John Sandford - Silken Prey

She hadn’t asked for a lawyer. This was delicate: Lucas didn’t want to talk about illegalities. Instead, he said, “Bob’s mother is worried sick about him, but we don’t know whether he’s just lying low, or if he’s been . . . killed. We’re afraid that he has been. If he’s still around, we desperately need to know that.”

“I . . . I . . . I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, I’m worried, too. He was the guy I was supposed to talk to, if I found anything out. Then he just stopped answering his phone. I was calling him every night, and then . . . he was gone.”

She’d just admitted being a spy. “Do you know where he got the pornography?” Jenkins asked. “Did he get it from a police officer?”

“The pornography . . . He didn’t have anything to do with that,” she said. “That’s crazy. He didn’t do dirty tricks.”

“We know you’re a little new with this political campaign stuff,” Lucas said. “But I’m here to tell you, Bob was involved in a few tricks in the past. And you’re sort of a dirty trick, spying on the Smalls campaign.”

“Everybody does it,” she said. “Everybody. Smalls has a spy in the Grant camp, too. Just ask him. Ask him under oath.”

“Okay,” Lucas said. Smalls had already as much as admitted that.

He looked at Jenkins, who was the asshole. Jenkins said, “I dunno. I doubt that everybody does it. Gotta be some kind of a crime. And she’s not all that new with this stuff—she’s worked those out-state campaigns.”

“It is not a crime,” she said, showing a little streak of anger. “It’s not illegal. I wouldn’t do anything illegal.”

“We know that you were close to Bob,” Lucas said. “We know that Bob needed somebody to help set the computer so the pornography would pop up—”

“I had nothing to do with that!” she said, her voice rising. “I would never do something that dirty. That’s rotten. That porn . . . that belongs to Smalls. Everybody knows about his attitude toward women, and sex . . .”

“Come on,” Jenkins said, the scorn rough in his voice.

“I didn’t . . .”

They pushed her for another five minutes, and she claimed that she worked afternoons and nights, and hadn’t been around when the trap must’ve been set. They pushed on that, and she eventually admitted that she thought that Tubbs had been in the office at night, two days before the trap popped. They pushed on that, and finally she said the magic words.

“Look,” she said. “I want a lawyer. Right fuckin’ now.”

Jenkins looked at Lucas and lifted his eyebrows. Arrest her? Lucas shook his head; he wasn’t ready for that. He said, “We’ll want to talk to you again. Do not go away. Do not try to avoid us. I’m tempted to arrest you, and put you in jail overnight, but I’m hoping that you understand that we need to know what happened, more than we need to haul in the small fish. You’re a small fish. Do you understand that?”

She nodded, and said, “Lawyer.”

Lucas offered to provide one, a public defender, but she said she’d get her own. “Are we done?”

“Yes. But don’t run—”

“I’m not going to run, but I want you to take me out of the office,” she said. She looked out through the glass window on Smalls’s office door. “They’re gonna be a little pissed at me.”

“That’s the least of your problems,” Lucas said. “Come on. We’ll take you out.”

• • •

SHE WAS RIGHT: when they walked out of the room, the other volunteers started hissing, and somebody called, “Put her ass in jail.” At the door, Knoedler flashed a finger over her shoulder, and Jenkins laughed and said, “That’s really classy, sweetheart.”

They saw her into her car, and as she backed out of the parking space, Lucas asked Jenkins, “What do you think?”

Jenkins shrugged and said, “Don’t think she knew about the porn. But I wouldn’t be surprised if she let Tubbs into the office, late one night, after everybody else had gone home.”

Lucas nodded. “Maybe. Which would make her a part of it. The thing is, the DFLers swear that they didn’t put her on Smalls, and I believe them because if they did, too many people would have to know about it. I’d find out, and they know that. So, they’re telling the truth. It had to be Tubbs, working alone, or Tubbs working for Grant. We need to keep going back to her, if nothing else breaks.”

“Maybe give Knoedler limited immunity,” Jenkins said.

“Don’t want to give her immunity, if she set the trap,” Lucas said.

Jenkins shook his head: “I gotta tell you: I kinda believed her about that. She got pretty hot about it and that looked real. Besides, she knows we can check.”

Lucas rubbed his nose and looked after her taillights, two blocks down the street. “Yeah. It did look kinda real,” he said. “Goddamnit.”

• • •

HE CHECKED ANYWAY, and Roman, the secretary, said that Knoedler hadn’t been scheduled to work, because even the volunteers were limited to eight hours a day. “But people, you know, are enthusiastic, and they come and go all the time. She could have been here, and I doubt that anyone would have thought it unusual, or even noticed.”

CHAPTER 14

Lauren had put together a munchie plate and Kidd was munching on the last of the celery with pimento cheese as he bypassed the privacy option on Taryn Grant’s bedroom security camera.

The camera was inactive, which meant nobody had walked through the bedroom in the past thirty seconds.

He was working off a laptop that was, technically, operating out of a Wi-Fi system in the federal courthouse, which was just up the street. He’d taken the precaution of building a repeater into the building several years earlier.

With nothing moving on the screen, he wandered away from the laptop to look at a landscape he was working on, a view of the Mississippi a few miles above the Coon Rapids Dam. The color of the autumn leaves and the dark river was all accurate enough, he thought, but didn’t work for the painting: and accurate color was not a driving aspect of his work.

He pulled on a paint-spattered apron, selected a handful of tubes of oil paint, squeezed some paint onto a glass palette, and began mixing color. An hour later, he was still adjusting the color on the river’s surface when the laptop screen flickered to life and Taryn Grant walked into the bedroom.

Kidd stepped over to the laptop as Grant kicked off her shoes, then unzipped the back of her dress, pulled it over her head, and tossed it on the bed. A slip followed, leaving her in her bra, underpants, and genuine nylon stockings held up with a genuine garter belt.

She walked off screen to the left, and Kidd said, aloud, “Come back, come back . . .”

Thirty seconds later, the screen went dead.

She had to come back through the bedroom, though, and Kidd pulled a drawing stool over to the laptop bench, sat and waited. Seven or eight minutes later, naked as the day she was born, fresh out of the shower, Grant walked across the bedroom, wiping down her back with a long white terrycloth towel. She was, Kidd thought, a healthy lass.

As Kidd watched, she tossed the towel on her bed and walked over to a side table, reached behind it, and must have pushed a button or moved a lever—a built-in bookcase on a sidewall smoothly rotated away from the wall. Grant stepped over to the safe and after punching in a string of numbers on the safe’s keypad, she pulled open the heavy steel door and started taking out jewelry cases.

Kidd turned to the studio and shouted, “Hey, Lauren. C’mere. Quick.”

Lauren popped into the doorway a minute later, said, “I’ve got to get Jackson . . .” Jackson was at school.

“Look at this,” Kidd said, pointing at the monitor.