John Sandford - Silken Prey

“I will. But it’s an odd thing to tell a cop you don’t know,” Lucas said, not quite trusting her. “What if I was working for Smalls?”

“I still have friends with the Secret Service,” she said. “I had them look you up. I know as much about you as Weather does.”

“Well, maybe not,” Lucas said, picking up on Green’s use of his wife’s first name.

“Anyway, you’re not working for Smalls,” Green said. Longer applause in the background. “I gotta go.”

“One more question,” Lucas said. “I saw a lot of cameras out there, which must go to what, a hard drive? Or the cloud?”

Long wait, and then Green said, “Oh, God.”

“What?”

Another long wait, then Green said, “I wish you hadn’t asked that. I wouldn’t have called you at all, but . . . Ah, damn. I work in the monitoring room, sometimes. There used to be a monthlong video-record sent out to the cloud. I noticed this morning that the wipe time has been reduced to forty-eight hours.”

“Forty-eight hours. Why?”

“I don’t know. There’s no reason to, and it worries me. The cameras only record when they pick up motion, so it’s not that much, and a hundred bucks a month would mean nothing to Ms. Grant. But somebody reduced the wipe time to forty-eight hours, and I was thinking, you know . . . if you were worried that somebody might get the archived recording with a search warrant, and if there was something on it that you didn’t want anybody to see . . . I mean, the change was made on Monday—about forty-eight hours after Tubbs disappeared.”

Lucas said, “You’ve got a suspicious mind, Alice.”

“Developed by government experts,” she said. “I gotta go. Right now. Good-bye.”

CHAPTER 13

On the way out the door, Lucas stopped at the BCA men’s room, where he found Jenkins, shirtless and shaving. He went to a urinal and over his shoulder asked, “What? You lost all your money gambling and now you’re homeless?”

“Got a date,” Jenkins said. “She likes it when my cheeks are smooth like a baby’s butt.”

“So she doesn’t get beard burn on her thighs?”

“That’s disgusting, but given a person of your ilk, I’m not surprised,” Jenkins said.

Lucas finished up at the urinal and walked over to wash his hands and said, “Say you’ve got a hot, rich politician running for office, but she’s losing, then her opponent is hit with a scandal involving child porn on his computers, then the guy you think put it there suddenly disappears and the politician turns out to have armed security people, including a couple of guys with thick necks who were in special operations in the army. What we unsophisticates call ‘trained killers.’ What do you think?”

Jenkins paused, half of his face covered with shaving cream, the other half bare and shaven; he asked, “You got that much for sure?”

“I’m being told all that,” Lucas said.

“Have you hooked Tubbs to Grant?”

“Not yet . . . but Tubbs was probably involved in dirty tricks, and she needed one, bad. And he had a whole bunch of money, cash, in a hideout spot.”

“You steal any of it?” Jenkins asked.

“No, no, I didn’t.”

“Huh,” Jenkins said. “Little cold cash is always useful.”

“But that would be illegal,” Lucas said.

“Oh, yeah, I forgot,” Jenkins said. “Listen, we told you, you gotta be careful. Now you gotta be more careful. If Tubbs was found dead with a gunshot wound or his head bashed in, that’s one thing. The killer could have been anybody. But if he disappears with no sign . . . then whoever disappeared him knew what he was doing, and that’s another thing entirely. You don’t find that kind of guy standing around on a street corner—a killer who knows how to organize it, and carries it out clean.”

“My very thought.”

Jenkins took another thoughtful scrape through the shaving cream, rinsed the blade, then asked, “Would winning the election be worth the risk of murdering somebody? Of getting involved in a conspiracy to murder somebody?”

“That’s the problem,” Lucas said. “I don’t think any rational person would, and Grant seems pretty rational. Either that, or she’s crazier than a shithouse mouse. I talked to her today, pushed her a bit, and she pushed back. Never showed a wrinkle of worry, which means she’s either innocent or nuts.”

“Go for innocent: it cuts down the number of problems,” Jenkins said.

“Another thing: I’m told one of these special forces guys is in love with her . . . which creates the question, exactly what would he do to see her win? Would he even tell her what he was planning to do?”

“Remember that guy who went around robbing those ladies’ spa places?” Jenkins asked. “You know, manicure stores? Couple years ago?”

“Yeah, but I can’t remember why he did it.”

“He did it because he figured that there wouldn’t be many guys around to deal with. No macho problems. It’d just be a bunch of women, and the places were almost all cash. He was getting a couple thousand bucks a week, paying no taxes, taking it easy,” Jenkins said. “Anyway, he was ex–special forces. I tried to get his military records, and couldn’t. Never did. We didn’t need them, as it turned out, because one of the places he hit made some great movies of him . . . but the point is, I couldn’t get the records. That’s gonna be a problem, if these guys are really ex-army. Especially if they’re former special ops.”

“Maybe I won’t need them,” Lucas said.

“Oh . . . I think you probably will. There’s nothing harder to break, IMHO”—he actually said the letters, I-M-H-O—“than a murder done by a guy who’s well organized, doesn’t feel much guilt, and you can’t find the body. I’ve had two of those, and I’m batting five hundred. The one guy I got, it was luck. This is probably gonna be tougher. So you will need all the background you can get on them. . . . Grant wouldn’t hire stupid people.”

“I knew that talking to you would cheer me up,” Lucas said.

“Yeah, well . . .”

Jenkins went back to shaving, and though it was late, Lucas headed back to his office. He wasn’t exactly inspired by Jenkins, but he could make a couple of quick checks.

• • •

HE FOUND EMPLOYMENT RECORDS for Carver and Dannon in the quarterly tax reports filed by Grant with the state, which gave him their full names and addresses—they both lived in the same town house complex off I-494 west of the Cities. They didn’t show up in the property tax records, so they were probably renting. He couldn’t get directly at the income tax records, though he had a friend who could; but he hesitated to use her when he didn’t have to, and he didn’t really need to know how much they made. The DMV gave him their birth dates, which was what he really needed.

With that, he went out to the National Crime Information Center. Carver had once been arrested, at age eighteen, for fighting, apparently while he was still in high school. The charges had been dismissed without prosecution. Dannon came up clean.

There was almost nothing else, on either of them. Jenkins had been right: he’d need the army records. He picked up the phone and called Kidd.

“I already owe you for the help with the porn and the Minneapolis connection . . . but I’ve spotted a couple of guys who I’m interested in, and I can’t find anything about them in the records that I can get at. Could you get military records?”

After a moment, Kidd said, “I hate to mess with the feds.”

“I can understand that,” Lucas said. “The thing is . . . these two guys are ex–special operations, apparently, and would have the skills to take out somebody like Tubbs. What I’d like to know is, did they have a record of killing in the military? Did they have a criminal history there? Did they get honorable discharges? I’ve got no way of getting that.”