Silken Prey

by John Sandford

  “No, but who knows? Maybe that was the shot. The ME’s guy says it looks pretty consistent with a one-o’clock shooting, the condition of the blood and the body temp.”

  “Who found the body?”

  “A woman named Carmen West,” Cochran said. “She puts up lawn signs for Smalls around the north end.”

  “Sounds like dangerous work,” Lucas said.

  “You mean because Smalls is a right-wing devil, and right-wing devils are not liked on the north side?”

  “Something like that. Anyway . . .”

  “Roman was supposed to be at work at six o’clock this morning,” Cochran said. “Last days of the campaign, and all that. When she didn’t show by eight, somebody at the office phoned West and asked her to knock on Roman’s door. West said the door was open. . . . She looked in, and saw Roman in the hallway. Called 911.”

  “All that seems legit?”

  “Yeah, it does.” Cochran pushed himself out of his chair. “Come on in, I’ll show you around.”

  Lucas followed him up to the porch and Cochran said, “Notice the door.”

  “Nothing there,” Lucas said, checking out the door.

  “It wasn’t forced,” Cochran said. “We can’t find anything forced. Either the door was unlocked, which seems unlikely for a single woman, or the guy had a key. We talked to the neighbors, who said she didn’t have a housekeeper, and her only relative—an heir—is her daughter, who lives in Austin, Texas, and was there this morning and took our call.”

  “Roman didn’t have a boyfriend?”

  “Daughter says no. She said they talked once or twice a week.”

  • • •

  LUCAS HAD BEEN TO all kinds of murder scenes in his career, and this was like most of them: that is, like nothing in particular. Another house with a worn couch and a newer TV and personal photos on the wall. A kitchen smelling of last night’s single-serving pepperoni pizza, dishes in the kitchen sink, waiting to be washed, but now with nobody to wash them.

  And, of course, a dead body in the hallway.

  Roman was flat on her back, her hands crossed on her chest. She had a slash across her face, which Cochran thought might have come from a gun sight. Her eyes were closed, which was better than open, for the cops, anyway; for Roman, it made no difference. “It looks like the shooter encountered her in the hallway, hit her with the gun, then shot her,” Cochran said.

  “Or vice versa.”

  “Could be. Can’t tell her posture when she was hit, because the bullet’s still inside. No exit, no trajectory.” As he spoke, Lucas heard a gust of laughter, from somewhere behind the house: children playing.

  “Goddamnit. I need to talk with her,” Lucas said, looking down at the body. “I mean, we could have either a multiple murderer, or a freakin’ weird coincidence.”

  “I might be able to help you with that, with the one-or-the-other,” Cochran said. He squatted, carefully, dug inside his jacket for a pencil, and pointed the pencil at a patch of black fabric under one of her arms. “See that? That’s a man’s glove. It’s pinned under her. There’s only one glove, nothing else like it in the house. We’re thinking . . .”

  “Could be the killer’s.”

  “Yeah. Either pulled off, or dropped out of a pocket,” Cochran said. “Anyway, there’s gonna be all kinds of DNA in it. If we get lucky . . .”

  If they got lucky, they’d get a cold hit from the Minnesota DNA bank. All felons in Minnesota were DNA-typed.

  “How soon?”

  “Tomorrow morning. It’ll be our top priority,” Cochran said.

  “I may send you a couple of swabs.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Maybe,” Lucas said.

  • • •

  LUCAS SAW A TOTE BAG sitting by the corner of the bed, and what appeared to be the silvery corner of a laptop poking out of it. “Would you mind taking the laptop out and turning it on?”

  Cochran said, “No, I don’t mind. . . . It doesn’t seem too connected to the shooting scene. But it should have been stolen.” He slipped the laptop out and said, “This isn’t good.”

  “What?”

  “It’s a Mac PowerBook, like mine. The first screen you come to is gonna want a password.”

  “Let’s give it a try,” Lucas said. Cochran didn’t want to put it down on anything the killer might have touched, so they carried it back outside, and he handed the laptop to Lucas and sat down in his lawn chair. Lucas sat on the stoop below him and turned it on. When they got to the password, Lucas asked, “What was the daughter’s name?”

