a clue?” Lucas asked.

  “It’s my lunch,” Morris said. “I’m thinking about eating it early.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m starving to death, that’s why,” Morris said. “My wife’s got me on a food-free diet.”

  “You are looking pretty trim,” Lucas lied, since he needed a favor.

  “Bullshit. I only started yesterday,” Morris said. Then his brow beetled, and he said, “Say, you don’t work here.”

  “I need to see the Tubbs file.”

  “Ah, man,” Morris said. “Of the twelve million things I didn’t need to hear this morning, that is number one. Davenport wants to see the Tubbs file.”

  “You’re working it?”

  “Nothing to work.”

  “So let me see the file,” Lucas said. “I may have some suggestions.”

  “That’s my greatest fear,” Morris said. “After the contents of my lunch bag, of course.”

  • • •

  LUCAS PAGED THROUGH the thin file, sitting at Morris’s desk, peering at his computer. Tubbs hadn’t been seen after Friday evening. Tubbs’s mother had called St. Paul on Saturday afternoon to report him missing. Not much had been done—a couple cops went around and knocked on his apartment door, and asked a few questions of his neighbors, who hadn’t seen him. His mother had shifted into high hysteria on Sunday, complaining to St. Paul that her son must have been kidnapped.

  According to Mrs. Tubbs, Tubbs was supposed to pick her up and go shopping on Saturday, but hadn’t shown, and hadn’t called to say he wouldn’t make it. Mom said he’d never done that in his life. On Sunday, he was supposed to take her to Mass, but hadn’t shown up then, either. She couldn’t get him at home or on either of his two cell phones, and she’d been trying since Saturday morning.

  The cops checked with AT&T and found that he hadn’t used either his home or his cell phones, nor had he used his credit cards, which was when they began to take the old woman’s complaints seriously: Tubbs had never, in a credit card record going back ten years, gone two days without using one. He paid for everything with a card, his mother said. He hardly used cash at all, because you couldn’t deduct invisible business expenses, and almost all of Tubbs’s expenses were business.

  On Sunday afternoon, Tubbs’s mother let the cops into his apartment for a look around. One of the cops said that it was apparent that he’d recently been sexually involved, as there were stains on the bedsheets. Samples had been taken. There was no sign of forced entry, or violence.

  On Monday morning, there were a couple of stories in the local newspapers, based on calls by Tubbs’s mother. The stories hadn’t shaken him loose, nor had he begun to use his credit cards.

  “You think he’s dead?” Lucas asked Morris.

  “That’s what I think,” Morris said.

  “What about his apartme
nt?”

  “What about it?”

  “Close it out yet?” Lucas asked.

  “Not yet,” Morris said. “You want to look around?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’d have to get an okay from Tubbs’s mother, but you’ll get it. She’s frantic,” Morris said. “Why are you interested?”

  “If I told you, you’d have to change your name and move to New Zealand,” Lucas said.

  “Seriously . . .”

  “I’m a little serious,” Lucas said. “I’m doing a political thing and you really don’t want to know about it. And it probably has nothing to do with Tubbs. If it does, I’ll tell you, first thing.”

  “First thing?”

  “Absolutely,” Lucas said.

  Morris reached out and touched his lunch sack, and said, “She made me a BLT. With motherfuckin’ soy bacon.”

  “Jesus, that’s not good,” Lucas said. “Motherfuckin’ soy bacon?”

  “That’s the way us black people talk,” Morris said.

  “What about Tubbs’s apartment?” Lucas asked.

  “I’ve got a key,” Morris said. “Let’s call the old lady. If you find anything . . .”

  “First thing,” Lucas said.

  Morris called Tubbs’s mother, explained that a high-ranking agent from the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension would like to check out the apartment, and was immediately given an okay. Morris gave him the key, said, “Use it wisely,” and agreed to send an electronic copy of the Tubbs file to the BCA, where Lucas could look at it.

  Lucas thanked him, and headed across town to the river, not to Tubbs’s apartment but to Kidd’s.

  • • •

  KIDD OWNED HALF A FLOOR in a redbrick restoration condo overlooking the Mississippi. Lucas had visited him a few times, and had watched the condo grow. Kidd had started with a single large unit, added a second one a few years later, and finally, during the great real estate crash, picked up a third unit for nearly nothing. He also owned a piece of the underground parking garage, where he kept a couple of cars and a boat.