Silken Prey

by John Sandford

  “What about Carver?” Lucas asked.

  “Carver was the last guy out of the house. Turns out, the Taliban guys they’d handcuffed were executed. So were the bodyguards, and two of them were kids. Eleven or twelve years old. Armed, you know, but . . . kids.”

  “Yeah.”

  “An army investigator recommended that Carver be charged with murder, but it was quashed by the command in Afghanistan—deaths in the course of combat,” Kidd said. “The investigator protested, but he was a career guy, a major, and eventually he shut up.”

  “Would he talk now? I need something that would open Carver up.”

  “I don’t think so,” Kidd said. “He’s just made lieutenant colonel. He’s never going to get a star, but if he behaves, he could get his birds before he retires.”

  “Birds?”

  “Eagles. He could be promoted to colonel. That’s a nice retirement bump for guys who behave. But, there’s another guy. The second-to-the-last guy out. He’s apparently the one who saw the executions and made the initial report. He’s out of the army now. He lives down in Albuquerque.”

  “I’ve got no time to go to Albuquerque,” Lucas said.

  Kidd shrugged: “That’s your problem. I’m passing along the information. He’s there, he apparently had some pretty strong feelings about what he saw. They might even have pushed him out of the army. Up until then, he looked like he’d probably be a lifer. Same general profile as Carver’s, but a few years younger. He was an E-6, a staff sergeant.”

  “You got a name and address?”

  “Yeah, I do. Dale Rodriguez is the name.” Kidd dug into his hip pocket, pulled out a sheet of white paper. “Here’s the address.”

  Lucas took the paper, stuck it in his own pocket. “How do I explain finding this?”

  “On those docs you got from the army records center, Carver’s last unit is listed. If you search for the unit on Facebook, you’ll find a half-dozen different guys listing it as part of their biographies. Rodriguez is one of them.”

  “Ah. I’ve got a researcher who is good with Facebook and all that.”

  “You might have to get in touch with all of them as a cover for contacting Rodriguez.”

  “That can be done,” Lucas said.

  “And keep me out of it.”

  “You’re gonna have to tell me someday how you come to have access to all this information. Government secrets. It can’t be legal,” Lucas said.

  “Probably not entirely legal,” Kidd said, scuffing along the street. “I’ve been doing this forever, from before there was an Internet. My access just grew. From the early hacking days, fooling around, back in the eighties. Now . . . I do databases. When I do computers at all, which isn’t that often anymore.”

  “With a specialty in revealing secrets.”

  “Not really,” Kidd said. “Sometimes I go looking for information, and I stumble over stuff that should be out there, in public. Secrets that shouldn’t be secrets. Some stuff should be secret—I’m not going to give away any biowarfare docs—but a lot of other stuff is criminal and gets covered up.”

  “I’m seeing some of that right now, on the local level,” Lucas said.

  “Yeah. Embezzlement gets covered up, nepotism, favors for special groups or corporations that can run into billions of dollars . . . special access. At the federal level, a lot of it gets classified one way or the other. I see no reason to honor that. It’s crime, plain and simple.”

  CHAPTER 16

  Dannon was waiting by the door when Taryn got back, late, from a campaign rally. She was getting beat up: she’d been to East Grand Forks, on the North Dakota border, early that morning, had flown to International Falls, on the Canadian border, in the afternoon, and in the evening, had been in Duluth, on the Wisconsin border, where the cars met her and brought her back home.

  The campaign had been shifting: it was all TV, and appearances that were sure to make TV, especially in those cities where they could still move votes. No more one-on-one talks, no more gatherings of the influential money men. It was too late for that. Now, it was all the downhill rush to Election Day, three days out.

  When Taryn came in the house, trailed by Carver, Alice Green, and Connie Schiffer, the campaign manager, Carver peered at Taryn, hard, and she gave a terse nod and said to Green, “We’re all done, Alice. You can take off. Six o’clock tomorrow morning.”

