Silken Prey

by John Sandford

  “I’ll show you the door,” Green said.

  On the way, Lucas said, “Chicken.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You didn’t want to hear that,” Lucas said.

  “I’m not paid to hear that,” Green said. She hesitated, then said, “Do you have a card?”

  Lucas gave her a card, taking a second to scribble his cell phone number on the back. “Call anytime,” he said.

  “Give me an hour,” she said.

  • • •

  ON THE WAY OUT to the highway, Lucas thought about Grant’s behavior, and came to a conclusion: she was either totally innocent, or totally nuts. A normal person, guilty, could never have pulled off that performance. But he’d known a number of crazies who could have. . . .

  Green called an hour and a half later. Lucas had gone back to the office, having already missed dinner, to check messages and track his agents on their regular assignments. He was most interested in the Ape Man Rapist of Rochester, who was attacking women as often as twice a week, but Flowers reported no progress. Lucas had just turned off his office lights when Green called. He answered: “Yes? Alice?”

  Green said, “I don’t know where Ms. Grant stands on all of this, but I need to talk to you. We need to keep this private.”

  “Is she there now?” Lucas asked.

  “She’s up on a stage. I’m at the back of the room . . . keeping an eye out.” Lucas could hear a voice in the background, and then a rumbling sound: applause line, he thought.

  Green continued: “I wanted to tell you, she works harder than anyone I’ve ever met. I find her admirable, if a little chilly. But I don’t want to have anything to do with any possible crime, and one of the other security men here . . . his name is Ronald Carver, conventional spelling . . . is pretty rough. I suspect that if you put enough money in front of him, he’d kill somebody for you, and do a thorough job of it. This man Tubbs, the man who disappeared? I’m not saying it’s Carver, but if you needed that done, if you needed Tubbs to go away, you’d try to find somebody just like Carver.”

  “What’s his background?” Lucas asked.

  “Ex-military special operations of some kind. A master sergeant, which is up there. The head of security, Doug Dannon, is the same kind, ex-military, but much more restrained. His problem is, he’s in love with Taryn, so . . . I don’t know what he’d do for her. But whatever has been done, I don’t know about it, and didn’t have anything to do with it. I’m not going to spy on Ms. Grant for you, but I wanted to say this. I hope you keep it under your hat.”

  “I will. But it’s an odd thing to tell a cop you don’t know,” Lucas said, not quite trusting her. “What if I was working for Smalls?”

  “I still have friends with the Secret Service,” she said. “I had them look you up. I know as much about you as Weather does.”

  “Well, maybe not,” Lucas said, picking up on Green’s use of his wife’s first name.

  “Anyway, you’re not working for Smalls,” Green said. Longer applause in the background. “I gotta go.”

  “One more question,” Lucas said. “I saw a lot of cameras out there, which must go to what, a hard drive? Or the cloud?”

  Long wait, and then Green said, “Oh, God.”

  “What?”

  Another long wait, then Green said, “I wish you hadn’t asked that. I wouldn’t have called you at all, but . . . Ah, damn. I work in the monitoring room, sometimes. There used to be a monthlong video-record sent out to the cloud. I noticed this morning that the wipe time has been reduced to forty-eight hours.”

  “Forty-eight hours. Why?”

  “I don’t know. There’s no reason to, and it worries me. The cameras only record when they pick up motion, so it’s not that much, and a hundred bucks a month would mean nothing to Ms. Grant. But somebody reduced the wipe time to forty-eight hours, and I was thinking, you know . . . if you were worried that somebody might get the archived recording with a search warrant, and if there was something on it that you didn’t want anybody to see . . . I mean, the change was made on Monday—about forty-eight hours after Tubbs disappeared.”

  Lucas said, “You’ve got a suspicious mind, Alice.”

  “Developed by government experts,” she said. “I gotta go. Right now. Good-bye.”

  CHAPTER 13

  On the way out the door, Lucas stopped at the BCA men’s room, where he found Jenkins, shirtless and shaving. He went to a urinal and over his shoulder asked, “What? You lost all your money gambling and now you’re homeless?”

