John Sandford - Silken Prey

Instantly, she said, a picture flashed up, and she’d reflexively looked at it: at first it seemed like a jumble of dead people, and then she realized that it was a group sex photo, and that two of the people in the photo were children.

She called Dad, and Dad dialed 911. The rest was history. Lucas learned almost nothing from the report that he hadn’t gotten from Smalls, except that Sarah Lawrence women freely used sexual references that Lucas heretofore thought confined to pornographic films.

He finished the file, and went into the kitchen in search of orange juice. Weather and Letty were leaning on the kitchen breakfast bar, programming something into Weather’s cell phone. Weather looked up and asked, “Well? What was in the file? Did he do it?”

Lucas got a bottle of orange juice from the refrigerator and twisted its cap off. “File was useless. One good thing: I’m not far behind the St. Paul cops.”

“I’m shocked that you’re behind at all,” Weather said.

“Me too,” said Letty. “Shame.”

“Thank you for your support,” Lucas said. “You’ll find me in the garage, sharpening my lawn mower blade.”

Letty looked at Weather and asked, “Is that a euphemism?”

“I hope not.”

Lucas ignored them, finished the orange juice, put the bottle in the recyclables, and went off to the garage.

They could taunt him all they wished; but Kidd’s scorchingly good-looking wife, Lauren, thought he was totally hot.

CHAPTER 4

Taryn Grant came back from a campaign loop through Rochester, Wabasha, and Red Wing, and found Doug Dannon, her security coordinator, waiting inside the door from the garage. Her two German shepherds, Hansel and Gretel, whimpered with joy when she walked in, and she knelt and gave them a good scratch and got a kiss from each of them, and then Dannon said, “I’ve got some news. Where’s Green?”

Alice Green was a former Secret Service agent. She was not in the loop on the shadow campaign. Taryn said, “Alice is with the car. . . . What happened?”

“The word around the Smalls campaign is that there’s a new state investigator looking into the porn scandal,” Dannon said. “I don’t know if they’ve taken it away from St. Paul, but Smalls is pretty happy about it. He thinks something’s gonna get done. There are rumors that Smalls talked to the governor, but nobody knows what was said.”

“The governor? He’s supposed to be on our side.” Taryn bent sideways and gave Gretel another scratch on the head.

“Don’t know—don’t know what’s happening. Maybe Connie can get something.”

Connie Schiffer was Taryn’s campaign manager.

“What about the investigator, the new guy?” Taryn asked.

“I’ve been looking him up on the Internet. He’s a killer. His name is Lucas Davenport, he’s been around a long time,” Dannon said. “Works for the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. There’s a ton of newspaper clips. He’s killed a bunch of people in shoot-outs. He seems to be the guy they go to, when they need somebody really smart, or really mean.”

“But what could he find out?”

“Worst case, he could find the thread that leads from Tubbs to Smalls,” Dannon said. “Everybody’s looking for Tubbs, but they don’t know about the connection. We can’t do anything about it. They’ll probably come and talk to you, Taryn. If they think there’s something fishy about the porn, this campaign is where they’ll look. If they find out that Tubbs is connected, and Tubbs never shows up . . . then they’ll be asking about murder.”

“But Tubbs will never show up,” she said.

“No. No chance of that,” Dannon said.

• • •

TARYN GRANT, DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATE for the U.S. Senate, suffered from narcissistic personality disorder, or so she’d been told by a psychologist in her third year at the Wharton School. He’d added, “I wouldn’t worry too much about it, as long as you don’t go into a life of crime. Half the people here are narcissists. The other half are psychopaths. Well, except for Roland Shafer. He’s normal enough.”

Taryn didn’t know Roland Shafer, but all these years later, she sometimes thought about him, and wondered what happened to him, being . . . “normal.”

The shrink had explained the disorder to her, in sketchy terms, perhaps trying to be kind. When she left his office, she’d gone straight to the library and looked it up, because she knew in her heart that she was far too perfect to have any kind of disorder.

• • •

NARCISSISTIC PERSONALITY DISORDER:

Has excessive feelings of self-importance.

Reacts to criticism with rage.

Takes advantage of other people.

Disregards the feelings of others.

Preoccupied with fantasies of success, power, beauty, and intelligence.

• • •

EXCESSIVE FEELINGS OF SELF-IMPORTANCE? Did that idiot shrink know she’d inherit the better part of a billion dollars, that she already had enough money to buy an entire industry ? She was important.

Reacts to criticism with rage? Well, what do you do when you’re mistreated? Shy away from conflict and go snuffle into a Kleenex? Hell no: you get up in their face, straighten them out.

Takes advantage of other people? You don’t get anywhere in this world by being a cupcake, cupcake.

Disregards the feelings of others? Look: half the people in the world were below average, and “average” isn’t anything to brag about. We should pay attention to the dumbasses in life?

How about, “Preoccupied with fantasies of success, power, beauty, and intelligence”? Hey, had he taken a good look at her and her CV? She was in the running for class valedictorian; she looked like Marilyn Monroe, without the black spot on her cheek; and she had, at age twenty-two, thirty million dollars of her own, with twenty or thirty times more than that, yet to come. What fantasies? Welcome to my world, bub.

• • •

THAT HAD BEEN more than a decade ago.

Taryn was now thirty-four. She still had those major assets—she was blond, good-looking, with interesting places in all the interesting places. She’d graduated from Wharton in Entrepreneurial Management, and then from the London School of Economics in finance. Until four years earlier, she’d worked in the finance department at Grant Mills, the family’s much-diversified agricultural products business, the fifth largest closely held company in the U.S.

She’d spent six years with Grant Mills, six years of snarling combat with a list of parents, uncles, and cousins, about who was going to run what. She might have won that fight, eventually, but she’d opted out. There was a lot of money there, but she couldn’t see spending her life with corn, wheat, beans, and rice.

She’d quit to start Digital Pen LLC, which wrote apps for smartphones and tablets. She employed two hundred people in Minneapolis, and another hundred out on the Coast, and had stacked up a few more tens of millions, on top of the three-quarters of a billion in the Grant Mills trust.

But even with Digital Pen, she’d grown bored. She’d turned the company over to a hired CEO, told him not to screw it up, and turned her eyes to politics.

Taryn had watched the incumbent U.S. senator, a Republican named Porter Smalls, stepping on his political dick for five consecutive years. She thought, Hmmm . She had an interest in the Senate, as a stepping-stone, and it was clear from early on that the main Democratic candidates would be the usual bunch of stooges, clowns, buffoons, apparatchiks, and small-town wannabees—and a witch—who couldn’t have found Washington, D.C., with a Cadillac’s navigation system and a Seeing Eye dog.

Taryn had everything she needed to buy a good, solid Senate seat, and start looking to move up. She’d pounded the field in the Democratic primary, taking fifty-one percent of the vote in a four-way race; the witch had finished third. She’d been a weekly visitor on both local and national talk shows, was good at it, and people started referring to her as a “rising star.”