  Green said, “Thank you, ma’am. Six a.m. You try to get some sleep.” Green turned and left.

  “Good advice,” said Schiffer to Taryn. “My butt is worn-out. And that goddamn Henderson.”

  “At least he gave us a little break,” Taryn said. The governor had emphasized, at his press conference, that Tubbs had probably been working alone. Smalls, at a later press conference, hadn’t challenged that assessment, and had said that it was time to get the election back on track. “Henderson seemed like he was trying to get everything back to neutral.”

  “I’d prefer a neutral in our favor,” Schiffer said. “But you’ve got to be ready for the questions, tomorrow, about this Knoedler girl.”

  “Yeah, yeah . . .” Taryn waved her off: they’d talked about it in the car. “If you think of anything else, call me on the way home: I’ll be up for another half hour.”

  “No Ambien,” Schiffer said. “We don’t need you stoned or sleepwalking if we wind up on one of the earlier shows.”

  Taryn nodded and said, “Take off.” And to Carver and Dannon, “Set up the security. I’m going to look at the schedule and think in bed for a while.”

  Schiffer left, pausing to say, “We’re still good. We’ve got four points, but we can’t take any more erosion. Two points and we’re tied and we lose control.”

  “Gotcha.”

  • • •

  AS SCHIFFER WAS LEAVING, Dannon asked Carver to do a serious look around the yard. One of the radar buzzers had been going off, Dannon said, and he hadn’t been able to isolate why.

  “Probably another goddamn skunk,” Carver said. He pulled his jacket back on and went to look.

  When he was gone, Taryn turned to Dannon and asked, “What?”

  “I talked to Quintana,” Dannon said. “He says that Davenport somehow figured out where the porn came from. He and the internal affairs officer at the Minneapolis Police Department are digging around, and Quintana says his name is going to come up. He thinks he can stay clear—but before he knew that Davenport was digging around, he went over to the Smalls campaign headquarters and talked to . . . the woman who set up the trap.”

  “Not this Knoedler girl?”

  “No.”

  “That’s a relief,” Taryn said. “Might as well tell me the name of the real one.”

  Dannon shook his head. “Not yet. Really, it’s a psychological issue—it’s hard to fake surprise or confusion if you’re not surprised or confused. Anyway, Quintana is afraid that if Davenport finds the source, she’ll tell him that Quintana already talked to her. And there’s no good reason he should have . . . or that he should have talked to her specifically. So if she mentions Quintana, they’ll know he was likely the source of the porn, and he’s in very deep shit. Like, going-to-prison deep shit. At that point, we don’t know what happens. He didn’t make any threats, but I gotta believe that he’ll cooperate if he’s given a break. Quintana doesn’t know who I am, but he’s a cop, and if I’m dragged into this, he might recognize my voice.”

  “What are you saying?” Taryn asked, one hand on her hip, her fist clenched.

  Dannon hesitated, then said, “I think this woman . . . has to go away. If she goes away, she can’t give up Quintana.”

  “Oh, Jesus Christ.”

  She stared at him for a moment, and he said hastily, “Don’t worry about it. Don’t think about it.”

  “One question. Why not Quintana himself?”

  “Harder target. He might already be on edge, he carries a gun, he’s been in a couple of shootings. If something went wrong . . . Anyway, I’ve been out scoutin
g around. The woman is easy, and it’ll be clean.”

  She continued to stare at him, he didn’t flinch, but felt it, and then she said, “I have a personal question for you. I . . . it seems like I’ve seen certain things in you. Do you . . . have some feelings for me? Something I should know about?”

  He shrugged again, and then said, as though he didn’t want to, “Well . . . sure. For quite a while.”

  “I’ve had some of that myself,” Taryn said. “There’s nothing I can do about it right now—I have to be steady with David, for appearances’ sake. I can’t seem like I might be flighty, or that I play around. I wanted you to know that David is on his way out. He doesn’t know, I’ll wait until after the election to tell him. But then, you and I . . . we’ll talk.”