  “Got a date,” Jenkins said. “She likes it when my cheeks are smooth like a baby’s butt.”

  “So she doesn’t get beard burn on her thighs?”

  “That’s disgusting, but given a person of your ilk, I’m not surprised,” Jenkins said.

  Lucas finished up at the urinal and walked over to wash his hands and said, “Say you’ve got a hot, rich politician running for office, but she’s losing, then her opponent is hit with a scandal involving child porn on his computers, then the guy you think put it there suddenly disappears and the politician turns out to have armed security people, including a couple of guys with thick necks who were in special operations in the army. What we unsophisticates call ‘trained killers.’ What do you think?”

  Jenkins paused, half of his face covered with shaving cream, the other half bare and shaven; he asked, “You got that much for sure?”

  “I’m being told all that,” Lucas said.

  “Have you hooked Tubbs to Grant?”

  “Not yet . . . but Tubbs was probably involved in dirty tricks, and she needed one, bad. And he had a whole bunch of money, cash, in a hideout spot.”

  “You steal any of it?” Jenkins asked.

  “No, no, I didn’t.”

  “Huh,” Jenkins said. “Little cold cash is always useful.”

  “But that would be illegal,” Lucas said.

  “Oh, yeah, I forgot,” Jenkins said. “Listen, we told you, you gotta be careful. Now you gotta be more careful. If Tubbs was found dead with a gunshot wound or his head bashed in, that’s one thing. The killer could have been anybody. But if he disappears with no sign . . . then whoever disappeared him knew what he was doing, and that’s another thing entirely. You don’t find that kind of guy standing around on a street corner—a killer who knows how to organize it, and carries it out clean.”

  “My very thought.”

  Jenkins took another thoughtful scrape through the shaving cream, rinsed the blade, then asked, “Would winning the election be worth the risk of murdering somebody? Of getting involved in a conspiracy to murder somebody?”

  “That’s the problem,” Lucas said. “I don’t think any rational person would, and Grant seems pretty rational. Either that, or she’s crazier than a shithouse mouse. I talked to her today, pushed her a bit, and she pushed back. Never showed a wrinkle of worry, which means she’s either innocent or nuts.”

  “Go for innocent: it cuts down the number of problems,” Jenkins said.

  “Another thing: I’m told one of these special forces guys is in love with her . . . which creates the question, exactly what would he do to see her win? Would he even tell her what he was planning to do?”

  “Remember that guy who went around robbing those ladies’ spa places?” Jenkins asked. “You know, manicure stores? Couple years ago?”

  “Yeah, but I can’t remember why he did it.”

  “He did it because he figured that there wouldn’t be many guys around to deal with. No macho problems. It’d just be a bunch of women, and the places were almost all cash. He was getting a couple thousand bucks a week, paying no taxes, taking it easy,” Jenkins said. “Anyway, he was ex–special forces. I tried to get his military records, and couldn’t. Never did. We didn’t need them, as it turned out, because one of the places he hit made some great movies of him . . . but the point is, I couldn’t get the records. That’s gonna be a problem, if these guys are really ex-army. Especially if they’re
former special ops.”

  “Maybe I won’t need them,” Lucas said.

  “Oh . . . I think you probably will. There’s nothing harder to break, IMHO”—he actually said the letters, I-M-H-O—“than a murder done by a guy who’s well organized, doesn’t feel much guilt, and you can’t find the body. I’ve had two of those, and I’m batting five hundred. The one guy I got, it was luck. This is probably gonna be tougher. So you will need all the background you can get on them. . . . Grant wouldn’t hire stupid people.”

  “I knew that talking to you would cheer me up,” Lucas said.

  “Yeah, well . . .”

  Jenkins went back to shaving, and though it was late, Lucas headed back to his office. He wasn’t exactly inspired by Jenkins, but he could make a couple of quick checks.

