Silken Prey

by John Sandford

  “Does she?” Del asked.

  The bartender shrugged. “I don’t know. I never seen him with any old ladies, and we don’t get many old ladies in here.”

  “Is he in here pretty regular?” Del asked.

  “Yeah, most days.”

  Lucas tipped his head toward the people in the booths: “Any of these people know him?”

  The bartender looked past him, then shook his head. “I wouldn’t say so. I don’t pay that much attention to who sits with who. We got a waitress comes in later this afternoon, she’d know better than me.”

  “But you think he comes from around here.”

  “Yeah, unless he takes a bus. I seen him coming from the direction of the bus stop.”

  Del looked at Lucas and shook his head. Not that many people would take a bus to a dive like Smackie’s. It wouldn’t be worth the money, since almost any other place would be better.

  Del said, “We’ll check back,” and he and Lucas started for the door. They were almost there when the bartender called, “Hey, guys. C’mere.”

  They walked back to the bar and the bartender flicked a finger at the window on the left side of the bar. The glass was dark green and dirty, not easily seen through, but they could see a very short man walking down a street toward the bar. The bartender said, “You owe me.”

  Del: “That’s him?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  • • •

  THEY WATCHED THE SHORT MAN until he crossed the street and started toward the bar entrance. Lucas looked around and said, “Better take him outside,” and Del said, “Yeah,” and they went to the door, waited for a few seconds, then pushed through into the daylight. Clay was only fifteen feet away. He saw Lucas, and quick as a rat, turned and started running.

  His feet were churning like a machine, Lucas noticed as he took off after the other man, but his legs were so short that he was only making about two feet per churn; Lucas caught him in a hundred feet. He didn’t want to make the mistake of having a knife or gun pulled on him, so when he was close behind, and Clay turned to look at him, he hit Clay on the back of the neck and sent him sprawling, hands first, into the street.

  Clay rolled over and looked up the muzzle of Del’s pistol. “How you doin’, James,” Del said. “You’re under arrest for murder.”

  “They’re lying to you,” Clay said. He was very short, maybe five-two, and thin.

  “Who’s lying to us?” Lucas asked.

  “The Chicago cops. I had not a single fuckin’ thing to do with any of that.”

  “Tell the Chicago cops that,” Lucas said. “Roll over on your face, keep your arms out . . . you know the routine.”

  Lucas patted him down, took a short folding knife out of Clay’s back pocket, handed it to Del. Del cuffed him, and they stood him up and Lucas held on to the cuff link while Del gave him a more thorough pat-down.

  A young white kid, maybe ten, rode up on a fenderless half-sized bicycle, an unlit cigarette dangling from his lower lip. He stopped and asked, “You guys cops?”

  “Yes,” Del said. “You go on home, son.”

  “Blow me,” the kid said, and rode away.

  “That’s righteous, that’s righteous,” Clay shouted after the kid, who gave him the finger.

  “I guess he doesn’t like any of us,” Del said.

  They put Clay up against Lucas’s Lexus, and Lucas called Cochran. Cochran came up and Lucas said, “We got Clay for you.”

  “What? How’d you do that?”

  “By accident, mostly.” He explained about Smackie’s.

  Cochran said, “All right. I’ll come down there myself and pick him up.”

  “Good. Because I hate to write reports,” Lucas said. “He’s your guy.”

  • • •

  LUCAS HAD BEEN BOTHERED by Clay’s reaction to the arrest. He told him, “You stand right there. If I’ve got to chase you down again, it won’t be any patty-cake slap on the neck like last time. You understand that?”

  Clay said, “Hey, man, you gotta listen to this. I never—”

  “Shut up,” Lucas said.

  He and Del moved off ten steps, and Lucas said, “If he killed Roman . . .”

  “I know,” Del said. “He’s been around. If he killed her, it should have been nothing but, ‘I wanna lawyer.’”

  “Maybe he’s stupid,” Lucas said, glancing at Clay.

  “He is stupid, but not that stupid,” Del said. “Doesn’t take that much firepower to remember ‘I wanna lawyer.’”

  “Yeah.” Lucas scratched his chin. “I’d like to ask him something . . . see his reaction.”