  “Only talk?”

  She gave him her best smile. “I don’t know what will happen. But I need somebody like you . . . and for more than a bodyguard.” She looked at her watch. “We’ll talk about this. . . . Right now, I need some sleep.”

  Dannon was left standing in the living room; as she turned into the hallway to the bedroom wing, she flashed another bright smile at him. He’d never expected that. And he never expected the result: his heart was singing. He’d heard about that happening, but he’d never before felt it.

  He walked around for a while, enjoying the glow. The glow never really faded, but he moved on to thinking a little wider, a little broader . . . and after a while, he made an executive decision.

  • • •

  LATE THAT NIGHT:

  Dannon walked down the street, moving carefully, watching the car lights. Cop cars had a peculiar look to them: if they weren’t going fast, they were going slow. They were big, and they were sedans. He didn’t want to be seen anywhere near this particular house.

  He was nearly invisible in a black cotton jacket and black slacks; there were almost no lights around, and lots of little clumps of hedge and old trees and crumbling concrete pillars that had once been decorative.

  He was told that it was a bad neighborhood, though he’d been in much worse; in fact, he’d been in a dive an hour before that he thought he might have to shoot his way out of. Still, this wasn’t exactly a well-lit park: he had yet to see a single soul on the street.

  Though wickedly aware of his surroundings, he didn’t look around; looking around attracted the eye. People who saw him would ask themselves, “Why’s that guy looking around like that?” He’d learned not to do it.

  He came up to the house—he’d passed it a few minutes earlier, moving much faster, checking it out—but now he crossed the woman’s lawn, avoiding the concrete steps that led up the front bank. The storm door was unlatched, which made things that much easier. He opened it, quietly, quietly, took off one glove, slipped the lock-pick into the lock on the main door, worked the pins, kept the tensioner tight, felt it click once, twice and then turn. He put the glove back on.

  He opened the inner door, slowly, slowly, and stepped inside, leaving the door cracked open. He took the pistol out of his pocket, waited for his eyes to fully adjust, saw a movement at the corner of his eye. A cat slipped away into the dark hallway, looking back at him.

  When he was sure that nothing was moving, he took a telephone from his pocket, selected a quiet old song, “Heart of Glass” by Blondie, and turned it on. The music tinkled out into the dark, quiet, pretty . . . disturbing.

  A woman’s voice: “Hello? Is there somebody there? I’m calling the police.”

  He thought, No, she isn’t.

  “Hello?”

  The hallway light clicked on, and the music played on.

  He heard her footfalls in the hallway, and then she appeared, wearing a cotton nightgown.

  Dannon shot her in the heart.

  For Taryn.

  He didn’t look at the woman’s face as she stepped back, stricken, put her hand to her chest, and said, “Awwww . . .” He reached out with his plastic-gloved hand, hit her in the face with the barrel of the pistol and she went down. Her feet thrashed, and he waited, and waited, and she went still. He stepped over her, walked down the hall to the bedroom, turned on the light, and took her purse, and tipped over a small jewelry case, took her cell phone, which was on the bed stand.

  He’d been inside for about a minute, and the clock in his head said he should leave. He went back through the hall, checked the woman’s still body.

  She was gone, no question of it. He fished a plastic bag out of his jacket pocket, shook out a glove, carefully rolled her body back, slipped the glove beneath it, and then let the body roll back in place. Okay. This was all right.

  Ninety seconds after he entered the house, he was out. He walked two blocks to his car, started up, then cruised as quietly as he could past the woman’s house. As he passed by, he picked up a cigarette lighter and a cherry bomb from the passenger seat, lit the cherry bomb, and dropped it out the window. He was a hundred yards up the street when he heard it go off.

