John Sandford - Silken Prey

Lucas rubbed his face and said, “Man, it’s like the old joke. Except the joke’s on me.”

“What joke?”

“The one about the guy who rolls a wheelbarrow full of sawdust out of a construction site every night.”

“I don’t know that one,” Cochran said.

Lucas said, “The security guy keeps checking and checking and checking the wheelbarrow, thinking the guy had to be stealing something. Never found anything hidden in the sawdust, and nobody cared about the sawdust. Couple of years later, they bump into each other, and the security guy says, ‘Look, it’s all in the past, you can tell me now. I know you were stealing something. What was it?’ And the guy says, ‘Wheelbarrows.’”

Lucas continued, “I was convinced that the person who set the trap had to have been planted on the Smalls campaign, which meant somebody new—a volunteer, or a new hire. I interviewed all the likely suspects. But she’s one of his oldest employees. I talked to her every time I went there, and it never occurred to me to question her .”

“She was the wheelbarrow.”

“Yeah. She was the fuckin’ wheelbarrow. Right there in front of my eyes.”

“Fuckin’s right,” Cochran said. “C’mere. I got a special surprise.”

He heaved himself out of his chair and Lucas followed him back into the house and into the bedroom. Cochran took a plastic glove out of his jacket pocket, pulled it on, and opened the bottom drawer on the bedside table. He took out a framed photograph and turned it in his gloved hand so Lucas could see it in the light from the bedroom window.

Helen Roman, at least ten years younger, sitting on Porter Smalls’s lap in a poolside chaise, somewhere with palm trees. Drinks on the deck below the chair.

Lucas looked at Cochran, who nodded: “Jilted lover?”

“At least. Several times by now,” Lucas said. He looked around the bedroom, and out the door into the lonely little dilapidated house, and thought about Smalls’s resort out on the lake. “She must have been pissed. You know what I’m sayin’?”

• • •

WORD OF ROMAN’S DEATH was going to get out soon enough, but Cochran hadn’t begun any notifications, other than the daughter. The woman who found the body had been sequestered, and hadn’t called the campaign or anyone else.

Lucas told Cochran that he was going to talk to Smalls, and Cochran nodded, but when Lucas called, Smalls’s phone clicked over to the answering service, as Smalls had warned him it often might. He turned it off when he was speaking, and he’d said he’d be speaking almost constantly in the week before the election. Lucas phoned Smalls’s headquarters and was told that the senator was, at that moment, appearing at a Baptist megachurch in Bloomington, on the south side of the metro area.

Lucas got the address, plugged it into his nav, and took off. On the way, he called Grant, and was again forwarded to the answering service. He’d gotten Grant’s campaign manager’s number, called that, and got Schiffer. “Where’s Ms. Grant?” he asked, after identifying himself.

“Is there a problem?”

“You might say so. I need to meet with Ms. Grant and her security people, especially Douglas Dannon and Ronald Carver. I assume Ms. Green will be there as well?”

“Well, Carver isn’t with us. . . . I suppose we can call him, if it’s urgent.”

“It’s urgent. Where are you?”

“I’m in Afton. We’re setting up for a rally in the park and a luncheon. Taryn’s in Stillwater right now, she’ll be going to Bayport in, mmm, fifteen minutes, and Lakeland at eleven-fifteen and Afton at noon.”

“How about Afton at eleven-thirty?”

“I’ll tell her to push everything up a bit, if it’s really urgent. We’ll be in the park. Look for the TV trucks.”

“It’s urgent. I’ll see you at eleven-thirty in the park.”

He made one more call, to the governor, who answered with a “What now?”

“Somebody murdered Porter Smalls’s secretary last night,” Lucas said. “Smalls had a sexual relationship with her and broke it off. Years ago, though. She was probably the one who set up the trigger on the computer.”

Long silence. Then, “Jesus, Lucas, who killed her?”

“I have some ideas . . . but now I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Lucas said. “I wanted to let you know, though: the whole thing might be headed over the cliff, again.”

“Think I’ll go to North Dakota. There are some border issues to deal with.”

“Not a bad idea,” Lucas said.

• • •

THE MEGACHURCH HAD PARKING for perhaps a thousand cars, and on this Sunday morning, there were probably twelve hundred jammed into the lot. Lucas walked into the entry and saw Smalls standing at a rostrum at the front of the church.

He’d apparently finished his talk and was answering questions. Lucas threaded his way through the crowded pews to the front, and stood waiting until Smalls saw him. When Smalls turned his way, Lucas tipped his head toward the back, and Smalls nodded at him and then said, “You know, folks, I could stand here and talk all day, but I’ve got another rally I’ve got to go to. You can reach me online with any more questions, and I can promise, you’ll get an answer. Let’s take two more questions. The lady in front, with the green blouse . . .”

Five minutes later, led by a security man, with another one trailing behind, and his campaign manager walking beside him, Smalls headed for a side door. Lucas walked that way. Smalls waited at the door until he caught up, and then led the way into a back hallway.

Lucas said, “We need to talk privately.”

Smalls said, “It can’t be good news.”

“No . . .”

Smalls said, “Hang on,” and walked back to the people who’d come through the door behind them, spoke to one, who pointed down the hall. Smalls walked back to Lucas and said, “Come on. I’d like Ralph to come along.”

Ralph Cox was his campaign manager. He was a tall, ruddy-faced man with curly black hair and overlong sideburns. Lucas nodded to Smalls and said, “That’s up to you,” and followed Smalls down the hall to an office. Smalls opened the door, and the three of them stepped inside.

Lucas pushed the door shut and asked, “You had an affair with Helen Roman?”

After a long pause, Smalls said, “Years ago.”

“Did she think that it might lead to something permanent?” Lucas asked.

“What’s going on? Is she the one who pushed the porn?”

“Would she have reason to?” Lucas asked.

Smalls wet his lower lip with his tongue, then said, “She was . . . disappointed when I broke it off. Pretty unhappy. I tried to make it up to her by overpaying her on the secretary’s job. There might have been some bad feeling at the time, but . . . that was years ago.”

Cox asked, “What happened? Have you arrested her?”

“She was murdered last night,” Lucas said.

Smalls staggered, as though he’d been struck. He reached behind himself, found an office chair, and sank into it. “My God. Helen?”

“She was struck in the head, the face, then shot with a small-caliber pistol,” Lucas said. “It looks at least superficially like a robbery, but I think . . . it’s related. I opened her computer and found notes from Tubbs. They’re cryptic—follow-ups on personal conversations. They don’t mention porn. They don’t even mention you. But Tubbs mentions that he’s got some kind of package, and that’s just a couple of days before somebody dropped the porn into your computer. Anyway, they had some kind of relationship. . . . I mean, maybe not sexual, but at least conversational. And it seemed like, conspiratorial.”

Cox said to Smalls, “We’ve got to get on top of this, and right now . We’ve got to give it a direction. There are two possibilities—that Tubbs and the Democrats led her into it, for purely political reasons, and that she was killed by a coconspirator, or that she dumped the porn to ruin you, because she was bitter about the broken relationship. We’ve got to hit the Tubbs angle hard. We’ve got to steer it—”