John Sandford - Silken Prey

She looked and a frown line appeared on her forehead and she said, “What is this? Is that Taryn Grant? Kidd, what the heck are you doing?”

“Hey. Look what she’s doing.”

Lauren peered at the monitor. “She’s . . . whoa, look at that.”

Grant had opened one of a half-dozen jewelry cases she’d put on the bed, and tried on a heavy necklace of knotted gold. She looked at herself in the mirror, then took off the gold, dropped it back next to the case, and opened another case. This necklace was smaller, more demure . . . and sparkled with diamonds.

Kidd tapped a corner of the screen: “She took it out of the safe.”

“Can we get a look at it? The safe?”

“I can rewind a bit, look at that corner . . .”

He stepped back through the recording, to the point that the camera had stopped recording. “The camera triggers on movement, and runs for another thirty seconds.”

There was a jump, and then the unclothed Grant walked into the screen again, from the left side, and Kidd said, “Yow,” and Lauren said, “Yeah, yow. You are in no way qualified to handle something like that.”

“ That , my little pumpkin flower, holds not a candle to your own self,” Kidd said.

“Thanks, but to be honest, you’re not qualified to handle me . I have to tone down my whole . . . Okay, here goes.”

Lauren watched as Grant opened the bookcase, and then the safe.

“That’s a Robinson Steel-Block,” Lauren said, peering at the safe door. “Can we rerun and get closer on the keypad?”

Kidd rattled some keys and the corner of the screen that showed the safe shifted to occupy the entire screen; a few more keystrokes and the recording stepped back and showed the bookcase opening. Grant’s hand appeared and she hit the key sequence.

Kidd said, “Jesus, an eight-number code.”

“You won’t get into a Robinson with a jackknife,” Lauren said. “Run that again.”

Kidd ran it again and Lauren said, “I think it was 62649628. Or it could have been 95970960. I’ll need to look at it some more. Is there an alarm when the safe opens?”

“I’d have to do a little more exploring to figure that out . . . but I doubt it,” Kidd said.

“Okay. I want to look at the way she pushed that button again.”

They ran the file a dozen times, and Lauren watched Grant’s arm and fingers as she pushed the button, or moved the lever, that shifted the bookcase. Eventually, she decided that it was a simple button-push, probably wireless, and that the button was mounted on the back of the side table. “You can see that she feels for it, for a second, and then her middle finger pushes it . . . not a slide motion. It’s a button, and she pushes it once: it’s not a coded sequence.”

Kidd started the live video again, and Grant, now back in her underpants, garter belt straps hanging loose down her legs, hooked her bra and started trying on the jewelry again, including a lot of colored gemstones.

“Look at that, I think that’s a ruby,” Lauren said. “My God, the thing’s the size of a drain stopper.”

Eventually, Grant chose what looked like a multiple string of pearls.

“The stuff she looked at, the stuff she rejected—assuming it’s all top-of-the-line, and given her money, I’d bet it is—we’re looking at a million bucks with just what we saw. There’s more in the safe. She was looking for the right necklace. She wouldn’t have taken everything out, the rings and bracelets.”

“I made a million last year,” Kidd said. “We don’t need the money.”

“That’s your money, not mine,” Lauren said. “I like to have my own money.”

“You can be such a silly shit,” Kidd said.

“Whatever. I’m going to want to look at a few key photos,” Lauren said.

“Me too,” Kidd said. “Like when she puts on her nylons . . .”

“Hey . . .”

“. . . my little rutabaga flower.”

Lauren patted his chest. “Put that video somewhere safe. I’m late to get Jackson. We’ll talk after he’s in bed tonight.”

• • •

KIDD TOLD LUCAS that Lauren had worked as an insurance adjuster, which was true enough: after Lauren called on her rich clients, their insurance needed adjustment. She mostly stole money, for the simple reason that it was . . . money. She’d also steal jewelry, if it was the kind that could be melted or broken down into unidentifiable stones.

Kidd had once needed to get some information on a man who was peddling defense secrets, and had used Lauren to hit his safe, as a cover for his own break-in. The safe couldn’t be cracked in place: it was too good. So Lauren had simply used a power jack to rip the safe completely out of the wall, had Kidd throw it out the window of the man’s condominium, and had whipped him into carrying the brutally heavy safe, at a fast jog, which was all he could manage, several hundred yards to their car. She’d taken the safe to a machinist friend, who’d cut it open.

Kidd could feel an incipient hernia when he even thought about that night. . . .

She hadn’t only stolen for the income, though: she had done it because she liked it, and often because her victims deserved it. The kind of people who were most vulnerable to her were almost always assholes, running some kind of illegal or immoral hustle. She chose them because most would not go to the police. Politicians were a favorite target—no politician had ever called the FBI to report that a hundred thousand dollars in twenty-dollar bills had been taken out of his freezer.

Lauren also had a taste for cocaine and cowboys, both of which she’d given up when she and Kidd had decided a child would be nice. Not that the taste had necessarily gone away.

• • •

WHEN JACKSON was put to bed that night, and Kidd was lying on the living room couch reading deep into George Bellows , a hefty volume produced by the National Gallery of Art, in conjunction with a retrospective exhibition on the American painter, Lauren came in and said, “Move your feet.”

Kidd sat up and Lauren plopped on the couch and asked, “Why’d you show me that?”

“You said last week that you were feeling stale. Then when we were over at the Roosavelts’ place, I noticed you casing the place.”

“I was looking at the new décor, with Suki,” Lauren said.

“Right.” The Roosavelts had decorated their new eight-thousand-square-foot penthouse with, among other things, a big Kidd landscape, and Kidd and Lauren had gone over to see what the installation looked like.

“Hey . . .”

“I need to know what’s going on in your head,” Kidd said.

“A lot of stuff,” Lauren said. “But to get back to Taryn . . . You think I should crack her house?”

“No. I want you to think about it,” Kidd said. “All about it. About what would happen if you were caught, about the effect it would have on Jackson and me, and what would happen if you weren’t caught. How would that change things? Or would it change anything?”

Lauren said, “I don’t know. I don’t know what would happen. But ever since you showed me the video . . . it’s like I’ve got a fever.”

“You had the fever before then. I could see it. If you hadn’t, I wouldn’t have shown you Grant’s bedroom.”

“Yeah . . .” She stood up and wandered over to the window and looked out at the river, where it disappeared around the bend and rolled off to the Gulf of Mexico. “Yeah, you’re right. I’ve been looking at places.”

“I was afraid of that,” Kidd said.

“I’ve never been caught,” Lauren said, turning back. “I’ve never been printed.”

“You didn’t have that much riding on it before,” Kidd said.

“You’re right. I didn’t.”