  • • •

  HE FOUND EMPLOYMENT RECORDS for Carver and Dannon in the quarterly tax reports filed by Grant with the state, which gave him their full names and addresses—they both lived in the same town house complex off I-494 west of the Cities. They didn’t show up in the property tax records, so they were probably renting. He couldn’t get directly at the income tax records, though he had a friend who could; but he hesitated to use her when he didn’t have to, and he didn’t really need to know how much they made. The DMV gave him their birth dates, which was what he really needed.

  With that, he went out to the National Crime Information Center. Carver had once been arrested, at age eighteen, for fighting, apparently while he was still in high school. The charges had been dismissed without prosecution. Dannon came up clean.

  There was almost nothing else, on either of them. Jenkins had been right: he’d need the army records. He picked up the phone and called Kidd.

  “I already owe you for the help with the porn and the Minneapolis connection . . . but I’ve spotted a couple of guys who I’m interested in, and I can’t find anything about them in the records that I can get at. Could you get military records?”

  After a moment, Kidd said, “I hate to mess with the feds.”

  “I can understand that,” Lucas said. “The thing is . . . these two guys are ex–special operations, apparently, and would have the skills to take out somebody like Tubbs. What I’d like to know is, did they have a record of killing in the military? Did they have a criminal history there? Did they get honorable discharges? I’ve got no way of getting that.”

  Kidd said, “I’ll tell you what. I’ll take a very conservative, safe approach. If I can get the stuff without a problem, without setting anything off, I’ll do it. I won’t take any risks. But if you use it, how’ll you explain it?”

  “You could dump it to my e-mail, anonymously. I’ll figure out a way to explain it that’ll keep you clear.”

  “I’m already not clear—people already know that I’m involved in this thing,” Kidd said.

  “What if I put in an official request for the records, with the army?” Lucas suggested. “They’ll take it under advisement, but they won’t give them to me. If you could find a way to ship the records out of the army’s database, like there was a slipup . . .”

  “Oh, boy . . .”

  “I’ll start calling the army the first thing in the morning. If you can help me out, that’d be good. If you can’t, you can’t.”

  “Oh, boy . . .”

  “And there’s another thing,” Lucas said. “Something I doubt you could do.”

  “Lucas, my man, you originally just wanted a little help protecting the American Way . . .”

  “I know, I know. But here’s the thing. Taryn Grant’s got this terrific security system. Cameras all over the place, inside and out. At one time, the photography went out to the cloud, saved for a month. In the last couple of days, somebody cut that to forty-eight hours. They did that about forty-eight hours after Tubbs disappeared. I’m wondering, what if Tubbs showed up at Grant’s place, and ran into something with one of these security guys?”

  “You want me to find the recordings?” Kidd asked.

  “If you can.”

  “Do you know which cloud?” Kidd asked. “There are lots of clouds.”

  “I don’t know jack shit,” Lucas admitted.

  “Do you know her cell phone number?”

  “Well . . . yeah, I do know that.”

  “Give it to me,” Kidd said. “It’s a start, if she monitors the system from her phone.”

  • • •

  LUCAS WENT HOME.

  Weather and Letty were curious, and Lucas kept them updated on his cases, but he had nothing to tell them. He did describe the meeting with Grant, and Weather said, “She sounds more interesting than I would have expected. Educated.”

  “She is. And she may have gotten a guy murdered.”

  “And she may not have,” Weather said. “Something for you to think about.”

  • • •

  LUCAS SPOKE TO the governor later that evening. The attorney general, the governor said, was all over the papers taken from Tubbs’s apartment. “I suggested he investigate them thoroughly, at least until the election was over and done with. That way, he’ll have the full attention of the press. He saw the wisdom of that.”

  “So I don’t have to worry about him being in my hair . . .”

  “At least not for a week,” Henderson said. “What’d you think of Grant?”

  “Smart and tough,” Lucas said.

  “She could be president someday, if you don’t drag her down.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Lucas asked.

  “I’m just sayin’, my friend. Keep me up to date.”

