John Sandford - Silken Prey

“It’s a little more complicated than that,” Del said.

“Del . . .”

“Yeah, yeah. You’re right,” Del said. “I’d probably wind up running a bar and hating it. Or be a repo man for somebody.”

“Repo? You’d wind up hanging yourself off your kid’s swing set.”

• • •

SANDY, THE RESEARCHER, called as they were pulling into Lucas’s driveway: “I found a half-dozen men from Carver’s former unit. . . . One guy, down in Albuquerque, says he was with Ron Carver on the night he got in trouble. His name is Dale Rodriguez. He’s willing to talk about it.”

Lucas looked at his watch: one o’clock in the afternoon. “Check on flights to Albuquerque, e-mail me when you find out when they are.”

“For today?”

“Yeah. And write up your notes on the Albuquerque guy, and e-mail those, too.”

He rang off and punched up Flowers. “Where are you?”

“Home.” Home was in Mankato, ninety miles south of the Twin Cities.

“Start up this way. Bring gear for an overnight,” Lucas said. “You may be flying, but you won’t need a weapon.”

“Where am I going?” Flowers asked.

“Albuquerque, if we can get you a flight.”

“You gonna brief me?”

“If we have time. Otherwise, take your laptop and I’ll send you a long note when you’re in the air.”

“You want me to hang around?” Del asked after Lucas rang off.

“Unless you need to deal with that tree.”

“The old lady’s got that covered,” Del said. “Tell you what: print out a picture of this Dannon and Carver, and I’ll run them up and show Irma.”

• • •

LUCAS DID THAT.

Del left, and Lucas checked his e-mail, found the airline schedule from Sandy, and called Flowers. “There’s a four-twenty flight. Can you make that?”

“Yes. I took my grab-bag and I’m on my way,” Flowers said. “Probably won’t have time to swing by your place, though.”

“That’s okay. It’s an interview with a friendly,” Lucas said. “Be good if you could do it tonight. I’ll try to set it up.”

He called Sandy: “Do you have phone numbers for the Albuquerque guy, this Rodriguez guy?”

“Yes, I do. When I talked to him, he said he was going off to class at a tech school there. He said he’d be back late in the afternoon. They’re an hour earlier than us.”

“Good. We’re gonna need a ticket for Flowers on the four-twenty. Tell Cheryl to fix that, will you?”

“Okay, and I’m sending my notes on Rodriguez . . . now.”

Lucas rang off and three seconds later, his e-mail pinged at him, and Sandy’s file came in. It was short: name, address, cell-phone number. She’d asked Rodriguez about Carver and he’d wanted to know why, and she’d said that there was a murder investigation going on, and that Carver was a “person of interest.” Rodriguez said that Carver “oughta be in jail,” and when Sandy asked why, Rodriguez said he’d shot some people in Afghanistan and shouldn’t have. Sandy had said that might be relevant, and asked Rodriguez if he’d talk to an investigator. He’d said he would. Sandy noted, “He didn’t seem all that reluctant. He sounded angry.”

Which was all good, in Lucas’s view. The army had buried the file, and Carver might have felt safe, but if Lucas threatened to revive it, he might be able to drive a wedge between Carver and Dannon.

• • •

HE CALLED JAMIE MOORE, the public defender, and said, “You’re gonna get a client named James Clay, who is being checked into the Hennepin County jail about now. Turk Cochran’s got him on a murder charge.”

“That’s profoundly interesting,” Moore said in a dead voice.

“I need to talk to him,” Lucas said. “Off the record.”

“What’s in it for him?” Moore asked.

“They got him on that Helen Roman killing, Porter Smalls’s secretary. I don’t think he did it. I want him to detail where he was when the murder happened, and then I’m going to backtrack him, see if his story holds up.”

“What does Turk have on him?”

“Cold hit on DNA. Found a glove under the victim’s body,” Lucas said. “Pretty conveniently under the victim’s body. But unless James gets a break, he’s done. You know what it’s like to argue with DNA.”

“Let me check around,” Moore said. “Unless you’re telling me a big fat one, I’ll get Dan to go over there and sit in with you.”

“Aw, not Dan, for Christ’s sakes, I hate that little snake,” Lucas said.

“Really? All right, let me look around. . . . I got Nancy Bennett. How about Nancy?”

“She’s fine. Also a snake, but a much better-looking one.”

“Give her an hour. She’ll have to do a little pre-interview, find out what’s what.”

“He’s already asked for an attorney.”

“Give us an hour.”

Lucas spent forty-five minutes writing a long memo to Flowers, who’d get it either in the airport lounge or in the air. He sent along Sandy’s memo on Rodriguez, and asked Flowers to get anything on the type and level of violence in which Carver had been involved, and what had happened on the last mission. He wanted details.

Forty minutes after he’d called the public defender, Moore called back and said, “Nancy’s at the jail. She’ll wait for you.”

Del called: “Irma says she doesn’t know if they were in there. She doesn’t think Carver, she’s not sure about Dannon, because she says there’s a lot of guys who look like him. In fact, there’s one sitting here right now.”

“Okay. It was worth the try. Listen. Meet me at the Hennepin jail.”

• • •

BENNETT AND CLAY were waiting in an interview room when Lucas and Del walked in. Bennett was a tall, thin, dark-haired woman wearing a jacket-and-pants combination that wouldn’t show dirt. Clay saw Lucas and said, “This is the sucker who hit me.”

“Is that right?” Bennett asked.

“Yeah. He was running. I used just enough violence to restrain him,” Lucas said. “He got an owie on his wrist.”

“Coulda got hurt,” Clay said.

Bennett ignored that and said to Lucas, “I don’t want to hear any bullshit about who did what to whom. Listen to what he has to say and take off. I got other things to do.”

“We’ll listen, anyway,” Lucas said.

She nodded at Lucas, then said to Del, “Those look like last month’s jeans, Del. You forget to change on the first?”

Del said, “Don’t be a twit.”

“A what?”

“A twit.”

She showed a sliver of a smile. “Well played.”

• • •

CLAY, ACCORDING TO CLAY, had spent Saturday evening, from around eight o’clock until the next morning, at a recreational facility called Joan What’s-Her-Name’s, and Del asked, “The red house?”

“That’s it.”

“How many people were there?”

“You know . . . coming and going,” Clay said.

“How many were staying?”

“The usual ones. The one called Mike, and Larry. Larry was there, lost his shoes somewhere, spent the whole time walking around in his socks. Chuck. This really, really white guy named Joe. He was so white it hurt my eyes to look at him. . . . A guy named Dave went through, he was a white guy, too, another guy named Bill was passed out on the couch the whole time. A couple of chicks . . .”

They were playing cards, he said. They tried to get the chicks to play strip poker. “She strips and then you poke her, heh-heh.”

Nobody else laughed, so he shrugged and said, “They didn’t play, they just wanted to, you know, get high.”

He’d been there all night, he said. He’d gotten high with what he brought with him, because he didn’t have any money, and then went to sleep on the floor in a back room. There was somebody else in there with him, but he didn’t know who. “All I know is, I was sleeping under a window with a crack at the bottom and when I got up in the morning, I was freezing and it felt like my bones was breaking.”