Silken Prey

CHAPTER 10

Taryn Grant wore cotton pajamas at night, and had just gotten into them, in a dressing room off the hallway in her bedroom suite, a few minutes before midnight, when she heard—or maybe felt—footsteps on the wooden floor coming down to the bedroom. The security people were the only others in the house, and weren’t welcome in her bedroom wing.

Something had happened, or was happening. She took down the Japanese kimono that she used as a robe, pulled it over her shoulders, and headed toward the door, just as the doorbell burped discreetly. She pressed an intercom button: “Yes?”

“It’s me, Doug. I need to talk with you.”

She popped the door and nodded down the hall: “In the sitting room.”

“Yes,” he said, and led the way.

The sitting room had three big fabric chairs arrayed around a circular table; the walls were in the form of a five-eighths dome—as though a big slice had been taken out of an orange—and kept their voices contained.

“What happened?” she asked, as she settled into a chair facing him.

“I talked with our source at the AG’s office. The police unraveled how Tubbs set up the computer, and they’ve tied his disappearance to the porn. I’ve got a lot of details, if you want to hear them, but the main thing is, the police will probably want to interview you, since you had the most to gain from the porn attack. You’ll need to figure out a response. The guy coming to interview you will probably be this Davenport, who I told you about.”

“Give me the details,” she said. “All of them. I’ll forget them later.”

Dannon spent twenty minutes on the briefing, reviewing what had happened that day at the attorney general’s office, and the results so far of investigations by Davenport and a St. Paul homicide cop named Morris. “We’ve had one piece of great good luck: when they found Tubbs’s hideout spot, there was no mention of the porn or any dirty tricks, other than the porn file itself. They did find some cash, and it may have been from us, but we were careful there, and it’s untraceable.”

When he was done, Taryn asked, “The fact that you talked to this guy at the AG’s office, could that come back to us?”

“No, I don’t think so—not in a way that could hurt us,” Dannon said. “I left the impression that we were desperate to work out the political implications of what was going on, this close to the election. Of course, when he took the money, he was technically committing a crime, so he won’t be inclined to talk.”

“Unless he suddenly starts feeling guilty,” Taryn said.

“Not a problem with this guy,” Dannon said. “He believes he’s on the side of Jesus, helping us beat Smalls. He knows taking the money was a crime of some kind, but he doesn’t think he’s really done anything wrong. He sees the money more as compensation for his time. A consultation fee.”

“Amazing how that works,” Taryn said.

“Yeah. Anyway, it all brings up the question about Tubbs’s girl,” Dannon said. “Davenport is going through the whole campaign committee office, grilling everybody, looking for his accomplice. I don’t think she knows anything about us.”

“Do you know who she is? What her name is?”

“Yeah, but I’m not going to tell you,” Dannon said. “I don’t want her name in your head, if you’re asked about her.”

She looked at him for a moment, thinking about that, then nodded and said, “Okay. I see that. But how could she know about us? Tubbs didn’t know for sure. Not until he got here.”

“Tubbs knew, he just didn’t have any proof,” Dannon said. “He didn’t know my name or anything about me. We made the assumption, incorrect, in retrospect, that if the payoff was big enough, he’d keep his head down, that he wouldn’t even want to know where the money came from. But once he started looking, it was just a matter of time before he found us.”

Taryn stood and wandered around the sitting area, working it out. “The real problem is, if he mentioned anything to this woman, even his suspicions, those would sort of harden up if she talked with the police. You know what I mean? If Tubbs was alive, but he hadn’t gone looking for you, and they found him and put him under oath, he’d have to admit that he couldn’t identify the person who paid him. But if this Davenport finds his girl, his accomplice, and she just tells him what Tubbs thought, that takes on its own reality. And Tubbs won’t be around to cross-examine, to say he didn’t know where the money came from.”

“That’s true,” Dannon said. “But: right now, they can’t know Tubbs’s motive. Not for sure. As far as they know, he might have done it on his own hook. If we do something about her, that would confirm to Davenport that there’s somebody else operating here. If he finds her and she says she doesn’t have any idea why Tubbs planted the porn, then it stops with Tubbs. But if she turns up dead, then there’s gotta be somebody else. See what I mean?”

“I do,” she said. “It’s a conundrum.”

