John Sandford - Silken Prey

Lucas had called Flowers in for two reasons: he was smart, and he’d been an MP captain in the army, before joining the St. Paul Police Department, and then the BCA. He normally worked the southern third of the state, except when Lucas needed him to do something else.

“I was struggling with the gobbledygook,” Lucas said, tossing the papers on the desk. “I figured as a famous former warlord, you’d know what it was all about.”

“I met a few of these guys in the Balkans,” Flowers said. “They’re scary. Smart, tough. Not like movie stars, not all muscled up with torn shirts. A lot of them are really pretty small guys, neat, quiet—you’d think you could throw them out the window, but you’d be wrong. Some trouble would start up, you know, and they’d get assigned a mission, they’d be really, really calm. Sit around eating crackers and checking their weapons. Contained. The army cuts them a lot of slack, because they’re very good at what they do . . . which, basically, is killing and kidnapping people.”

“An uncommon skill set,” Lucas said.

“Yeah. I didn’t have a lot of contact with them,” Flowers said. “They had their own compounds. They’re secretive, a lot of them get killed—they have an unbelievable mortality rate. Even with that, they stay in the military. Some of them call the army ‘Mother.’ I think they get hooked on the stress and the camaraderie. Or maybe the sense that they’re doing something really important, which they are. If they leave the military, they tend to get in trouble as civilians. Some of them, after they leave, wind up as military contractors, or working for military contractors, right back where they started. Roaming around the world, with a gun in their back pocket.”

Lucas said, “Bob Tubbs, if he was working for the Grant campaign, might have posed some kind of danger to them. Maybe he wanted more money. Maybe he couldn’t keep his mouth shut, maybe he wanted credit for taking down a senator. Who knows?—but he may have represented some kind of danger. And you’ve got these guys right there—”

“You don’t have a fuckin’ thing on them, do you?” Flowers asked.

“Not a fuckin’ thing,” Lucas said. “Which is why I brought you in. I want you to tell me: if a guy disappears without a trace, and you have these two guys hanging around . . . what are the chances?”

“You don’t need me to figure that out. You already have,” Flowers said, kicking his feet off the desk. “You just want me to say you’re right.”

“Am I right?”

“Probably. What are you going to do about it?”

“Will I ever get any evidence against them?”

“Not unless something weird happens,” Flowers said. “Listen, let me tell you. Strange things happen in combat areas. Unpleasant things have to be done . . . and somebody has to do them. But those things can’t be pulled out in the open. The do-gooders would be screaming to high heaven and careers would be wrecked. You know, ‘That’s not how we do things in America.’ Well, you know, sometimes it is. Look at bin Laden: he was executed, not killed in a gunfight. Everybody knows that, but he was so big, there’s a national collective agreement not to mention it. When something like that happens, people like Carver are holding the gun. There was no way to hide the bin Laden thing, but in other cases . . . they have to hide what they did. The army knows , but it doesn’t know. Even the do-gooders in the Congress know , but they don’t want to hear it. It’s like the guys in Vice, or Narcotics. They’re like you , really. Sometimes, strange things need to get done.”

“Okay.”

“Now, I don’t know what Carver did that got him kicked out, but it was serious, and he was lucky,” Flowers said. “I’d say it’s about ninety–ten that if he’d done the same thing as a cop, whatever it was, he’d have gone to prison. Whatever he did, he had to go—but at the same time, the army took care of him.”

“What if I subpoenaed some colonel in here to get specific about what he did?”

Flowers snorted. “Never happen.”

Lucas said, “We go to federal court—”

“It would take you ten years before you saw the guy’s face, and then he wouldn’t be able to remember anything specific,” Flowers said. “I’m not kidding you, Lucas. It wouldn’t happen.”

“So what do I do?” Lucas asked.

Flowers stood up and yawned and stretched. “I don’t know. Sneak around. Plot. Manipulate. Lie, cheat, and steal. Do what the army did—settle it off the record. Or, forget it.”

“I got one senator, one governor, and one would-be senator pointing guns at my head.”

“If they take you down, can I have your job?” Flowers asked.

Lucas didn’t smile. He said, “Careful what you wish for, Virg.”

Virgil: “Hey. I wasn’t serious.”

“I am,” Lucas said.

Lucas took Flowers to lunch, and they talked about it some more, and about life in general. Flowers had recently come off a case where he’d run down four out of five murderers. Three of them had been killed—none of them by Flowers—one was in Stillwater for thirty years, and one was walking around free. Flowers had been unhappy about the one who walked—and Lucas had argued that he’d done as much as he could, and that overall, justice had been served, even if the law hadn’t gotten every possible ounce of flesh.

Now Flowers was arguing the same thing back to him. If Dannon and Carver had killed Tubbs, Lucas wouldn’t find out about it except by accident. If justice were to be done, it would have to be extrajudicial.

“You think I should push them into a gunfight?” Lucas asked, only half-jokingly.

“Oh, Jesus, no. It’d be fifty-fifty that you’d lose,” Flowers said. “If you took on both of them, it’d be seventy-thirty.”

Lucas said nothing.

“Of course, if you did lose, at least you’d die knowing that I’d be here to take care of Weather,” Flowers said.

“It’s good to know you have friends,” Lucas said.

• • •

WHEN FLOWERS LEFT—he said he was headed for the St. Croix River to check out possible environmental crimes, which meant that he was going fishing—Lucas went back to the BCA and shut his office door, sat in the chair where Flowers had been sitting, and put his feet up in the same spot.

If Dannon and Carver had been involved in the murder of Tubbs (if Tubbs had been murdered—the small possibility that he hadn’t been wriggled away at the back of his thoughts), there were two possibilities: that one of them had done it on his own, and the other didn’t know about it; or, more likely, that both of them were involved.

What about Grant? Did she know? He considered that for a while, and finally concluded that there was no way to tell. If she did know, or if she suspected, she’d be the weak link. He’d be tempted to go after her under any normal circumstances, but the circumstances were anything but normal. With a razor’s-edge election coming up, any suggestion by a police official that she might know about a murder could tip the balance. And with no evidence on which to base the probe, that police officer could be in a lot of trouble if his suggestion didn’t pan out.

For practical purposes, he’d have to confine his investigation to Dannon and Carver.

He thought about them for a while—about what Flowers had seen in their records—and then picked up his phone. The woman on the other end said, “It’s been a while.”

“You got time for tea?” Lucas asked.

“A social occasion? Trading information about old friends, and who’s been up to what?”

“We can do that, too.”

They took tea at a Thai place on Grand Avenue. Sister Mary Joseph was exactly Lucas’s age; they’d walked hand in hand to kindergarten, when she was simply Elle. She might well have been, Lucas thought, when he thought about it, the first female he’d loved, though they’d gone through life on radically different paths. She’d chosen the nunnery and he’d chosen the craziest possible contact with the world.