John Sandford - Silken Prey

“I’m a cop,” Lucas said. “I need to talk to you. I need to talk to you right away, and somewhere private, where Dannon and Grant aren’t around.”

“I don’t think I want to do that,” Carver said, and the line went dead.

“Well, shit,” Lucas said.

“You’re a smooth talker,” Del said.

“I wonder if he’s got a smartphone,” Lucas said. He sent a text: “Six executed in Afghanistan. Want to hear the governor talking about it on TV? Take the call.”

He sent it, and got back “delivered” a second later. Ten seconds after that, Carver took the second voice call and said, “What kind of bullshit is this?”

“You know what kind of bullshit it is. It’s Leavenworth bullshit,” Lucas said. “Now, you need to take a little time off this afternoon, go out for a cup of coffee. There’s an obscure Caribou Coffee a couple miles from Grant’s house. Give me a time.”

After a moment of silence, Carver said, “Three o’clock.”

“Good. And I’ll tell you, Ron, we are going to put some serious shit on you. We’re also going to give you a way out. All of that gets canceled if you talk to Dannon or Grant. They’re the targets in this. We’ve already got a guy willing to swear that Dannon set up the porn deal for Grant. You can walk, or you can get added to the list. I’ll see you at three, and we’ll decide which it is.”

Lucas clicked off without giving him a chance to answer.

• • •

THEY HAD TIME to kill, and with one thing and another, killed it. The two women were going in with briefcases and spiral binders and carefully coordinated suits: real estate agents. Lucas would be wearing a wire, monitored from a van with a plumber’s logo on the side, and a real phone number for anyone who needed plumbing services. Jenkins and Shrake would be nearby, but out of sight in separate cars, listening to the conversation on their own radios.

When Carver arrived, a tech who was riding in the plumbing van would try to place a battery-powered GPS tracker on Carver’s car, if he could do it without being seen. When Carver left, he’d be tracked by Jenkins and Shrake, who would be well out of sight, running on parallel roads where they could. Lucas and the two women would follow in separate cars.

Del would watch Dannon. If he had an opportunity, he’d place another GPS tracker on Dannon’s vehicle.

Since Lucas had been in the same coffee shop that morning, talking to Green, he knew the layout of the place. He told the two women agents, Stack and Bradley, to park as close as they could to the coffee shop’s door, hoping that would push Carver away from a parking place that he could see from the shop, and give the technician a good chance to install the tracking bug.

The women were to take a table on the left end of the semicircular seating area, out of sight from where Lucas would take a table, on the far right end.

• • •

AND THAT’S WHAT they all did.

The two women went in at ten minutes of three, ordered a Northern Lite Salted Caramel Mocha and a large Americano, and two cranberry scones, put their briefcases on the floor by their ankles, tops open, guns right there, and opened a notebook full of pictures of houses.

Lucas arrived five minutes later, and as he did, Shrake called: “He’s here, across the street behind the BP station. He’s watching you.”

“All right. I’m going in. If he pulls out a deer rifle, shoot him,” Lucas said.

“Will do.”

Lucas went in, saw the two women at the table on the right, got a Diet Coke and another scone, and walked down to the left, an empty table near the restroom door. His phone rang and Shrake said, “He’s coming,” and a second later, “He’s parking on the side.”

Carver slouched along the outside walk, pushed through the door. He was wearing a dark blue nylon shell over a cotton sweater, black slacks, and boots. He looked around the room, his gaze pausing on each of the people at the tables, on the servers, and finally to Lucas. Lucas nodded. Carver turned away, stepped up to the counter, got a large cup of black coffee, and Lucas thought, Scalding hot coffee.

Carver was a big guy, thick through the chest, but moved easily, comfortable with his size. Lucas wondered, if it came to a fistfight, if he could take him; and he decided he could. Lucas watched as Carver got his coffee and crossed to Lucas’s table, put the coffee on the table, and sat down and asked, “What is this bullshit?”

Lucas said, “I know goddamned well that either you or Dannon killed Tubbs and Roman. I thought about it for a while, and decided that it’d be either Dannon by himself, or both of you together. I don’t know where Grant comes in, if she’s even aware of it. I need somebody to talk to me about it. I picked you.”

“I have no idea of what you’re talking about—”

“I hope that’s not true, because whether or not it is, I’m going to hurt you. I got the records from the investigation into the shootings in Afghanistan, and I’ve got a guy who can put them on the political agenda. I think I can get the army to pull you back in—they can do that, for crimes committed under their jurisdiction—and I think I can get you sent to Leavenworth. I’m not sure I can do all that, but I think I can. And I will, unless you talk to me.”

“There’s nothing to talk about,” Carver said. “The army cleared me. Those people were killed by Taliban firing through the windows, blind firing—”

“The report says there are witnesses who say otherwise. We’ve got video shot from an Apache . . . is that right? An Apache? A helicopter gunship? They have night-camera video from every angle on that house you raided, and nobody’s shooting into it, not in a way that would hit people lying on the floor.”

“It’s that fuckin’ Rodriguez, isn’t it?” Carver said. “Listen, I gave him a down-check on an evaluation, stalled him out at E-6, and he never got over it. Said he was going to get me. Now he’s talking to you, right?”

Lucas spoke right past him: “I can offer you a deal. You give me anything that points at Dannon, or Grant, for that matter, and we’ll let sleeping dogs lie. Nobody will mention the word ‘Afghanistan.’ I can’t offer you immunity for anything you’ve done here in Minnesota, only a prosecutor can set that up, but I can offer to testify in your behalf, in any court case that comes up, to say that you cooperated and aided the investigation.”

Carver looked at Lucas over the coffee, which he hadn’t touched, and finally said, “That’s it? That’s all you got?”

“I can’t tell you what else we have—but one reason we came to you, is that we can hang the child porn thing on Dannon, and the two killings that follow the child porn. All by itself, the porn will get him twenty years. We need one more little thing to get him for the whole works—we’re still processing the Roman scene, and we’ve got quite a bit of DNA. That takes a while to come back. If it comes back Dannon, he’s done. If it comes back Carver, and you’ve been stonewalling us . . . then that’s done. No deal. No way.”

Carver shook his head: “First of all, as a suck-ass small-town cop, you got no idea of what you’re getting into with the army. They cleared me, and if you try to prove otherwise, they’ll hand you your ass. And I don’t give a shit about any governor. The army’s bigger than any governor, and they’ll hand him his ass, too. Not because they’re protecting me. Because those generals, they’ll be protecting themselves.”

“I’m willing to find out,” Lucas said.

“Then you’re gonna have to,” Carver said. “Second of all, even if I knew something, I wouldn’t tell you, because you can’t even give me immunity. The best I could hope for, if I knew about these killings, would be what? Life with parole? Twenty years? Say I keep my mouth shut, and you’re right about the governor and all that, and the army pulls me back . . . nothing they do could be worse than what you’re talking about. To tell you the truth, given what happened that whole night . . . heroes in a firefight . . . I don’t see any way they convict me of anything.”