“I’ve been thinking about it,” Dannon said. “Davenport’s already raised the question of whether somebody in the Minneapolis Police Department might have been involved with the porn. Well, there is somebody. When Tubbs first got back in touch with me, with the porn idea, I asked him where he’d get it. He said he knew a vice cop in Minneapolis who had a file of it. I don’t know if it’s for the cop’s own viewing pleasure, or just one of those things that cops do. Anyway, I pushed Tubbs on it, saying I had to vet the guy before Tubbs made an offer. Tubbs told me the guy’s name is Ray Quintana. If word ever gets out that he supplied the porn, he’s in a world of hurt. So I’m thinking . . . I could call Quintana, mention that Tubbs’s girl could be a problem for him, and maybe he could figure out a way to do a little investigating for us. As a vice cop, looking into this porn allegation. Talk to her. Let us know if there’s a problem.”

“This is turning into a rat’s nest,” Taryn said. “One complication after another.”

“Yes. And maybe the best way out would be to do nothing. Deny, deny. They’ll be looking at you for sure, but there’s no way to connect us to anything. We’ve never had any formal contact with Tubbs—you never met him, you don’t know him, Connie doesn’t know him. . . . We could just sit tight.”

“Maybe even put out the word that we suspect Smalls of some kind of disinformation campaign.” Taryn stood and walked a few steps down the hall, then back, and a few steps up the hall, and back.

“I don’t know how you’d work that—”

She waved a hand at him: “I do. That’s not your concern. The real question mark is Tubbs’s girl. If this Davenport cracks her, and she points at us, we can deny . . . but the word’ll get out and the implications of it all, like Tubbs’s disappearance . . . I’ll lose the election.”

“But you won’t go to prison.”

“But I want to win. That’s the whole point of the exercise,” Taryn said.

They sat in silence for a minute, then Dannon said, “What do you want me to do?”

“Think about it,” she said. “You’re smart. And I’ll think about it overnight. We’ll talk tomorrow morning. It’s all a balancing of the various risks, and the various goals. It’s like a calculus problem: and there is an answer.”

• • •

THE HOUSE HAD WI-FI throughout, and when Dannon was gone, Taryn fired up her laptop, went online, and looked up Lucas Davenport. Google turned up thousands of entries, most from newspapers and television stations statewide, covering criminal cases on which he’d worked over the past twenty-five years.

There were also what appeared to be several hundred business-oriented entries from his involvement with Davenport Simulations.

Those caught her attention, and she dug deeper. Davenport, it seemed, had been a role-playing game designer as a young man, and then, with the rise of the machines, had created a number of simulations for 911 systems. The simulations were in use nationwide, and after the World Trade Center attack, Davenport Simulations had moved more extensively into training software for security professionals. By that time, she found, Davenport was out of the business, having sold it to his management group.

The local business magazines estimated that he’d gotten out with around forty million dollars.

So he was smart and rich.

And the first batch of clips demonstrated that he was, without a doubt, a killer.

Somebody, she thought, that she might like.

• • •

SHE HAD A RESTLESS NIGHT, working through it all, and in the morning beeped Dannon on the walkie-talkie function and said, “I’m going to get an orange juice. Meet me by the pool in three minutes.”

Three minutes later, she was asking, “This Quintana guy, the Minneapolis cop. If we asked him to check around, he wouldn’t have any idea where the question was coming from, right?”

“Well, he’d have an idea,” Dannon said. “It’s possible that he and Tubbs speculated on it, but there’s no way he could know for sure.”

“Then I think we ask him to look up this woman, Tubbs’s girl, and ask the question. He should be able to come up with some kind of legal reason for doing it—that he heard about the attorney general’s review and thought he ought to look into the Minneapolis department’s exposure, something like that. Some reason that wouldn’t implicate him. Just doing his job.”

“I thought about that last night—I couldn’t decide. I’m about fifty-fifty on it,” Dannon said.

“So I’ve decided,” Taryn said. “Do it, but be clever about it. Don’t give yourself away. Call from a cold phone.”

“I can be careful,” Dannon said, “but it’s still a little more chum in the water. We could be stirring up the sharks.”

“It’s a small risk, and we need to take it,” she said. “Make the call. Let’s see what happens.”