  “Callie . . . Roman.”

  Lucas typed “Callie” into the password slot, and the computer opened up.

  “Christ, it’s like you’re a detective,” Cochran said.

  Lucas went to the e-mail and started scrolling backwards. He found a BLTUBBS on the second page down, turned to Cochran and said, “It’s not a robbery.”

  “Do tell?”

  “Well, maybe not. But if it is, we really are ass-deep in coincidence.”

  He found a half-dozen messages from Tubbs in the past three weeks. Tubbs and Roman had been talking about something, but the messages were never specific. “Call you this evening . . .” and “Where will you be tonight?”

  The replies were as short and nonspecific as the questions. The only thing that might mean something was a note from Tubbs that said: “Got the package. Talk to you tonight. Call me when you get home.” The message was sent four days before the porn popped up on Smalls’s computer. The last access of the pornography on the Minneapolis police computers had been five days before.

  Lucas asked Cochran, “Cell phone?”

  He shook his head. “No cell phone, but she didn’t have a landline, either. The killer took the cell. Like he should have taken the computer,” Cochran said. “You want to give me the whole rundown on this?”

  • • •

  LUCAS SHUT DOWN the computer and handed it back to Cochran, stood up, dusted off the seat of his pants, leaned against the porch banister, and told him about the investigation, leaving out only what was necessary. When he was done, Cochran said, “You never talked to her? I mean, you talked to her, but you didn’t interview her?”

  Lucas rubbed his face and said, “Man, it’s like the old joke. Except the joke’s on me.”

  “What joke?”

  “The one about the guy who rolls a wheelbarrow full of sawdust out of a construction site every night.”

  “I don’t know that one,” Cochran said.

  Lucas said, “The security guy keeps checking and checking and checking the wheelbarrow, thinking the guy had to be stealing something. Never found anything hidden in the sawdust, and nobody cared about the sawdust. Couple of years later, they bump into each other, and the security guy says, ‘Look, it’s all in the past, you can tell me now. I know you were stealing something. What was it?’ And the guy says, ‘Wheelbarrows.’”

  Lucas continued, “I was convinced that the person who set the trap had to have been planted on the Smalls campaign, which meant somebody new—a volunteer, or a new hire. I interviewed all the likely suspects. But she’s one of his oldest employees. I talked to her every time I went there, and it never occurred to me to question her.”

  “She was the wheelbarrow.”

  “Yeah. She was the fuckin’ wheelbarrow. Right there in front of my eyes.”

  “Fuckin’s right,” Cochran said. “C’mere. I got a special surprise.”

  He heaved himself out of his chair and Lucas followed him back into the house and into the bedroom. Cochran took a plastic glove out of his jacket pocket, pulled it on, and opened the bottom drawer on the bedside table. He took out a framed photograph and turned it in his gloved hand so Lucas could see it in the light from the bedroom window.

  Helen Roman, at least ten years younger, sitting on Porter Smalls’s lap in a poolside chaise, somewhere with palm trees. Drinks on the deck below the chair.

  Lucas looked at Cochran, who nodded: �
��Jilted lover?”

  “At least. Several times by now,” Lucas said. He looked around the bedroom, and out the door into the lonely little dilapidated house, and thought about Smalls’s resort out on the lake. “She must have been pissed. You know what I’m sayin’?”

  • • •

  WORD OF ROMAN’S DEATH was going to get out soon enough, but Cochran hadn’t begun any notifications, other than the daughter. The woman who found the body had been sequestered, and hadn’t called the campaign or anyone else.

  Lucas told Cochran that he was going to talk to Smalls, and Cochran nodded, but when Lucas called, Smalls’s phone clicked over to the answering service, as Smalls had warned him it often might. He turned it off when he was speaking, and he’d said he’d be speaking almost constantly in the week before the election. Lucas phoned Smalls’s headquarters and was told that the senator was, at that moment, appearing at a Baptist megachurch in Bloomington, on the south side of the metro area.

  Lucas got the address, plugged it into his nav, and took off. On the way, he called Grant, and was again forwarded to the answering service. He’d gotten Grant’s campaign manager’s number, called that, and got Schiffer. “Where’s Ms. Grant?” he asked, after identifying himself.

