John Sandford: Silken Prey

Smalls made a noise that sounded like a fart, and Henderson said, “Thank you for that comment, Porter.”

After some more back-and-forth, Henderson declared the meeting over. “We all need to go back and think about what we’ve heard here today, think really hard about it. We need to start winding down the war. We don’t need anything like this to ever happen again.”

The people at the meeting flowed out of the conference room, into the outer office, but then stopped to talk: Grant with Schiffer and Rose Marie, Smalls with Mitford. Henderson pulled Lucas aside and said, “Let’s keep the rest of the investigation very quiet. Back to quiet mode.”

“Not much left to do,” Lucas said. “I’ll let you know if anything else serious comes up, but I think it’s over.”

“Good job,” Henderson said. “But goddamn bloody. Goddamn bloody. ”

Lucas saw Green hovering on the edge of the gathering and waved her over. She came, looking a little nervously over at Grant, who was talking with Rose Marie and paying no attention to Green.

Lucas said, “Governor, this is Alice Green, a former Secret Service agent and Ms. Grant’s security person. I think she’s a woman of integrity, and if you someday have an opening on your staff for a personal security aide . . . she’s quite effective.”

Henderson smiled and took her hand and didn’t immediately let it go. He said, “Well, my goodness, as we wind up for this upcoming presidential season, I might very well have an opening . . .”

Lucas drifted away, and let them talk.

• • •

OTHER BITS OF THE CASE fell to the roadside, one piece after another.

The Minneapolis Police Department showed little appetite for investigating itself concerning the possibility that dozens of its personnel had been viewing child porn as a form of recreation. A few scraps of the story got out, and there were solemn assurances that a complete investigation would be done, even as the administration was shoveling dirt on it. Quintana, no dummy, apologized to everybody, while hinting that he’d have to drag it all out in the open if anything untoward happened to him. He took a reprimand and a three-day suspension without pay, and went back on the job.

Knoedler, the Democratic spy, got lawyered up, and the lawyers quickly realized that everything could be explained by the Bob Tubbs–Helen Roman connection, and there were no witnesses to the contrary. They put a “Just Politics” label on it, and it stuck.

Clay, the suspect in the Roman murder, was freed, and Turk Cochran, the Minneapolis homicide detective, mildly pissed about that, gave Lucas’s cell phone number to Clay and told him to check in at least once a week and tell Lucas what he was up to. Clay started doing that, leaving long messages on Lucas’s answering service when the call didn’t go through, which threatened to drive Lucas over the edge.

• • •

TWO WEEKS AFTER the shootings, a few days after the meeting in the governor’s office, Dannon’s aunt came from Wichita, Kansas, to Minneapolis, to sign papers that would transfer Dannon’s worldly goods to her. She was his closest relative, as his parents had died twenty years earlier in a rural car accident, and he’d left no will that anybody could find.

The crime-scene people told Lucas that she would be at his apartment to examine it and to sign an inventory, and Lucas stopped by for one last look. A BCA clerk was there, with the inventory, and Lucas found nothing new to look at. The aunt, after signing the inventory, gave him a box covered with birthday-style wrapping paper; the box had been unwrapped, and opened.

“I think you should give this to that woman, the senator,” the aunt said. Her name was Harriet Dannon.

Lucas took out a sterling silver frame. Inside was a news-style photo of Grant on the campaign, shaking hands with some young girls, with Dannon looming in the background. The frame was inscribed, “I’ll always have your back. Love, Doug.”

“I never thought he was a bad man,” Harriet Dannon said. “But I mostly knew him as a boy. He was a Boy Scout. . . . I never thought . . .”

• • •

LUCAS DIDN’T QUITE KNOW why Harriet Dannon thought he should give the picture to Grant, but he took it, and back outside, thought, Might as well. He was not far from her house, and he drove over, pulled into the driveway, pushed the call button.

A full minute later—there may have been some discussion, he thought—the gate swung back. He got out, walked to the front door, which opened as he approached. Alice Green was there: “What’s up?”

“Closing out Dannon’s town house. Is Senator Grant in?”

“She’s waiting in the library. With the dogs.”

Lucas reached inside his sport coat and touched his .45, and Green grinned at him. “Won’t be necessary,” she said. And very quietly: “Thanks for the governor. That’s going to work out.”

“Careful,” he said.

• • •

GRANT WAS IN THE LIBRARY, sitting in the middle of the couch with the two dogs at her feet, one on either side of her; like Cleopatra and a couple of sphinxes, Lucas thought.

He walked in and she asked, “What do you want?”

“I was over at Dannon’s apartment, we’re closing it out. He left this: I guess he never had a chance to give it to you.”

She looked at the photo, and then the inscription, then tossed it aside on the couch. “That’s it?”

Very cold, Lucas thought. “I guess,” he said. He turned to walk away, and at the edge of the room, turned back to say, “I know goddamn well that you were involved.”

She said not a word, but smiled at him, one long arm along the top of the couch, a new gold chain glowing from her neck. If a jury had seen the smile, they would have convicted her: it was both a deliberate confession and a smile of triumph.

But there was no jury in the room. Lucas shook his head and walked away.

• • •

IN THE CAR, backing out of the driveway, he had two thoughts.

The first was that Porter Smalls, in vowing to smear Grant with other members of Congress, was pissing into the wind. He could go to the lame-duck session and complain all he wanted about Taryn Grant, but nothing would be done, because Grant was a winner. In Lucas’s opinion, a good part of the Congress seemed to suffer from the same psychological defects that afflicted Taryn Grant—or that Taryn Grant enjoyed, depending on your point of view. Their bloated self-importance, their disregard of anything but their own goals, their preoccupation with power . . .

Not only would Taryn Grant fit right in, she’d be admired.

The second thought: He was convinced that Grant was involved in the killings—not necessarily carrying them out, but in directing them, or approving of them. Once a psychopathic personality had gotten that kind of rush, the kind you got from murder, he or she often needed another fix.

So: he might be seeing Taryn Grant again.

He would find that interesting.

• • •

A COUPLE MORE WEEKS slipped by.

A mass shooting in Ohio wiped everything else out of the news, and the whole election war began to slip into the rearview mirror.

Flowers arrested the Ape Man Rapist of Rochester, a former cable installation technician, at the Mayo Clinic’s emergency room. He’d tangled with the wrong woman, one who had a hammer on the side table next to her bed. And though the rapist was wearing his Planet of the Apes Halloween monkey head, it was no match for her Craftsman sixteen-ounce claw. After she’d coldcocked him, she made sure he couldn’t run by methodically breaking his foot bones, as well as his fibulas, tibias, patellas, and femurs. Flowers estimated he’d be sitting trial in three months, because he sure wouldn’t be standing.