  “You give away too much, you’re going to piss off Turk.”

  “Little rain falls in everybody’s life,” Lucas said.

  Lucas ambled back to Clay and said, “You’re toast. We got the DNA. Why’d you do it? You get paid? Or was it because it looked easy?”

  “What’d I do?” Clay asked, and Lucas got the impression that he really was confused.

  “Gimme a break,” Lucas said. “You been around. You know what the deal is. You’re a smart guy—you killed that old lady and you took her purse and her other stuff. What’d you do with the gun?”

  Clay’s eyes had widened, and he shook his head. “What are you talking about, man? I never killed no old lady. What the fuck you talking about?”

  “Up on the north side? Middle of the night? This coming back to you, now? One shot, right in the heart? Did you think she was like, attacking you? That she had a gun?”

  “What? I never killed nobody. Nobody.” He looked from Lucas to Del and shook his head.

  “Where you living, James?” Del asked. “You living with your mom?”

  “I gotta place. Look, I’m doing all right. I got a part-time gig with this guy. . . . I didn’t kill nobody. I don’t got a gun.”

  Lucas pushed him, and Clay said he took messages around town for some guy, whose name he didn’t know. Translated, that meant that he was delivering dope; in any case, he had a job.

  “When we go up to your place, we’re going to find the other glove, won’t we?” Del asked.

  “Other glove? Hey . . . you got my glove?”

  “You’re missing one, right?” Del asked.

  “Yeah, I missing one. How’d you know that?”

  “A little birdie whispered it to me.”

  “Somebody took my glove. Or maybe I dropped it,” Clay protested. “I was wearing it up to Smackie’s. I was walking home, it gotten cold, I takes my gloves out, and I only got one. I say, ‘What’s this shit?’ I go back to Smackie’s, but there’s no glove, and nobody saw it. . . . You saying you found my glove?”

  “Yes. Under the old lady’s body,” Del said.

  “Man, you’re crazy. You’re fuckin’ insane, man.” He looked at the two of them, then said the magic words: “I wanna lawyer.”

  Del looked at Lucas and said, “Turk’s gonna be pissed.”

  • • •

  COCHRAN WASN’T COMPLETELY UPSET with the preemptive interrogation for the simple reason that he had the glove with the DNA, and a glove with DNA was about all a jury required. He and another cop picked up Clay, listened to Lucas’s unformed doubts, said “Thank you,” and headed off to the Hennepin County jail.

  “What’re you going to do?” Del asked.

  “Probably piss off Turk some more. I’m going to talk to Jamie Moore, see if he’ll get Clay to talk to me again.”

  When Turk was gone, Del started back to Smackie’s.

  “Where’re you going?” Lucas asked.

  “See if the bartender knows about that glove,” Del said.

  “Good.” Lucas went along.

  The bartender, however, didn’t know about the glove. “But I’m behind the bar. You have to ask Irma.”

  “The waitress?”

  “Yeah, the waitress.”

  “You got a phone number?” Del asked.

  He did, and they got it, and went outside to make the call.

&n
bsp; Irma was on a bus, on the way to work. Lucas put her on the cell-phone speaker, identified himself, and said, “We just arrested one of your customers, a guy named James Clay,” Lucas said.

  “I don’t know that name,” she said.

  “He’s a short guy with some scars on his face, tattoo around his neck, deals a little dope,” Lucas said.

  “Colored guy?”

  “Yeah. Got cornrows,” Lucas said.

  “Okay, yeah, I know who he is.”

  “He says the other night, he was in your place, and he lost a glove in there, and didn’t find out until after he left, but then he went back to look for it. You remember anything like that?”

  “Well, yeah. He asked me if I seen a glove on the floor, but I didn’t.”

  “Okay. How about this? Was there a guy in there, maybe five-ten, six-foot tall, sort of blond, blond mustache?”

  “Oh, yeah. All the time.”

  Lucas’s heart jumped. But: “All the time?”

  “Hey, this is Minneapolis. I see about thirty guys like that. All the time.”

  That wasn’t good. Irma said she’d be at work in forty-five minutes, and Lucas said he might stop by with a photograph.

