John Sandford - Silken Prey

“What’s so urgent?” she asked.

“These two gentlemen,” Lucas said, flicking a finger at Carver and Dannon. “Are they Misters Carver and Dannon?”

Grant turned, as if checking, then turned back and said, “Yeah,” and nibbled on the cone, which looked like a cherry-nut, one of Lucas’s favorites.

“Then let’s find a place where we can talk,” Lucas said.

“Courtyard,” Green said, nodding toward an empty outdoor dining space to the left of the ice cream parlor. “You don’t want to talk to me?”

“Not at the moment,” Lucas said. “You might keep people away? Even other staffers. This is sort of private.”

Green nodded; Schiffer said, “I’m going to listen in.”

They moved over to the empty space, Green hovering on the periphery, listening. Lucas said, “One of Porter Smalls’s secretaries was murdered last night. Shot to death in her house, in Minneapolis. I went through her laptop and she’d been corresponding in a fairly cryptic way with Bob Tubbs before he disappeared, and just before the pornography popped up on Smalls’s computer.”

He’d been watching Carver and Dannon, and nothing moved in their eyes, which Lucas thought interesting, because he thought something should have.

Grant said, “Well, that’s awful, but what does it have to do with us?”

“Tubbs is dead, I’m almost certain of it, at this point, and now Helen Roman has been murdered. It was all done very well, from a professional-killing standpoint. Most people who kill for money are fools and idiots and misfits. This doesn’t appear to be the work of fools.”

Grant said, “Yeah, yeah,” and made a rolling motion with one forefinger— moving right along —as she simultaneously took another nibble of the cherry-nut.

“Well, it’s possible that she put the porn on Smalls’s computer to get revenge on him,” Lucas said. “They’d had some personal disagreements, apparently. But if that was what it was, a personal matter, why would anybody kill her? Or Tubbs?”

“Well, I don’t know,” Grant said. “Are you sure she was killed for that reason? Because it had something to do with Smalls?”

Lucas was forced to admit it: “No. Not absolutely sure. But pretty sure. The other possibility is that the people who paid for the porn to be dumped on Porter Smalls, knowing that doing so involves a number of felonies, are breaking the link between themselves and the pornography. Breaking the link very professionally. I did the obvious: I looked for professional killers. The only ones I could find”—Lucas nodded at Carver and Dannon—“are employed by you.”

“What!” Schiffer blurted, not a question.

Lucas had been watching Carver and Dannon again, and again, their eyes were blank; if they’d been lizards, Lucas thought, a nictitating membrane might have dropped slowly across them.

“That . . .” Grant waved her arms dismissively. “I really do have to talk to somebody about you. Professional killers? They’re decorated war veterans. Were you in the military? Did you—”

Dannon interrupted her, and said to Lucas, “We had nothing to do with anything like that. We’re professional security guys, end of story. If you have any evidence of any sort, bring it out: we’ll refute it.”

“I want to have a crime-scene guy take DNA samples from you,” Lucas said. “Doesn’t hurt, nothing invasive—”

“DNA?” Grant sputtered. “You know what—”

“It’s okay with us,” Dannon said, and now there was something in his eye, a little spark of pleasure, a job well done. Lucas thought, This isn’t good.

Grant snapped at Dannon: “Don’t interrupt. I know that you had nothing to do with this, I know the DNA will come back negative, but don’t you see what he’s doing? When the word gets out that my bodyguards have been DNA-typed in a murder case? This guy is working for Smalls—”

“No. I’m not,” Lucas said. “I guarantee that nothing about the DNA samples will get out before the election. I’ll get one guy to take the samples and I’ll read him the riot act. He will not say a word, and neither will I. If word gets out, I’ll track it, and if it’s my guy, I’ll see that he’s fired and I’ll try to put him in jail.”

Grant, Schiffer, Carver, and Dannon exchanged glances, and then Grant said to Dannon, “You’ve got no problem with this?”

“No. It’s probably what I’d do in his place.” He showed a thin white smile: “Because, you know, he’s right. We are trained killers.”

He poked Carver in the ribs with an elbow, and Carver let out a long, low, rambling laugh, one of genuine amusement, and . . . smugness. Lucas thought, They know something.

• • •

WITH THEIR CASUAL ACQUIESCENCE to the DNA tests, Lucas was left stranded. He asked some perfunctory questions—where were you last night at one o’clock? (At our apartments.) Did anyone see you there? (No.) Any proof that you were there? (Made some phone calls, moved some documents on e-mail.) Can we see those? (Of course.) Did you know either Tubbs or Roman? (No.)

Lucas walked away and made a call, asking them to wait, got hold of a crime-scene specialist, and made arrangements for Carver and Dannon to be DNA-typed.

He went back to them and said, “We’d like you to stop in at BCA headquarters on your way back through St. Paul, anytime before five o’clock. You’ll see a duty officer, tell him that you’re Ronald and Douglas—you won’t have to give your last name or any other identifier—and that you’re there at my request, Lucas Davenport’s request, to be DNA-typed. A guy will come down to do the swabs. This will take one minute, and then you can take off. The swabs will be marked Ronald and Douglas, no other identifiers.”

Carver and Dannon nodded, and Grant said, “What a crock,” and tossed the remains of her ice cream cone into a trash can. “If you’re done with us, I’m going to go shake some hands. I’ll tell you what—nothing about this better get out.”

“It won’t,” Lucas said. To Carver and Dannon: “Don’t go anywhere.”

Grant led her entourage across the street, with Green lingering behind. She said to Lucas, “Interesting.”

“They did it,” Lucas said. “You take care, Alice.”

“I can handle it,” she said.

“You sure? You ever shot anyone?”

“No, but I could.”

Lucas looked after Dannon and Carver: “If it should come to that—and it could, if they think you might have figured something out—don’t give them a chance. If you do, they’ll kill you.”

CHAPTER 18

Ray Quintana was a fifty-one-year-old Minneapolis vice cop, a detective sergeant, and having thought about it, he figured that he’d thoroughly screwed the pooch, also known as having poked the pup or fucked the dog. He didn’t know who’d been calling him about Helen Roman, but he suspected that whoever it was had gone over to Roman’s house the night before and killed her.

Quintana wasn’t a bad cop; okay, not a terrible one. He might have picked up a roll of fifties off a floor in a crack house that didn’t make it back to the evidence room; he might have found a few nice guns that the jerkwads didn’t need anymore, that made their way to gun shows in Wisconsin; he might have done a little toot from time to time, the random scatterings of the local dope dealers.

But he’d put a lot of bad people in jail, and overall, given the opportunities, and the stresses, not a bad guy.

When Tubbs had come to him, he’d put it out there as a straight business deal: Tubbs had heard from somewhere unknown that the Minneapolis Police Department had an outrageous file of kiddie porn. Quintana had known Tubbs since high school; Tubbs had been one of the slightly nerdy intellectuals on the edge of the popular clique, while Quintana had been metal shop and a football lineman.