  “Is there a problem?”

  “You might say so. I need to meet with Ms. Grant and her security people, especially Douglas Dannon and Ronald Carver. I assume Ms. Green will be there as well?”

  “Well, Carver isn’t with us. . . . I suppose we can call him, if it’s urgent.”

  “It’s urgent. Where are you?”

  “I’m in Afton. We’re setting up for a rally in the park and a luncheon. Taryn’s in Stillwater right now, she’ll be going to Bayport in, mmm, fifteen minutes, and Lakeland at eleven-fifteen and Afton at noon.”

  “How about Afton at eleven-thirty?”

  “I’ll tell her to push everything up a bit, if it’s really urgent. We’ll be in the park. Look for the TV trucks.”

  “It’s urgent. I’ll see you at eleven-thirty in the park.”

  He made one more call, to the governor, who answered with a “What now?”

  “Somebody murdered Porter Smalls’s secretary last night,” Lucas said. “Smalls had a sexual relationship with her and broke it off. Years ago, though. She was probably the one who set up the trigger on the computer.”

  Long silence. Then, “Jesus, Lucas, who killed her?”

  “I have some ideas . . . but now I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Lucas said. “I wanted to let you know, though: the whole thing might be headed over the cliff, again.”

  “Think I’ll go to North Dakota. There are some border issues to deal with.”

  “Not a bad idea,” Lucas said.

  • • •

  THE MEGACHURCH HAD PARKING for perhaps a thousand cars, and on this Sunday morning, there were probably twelve hundred jammed into the lot. Lucas walked into the entry and saw Smalls standing at a rostrum at the front of the church.

  He’d apparently finished his talk and was answering questions. Lucas threaded his way through the crowded pews to the front, and stood waiting until Smalls saw him. When Smalls turned his way, Lucas tipped his head toward the back, and Smalls nodded at him and then said, “You know, folks, I could stand here and talk all day, but I’ve got another rally I’ve got to go to. You can reach me online with any more questions, and I can promise, you’ll get an answer. Let’s take two more questions. The lady in front, with the green blouse . . .”

  Five minutes later, led by a security man, with another one trailing behind, and his campaign manager walking beside him, Smalls headed for a side door. Lucas walked that way. Smalls waited at the door until he caught up, and then led the way into a back hallway.

  Lucas said, “We need to talk privately.”

  Smalls said, “It can’t be good news.”

  “No . . .”

  Smalls said, “Hang on,” and walked back to the people who’d come through the door behind them, spoke to one, who pointed down the hall. Smalls walked back to Lucas and said, “Come on. I’d like Ralph to come along.”

  Ralph Cox was his campaign manager. He was a tall, ruddy-faced man with curly black hair and overlong sideburns. Lucas nodded to Smalls and said, “That’s up to you,” and followed Smalls down the hall to an office. Smalls opened the door, and the three of them stepped inside.

  Lucas pushed the door shut and asked, “You had an affair with Helen Roman?”

  After a long pause, Smalls said, “Years ago.”

  “Did she think that it might lead to something permanent?” Lucas asked.

  “What’s going on? Is she the one who pushed the porn?”

  “Would she have reason to?” Lucas asked.

  Smalls wet his lower lip with his tongue, then said, “She was . . . disappointed when I broke it off. Pretty unhappy. I tried to make it up to her by overpaying her on the secretary’s job. There might have been some bad feeling at the time, but . . . that was years ago.”

  Cox asked, “What happened? Have you arrested her?”

  “She was murdered last night,” Lucas said.

  Smalls staggered, as though he’d been struck. He reached behind himself, found an office chair, and sank into it. “My God. Helen?”

  “She was struck in the head, the face, then shot with a small-caliber pistol,” Lucas said. “It looks at least superficially like a robbery, but I think . . . it’s related. I opened her computer and found notes from Tubbs. They’re cryptic—follow-ups on personal conversations. They don’t mention porn. They don’t even mention you. But Tubbs mentions that he’s got some kind of package, and that’s just a couple of days before somebody dropped the porn into your computer. Anyway, they had some kind of relationship. . . . I mean, maybe not sexual, but at least conversational. And it seemed like, conspiratorial.”

