John Sandford - Silken Prey

Taryn looked at him: “How much appreciation?”

Carver shrugged and said, “Whatever you think.”

She touched her lip, half turned away, considering: even rich people hate to give away money. Then she turned back and said, “A hundred thousand each. All cash. As soon as it’s done.”

Carver said, “Hooah!”

Dannon was less enthusiastic: “We’ll need to do some recon. We’ll need to fix it so that we’ve got alibis.”

“You know about those things,” Taryn said. “I’m out of it. If you get caught, I’ll say I had no idea.”

The two men nodded. Dannon said, “If we get caught, there’s no reason to drag you into it. You could help us more from the outside, than if you were inside with us.”

“I hope that’s clear,” she said, looking at Carver.

He said, “Clear.”

“Then kill him,” she said.

• • •

DANNON AND CARVER HAD buried Tubbs north of the Cities, in a marsh along the Mississippi. Taryn had helped: they’d put Tubbs’s body in the back of Carver’s SUV, and drove to the town house complex where both men were living. They parked in back, and Carver called Dannon, and then Dannon called Taryn, and a few minutes later, Taryn called Dannon back. They then went on to bury the body, while Taryn drove to their apartments and sent e-mails to herself and to a friend of Carver’s, from their laptops in their respective apartments. All of that could be time-checked, if it ever came to that.

Then . . . nothing much had happened until the St. Paul papers reported that the police were looking for Tubbs, and feared foul play. And now the report that a new investigator was on the job.

When Dannon broke that news—that the new guy, Davenport, was a killer—she said, “Ah, God,” and “Let’s talk later. I need to go for a swim, and Alice’ll be here in a minute. Let’s talk tonight.”

“I’m not sure we should talk later,” Dannon said. “I think we ought to stop talking about it and focus on our ignorance. We don’t know what happened with the porn, we don’t know what happened with Tubbs, we don’t know anything. If you can convince yourself of that, that you don’t know anything . . . it’ll be much easier to sell it to the cops.”

“Focus on our ignorance.” She didn’t quite grasp the concept. She’d never been ignorant.

“Yeah. Just rewind back before we talked to Tubbs and think what your head was like,” Dannon said. “Then think about the newspaper stories and think about your reaction to them. What you would have thought about them, if you didn’t know what really happened. Then, when the cops come, if they come, you’re confused about it all. A little scared. You ask questions, you suggest answers, you’re all over the place. But basically, ignorant. Just delete Tubbs from your mind. You don’t know him. You never knew him.”

“I’ll have to think about it, but I can do that,” Taryn said.

“Of course you can,” Dannon said. “But don’t think about ways to trick them or outsmart them. Just focus on your ignorance. You don’t know anything, but you’re willing to speculate, and you’d like some information from them—to hear what they think.”

“What about you and Carver?”

“We can handle it,” Dannon said. “We’ve spent half our lives lying to cops, of one kind or another. Nobody else on the staff knows. Might not be a bad idea for us to stay away completely . . . unless they ask for us.”

“Let’s do that,” Taryn said. “Maybe you two could start doing some advance security work.”

“I’ll talk to Ron,” Dannon said. He heard high heels, and said, “Here comes Alice.”

• • •

TWENTY MINUTES LATER, TARYN was sitting on the edge of the pool, wearing a conservative one-piece bathing suit. Alice Green, a lithe, handsome woman in her late thirties, relaxed in a chaise, reading the Star Tribune , while the dogs sat at her feet. The dogs were the world’s most efficient burglar alarm. If anyone tried to enter the pool area, the dogs would be looking at them. If Taryn told them to attack, they’d tear that person apart, no questions asked.

Taryn slipped into the water, shivered, and started swimming laps. The exercise blanked her mind for the first two hundred yards, but after she got into the rhythm of it, she began reliving Tubbs’s visit, and what happened next: not to obsess about it, but to cultivate her ignorance, as Dannon called it.

The two men had been gone for four hours, altogether, and when they’d come back, muddy and tired, they told a sleepless Taryn that they’d gone way up the Mississippi toward St. Cloud, found a fisherman’s track that led to the river, and carried the body well off the track and buried it deep.

“Just about killed ourselves out there in the dark,” Carver said. “He’s gone. Put a few concrete blocks on top of him, just in case.”

“In case of what ?” Taryn asked, fascinated in spite of herself.

“Well . . . body gases,” Carver said. “The ground was a little wet, you wouldn’t want him popping up.”

A few miles back toward the Twin Cities, they’d detoured down a side road, and threw Carver’s carefully cleaned baseball bat into the roadside ditch. “Couldn’t find it again ourselves, even if we had to,” Dannon said, as they drove away in the dark.

• • •

TARYN KEPT SWIMMING, TWENTY laps, thirty, touching the lap counter at the west end of the pool after every second turn.

She had to think seriously about Carver and Dannon. Dannon was well under control—he’d been her security man for four years, and for all four years had hungered for her. Not just for sex. He was in love with her. That was useful. Carver was cruder. He didn’t want her total being, he just wanted to fuck her. If she wasn’t available, somebody else would do. So her grip on him was more precarious.

And the problem with Carver was, he was more of an adventurer than Dannon.

Dannon was happy to handle her security, and was good at it. He read about it, he knew about alarms and randomizing patrols and evasive driving, and all the rest. He took courses. She’d had a lover, a semi-dumb guy as anxious to get into her money as into her pants, and when she was done with him, he wouldn’t go away. Dannon had talked to him, and the guy had moved to Des Moines. No muss, no fuss.

On the night Tubbs was killed, Taryn had given each of the men a hundred thousand dollars in cash and gold, as a “thank you.”

Dannon had carefully stashed his in a safe-deposit box. Carver, on the other hand, had asked for a day off. “The money just burns a hole in my pocket,” he confessed. “I’d like to hop a plane for Vegas, if you don’t mind.”

That had been a Friday night. He’d left Saturday morning and had gotten back Sunday night, most of the money gone. Dannon said later he’d blown it on hookers, cocaine, and craps and felt that he’d gotten his money’s worth.

So Carver sought risk, while Dannon tried to minimize risk. That made Carver a loose cannon, and given her involvement, she didn’t need any cannons to be loose.

She thought for a few minutes about what would happen if, for example, Carver tried to squeeze her for money, as Tubbs had. He might suspect that Dannon would come after him, because Dannon was in love with her. But would that frighten him? Could Dannon take him? And if it got all bloody, and somebody tried to make a deal with the police, to trade her in . . . what would happen?

She had to think about it. Was Dannon loyal enough to take out Carver if she asked him to? Was Carver smart enough to set up a booby trap that would snap on them, if they took him out? Might he already have done so?

But thinking about it was hard. Ever since Tubbs had gone away, she’d had trouble tracking. But she had to track.