John Sandford - Silken Prey

“Shut up for a minute. You can talk about that later,” Lucas said to him. Back to Smalls: “You said she was disappointed. How disappointed? You think she might have done the porn?”

“I don’t know . . . maybe. Maybe she was a little resentful. I didn’t think so for a long time, but in the last couple of years, she’s been getting more and more distant.”

“Ah, Jesus Christ on a crutch,” Cox said.

Smalls: “Watch your mouth, Ralph. We’re in a church. If they heard you . . .”

“Sorry. But for God’s sakes, Porter, if this comes out the wrong way, the TV people will dig up every woman you’ve ever slept with, and from what I understand, there’s a lot of them.”

Lucas said, “Could we—”

Cox jumped in again. “I’m gonna leave you guys to talk. I gotta call Marianne and get something going. We got no time for this, no time.”

And he was out the door.

“Who’s Marianne?” Lucas asked.

“Media,” Smalls said. He pushed himself out of his chair. “I’ll tell you, Lucas, this is pretty much the end, for me. Ralph can do all the media twisting he wants, but it ain’t gonna work.”

“There’s something else going on,” Lucas said. He hesitated, thinking that he might be about to make a mistake. “It’s possible that if Tubbs was working for the Grant campaign that he was killed to break the connection between the porn and the Grant campaign. And that the same people who killed him, killed Roman.”

Smalls waved him off, with a hand that looked weary. “Yeah, yeah, but I’ll tell you what, Lucas. Political campaigns don’t have killers on their staffs. End of story.”

Lucas looked at him, didn’t say a word.

Smalls peered back, then said, “What?”

Lucas shrugged.

“What, goddamnit? Are you . . . Grant doesn’t have a killer . . . ?” He was reading Lucas’s face, as a politician can, and he said, “Jesus Christ, what’d you find out?”

“Watch the language,” Lucas said. “This is a church.”

“Don’t hassle me, Lucas. This is my life we’re talking about.”

“Grant has these two bodyguards,” Lucas said. “They were involved in some very rough stuff in Iraq and Afghanistan. One of them was pushed out of the army for something he did there. He killed a bunch of people he shouldn’t have—executed them. Including a couple of kids. I talked to an ex-army guy, a BCA guy now, who understands these things, and he said these guys essentially specialized in killing and kidnapping.”

Smalls took off his glasses, rubbed his face with his hands. “I . . . This is really hard to believe.”

“I know. I’ll tell you what, when you spend your life doing investigations, you become wary of coincidences. Because they happen. It’s possible that there was a dirty trick, followed by two killings, at a critical moment in a political campaign, and it’s all purely a coincidence that the person who most benefits had two killers standing around. I personally am not ready to believe that.”

“What’re you gonna do?”

“I’m gonna go jack them up. But they’re smart, and I have no evidence. None. If they tell me to blow it out my ass, well . . .”

“Killers,” Smalls said. “I tell you, politics has gotten rougher and rougher, but I never thought it could come to this. Never. But maybe . . . Now that I think about it, maybe it was inevitable.”

• • •

LUCAS TOOK OFF FOR AFTON. Afton was a small town, one of the oldest in Minnesota, built on the wild and scenic river that separated Minnesota from Wisconsin. The river was gorgeous in the summer and early fall and at mid-winter, after the freeze; less so in the cold patch of November or the early rains of March. But this day, though November, was particularly fine.

Lucas went to the University of Minnesota on a hockey scholarship, but since you couldn’t major in hockey—and his mother peed all over the idea, suggested by the coaches, that he major in physical education—he wound up in American studies, a combination of American literature, history, and politics. He did well in it, enjoyed it, and since it was commonly used as a pre-law major, he thought about becoming a lawyer like a number of his classmates.

After all the bullshit was sorted through, a levelheaded professor suggested that he try police work for a year or so. He could always go back to law school, or even go to law night school, if he didn’t like the cops—and the time on the street would be invaluable for certain kinds of law practice.

Lucas joined the Minneapolis cops, and never looked back: but the four years in American studies stuck with him, especially the literature. He thought Emily Dickinson was perhaps the best writer America had ever produced; but on this day, heading east out of the Cities, then south down the river, he thought of how some of the writers, Poe and Hemingway in particular, used the weather to create the mood and reflect the meanings of their stories.

Poe in particular.

Lucas could still quote from memory the first few lines of “The Fall of the House of Usher”: During the whole of a dull, dark and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. . . .

And Lucas thought what a literary conceit that all was: he’d gone to a murder scene on a beautiful fall day, and heard children laughing outside. And why not? The murder had nothing to do with them, and old people died all the time.

Now he, the hunter, was headed south to tackle a couple of probable killers, a fairly grim task; but over here, to the right of the highway as he went by, a man was washing down his fishing boat, preparing it for winter storage; and coming down the road toward him, a half-dozen old Corvettes, all in a line, tops down on a fine blue-sky day, the women in the passenger seats all older blondes, one after the other.

And why not? Life doesn’t have to be a long patch of misery. There was plenty of room for blondes of a certain age, to ride around in seventies Corvettes, like they’d done when they were girls; a few beers at Lerk’s Bar, and then a dark side street with a hand up their skirts. That was still welcome, wasn’t it?

He’d made himself smile with all the rumination. He really ought to lighten up more, Lucas thought, as the last of the Corvettes went past. Hell, what are a couple more killers in a lifetime full of them? And he liked hunting, and what better day to do it than a fine blue day in the autumn of the year, with not a cloud in the heavens, when riding through a singularly beautiful tract of country, in a Porsche with the top down?

Fuck a bunch of E. A. Poe.

And his Raven.

• • •

THE GRANT CARAVAN had pulled to the side of the street in what passed for downtown Afton. A small crowd was hanging around in the park across the street, and a cable TV station was setting up a small video camera in front of a bandstand. Grant and her people were apparently in an ice cream parlor.

Lucas dumped the Porsche and started across the street to the parlor. As he did, Alice Green came out the front door and moved to one side, and nodded toward Lucas; then Grant came out the door holding an ice cream cone, squinted at him in the sunlight, and licked the cone as he came up.

Lucas thought, Some women shouldn’t be allowed to lick ice cream cones, because it threw men into a whole different mental state. . . .

Schiffer came out of the ice cream parlor, also licking an ice cream cone, with markedly less effect; she was followed by a tall, bullet-headed man with fast eyes who Lucas suspected was one of the bodyguards; his eyes locked on Lucas. Then another man came out, smaller than the first, but with the same fast eyes, and the same quick fix on Lucas. Lucas wanted to put a hand on his .45, but instead, called, “Ms. Grant—glad you had the time.”