  • • •

  ON THE WAY BACK to Lucas’s house, he told Del what he’d learned about Grant’s bodyguards, and explained why he hadn’t involved Del from the start: the danger of messing with politicians.

  “I appreciate the thought, but I can take care of myself,” Del grumped.

  “No, you can’t, not anymore,” Lucas said. “If I get fired, I’m okay. Even with this depression, or whatever you want to call it, I make more off my investments than I earn from the BCA. If you get fired, what’re you gonna do? Get a job as a bank guard? Stick up liquor stores? There aren’t a hell of a lot of openings for guys with your job description: ‘Hang around bars and bullshit people and sometimes arrest them.’”

  “It’s a little more complicated than that,” Del said.

  “Del . . .”

  “Yeah, yeah. You’re right,” Del said. “I’d probably wind up running a bar and hating it. Or be a repo man for somebody.”

  “Repo? You’d wind up hanging yourself off your kid’s swing set.”

  • • •

  SANDY, THE RESEARCHER, called as they were pulling into Lucas’s driveway: “I found a half-dozen men from Carver’s former unit. . . . One guy, down in Albuquerque, says he was with Ron Carver on the night he got in trouble. His name is Dale Rodriguez. He’s willing to talk about it.”

  Lucas looked at his watch: one o’clock in the afternoon. “Check on flights to Albuquerque, e-mail me when you find out when they are.”

  “For today?”

  “Yeah. And write up your notes on the Albuquerque guy, and e-mail those, too.”

  He rang off and punched up Flowers. “Where are you?”

  “Home.” Home was in Mankato, ninety miles south of the Twin Cities.

  “Start up this way. Bring gear for an overnight,” Lucas said. “You may be flying, but you won’t need a weapon.”

  “Where am I going?” Flowers asked.

  “Albuquerque, if we can get you a flight.”

  “You gonna brief me?”

  “If we have time. Otherwise, take your laptop and I’ll send you a long note when you’re in the air.”

  “You want me to hang around?” Del asked after Lucas rang off.

  “Unless you need to deal with that tree.”

  “The old lady’s got that covered,” Del said. “Tell you what: print out a picture of this Dannon and Carver, and I’ll run them up and show Irma.”

  • • •

  LUCAS DID THAT.

  Del left, and Lucas checked his e-mail, found the airline schedule from Sandy, and called Flowers. “There’s a four-twenty flight. Can you make that?”

  “Yes. I took my grab-bag and I’m on my way,” Flowers said. “Probably won’t have time to swing by your place, though.”

  “That’s okay. It’s an interview with a friendly,” Lucas said. “Be good if you could do it tonight. I’ll try to set it up.”

  He called Sandy: “Do you have phone numbers for the Albuquerque guy, this Rodriguez guy?”

  “Yes, I do. When I talked to him, he said he was going off to class at a tech school there. He said he’d be back late in the afternoon. They’re an hour earlier than us.”

  “Good. We’re gonna need a ticket for Flowers on the four-twenty. Tell Cheryl to fix that, will you?”

  “Okay, and I’m sending my notes on Rodriguez . . . now.”

  Lucas rang off and three seconds later, his e-mail pinged at him, and Sandy’s file came in. It was short: name, address, cell-phone number. She’d asked Rodriguez about Carver and he’d wanted to know why, and she’d said that there was a murder investigation going on, and that Carver was a “person of interest.” Rodriguez said that Carver “oughta be in jail,” and when Sandy asked why, Rodriguez said he’d shot some people in Afghanistan and shouldn’t have. Sandy had said that might be relevant, and asked Rodriguez if he’d talk to an investigator. He’d said he would. Sandy noted, “He didn’t seem all that reluctant. He sounded angry.”

  Which was all good, in Lucas’s view. The army had buried the file, and Carver might have felt safe, but if Lucas threatened to revive it, he might be able to drive a wedge between Carver and Dannon.

  • • •

  HE CALLED JAMIE MOORE, the public defender, and said, “You’re gonna get a client named James Clay, who is being checked into the Hennepin County jail about now. Turk Cochran’s got him on a murder charge.”

  “That’s profoundly interesting,” Moore said in a dead voice.