  Cox said to Smalls, “We’ve got to get on top of this, and right now. We’ve got to give it a direction. There are two possibilities—that Tubbs and the Democrats led her into it, for purely political reasons, and that she was killed by a coconspirator, or that she dumped the porn to ruin you, because she was bitter about the broken relationship. We’ve got to hit the Tubbs angle hard. We’ve got to steer it—”

  “Shut up for a minute. You can talk about that later,” Lucas said to him. Back to Smalls: “You said she was disappointed. How disappointed? You think she might have done the porn?”

  “I don’t know . . . maybe. Maybe she was a little resentful. I didn’t think so for a long time, but in the last couple of years, she’s been getting more and more distant.”

  “Ah, Jesus Christ on a crutch,” Cox said.

  Smalls: “Watch your mouth, Ralph. We’re in a church. If they heard you . . .”

  “Sorry. But for God’s sakes, Porter, if this comes out the wrong way, the TV people will dig up every woman you’ve ever slept with, and from what I understand, there’s a lot of them.”

  Lucas said, “Could we—”

  Cox jumped in again. “I’m gonna leave you guys to talk. I gotta call Marianne and get something going. We got no time for this, no time.”

  And he was out the door.

  “Who’s Marianne?” Lucas asked.

  “Media,” Smalls said. He pushed himself out of his chair. “I’ll tell you, Lucas, this is pretty much the end, for me. Ralph can do all the media twisting he wants, but it ain’t gonna work.”

  “There’s something else going on,” Lucas said. He hesitated, thinking that he might be about to make a mistake. “It’s possible that if Tubbs was working for the Grant campaign that he was killed to break the connection between the porn and the Grant campaign. And that the same people who killed him, killed Roman.”

  Smalls waved him off, with a hand that looked weary. “Yeah, yeah, but I’ll tell you what, Lucas. Political campaigns don’t have killers on their staffs. End of story.”

  Lucas looked at him, didn’t say a word.

  Smalls peered back, t
hen said, “What?”

  Lucas shrugged.

  “What, goddamnit? Are you . . . Grant doesn’t have a killer . . . ?” He was reading Lucas’s face, as a politician can, and he said, “Jesus Christ, what’d you find out?”

  “Watch the language,” Lucas said. “This is a church.”

  “Don’t hassle me, Lucas. This is my life we’re talking about.”

  “Grant has these two bodyguards,” Lucas said. “They were involved in some very rough stuff in Iraq and Afghanistan. One of them was pushed out of the army for something he did there. He killed a bunch of people he shouldn’t have—executed them. Including a couple of kids. I talked to an ex-army guy, a BCA guy now, who understands these things, and he said these guys essentially specialized in killing and kidnapping.”

  Smalls took off his glasses, rubbed his face with his hands. “I . . . This is really hard to believe.”

  “I know. I’ll tell you what, when you spend your life doing investigations, you become wary of coincidences. Because they happen. It’s possible that there was a dirty trick, followed by two killings, at a critical moment in a political campaign, and it’s all purely a coincidence that the person who most benefits had two killers standing around. I personally am not ready to believe that.”

  “What’re you gonna do?”

  “I’m gonna go jack them up. But they’re smart, and I have no evidence. None. If they tell me to blow it out my ass, well . . .”

  “Killers,” Smalls said. “I tell you, politics has gotten rougher and rougher, but I never thought it could come to this. Never. But maybe . . . Now that I think about it, maybe it was inevitable.”

  • • •

  LUCAS TOOK OFF FOR AFTON. Afton was a small town, one of the oldest in Minnesota, built on the wild and scenic river that separated Minnesota from Wisconsin. The river was gorgeous in the summer and early fall and at mid-winter, after the freeze; less so in the cold patch of November or the early rains of March. But this day, though November, was particularly fine.

  Lucas went to the University of Minnesota on a hockey scholarship, but since you couldn’t major in hockey—and his mother peed all over the idea, suggested by the coaches, that he major in physical education—he wound up in American studies, a combination of American literature, history, and politics. He did well in it, enjoyed it, and since it was commonly used as a pre-law major, he thought about becoming a lawyer like a number of his classmates.