Silken Prey

by John Sandford

  Quintana told it this way:

  Tubbs said, “You guys have an extensive file of kiddie porn somewhere in your computers. Here in Vice, and down in Domestics. I don’t care about that, but there’s one picture in there that I need to see. I need to see it off the record.”

  Quintana: “What’s this all about?”

  Tubbs: “A very large person in the state legislature is banging a girl on the side. Young, but not too young. But now it turns out that she might have been involved in some kind of porn ring and probably prostitution, and was busted by you guys. I need to look at her picture. I can’t get at it through regular sources, because she was underage when she was busted, and the file is sealed.”

  Quintana: “Why do you need to look at it?”

  Tubbs: “Because this guy is in a pretty tender spot. He’s in the process of getting a divorce. His wife’s lawyer is a wolverine, and if she gets a sniff of this chick—and maybe she already did—they’re going to make an issue of it. Then, it’s all gonna come out. He needs to know if this girl’s the one involved in porn and prostitution and all that. I’ve seen his girlfriend. Now I need to look at the file.”

  Quintana: “Even if she was, what would he do about it?”

  Tubbs: “Put her ass on a plane to Austin, Texas. He’s got a buddy in the Texas legislature who’ll give her a job, and his old lady won’t be able to find her.”

  Quintana: “Why doesn’t he do that anyway?”

  Tubbs: “Because it’ll cost an arm and a leg. If she’s not the one, he won’t do it. The other thing is, he doesn’t want to ask the girl, because he’s afraid it’ll change things. And she might decide to ask for a little cash herself. If she’s the one. All he wants to do is know.”

  Lucas asked, “You gave him the file?”

  Quintana shook his head. “No. All I did was sit at the computer and call up the file. I knew what he was talking about, the girl, because it went back to Tom Morgan’s case three years ago.

  “I showed him the picture, and he asked me to enlarge it, the best shot of her face. He looked at it and then he said, “Close, but no cigar. She’s not the one.”

  Marion: “Then what?”

  “I closed the file and he said thanks, and he went away.”

  Marion: “Didn’t give you a little schmear?”

  “No, no. Nothing like that,” Quintana said. “Look, this was a fast favor for a guy. Didn’t look at the porn, didn’t do any of that. A favor for a guy big in the legislature. You know how that works.”

  “You believed all that bullshit?” Marion asked.

  Quintana shook his head: “It looks bad now, but yeah, I believed him. Like I said, I knew him forever.”

  Lucas said, “If you didn’t give him the file, how’d he get it?”

  Quintana shook his head. “I don’t know for sure. But I’ve got my suspicions.”

  “Like what?”

  “He was standing behind me when I signed on,” Quintana said. “He might have seen my password . . . it’s . . . this sounds even stupider . . . it’s ‘yquintz.’ And I mean, he was right there. Once you’ve got the password, you can get in even from outside, if you need to. After I signed on, I looked up the file. He saw that, too.”

  Marion said, “Unbelievable.”

  Quintana ran his hands through his hair. “Yeah, I know. Oldest goddamn trick in the book,” Quintana said. “I never saw it. I mean, all he wanted to do was look at one face.”

  Lucas mostly didn’t believe it, but was willing to buy it if he got anything that would aim him at Carver and Dannon. He asked, “What was this information you got?”

  “Yesterday I was working over on Upton—we think there might be a high-ticket whorehouse over there, don’t tell anybody. Anyway, I was sitting in my car taking down tag numbers and taking pictures of these girls coming and going, and I get this phone call. The guy says that he bought the pornography file from Tubbs and Tubbs said he got it from me. I say, ‘That’s bullshit, I didn’t give him anything.’

  “The guy says, ‘Well, he said he got it from you, and I think he might have told a woman over in Smalls’s office. And he might’ve told her about me, too. She’s the one who put the porn in. Nobody knows who I am, but somebody needs to go over and talk to this woman, this Helen Roman. Like a cop. Needs to ask her where the porn came from, and where it went.’

  “I said, ‘I didn’t give anybody any porn. Who is this, anyway?’

  “He said, ‘A guy who doesn’t like Porter Smalls.’

