John Sandford - Silken Prey

Green had lingered in the doorway, listening, and one of the dogs moved up to Lucas and put its head on his knees, looking straight in at his groin. Lucas said, “Ms. Grant, you wanna move the dog?”

“Make you nervous?”

“Makes me angry,” Lucas said. “If this dog bites me, I shoot it. Then I shoot the other one if I have to, then I throw you on the floor, cuff you, and drag your ass down to the Hennepin County jail and charge you with aggravated assault on a police officer. Then you will go to jail.”

“Gretel won’t bite unless I tell her to,” Grant said. But she said to the dog, “Gretel, back,” and the dog eased away from Lucas.

Green said, “Ms. Grant, I’ll be in the nook.”

“Thanks, Alice,” Grant said, and to Lucas, “I don’t like you, and I suspect you don’t like me, but try to be fair. Don’t stick yourself into this campaign. Don’t sabotage me.”

“I’m not trying—”

“Whether you’re trying or not, that’s the effect,” Grant said. “Wait a week or ten days, let the election take place, then do your worst. But give me a chance. I’ve worked very hard for it.”

“So has Senator Smalls.”

“Smalls should be okay, after Rose Marie Roux’s press conference. I’m the one who has the problem now,” Grant said. “And listen: even I think it’s possible that you’re right, to some extent. It’s possible that somebody who was trying to help me—this Tubbs person—might have put the porn on Smalls’s computer. But I know nothing about that. There are dozens of people working in campaigns, all kinds of people who don’t like Smalls, and some of those people are a little nuts. So it’s possible that somebody went after him, but it’s just as likely that they were trying to hurt him, as trying to help me. A lot of union people hate him—especially public employee union people—and the pro-choice people go crazy when they talk about him. Look at them!” She tightened up a fist and smacked it into her thigh, and said it again. “Look at them!”

“We’ll look everywhere,” Lucas said. “So let me go through this. You didn’t know Tubbs, and though you may have shaken hands, or had some slight contact with him, you’ve never had any kind of substantive talk with him.”

“No, I haven’t. And let me ask you this—how do you know that Tubbs didn’t put the porn on the computer, and then take off? How do you know that he hasn’t deliberately put himself out of reach?” she asked. “Win or lose, after the election’s over, nobody’s going to care much about the porn.”

Lucas said, “It’s not just that he’s gone, it’s that he left a lot of cash behind, and he also isn’t using his credit cards,” Lucas said. “He hasn’t used them once since he was last seen on Friday night, and he uses them all the time.”

“But you don’t know ,” she insisted.

“No, I don’t.”

“Then don’t fuck with me on the basis of guesswork,” Grant said. “At least, not until the election is done.”

Lucas stared at her for a moment, and she didn’t flinch. He asked, “What about your campaign manager? Did she know Tubbs? Who, in your campaign, is in charge of dirty tricks?”

“There are no dirty tricks in this campaign, for the simple reason that anything you can accuse Smalls of doing, he’s already admitted. Has he been unfaithful to his wife? Yes. He’s talked about it on TV. Made a lot of money as an attorney, screwing over widows? Yes, he’s talked about that on TV. What kind of dirty trick would work with him?”

“Well, child porn,” Lucas said.

“That’s absurd,” Grant said. “If anybody even hinted at something like that, I’d not only fire him, I’d do everything I could to destroy him.”

“I need to talk to your campaign manager,” Lucas said.

“I will give you her number, and you can ask her yourself,” Grant said. “She wanted to be here today, but I made her go away. I didn’t want her . . . using this discussion in some way . . . in the campaign.”

Felt like a threat, smelled like a threat, Lucas thought. “Like how?”

“I don’t know, but I don’t know you, and neither does Connie, and she might have asked a little more about your background to see exactly why . . . you’re here.”

“I think I’ve made that clear,” Lucas said.

She leaned back on the couch. “Well, you have. But in my position, which is very delicate right now, Connie would say that we couldn’t ignore the possibility that you’re lying. She’d want some research.”

Lucas asked, “How many armed security people do you have? Is Alice Green the only one?”

He saw a quick flash of uncertainty in her eyes, which vanished as quickly as it came; and quite possibly was a trick of his imagination. She said, “Year-round, there are three, working various hours. During the campaign there are eight, because they have to travel with me. This house is extensively wired for security. There are two safe rooms, I can get to them in a few seconds from anywhere in the house, and, of course, Hansel and Gretel are full-time. They’re here overnight. If I put them on guard, they stop being dogs and start being leopards.”

“Okay,” Lucas said. He thought for a moment, and then stood up. “I’m done. I apologize if I upset you, but this is a very serious matter.”

She waved a hand at him and said, “Just be fair.”

• • •

THE DOGS TOOK HIM through the door to the living room, where Green was sitting with a magazine that she wasn’t reading.

“I’ll show you the door,” Green said.

On the way, Lucas said, “Chicken.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You didn’t want to hear that,” Lucas said.

“I’m not paid to hear that,” Green said. She hesitated, then said, “Do you have a card?”

Lucas gave her a card, taking a second to scribble his cell phone number on the back. “Call anytime,” he said.

“Give me an hour,” she said.

• • •

ON THE WAY OUT to the highway, Lucas thought about Grant’s behavior, and came to a conclusion: she was either totally innocent, or totally nuts. A normal person, guilty, could never have pulled off that performance. But he’d known a number of crazies who could have. . . .

Green called an hour and a half later. Lucas had gone back to the office, having already missed dinner, to check messages and track his agents on their regular assignments. He was most interested in the Ape Man Rapist of Rochester, who was attacking women as often as twice a week, but Flowers reported no progress. Lucas had just turned off his office lights when Green called. He answered: “Yes? Alice?”

Green said, “I don’t know where Ms. Grant stands on all of this, but I need to talk to you. We need to keep this private.”

“Is she there now?” Lucas asked.

“She’s up on a stage. I’m at the back of the room . . . keeping an eye out.” Lucas could hear a voice in the background, and then a rumbling sound: applause line, he thought.

Green continued: “I wanted to tell you, she works harder than anyone I’ve ever met. I find her admirable, if a little chilly. But I don’t want to have anything to do with any possible crime, and one of the other security men here . . . his name is Ronald Carver, conventional spelling . . . is pretty rough. I suspect that if you put enough money in front of him, he’d kill somebody for you, and do a thorough job of it. This man Tubbs, the man who disappeared? I’m not saying it’s Carver, but if you needed that done, if you needed Tubbs to go away, you’d try to find somebody just like Carver.”

“What’s his background?” Lucas asked.

“Ex-military special operations of some kind. A master sergeant, which is up there. The head of security, Doug Dannon, is the same kind, ex-military, but much more restrained. His problem is, he’s in love with Taryn, so . . . I don’t know what he’d do for her. But whatever has been done, I don’t know about it, and didn’t have anything to do with it. I’m not going to spy on Ms. Grant for you, but I wanted to say this. I hope you keep it under your hat.”