John Sandford - Silken Prey

When Lucas came in, behind Green, Grant stood up, putting her drink aside, and asked, “What? What now?”

“Your pal Dannon murdered your pal Carver and took his body out in the countryside to bury it. We were tracking him, and when we approached him at the grave he was digging, he tried to shoot it out. He’s dead.”

There was a moment of utter silence: Schiffer seemed to be the most affected, as she got to her feet, her face gone white, a hand at her throat.

Grant recovered first, and asked, “What . . . does that mean?”

“We were hoping you could help us with that,” Lucas said.

“I don’t know what that means,” Grant said.

“You sent me a message earlier tonight . . .” Lucas began.

Grant put up a hand: “No. No, I didn’t. I already told you that.”

Lucas took his phone out of his pocket, called up the message, stepped up to her and said, “Here’s the message. Is this your phone number?”

She looked at the message and the number, and said, “That’s not right. That’s crazy.”

“Is that your phone number?”

“Yes, but my phone, I can’t find my phone. It’s gone. Somebody took it out of my purse. Marjorie had my purse . . .”

She looked at the woman on the floor, who said, “I was really careful with the purse. It was zipped up.”

Lucas said, “The call came in at ten-oh-six. You were still here at ten-oh-six, weren’t you?”

Grant looked at Schiffer, who said, “Yes . . . we were still here. We left for the hotel around ten-fifteen.”

Grant said, “Then the phone call came from here. My purse was back in the bedroom. In fact . . .” She looked at Schiffer. “In fact, you called me while I was back there.”

They stared at each other for a moment, then Schiffer said, “That’s right,” dug around in her bag, pulled out her phone, and said, “I made that call at nine-fifty-eight. What’s that . . . eight minutes before you got the message?”

“There was nobody in the bedroom but me. I went back there to get ready to go,” Grant said. To Schiffer: “I got the call from you . . . I put my phone back in my bag. My bag was on the chest of drawers.”

Green stepped over to Grant and took her by the arm and said, “One second . . .” She pulled Grant off to one side, twenty feet away, stood with her back to Lucas and the rest of the group, and whispered directly into Grant’s ear. Grant looked at her, then nodded, came back and said, “I’d like to alter that statement a bit. Doug Dannon escorted me back there. We didn’t talk, I just wanted some privacy to pee. I was alone when Connie called, and I dropped my phone back in my purse and came straight out here. Then when we were ready to go, I went back and got my purse.”

“Can we look at the bedroom?” Lucas asked.

Schiffer said, “Maybe we ought to have a lawyer.”

Lucas: “There’s a very good chance . . . actually, it’s not a chance, it’s a certainty, that this is a crime scene. Somebody called me on Ms. Grant’s phone, who had knowledge that Dannon was planning to kill Carver. As he did. A lawyer might tell you not to talk, but he can’t keep us away from a crime scene.”

Schiffer shrugged, and Grant said, “I don’t care, anyway. This is . . . awful. Awful! This is insane! The bedroom . . .”

She walked back toward the bedroom wing, and Lucas, Del, Schiffer, Green, and the others followed. Halfway down the hall, Lucas looked back and said, “I don’t want anyone here except Ms. Grant.”

Grant said to Lucas, “I want witnesses. You have lied to me and worked for Smalls since the beginning of this thing, and I wouldn’t put it past you to frame me. I want witnesses. I want Connie and Alice with me.”

Lucas said, “I did not . . .” Then he stopped and nodded. “Ms. Green and Ms. Schiffer. Nobody else. Do not touch a thing. Stand in the doorway where you can see and hear, but do not touch anything. Do not touch the door or the doorknobs or anything else.”

They stepped inside the bedroom and Grant pointed to her left and said, “I went in there to use the bathroom. My purse was right here, on the dresser.” She pointed at the dresser. “Doug was out in the hall. Nobody could have gotten past him, without him knowing. And I don’t know why a, a . . . confederate . . . of his would call to say he was planning to kill Ron. Anyway, I used the bathroom, and came out, and as I came out, the phone rang, and I talked to Connie, and then put the phone back in the purse and went out. With Doug . . .”

When they’d entered the bedroom, Del had slid off to the left to clear the bathroom. He came back and listened to Grant’s narration. When she finished, he asked, “When you were in the bathroom, did you notice anything unusual? Did you look out the window?”

“Out the window? No, I didn’t look out . . . Why?”

“Because the window seems to be missing,” Del said.

• • •

LUCAS HAD BEEN INVOLVED in any number of clusterfucks in his working life, but the one at Grant’s house was notable. They all went to look at the window, which was, without a doubt, missing. Then they trooped around to the backyard, where they found three separate sheets of glass lying under an arborvitae.

Lucas said, “Why would—”

Taryn put a hand to her lips and said, “Could they get in the safe?”

“What safe?” Del asked.

They trooped back inside, and Taryn reached behind a side table and did something, and a bookcase rotated out from the wall. They all looked at the safe, which was closed. She said, “Would you turn away for a minute?” and they did, and turned back when she said, “Okay,” and turned the heavy handle that worked the safe locks.

She pulled the door open and looked into a safe that was completely empty.

In the silence, she stumbled backward, staring at the empty steel hole in the wall, and screamed, “No! No! No!”

Lucas was looking at her face when she opened the safe, and in his estimation, there was no chance that she was faking the reaction. Not even if she was crazy; not even if she’d known the safe was empty, and had rehearsed.

No chance.

• • •

LUCAS MOVED EVERYBODY out to the living room, and sat them down, and called the BCA duty officer again, and told him what had happened. He said, “You’ve got people spread all over the metro area.”

“Leave the Dannon and Carver apartments. Seal them up—we can get to them later. Right now, I need a crew here. Get them moving.”

Grant was pacing the living room, hands to her face. Everybody else sat without talking. Green went into the kitchen to get something to drink, and Lucas followed her. She handed him a personal-sized bottle of orange juice, opened one for herself, and asked, “Is there any possible way to keep me out of this? As an informant? I need the work.”

“If you don’t have a problem with the possibility of a little perjury,” Lucas said.

“I don’t, because I never told you anything meaningful,” she said.

“I keep thinking, the one person who may have had access to that phone, and who might have been aware of the whole Dannon-Carver situation, and who might have been willing to warn me . . . was you.”

“But I didn’t. And when we give our statements, you’ll find that I was right on the door when Taryn went back to the bedroom with Doug. I was monitoring the door, and the comings and goings, every minute. I couldn’t have made that phone call: and I didn’t.”

“So you’re out, if that’s what the statements show,” Lucas said. “I’m leaving my ass in your hands. I won’t mention you, and you don’t mention me, except when we spoke in public.”

“Thank you.”

They carried the bottles of juice back into the living room, where Grant looked at them, and muttered, almost to herself, “Almost four million.”