  “I need to talk to him,” Lucas said. “Off the record.”

  “What’s in it for him?” Moore asked.

  “They got him on that Helen Roman killing, Porter Smalls’s secretary. I don’t think he did it. I want him to detail where he was when the murder happened, and then I’m going to backtrack him, see if his story holds up.”

  “What does Turk have on him?”

  “Cold hit on DNA. Found a glove under the victim’s body,” Lucas said. “Pretty conveniently under the victim’s body. But unless James gets a break, he’s done. You know what it’s like to argue with DNA.”

  “Let me check around,” Moore said. “Unless you’re telling me a big fat one, I’ll get Dan to go over there and sit in with you.”

  “Aw, not Dan, for Christ’s sakes, I hate that little snake,” Lucas said.

  “Really? All right, let me look around. . . . I got Nancy Bennett. How about Nancy?”

  “She’s fine. Also a snake, but a much better-looking one.”

  “Give her an hour. She’ll have to do a little pre-interview, find out what’s what.”

  “He’s already asked for an attorney.”

  “Give us an hour.”

  Lucas spent forty-five minutes writing a long memo to Flowers, who’d get it either in the airport lounge or in the air. He sent along Sandy’s memo on Rodriguez, and asked Flowers to get anything on the type and level of violence in which Carver had been involved, and what had happened on the last mission. He wanted details.

  Forty minutes after he’d called the public defender, Moore called back and said, “Nancy’s at the jail. She’ll wait for you.”

  Del called: “Irma says she doesn’t know if they were in there. She doesn’t think Carver, she’s not sure about Dannon, because she says there’s a lot of guys who look like him. In fact, there’s one sitting here right now.”

  “Okay. It was worth the try. Listen. Meet me at the Hennepin jail.”

  • • •

  BENNETT AND CLAY were waiting in an interview room when Lucas and Del walked in. Bennett was a tall, thin, dark-haired woman wearing a jacket-and-pants combination that wouldn’t show dirt. Clay saw Lucas and said, “This is the sucker who hit me.”

  “Is that right?” Bennett asked.

  “Yeah. He was running. I used
just enough violence to restrain him,” Lucas said. “He got an owie on his wrist.”

  “Coulda got hurt,” Clay said.

  Bennett ignored that and said to Lucas, “I don’t want to hear any bullshit about who did what to whom. Listen to what he has to say and take off. I got other things to do.”

  “We’ll listen, anyway,” Lucas said.

  She nodded at Lucas, then said to Del, “Those look like last month’s jeans, Del. You forget to change on the first?”

  Del said, “Don’t be a twit.”

  “A what?”

  “A twit.”

  She showed a sliver of a smile. “Well played.”

  • • •

  CLAY, ACCORDING TO CLAY, had spent Saturday evening, from around eight o’clock until the next morning, at a recreational facility called Joan What’s-Her-Name’s, and Del asked, “The red house?”

  “That’s it.”

  “How many people were there?”

  “You know . . . coming and going,” Clay said.

  “How many were staying?”

  “The usual ones. The one called Mike, and Larry. Larry was there, lost his shoes somewhere, spent the whole time walking around in his socks. Chuck. This really, really white guy named Joe. He was so white it hurt my eyes to look at him. . . . A guy named Dave went through, he was a white guy, too, another guy named Bill was passed out on the couch the whole time. A couple of chicks . . .”

  They were playing cards, he said. They tried to get the chicks to play strip poker. “She strips and then you poke her, heh-heh.”

  Nobody else laughed, so he shrugged and said, “They didn’t play, they just wanted to, you know, get high.”

  He’d been there all night, he said. He’d gotten high with what he brought with him, because he didn’t have any money, and then went to sleep on the floor in a back room. There was somebody else in there with him, but he didn’t know who. “All I know is, I was sleeping under a window with a crack at the bottom and when I got up in the morning, I was freezing and it felt like my bones was breaking.”

  Larry was still there when he woke up, still high; Bill was still passed out, and might have been dead. Somebody should check. Chuck was lifting a weight in the kitchen: it was a dumbbell, and there was only one, so he was changing hands with it, and was drinking Campbell’s Tomato Soup straight out of the can.