  “I said, ‘I don’t like Porter Smalls either, but I didn’t give a thing to Tubbs.’

  “The guy says, ‘Look, all you have to do is check with her.’

  “I say, ‘Not me.’

  “Then the guy hangs up,” Quintana said.

  “And you’ve got the phone number,” Lucas said.

  Quintana nodded: “I do.” He dug in his pocket and handed Lucas a slip of notepaper, with a phone number on it.

  Lucas took the paper, and Marion said, “I’m gonna need that.”

  Lucas nodded, took out a pen and a pocket notebook, and wrote the number down, and passed the original slip back to Marion. “I’m going to run down the number and look at the activity on that phone,” Lucas said. “If this is real, it could be a serious break.”

  “I just hope I get credit for it,” Quintana said.

  Meers said, “That’s pretty much the story. A simple request from a friend, to help out a guy in the legislature. If you go after a guy for that, we wouldn’t have a police department left.”

  Marion said, “You know the problem, though: it’s not important unless it becomes important. Ray’s now all tangled up in what could be a double murder case. One way or another . . .”

  Quintana said, “Come on. If I hadn’t told you, you’d never have found out. I could’ve lied. Instead, I came right in, as soon as I worked it out. I even gave you what Lucas said could be a break. A serious break.”

  Marion looked at Lucas and asked, “What’s the BCA think?”

  Lucas said, “This is all on you guys. Do what’s best: I don’t care. I just want the phone number.” He looked at Quintana: “Where’s the phone they called you on?”

  “In my pocket.” He fished it out: an iPhone.

  “I’m going to need to take it with me. I need to take it to our lab, we’ll get in touch with your . . . Who’s your service provider?”

  “Verizon.”

  “We’ll get in touch with Verizon, and when we know where our targets are, we’re going to want you to call them,” Lucas said.

  Quintana shook his head. “You can take my phone, but these guys are way too smart to be using their own phone. I’d give you ten to one that it’s a disposable.”

  “That’s why we need to catch them with it. We’ll be monitoring the call and the location it comes from,” Lucas said. “I’ll probably get back to you tonight. Where you gonna be?”

  “Without my cell . . . I’ll probably go home if Buck is done talking to me. I’ve got a landline there.”

  “Okay. You sit there, wait for my call,” Lucas said. “You go along with all of this, I’ll testify on your side in any kind of proceedings.”

  Quintana nodded. “I’ll do that.”

  He passed Lucas his cell phone, and Lucas said, “If you’ll all excuse me . . . I gotta run.”

  As he headed for the door, Quintana called, “You believe me, right?”

  Lucas paused at the door, then said, “No, not the whole story. Not even very much of it. But I believe the phone number.”

  • • •

  THEN HE HAD a lot to do. From his car, as he headed back across town to the BCA, he called Jenkins and told him to find Shrake: “I know it’s Sunday, but I need you to babysit some people for me. Only until tonight. I need to know where they are, all the time.”

  “How complicated is this going to be?”

  “Not complicated. You have to tag a campaign caravan.” He told Jenkins to find out where Tary
n Grant was going to be, described Dannon and Carver. “It’s those two guys you’ve got to stay with. I want you to go separately so if they split up, you can follow both of them. But they should stick pretty close to Grant for as long as I need you to watch them.”

  “Good enough,” Jenkins said.

  • • •

  LUCAS HAD TO MAKE some calls, first to the director, and then the deputy director, and between them they found a technician who was willing to come in and set up the phone monitoring system. When he got there, the tech came up to Lucas’s office and said, “We don’t usually need a subpoena for Verizon, if we just want a location, but I’ll check with them first. That’s not usually a problem, though.”

  “Then get it going,” Lucas said.

  He was a little cranked: if this worked out, there’d be somebody in the bag by midnight. He called Jenkins: “Where are you guys?”

  “Grant’s up in Anoka. We’re on the way. Then she’s going to St. Cloud for an eight-o’clock appearance and then back home. Probably back in the Cities between ten and midnight.”

  “Keep me up to date,” Lucas said.