  • • •

  LUCAS GOT TO THE OFFICE early the next morning, conscious of the time difference between Minneapolis and Washington, and began calling the Pentagon. He spent two hours talking to a variety of captains, majors, and colonels—somehow missing lieutenant colonels—and got nothing substantial, except the feeling that everybody dreaded making a mistake. He did get pointed to online request forms, which he dutifully filled out and submitted, and backed those with direct e-mails to the captains, majors, and colonels, reiterating his requests for information.

  When he was done, he had no information, but had laid down a solid record of information requests. Now if Kidd came through . . .

  Lucas thought about spies, and with no particular place to push, eventually drove over to Smalls’s campaign headquarters and talked to Helen Roman, Smalls’s campaign secretary, who sent him down the hall to a guy named John Mack, the deputy campaign manager. He was, Roman told him, in charge of operations.

  Mack said that he knew Bob Tubbs by sight, and may have said hello at the candy machine, but had never had a real conversation with him. “He’s a bit older than I am—we’re not contemporaries. I don’t know what we’d have in common. We’re not even with the same political party.”

  “Even without knowing him, but just knowing what he did . . . knowing what you do . . .”

  “Maybe I should take the Fifth,” Mack said.

  “C’mon, man, gimme a little help . . . Give Smalls a little help.”

  Mack repeated that he didn’t know anything about spying, but just as an intellectual exercise . . .

  Tubbs’s accomplice would have had one of three motives for trying to dump Smalls, Mack said: (1) financial—he might have been paid; (2) ideological—he wanted Smalls dumped because he hated his politics; or (3) personal—he (or she) was a close friend or lover of Tubbs; or he (or she) was a personal enemy of Smalls.

  If it were (3), it seemed likely that the accomplice would also be older. Perhaps not exactly Tubbs’s or Smalls’s contemporary, but most of the volunteers were college kids, and unlikely to be close enough to either man to do something as ugly as dropping the child pornography on Smalls, simply at Tubbs’s say-so.

  Could be (2) ideological, Mack said, although the volunteers were vetted before they were given any real responsibility. “But the thing is, if they planted this thing in Porter’s computer, they don’t have to have
any responsibility. All they need is access,” Mack said. “I have no idea how many office keys are floating around, but it’s quite a few, and the place is empty late at night.”

  Or he said, it could be (1) financial . . . though if it were financial, how would Tubbs have made the approach to the accomplice, or spy? He could probably have done it only through personal knowledge of the accomplice, and that would loop right back to (3): a personal relationship.

  So Lucas was probably looking for somebody a bit older, Mack said, or a reckless, ideologically driven youngster, whom Tubbs would have to have known. Was it possible that Tubbs had recruited a spy for Taryn Grant’s campaign, then enlisted him to do the pornography dump?

  “Grant says she didn’t know Tubbs, and she seems smart enough that she probably wouldn’t lie about it . . . especially if we could find out about it,” Lucas told Mack. “Anyway, I believed her. She probably didn’t know him.”

  “I’ll tell you what—if an operator like Tubbs knew about a spy in our campaign, other Democrats would know about it, too,” Mack said. “I think you might be going around threatening the wrong people.”

  “I wasn’t threatening you,” Lucas said.

  “Then why am I sweating?”

  • • •

  LUCAS WAS MULLING IT all over as he walked out to his car, and as he popped the door lock, took a call from Marion, the Minneapolis internal affairs cop.

  “Just an update: I’ve been tearing up Domestics this morning. I don’t have any proof, but I’ve got a half-dozen names, and whoever copied that porn for Tubbs is probably on the list.”

  “How’d you get the names?” Lucas asked.

  Marion explained that he’d started with the people he’d considered least likely to be involved, and with the threat of felonies hanging over their heads, they’d been cooperative. He’d been looking for people who’d been seen using the Domestics computer at unlikely times, alone or in small groups, or had been unhappy to be seen using it and had quickly signed off when a new face turned up at the office.

  “There are five guys and one woman who may—and I say ‘may’—have been looking at the porn repeatedly. I think all six probably were . . . kind of like a little club down there that knew about it. Two of the shrinks had heard rumors about child porn on city computers. That’s where I got the names.”