  He did that because, at that moment, Carver was at Dannon’s town house, sending an e-mail to Grant, under Dannon’s name. When he’d done that, Carver would go back to his own town house, wait a few minutes, then make a phone call to a Duluth hotel, to see if they’d found a Mont Blanc pen. Then he’d go browse pens on Amazon and eBay. There’d be time stamps on all of that, if the cops came looking.

  Two minutes after that, he dropped the thoroughly clean gun into a nearly full trash dumpster behind a restaurant. It would be at the landfill the next day. He took the money and credit cards out of the purse and threw the purse into a patch of weeds.

  The plastic bag went in another dumpster, a mile from his apartment. The credit cards went down a sewer, the cash in his pocket.

  Clean hit.

  CHAPTER 17

  Lucas was up early the next morning, went for a run, got home and called his part-time researcher, a woman named Sandy. He told her that he needed her to work on a semi-emergency basis. He wanted all the names she could find for Carver’s last military unit, and said he was especially interested in people who were no longer with the military. “Check the social media—all your usual sources. If you find anybody, I want to know what they’re doing.”

  He’d just gotten out of the post-run shower when Turk Cochran called from Minneapolis Homicide.

  Cochran said, “Hey, big guy. The word is, you’ve been snooping around city hall, trying to figure out if somebody over here supplied Porter Smalls’s kiddie porn.”

  “You calling to confess?”

  “Yeah, I did it with my little laptop. No wait, I meant my little lap dance, not laptop. Is this call being recorded?”

  “What’s up, Turk?” Cochran hadn’t called simply to crack wise.

  “What I meant to say is, some really bad person broke into Helen Roman’s house last night and shot her to death. I was told that this particular murder might be of interest to yourself.”

  “Helen Roman?” For a moment, Lucas drew a blank. He knew that name. . . . “Helen Roman? Smalls’s secretary? Somebody killed her?”

  “That’s what I’m saying. Looks sorta like a robbery, but sorta not like a robbery. You want to take a look?”

  “Tell me where. I’ll be there.” Lucas had taken any number of calls about murders: this one had his heart thumping.

  • • •

  HELEN ROMAN’S SMALL HOUSE was on the outskirts of what the Minneapolis media called “North Minneapolis.” That was the approved code designation for “black people,” usually referred to, further down in the story, as the “community,” as in “community leaders asked, ‘How come you crackers never talk about white junkies getting aced in East Minneapolis?’”

  Lucas left the Porsche at the curb, said hello to a patrol sergeant he’d known for twenty years or so, and crossed the lawn to the small front porch, where Cochran was sitting in an aluminum lawn chair. Cochran was a big man, fleshy-faced with a gut, and the lawn chair was his, kept in the trunk of his car, so he’d have somewhere to sit when he was w
orking around a crime scene.

  “Why’s it not like a robbery?” Lucas asked.

  “Didn’t take enough stuff,” Cochran said. He was wearing gray flannel slacks, a red tie, and a blue blazer; he looked like a New York doorman. “She had quite a bit of takable stuff, lying around loose. The thing is, when something like this happens, either the shooter runs, instantly, or he stays around long enough to accomplish the mission. It’s not very often that they stay around for fifteen seconds. It’s either nothing, or five minutes. But why am I telling you that?”

  “I would not be confident in that generalization when applied to a specific case,” Lucas said.

  “Jeez, you know a lot of big words,” Cochran said. “If I understood them all, I agree—somebody might stay around for fifteen seconds, like this guy did, but not often.”

  “You got a time for it?”

  “Right around one in the morning. Actually, since you ask, about five after one. A guy was watching TV up the street, heard a shot. If that was the shot. The thing is, he said it sounded like a shotgun: a big BOOM. I asked him if he knew what a shotgun sounded like, and he said yeah, he’s a turkey hunter. But: the medical examiner’s guy tells me that it looks like Roman was shot by a small-caliber weapon, probably a .22. Inside the house. Windows and doors all closed. I’m not even sure that could be heard, five houses away.”

  Lucas said, “Huh.” And, “So you haven’t figured out the boom.”