John Sandford - Silken Prey

“One question. Why not Quintana himself?”

“Harder target. He might already be on edge, he carries a gun, he’s been in a couple of shootings. If something went wrong . . . Anyway, I’ve been out scouting around. The woman is easy, and it’ll be clean.”

She continued to stare at him, he didn’t flinch, but felt it, and then she said, “I have a personal question for you. I . . . it seems like I’ve seen certain things in you. Do you . . . have some feelings for me? Something I should know about?”

He shrugged again, and then said, as though he didn’t want to, “Well . . . sure. For quite a while.”

“I’ve had some of that myself,” Taryn said. “There’s nothing I can do about it right now—I have to be steady with David, for appearances’ sake. I can’t seem like I might be flighty, or that I play around. I wanted you to know that David is on his way out. He doesn’t know, I’ll wait until after the election to tell him. But then, you and I . . . we’ll talk.”

“Only talk?”

She gave him her best smile. “I don’t know what will happen. But I need somebody like you . . . and for more than a bodyguard.” She looked at her watch. “We’ll talk about this. . . . Right now, I need some sleep.”

Dannon was left standing in the living room; as she turned into the hallway to the bedroom wing, she flashed another bright smile at him. He’d never expected that. And he never expected the result: his heart was singing. He’d heard about that happening, but he’d never before felt it.

He walked around for a while, enjoying the glow. The glow never really faded, but he moved on to thinking a little wider, a little broader . . . and after a while, he made an executive decision.

• • •

LATE THAT NIGHT:

Dannon walked down the street, moving carefully, watching the car lights. Cop cars had a peculiar look to them: if they weren’t going fast, they were going slow. They were big, and they were sedans. He didn’t want to be seen anywhere near this particular house.

He was nearly invisible in a black cotton jacket and black slacks; there were almost no lights around, and lots of little clumps of hedge and old trees and crumbling concrete pillars that had once been decorative.

He was told that it was a bad neighborhood, though he’d been in much worse; in fact, he’d been in a dive an hour before that he thought he might have to shoot his way out of. Still, this wasn’t exactly a well-lit park: he had yet to see a single soul on the street.

Though wickedly aware of his surroundings, he didn’t look around; looking around attracted the eye. People who saw him would ask themselves, “Why’s that guy looking around like that?” He’d learned not to do it.

He came up to the house—he’d passed it a few minutes earlier, moving much faster, checking it out—but now he crossed the woman’s lawn, avoiding the concrete steps that led up the front bank. The storm door was unlatched, which made things that much easier. He opened it, quietly, quietly, took off one glove, slipped the lock-pick into the lock on the main door, worked the pins, kept the tensioner tight, felt it click once, twice and then turn. He put the glove back on.

He opened the inner door, slowly, slowly, and stepped inside, leaving the door cracked open. He took the pistol out of his pocket, waited for his eyes to fully adjust, saw a movement at the corner of his eye. A cat slipped away into the dark hallway, looking back at him.

When he was sure that nothing was moving, he took a telephone from his pocket, selected a quiet old song, “Heart of Glass” by Blondie, and turned it on. The music tinkled out into the dark, quiet, pretty . . . disturbing.

A woman’s voice: “Hello? Is there somebody there? I’m calling the police.”

He thought, No, she isn’t .

“Hello?”

The hallway light clicked on, and the music played on.

He heard her footfalls in the hallway, and then she appeared, wearing a cotton nightgown.

Dannon shot her in the heart.

For Taryn.

He didn’t look at the woman’s face as she stepped back, stricken, put her hand to her chest, and said, “Awwww . . .” He reached out with his plastic-gloved hand, hit her in the face with the barrel of the pistol and she went down. Her feet thrashed, and he waited, and waited, and she went still. He stepped over her, walked down the hall to the bedroom, turned on the light, and took her purse, and tipped over a small jewelry case, took her cell phone, which was on the bed stand.

He’d been inside for about a minute, and the clock in his head said he should leave. He went back through the hall, checked the woman’s still body.

She was gone, no question of it. He fished a plastic bag out of his jacket pocket, shook out a glove, carefully rolled her body back, slipped the glove beneath it, and then let the body roll back in place. Okay. This was all right.

Ninety seconds after he entered the house, he was out. He walked two blocks to his car, started up, then cruised as quietly as he could past the woman’s house. As he passed by, he picked up a cigarette lighter and a cherry bomb from the passenger seat, lit the cherry bomb, and dropped it out the window. He was a hundred yards up the street when he heard it go off.

He did that because, at that moment, Carver was at Dannon’s town house, sending an e-mail to Grant, under Dannon’s name. When he’d done that, Carver would go back to his own town house, wait a few minutes, then make a phone call to a Duluth hotel, to see if they’d found a Mont Blanc pen. Then he’d go browse pens on Amazon and eBay. There’d be time stamps on all of that, if the cops came looking.

Two minutes after that, he dropped the thoroughly clean gun into a nearly full trash dumpster behind a restaurant. It would be at the landfill the next day. He took the money and credit cards out of the purse and threw the purse into a patch of weeds.

The plastic bag went in another dumpster, a mile from his apartment. The credit cards went down a sewer, the cash in his pocket.

Clean hit.

CHAPTER 17

Lucas was up early the next morning, went for a run, got home and called his part-time researcher, a woman named Sandy. He told her that he needed her to work on a semi-emergency basis. He wanted all the names she could find for Carver’s last military unit, and said he was especially interested in people who were no longer with the military. “Check the social media—all your usual sources. If you find anybody, I want to know what they’re doing.”

He’d just gotten out of the post-run shower when Turk Cochran called from Minneapolis Homicide.

Cochran said, “Hey, big guy. The word is, you’ve been snooping around city hall, trying to figure out if somebody over here supplied Porter Smalls’s kiddie porn.”

“You calling to confess?”

“Yeah, I did it with my little laptop. No wait, I meant my little lap dance, not laptop. Is this call being recorded?”

“What’s up, Turk?” Cochran hadn’t called simply to crack wise.

“What I meant to say is, some really bad person broke into Helen Roman’s house last night and shot her to death. I was told that this particular murder might be of interest to yourself.”

“Helen Roman?” For a moment, Lucas drew a blank. He knew that name. . . . “ Helen Roman? Smalls’s secretary? Somebody killed her?”

“That’s what I’m saying. Looks sorta like a robbery, but sorta not like a robbery. You want to take a look?”

“Tell me where. I’ll be there.” Lucas had taken any number of calls about murders: this one had his heart thumping.

• • •

HELEN ROMAN’S SMALL HOUSE was on the outskirts of what the Minneapolis media called “North Minneapolis.” That was the approved code designation for “black people,” usually referred to, further down in the story, as the “community,” as in “community leaders asked, ‘How come you crackers never talk about white junkies getting aced in East Minneapolis?’”