John Sandford - Silken Prey

“Goddamnit, where are you?” Lucas asked.

He got the location, and told Flowers to go that way, and then made the call on Quintana’s phone and handed it to Quintana. It rang, and rang, and rang, with no answer. The tech called and said, “We’ve got a location for you. The phone’s at Hampshire Avenue North and Thirtieth.”

“What?”

“It’s at Hampshire Avenue North and Thirtieth. There’s a park there.”

Lucas asked, “Where in the hell is that?”

“Well, if you’re at Grant’s house, it’s about eight miles east. As the crow flies.”

“Sonofabitch,” Lucas said.

“What’re we doing?” Flowers asked.

“Got no choice, now. We’ll try to shake them, see if anything comes loose,” Lucas said.

He turned around in his seat and said to Quintana, “I’m going to point out these guys and tell you to look at them. Like you’d seen them before. I want you to take a long look, then come over and mutter at me. Don’t let them hear what you’re saying.”

“I never saw them,” Quintana said.

“Ray, for Christ’s sakes, I’m trying to shake ’em. We’re doing a pageant.”

Quintana cracked a smile. “All right.”

“What do you want me to do?” Flowers asked, as they turned a corner and saw the lights on the squad cars.

“Well, given the way you’re dressed, you could ask me if I want them hog-tied,” Lucas said.

“Don’t take it out on me,” Flowers said. “I’m not the one who . . .”

“. . . poked the pup,” Quintana said.

“Shut up,” Lucas snarled, no longer in the mood for humor.

• • •

WHEN THEY CAME UP on the lights, the street was full of cops and politicians. Flowers turned on his own flashers, and a cop who started toward them stopped and put his hands on his hips. Lucas, Flowers, and Quintana got out, and the cop waited for them to walk up, and then asked, “Any chance you’re the BCA?”

“BCA and Minneapolis police,” Lucas said.

At that moment, Taryn Grant, who was in the street with a half-dozen campaign workers and her security people, came steaming toward them and shrieked, “I knew it was you. I knew it.”

“Shut up,” Lucas said, but without much snap.

“This is the last straw.” She was wildly angry; her blond hair had come loose from whatever kind of spray had been keeping it neat, and was fluttering over her forehead. Her campaign manager, Schiffer, took her arm and tried to pull her back, and Grant pulled free.

Dannon, Carver, and Green had come up behind Grant. Lucas turned to Quintana and said, “Take a look.”

Quintana, with the unpleasant grittiness of a vice cop, stepped up close to Carver and looked him straight in the face for a long beat; then stepped over to Dannon and did the same thing. Neither man turned away, but they didn’t like it.

“Who’s this guy, and what does he want?” Dannon asked.

“I’m a cop,” Quintana said. “You got a problem with that?”

“I don’t like somebody standing two inches in front of my face breathing onions on me,” Dannon said. “So back off.”

Quintana did. Carver nodded at Flowers and asked, “Why’s there a cowboy with you?”

“Lucas might’ve wanted you hog-tied,” Flowers said. “He thought I’d be the guy to do it.”

Carver stared at Flowers for a minute, then asked, “You in the military?”

“Yeah, for a while.”

“Officer?”

“Yeah.”

“MP?”

“Yeah.”

“I thought so,” Carver said.

Quintana had stepped over to Lucas and said, in a low tone, “I can’t hardly believe it, but I think it really is that second guy I talked to.” He looked back over his shoulder at Dannon and Carver and said, “The smaller one. He’s got that funny accent—Texas. Like George Bush.”

Dannon stepped toward them and said, “We gave you those DNA samples.”

Lucas nodded and squared off with Grant. “We’ve got two days before the election and this whole thing is coming to a boil. We’re watching everybody, because we don’t want anybody else to show up dead: there have been two murders so far. We don’t need a third.”

“We don’t have anything to do with any murders,” she shouted, and Lucas could see little atoms of saliva spray in the headlights of Flowers’s truck.

“We can’t take any chances— you could be a target,” Lucas said. “We had no plans to stop you. We were making sure that everybody got home all right.”

“Fuck you,” she shouted.

• • •

LUCAS TOLD SHRAKE and Jenkins to go home, and back in Flowers’s truck, Lucas asked Quintana, “How sure are you?”

Quintana shrugged. “Hell, Lucas—he sounded like the guy. It’s not like he’s some random asshole and I’m trying to pick him out of a hundred people by the tone of his voice. He’s your suspect, and I can tell you he’s got that accent, and that was right, and his tone was right, and the way the words came out, that’s exactly right. He sounded exactly like the guy on the phone. You say you’re looking for professional killers and you find two professional killers, and then I listen to one of them . . . what are the chances that it’s not him?”

“Slim and none, and slim is outta town,” Lucas said. “I want you to go back to the office and write this down. A standard incident report and e-mail it to me. I’ll talk to Marion and tell him you’re working with me.”

“I appreciate it,” Quintana said, and he looked like he did. “In the meantime, I might move out to a motel for a couple of weeks.”

“Stay in touch,” Lucas said to Quintana, as Flowers pulled away from the curb. “I don’t want to wonder what the hell happened to you.”

Flowers asked, “We’re going to Hampshire and Thirtieth?”

“Yeah, if we can find it.”

Lucas called up the Google Maps app on his iPhone, and fifteen minutes later they pulled to the side of the road, houses on one side, a park on the other. Dark as tar on the park side.

Flowers got a flash and Lucas dialed the phone. They walked up and down the road, and then Virgil heard it buzzing down in the weeds. It took a minute or so and a couple of calls to find it. Flowers bagged it and handed it to Lucas.

“Have them check the battery,” Flowers said. “They probably had to pull an insulating tab off. Maybe they forgot to wipe it.”

“Fat chance,” Lucas said. “But I’ll do it anyway. I’m pulling on threads, ’cause threads are all I’ve got.”

CHAPTER 19

Taryn fixed herself a lemon drop, with a little extra vodka, as soon as she was back in the house; Dannon helped himself to a bottle of beer, Schiffer had a Diet Pepsi, Carver poured a glass of bourbon, Green got a bottle of Evian water. Schiffer said to Taryn, “All right, enough is enough, if you want to call the governor in the morning, go ahead and do it. But right now we’ve got more important stuff on the table.”

“He thinks we killed somebody,” Taryn shouted at her. “He thinks—”

“You know you didn’t, so he’s got no proof. You gotta keep your eye on the ball,” Schiffer shouted back, the two women face-to-face. “We’ve got one more day of campaigning. We can still lose it.”

Taryn looked at her over the glass, then asked, “Where are we?”

The media woman, whose name was Mary Booth, stepped up: “While you were up north, we’re seeing a new Smalls ad. It ran prime time, Channel Three at seven o’clock, it’s been on ’CCO and KSTP. We’d bought out the KARE slots so it wasn’t there.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, what is it?” Taryn asked.

“Well, all that neutrality thing is done with. He knows there’s no time left, so he dropped the bomb—he says you planted the porn on him,” Booth said. “He doesn’t come right out and say the words, but he talks about the Democrats and opposition dirty tricks, and he gets angry. I’d say it’s quite effective.”