John Sandford - Silken Prey

Because now, she was winning the election, up three points and climbing.

• • •

SHE HIT THE COUNTER at the end of the pool, and a big red LED “40” popped up. Forty laps, a thousand yards, a little more than half a mile.

She climbed out of the pool, and Alice, who’d been watching the counter, was waiting with a towel.

“You’d have been a good agent,” Alice said. “Smart, terrific condition.”

“Thank you,” Taryn said. “I’m not sure I could handle the guns. I don’t like guns.”

“We had a saying in the service,” Alice said. “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. Guns just make it really, really easy.”

“Too easy, if you ask me,” Taryn said. “When I get to the Senate, I’ll try to do something about that. I always feel bad when I read about people being killed. It’s usually so senseless. You know, ‘The bell tolls for thee,’ or whatever.”

CHAPTER 5

When Lucas woke Monday morning, the first thing he did was check the window: blue sky. Excellent. Another good day. People had been talking about bad weather coming in, but he didn’t know when it was supposed to arrive.

And, thank God, they were through the weekend. Working on a Sunday was a pain in the ass, with everybody gone. Today, there’d be a lot going on: no more matinee movies.

He’d start with the volunteer who found the porn, he thought as he got dressed. He picked out a medium-blue wool suit that he’d thought would look awful at the time the salesman suggested it, but that had become one of his cool-weather favorites. He tried several ties, finally choosing a red-and-blue check with a turquoise thread in it, which went nicely with his eyes. Black lace-up shoes from Cleverley of London, for which he’d been measured during a European trip two years earlier, finished the ensemble.

The volunteer’s family, the Hunts, lived in Edina, an affluent Minneapolis suburb. Lucas took the Porsche, because it would feel at home there. He took ten minutes driving across town, and after a few minutes of confusion caused by the Porsche’s outdated navigation system, found the Hunts’ home: another sprawling brick ranch, at the end of a woody cul-de-sac.

• • •

BRITTANY HUNT MET LUCAS at the door, her mother a step behind. Lucas was amazed: they looked almost exactly alike, and that was like Doris Day in 1960. Lucas hadn’t yet been born in 1960 to get the full Doris Day effect, but he’d seen her often enough on late-night television. . . .

“I’m Brittany,” Brittany said, offering her hand in a firm shake. “I’m the one who outed him.”

“I’m her mother, Tammy,” her mother said. “Friends call me Tam.” She had perfect white teeth and sparkled at Lucas, and she smelled of Chanel on a Monday morning at home.

They led the way inside and a sliding door banged shut in the back. A man in an open-necked white shirt and khakis padded through the living room and thrust out his hand and said, “Jeff Hunt.”

They wound up seated on a semicircular couch in a conversation pit in front of a flagstone fireplace. Lucas said, “So tell me what happened.”

Brittany told him, and it was exactly what she’d told the St. Paul cops. When she finished—she’d stood by the computer until the cops got there—Lucas turned to Jeff and said, “You called the cops right away?”

“Instantly,” he said. “First of all, you can’t let people get away with this kind of stuff. Second of all, I was worried about Brit. What if he’d come back and found her standing there, with that stuff on the screen? I mean, this is the end of everything for him. What if he’d gotten violent?”

“I don’t understand why they haven’t arrested him yet,” Tam said. “He’s such a monster. I mean, children.”

“There are some questions,” Lucas said. “But unless something changes, it looks like the Hennepin County attorney is planning to take it to the grand jury next week, unless the attorney general takes it away.”

“The AG is gonna run for governor, and he’d love to bag Smalls, so I bet he takes it,” Jeff said. Jeff was yet another attorney. “If he does, it’ll go to a grand jury for sure. If he loses the case, he can blame the grand jury for the indictment. If he wins, who cares about the grand jury?”

Lucas said, “Well . . .”

• • •

THEN BRITTANY CHANGED EVERYTHING.

“What a weird summer,” she said. “Child porn on Porter’s computer and then Bob Tubbs vanishes.”

Lucas looked at her for a moment, then said, “Bob Tubbs? What did Bob Tubbs have to do with this?”

“Well, nothing,” she said. “But, you know, he was around. You ever met him? Big tall blond guy? He used to call me chica , like the Mexicans do.”

“He worked for Smalls?” Lucas asked.

She shook her head. “I don’t know the details, exactly, but he was a lobbyist for the Minnesota Apiary Association.”

“You mean, archery?” Jeff asked.

“No, apiary , Daddy. You know, honey bees. There was some kind of licensing thing going on,” Brittany said. “The state was going to put on a fee, and some of the bee guys said they wouldn’t bring their hives into Minnesota if that happened, and Tubbs thought that the bees were interstate commerce and so only the feds were allowed to regulate it. Or something like that. I don’t know. I wasn’t interested enough to follow it. But Bob was around.”

“What about Bob?” Tam asked Lucas.

Lucas said, “He’s one of our local political operators. He disappeared . . . what, it must have been Friday night?”

“Same day the porn file popped up,” Jeff said.

“I’m not sure that’s right, though,” Lucas said. “I just heard about it from a St. Paul cop. Tubbs’s mother claims he’s been kidnapped. A couple people have said he might be on a bender somewhere. He did that once before—vanished, and turned up a week later in Cancún, dead drunk in a hotel room. But, I guess he hasn’t been using his credit cards, doesn’t answer his cell phone, his passport was in his desk, and his car is sitting in his parking garage.”

“Boy, that doesn’t sound good,” Jeff said.

Lucas looked at Brittany. “How’d you even know about him?”

“It was in the paper,” she said. “This morning. People are looking all over for him.”

Tam’s hand went to her throat: “You think . . . dead?”

“Don’t know,” Lucas said. “My agency isn’t involved. It’s just, you know, what I hear.”

• • •

WHEN LUCAS LEFT, ten minutes later, Brit, Tam, and Jeff came out on the porch to wave good-bye. He waved, and sped back to St. Paul.

As Lucas was on the way to his office, ICE called and told him that she had the copy of Smalls’s hard drive. “Got everything, gonna take you six months to read it. There’s about a million e-mails. And old albums. He’s got every Bowie album ever made.”

“Let’s try not to judge,” Lucas said. “Anyway, I’m not going home, I’m coming there. Wait for me.”

When Lucas got to the St. Paul police parking lot, he found her waiting in a black six-series BMW convertible. She handed Lucas a hard drive about the size of a paperback and said, “Who do I bill?”

“Send it to me personally,” Lucas said. “I’ll get it back later. Anything happen out of the ordinary?”

“Purely routine,” she said. “Tell Kidd that it was Windows 7 . . . not that he won’t know.”

She didn’t ask if she could come along, to visit with Kidd.

• • •

WHEN SHE WAS GONE, Lucas went inside, badged his way back to the homicide unit, and found Roger Morris peering at a brown paper bag with a small grease stain at one end.

“Is that a clue?” Lucas asked.