John Sandford - Silken Prey

Lucas: “What?”

“That’s what they got—whoever it was. Four million. Cash, gold coins, and mostly a lot of jewelry. Diamonds, gold. The Star of Kandiyohi, which is a diamond as big as a robin’s egg, a Patek Philippe watch that I got from my grandfather, worth a quarter million dollars all by itself. . . .”

Schiffer looked at her and said, “Okay. Agent Davenport has his crime scene. But you are a United States Senator-elect, and we have important issues to deal with. We need legal advice. Now.”

Schiffer looked around: “Not another word, anybody. Not another word to Agent Davenport or other police officers, not until the lawyers get here.”

CHAPTER 28

Weather usually slept hard from ten o’clock at night until six in the morning. Lucas came to bed at all kinds of times, usually between midnight and three, so when he didn’t come to bed on election night, she didn’t miss him until she woke up at six. Then she got on the phone, a cold clutch in the stomach, and when he answered, she said, “You’re not shot.”

“No,” he said. “But there was some shooting.”

He spent five minutes telling her about it, in detail, and at the end of it, she said, “I’m revising a rhino in two hours and I’m shaking like a leaf.” Translated: She was fixing a nose job that some other surgeon had messed up.

“Stop shaking,” Lucas said. “I’m fine, Jenkins and Shrake are fine, Bradley and Stack are a little screwed up, but they’ll be okay, and Del is good, except that he looks like a bug.”

Then he had to explain that.

• • •

THE LAWYERS ARRIVED, and officially informed Lucas that there would be no further statements from the principals, until there had been extensive consultations. They said it in a long-winded way, and Lucas had to take a break from it, when a crime-scene supervisor called.

“We’ve been out here walking the area and we’ve found what looks a lot like another grave. It’s about a hundred and fifty feet from the grave Dannon was digging, on the same track, on the same side of the road. We’ll document it and open it.”

“Do that,” Lucas said. “It’s Tubbs.”

• • •

THE CRIME-SCENE CREW ARRIVED in force, and started by processing the window in Taryn’s bathroom and the ground outside. They would get to the safe, but the supervisor complained to Lucas, “Why’d you let her open the safe? There might have been prints on the keypad.”

“Given the look of the rest of it, do you really think so?” Lucas asked.

“Well, no. But . . .”

“No buts. If this was a real robbery, it was a pro. Like, a top pro,” Lucas said.

“You think it wasn’t real?”

“I’m not sure of anything,” Lucas said. He looked at his watch: “Gotta make a call. I’ll talk to you again before I leave.”

• • •

THE SUN WAS UP, somewhere behind the clouds, but exactly where was hard to tell. In any case, it was light outside when Lucas wandered down to the end of the driveway and called the governor.

The governor’s phone rang four times, then Henderson said, “This time of the morning, it can’t be good.”

“About your party’s senator-elect: her top security guy murdered another one of her security people and tried to bury him by the Mississippi halfway to St. Cloud. We interrupted that and there was a shoot-out and he was killed. The crime scene has found another dug-up area nearby. I think they’ll be pulling Tubbs out of there, in the next couple of hours.”

After a moment, the governor laughed and said, “You are a piece of work, Lucas. You and that fuckin’ Flowers, both of you. I really get my entertainment dollar’s worth.”

“The last person who said I was a piece of work, offered to take me to bed,” Lucas said.

“Well, I’ll pass on that,” Henderson said. Then, after a moment of silence, the governor said, “I’ll have to mediate this. I’ll have to confer with other Important People. Porter, of course, is going to lay an ostrich-sized egg. I don’t see how Grant can stay on as a senator, and frankly, that’s about the best possible outcome I could have imagined.”

“How’s that?” Lucas asked.

“Guess who would appoint her replacement?” Henderson said. “I’d have Porter Smalls out of my hair and a new senator who would be wildly happy about supporting me for a better job . . . if somebody goes looking for, say, a vice president.”

“That hadn’t occurred to me,” Lucas said.

“Because you’re not a natural politician,” the governor said. He laughed again. “This is the kind of thing that makes life interesting.”

“Unless you’re Dannon. Or Carver.”

“Well, yeah, I suppose,” the governor said. “I’ll assign somebody to say a prayer for them.”

• • •

AFTER THAT, IT WAS a lot of crime-scene stuff, lawyers and political wrangling. Tubbs was dug up and after a nasty autopsy, he was reburied. He’d been hit on the head with a heavy, rounded object like a baseball bat. Death had not been quick.

They found the smear of blood that Tubbs had left in Dannon’s car. Unfortunately, the crime-scene tech who found it, and sampled it, unknowingly destroyed the scrawled TG—for Taryn Grant—that Tubbs had hoped they’d see. DNA proved that Tubbs had been in Dannon’s car, but they already knew that Dannon or Carver had killed him. So Tubbs’s last, fading, flickering effort came to nothing.

• • •

LUCAS GOT STATEMENTS from everybody and Alice Green had been telling the truth: at the time Grant went to the bedroom with Dannon, Green had been assigned to the door, and could be seen doing that on the security tapes. Connie Schiffer, in particular, had been curious about Grant and Dannon leaving the party, heading back to the bedroom, and had exchanged looks with Green.

One other politician, arriving late to congratulate the new senator, spoke to Green at the door, and remembered that Grant had not been in the room when he got there. He asked for her, and a moment later she reappeared from the direction of the bedroom, to give him a hug.

The tapes of the bedroom showed nothing, because the room started out dark. Then there was a flicker of light, apparently when Grant walked into the room, and she’d reached out (automatically, she said) and hit the privacy switch, which turned the cameras off. A minute later, she hit the privacy switch again (again, she said, an automatic reflex) and turned the cameras back on as she left. She left the door open, so there was a bit of light, and then a short time later, the door mysteriously closed again, killing the light. There was nothing more on the tape for several hours, when Grant got back from the hotel and hit the privacy switch on the way to the bathroom.

The next people on the tape were Grant, Lucas, Del, and the others, going down to investigate the bedroom.

All of that supported what both Grant and Green had said, except on one point: Grant hadn’t been in the bedroom long enough to get to the bathroom and pee, not unless she’d set the women’s North American land-speed record for micturition. Nor had she reported the cut-out windows, which seemed impossible to miss. The toilet was in a separate booth, and the window was right overhead. But she was sticking to her story, saying that she hadn’t bothered to turn the light on in the bathroom and was in a hurry and simply hadn’t noticed the windows. In reality, Lucas suspected she’d gone back to talk with Dannon, but didn’t want to admit it, because the next thing Dannon did was kill Carver.

He also suspected the robbery had taken place when the door mysteriously closed, because that must have been when the phone was stolen; and after the party had gone to the hotel for the victory celebration, the house had been closed and the dogs turned loose.