  Lucas called Quintana: “It’ll be late—I’ll probably come get you around nine or ten o’clock.”

  Lucas needed something to eat. He called Weather to find out what the food situation was, and was told that the housekeeper was making her patented mac & cheese & pepperoni. “I’ll be there,” he said.

  He was pulling his jacket on when Virgil Flowers called: “I was talking to Barney and he didn’t know what you were up to, but he said you might use my help. I’m down in Shakopee. I can either go home, or head your way.”

  “My house,” Lucas said. “Helen’s making her mac and cheese and pepperoni.”

  “What happened to that vegetarian thing you guys were doing?”

  “Ah, that only lasted a month or two. Besides, pepperoni isn’t meat—it’s cheese made by pigs,” Lucas said. “Anyway, we’ll be going out later. I’ll tell you about it when you get there.”

  He called Weather and told her that Flowers was coming to dinner, and she said, “We got plenty.”

  Which was true: the mac and cheese and pepperoni usually went on for the best part of a week.

  • • •

  LUCAS GOT HOME, changed into jeans, a wool vest over a white dress shirt, and an Italian cotton sport coat, blue-black in color that would be excellent, he thought, for nighttime shoot-outs. It hadn’t yet been tested for that. When he got back downstairs, Flowers had come in, wearing a barn coat, jeans, and carrying a felt cowboy hat. His high-heeled cowboy boots made him an inch taller than Lucas.

  “There better not be a fuckin’ horse in my driveway,” Lucas said.

  A bit later, Lucas took a call from the BCA tech, who said they were set with Verizon, and they could give him a real-time location as soon as Lucas called the other phone, which, as it happened, also used Verizon. There’d been no calls on the phone for two days; the last call had been to Quintana’s number.

  They all ate together at a long oblong dinner table, Flowers and Letty happily gabbing away—Flowers, a part-time writer with a developing reputation, had done a biographical piece about Letty that had been published in Vanity Fair, with photographs by Annie Leibovitz. They were all now dear friends, Annie and Letty and Virgie.

  Leibovitz had taken a bunch of pictures of Lucas, too, but the magazine had used only one. Lucas thought it made him look like a midwestern prairie preacher from the nineteenth century. As for the friendship, he thought Letty and Virgie were getting a little too dear. The issue came up before dinner, and Weather told him he was losing it if he thought Flowers had untoward ideas about Letty.

  “When it comes to being around women, I wouldn’t trust that guy further than I could spit a Norwegian rat,” Lucas had grumbled.

  “Why? Because he reminds you so much of your younger self?” she’d asked.

  “Maybe,” Lucas had said. “But not that much younger.”

  “He’s not interested in Letty,” Weather had declared.

  “Okay,” Lucas said. “How about in you?”

  “Don’t be absurd,” she’d said, ostentatiously checking her hair in the mirror.

  • • •

  AFTER DINNER, Lucas and Virgil went to Lucas’s study, with Letty perching on a side chair, and Lucas briefed him about the situation. “Basically,” Flowers summed up, “we’ve got nothing, but if their phone’s GPS says that they’re in a certain spot, you think that’s good enough for a search and seizure.”

  “I know it is, because there’s been another case just like it,” Lucas said. “It was in LA, but the federal court refused to order the evidence set aside.”

  “And so this could prove that these two highly trained killers were involved with the porn, and we know for sure that they’ve got guns.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Virgil thought about that and said, “Okay.”

  They’d sat down to eat at seven, had finished with the food and talk at eight, and at eight-thirty, sitting in the den, Lucas took a call from Jenkins. “This is going to wind up sooner than I thought,” Jenkins said. “She finished talking, the TV is pulling out, now she’s going around mixing with the kids, but that’s not going to last long, once the TV is gone. I think we’ll be out of here in fifteen minutes, and then it’s an hour back to her place.”

  He said to Flowers, “Let’s go. Excuse me—I meant, ‘Saddle up.’”

  “Yeah,” Virgil said, getting his hat.

  “Don’t let him push you around,” Letty told Virgil. “That hat looks good on you. Not everybody could pull it off, but you can.”

