John Sandford - Silken Prey

She considered for a moment and then said, “Well, it would be a terrible idea, but talking to either one of them, Dannon or Carver, would be a terrible idea. I assume you’ve got your back against the wall.”

“It’s my last shot,” Lucas said. “I’m almost certain that Dannon was involved in placing the porn on Smalls’s computer. If Tubbs and Roman were killed to cover that up, then it’s at least possible that he was acting alone and Carver could give me some insight into how to get him. Or, it’s possible that Carver cooperated, but would take a plea. Also, I’ve got something on Carver that might convince him to cooperate. So, I’m looking at Carver.”

“I doubt that he’ll crack,” Green said. “He’ll stonewall. So will Dannon, for that matter. There’s not much choice there.”

Stonewall. She picked the same word as Elle had. “If you had to make a choice . . . which one would you choose?” Lucas asked.

She thought for a moment, sipping at the coffee, and finally said, “If I had to choose, I guess I’d have to agree with you: I’d go with Carver, if you’ve got some leverage. He’s not as smart as Dannon. It’s barely possible that you might confuse him enough to get something. I don’t think that would be the case with Dannon. Also, Dannon’s got another reason to stonewall: Taryn has started sleeping with him. If you take him down, she’d go down, too. At least, he’ll see it that way. So he’ll stonewall.”

“It’ll be tough either way,” Lucas agreed.

“I’d say you’ve got no chance with Dannon, no matter how involved he is, and you’ve got a five percent chance with Carver. Or two percent.”

“Off the top of your head . . . what are the chances that Grant knows what they did? That she’s involved, that she directed it or approved it?”

Green shook her head: “She’s a smart woman. I’d be surprised if she was involved. But . . . and I say but . . . she’s obviously a sociopath. It wouldn’t bother her that people died to get her into the Senate. It would bother her that she could go to prison for it. She’s made that calculation, too. That’s why she gets so angry when she sees you.”

Lucas nodded, and said, “Okay,” then leaned forward, his forearms on the table. “If I drive a wedge between Dannon and Carver, what would happen?”

“I don’t know. They’re colleagues, but not exactly friends,” Green said. “Dannon is somewhat . . . disparaging . . . when it comes to Carver, because Carver was a sergeant, an enlisted man, and Dannon was an officer. He treats me more as an equal because I was with the Secret Service. Carver feels it. It pisses him off.”

“What’s Carver’s relationship with Grant?”

“He’s become . . . overly familiar. I don’t know what happened, but yesterday I heard him call her ‘honey,’ when he thought they were alone. I pretended not to hear.”

“She’s not sleeping with him, too?”

“Oh, no. She’s definitely the officer type. In fact, I’m a little surprised by the thing with Dannon. When I say ‘officer type,’ I’m talking generals, not captains. But, maybe it’s just sex.”

“All right,” Lucas said. “Do you have a phone number for Carver?”

“Yes. He’s already at the house, by the way. He’ll be with Taryn until three o’clock, when he gets a couple hours off, to get ready for tonight. If you need to meet with him privately, you could call him while she’s speaking. She has four brief appearances today, mostly for the television cameras, and for a couple of blogs. Then they’ll head back and watch the results come in.”

“Any idea about times?”

She took a piece of paper out of her bag and pushed it across the table. “I made a copy of her schedule. I’d call at one of the first two events—the schedule there is pretty hard. Later in the day, the timetable tends to slip.”

“All right,” Lucas said. “Thank you. Uh, do you have Carver’s double-secret cell-phone number?”

“I do.” She pulled back the paper with the schedule on it, took a pen out of her bag, and wrote the number on the paper. “Don’t tell him where you got it.”

“I won’t,” Lucas said.

“Did you find out what Carver did in the army? Is that what you’ve got on him?”

Lucas’s eyebrows went up. “You know about that?”

“I don’t know what it is, but I know something bad happened,” Green said. “I suspect people wound up dead. I tried to find out, but I’m told it’s all very classified.”

“How about that,” Lucas said.

She gazed at him for a moment, then said, “But you know?”

He smiled: “That’s classified.”

She smiled back. “You’re a piece of work, Davenport. If it weren’t for Weather, I’d take you to bed.”

“If it weren’t for Weather, I’d go,” Lucas said.

• • •

THE EXCHANGE KEPT LUCAS warm all the way out to the car. He’d jump off a high building before he betrayed Weather, but a little extracurricular flirtation kept the blood circulating; not that all of it went to the brain.

Green asked Lucas not to call Carver until at least Grant’s first appearance of the day. “I want it to be in Carver’s head that I was around when you called. A little psychological insurance that he doesn’t think of me, when he wonders how you got the number for his phone. He’s a scary guy.”

“I can do that,” Lucas said. “And you lay low. It should be over in another day or two, one way or another.”

She said, “I feel like it’s gotta happen today. Everything is coming down to today. Taryn’s snap polls say she’s up, but it’s really, really close, and Smalls may be narrowing the lead. It feels to me like everything’s going to end tonight, when the votes come in.”

CHAPTER 22

After leaving Green, Lucas went back to BCA headquarters in St. Paul and rounded up Del, Shrake, and Jenkins. After talking with Henry Sands, the director, he got the green light to borrow four more male and two female agents from other sections. They’d work in two shifts; he would have preferred to use Virgil Flowers to lead the second shift, but Flowers was still in New Mexico. Instead, he assigned the second shift to Bob Shaffer, a lead investigator with whom he’d worked on other cases.

He got the working group together in a classroom and briefed all nine of them on the entire Smalls/Tubbs investigation, and told them about his planned approach to Carver.

“One of the problems we’re facing is that these two guys are probably tougher than any of us, and very experienced in killing, very cool about it,” Lucas said. “What I’m going to do is try to drive a wedge between them, which could create an explosive situation. Could create an explosive situation—but it might not do anything at all. There’s no way to tell what will happen. We’re going to spend today, tonight, and tomorrow monitoring Carver, and Dannon, too. If nothing happens before then, it’s probably a bust.”

When he was done, one of the agents, Sarah Bradley, raised a hand and asked, “If you really get Carver jammed up with this army case, and if he’s armed, what happens if he goes off on you?”

“He’s too experienced to go off on me, I think,” Lucas said. “If we hook up at a restaurant or coffee shop—that’s what I’m thinking—it’d be too public. He might leave ahead of me, go storming out of the place, and then try to back-shoot me, I suppose, but I don’t see that, either. He’ll want to think about it.”

“But this army thing—it sounds impulsive, like he cracked,” Bradley said. “If he cracked then, he could crack again.”

Lucas said, “That’s not the feeling I got. I got the feeling that the army was talking about a cold series of executions. He thought he could get away with it. Either that nobody would know, or that none of his platoon would tell, or that if somebody did, he’d be covered. He was partly right—they kicked him out but didn’t prosecute. The point is, it seems to me that he . . . thought about it. At least a bit.”