  “Thank you, sweetheart,” Flowers said, and he and Lucas were out the door.

  They took Flowers’s truck, and as they backed out of the driveway, Lucas noticed that Flowers was smiling.

  “What’s the shit-eating grin about?” Lucas asked.

  “Ah, I love pimping you about Letty. And Weather, for that matter.”

  “I don’t mind, as long as you keep your hands off Helen and that mac and cheese and pepperoni,” Lucas said.

  • • •

  JENKINS CALLED TO SAY that Taryn Grant’s caravan consisted of three cars. The first carried what appeared to be three lower-ranking campaign people, one of whom was probably the media liaison. The second car was a big American SUV, and carried Grant, a short, heavyset woman, and one of the bodyguards; from Lucas’s description, he thought it was probably Carver. The third car carried the other bodyguard, Dannon, and a thin woman who was apparently also security.

  “Alice Green, ex–Secret Service,” Lucas said. “Where are you guys?”

  “Shrake is out front, I’m a quarter mile back, with four cars between us.”

  “Stay in touch,” Lucas said. “Let me know for sure when they hit 494.”

  Quintana lived in Golden Valley, a first-ring suburb west of Minneapolis. He was standing on his front porch when Lucas and Virgil arrived. He got in the backseat, and Lucas introduced Flowers. Quintana said, “I appreciate the chance.”

  “Like I said, it’s up to Minneapolis what they do about this,” Lucas said. “But you kinda blew it, Ray.”

  “I know that,” Quintana said. “But tell me you don’t do a little off-the-record relationship stuff. I thought Tubbs might be something for me: a guy to know.”

  “I understand that,” Lucas said. “I don’t buy all that other stuff.”

  “Ahhh . . .” Quintana shut up and looked out the side window.

  After a couple minutes of silence, Virgil said to Lucas, “At least we know he’s not lying to us now.”

  “How’s that?” Lucas asked.

  “His lips aren’t moving.”

  Quintana began laughing in the backseat, and then Lucas and Virgil started.

  • • •

  THEY PULLED INTO a mostly empty strip mall parking lot a mile from Grant’s house. The streets were good between the mall and her house, and they could be there in a cou
ple of minutes. They talked about Tubbs and Roman, but not about Quintana’s problem.

  “I wish that motherfucker Tubbs wasn’t dead,” Quintana said. “Then I could kill him myself.”

  Lucas asked Flowers how his most recent romance had been going.

  “I think it’s gone,” Flowers said. “We’re apparently friends, now.”

  “That’s not necessarily the kiss of death,” Quintana said from the backseat, and they talked about that for a while.

  Jenkins called when the caravan got off I-94 and headed south on I-494, and then when it got off I-494 and headed west. Lucas called the tech and said, “I’m making the call.”

  And at that moment, as he hung up on the tech and prepared to call the unknown phone, another call from Jenkins came in. “Man, we got a problem. We got a problem.”

  “What?”

  “I got a cop car on my ass, and so does Shrake. The caravan has pulled over ahead of us. Shit! They made us. I gotta talk to this cop.”

  “Goddamnit, where are you?” Lucas asked.

  He got the location, and told Flowers to go that way, and then made the call on Quintana’s phone and handed it to Quintana. It rang, and rang, and rang, with no answer. The tech called and said, “We’ve got a location for you. The phone’s at Hampshire Avenue North and Thirtieth.”

  “What?”

  “It’s at Hampshire Avenue North and Thirtieth. There’s a park there.”

  Lucas asked, “Where in the hell is that?”

  “Well, if you’re at Grant’s house, it’s about eight miles east. As the crow flies.”

  “Sonofabitch,” Lucas said.

  “What’re we doing?” Flowers asked.

  “Got no choice, now. We’ll try to shake them, see if anything comes loose,” Lucas said.

  He turned around in his seat and said to Quintana, “I’m going to point out these guys and tell you to look at them. Like you’d seen them before. I want you to take a long look, then come over and mutter at me. Don’t let them hear what you’re saying.”

  “I never saw them,” Quintana said.

  “Ray, for Christ’s sakes, I’m trying to shake ’em. We’re doing a pageant.”