Silken Prey

CHAPTER 17

Lucas was up early the next morning, went for a run, got home and called his part-time researcher, a woman named Sandy. He told her that he needed her to work on a semi-emergency basis. He wanted all the names she could find for Carver’s last military unit, and said he was especially interested in people who were no longer with the military. “Check the social media—all your usual sources. If you find anybody, I want to know what they’re doing.”

He’d just gotten out of the post-run shower when Turk Cochran called from Minneapolis Homicide.

Cochran said, “Hey, big guy. The word is, you’ve been snooping around city hall, trying to figure out if somebody over here supplied Porter Smalls’s kiddie porn.”

“You calling to confess?”

“Yeah, I did it with my little laptop. No wait, I meant my little lap dance, not laptop. Is this call being recorded?”

“What’s up, Turk?” Cochran hadn’t called simply to crack wise.

“What I meant to say is, some really bad person broke into Helen Roman’s house last night and shot her to death. I was told that this particular murder might be of interest to yourself.”

“Helen Roman?” For a moment, Lucas drew a blank. He knew that name. . . . “Helen Roman? Smalls’s secretary? Somebody killed her?”

“That’s what I’m saying. Looks sorta like a robbery, but sorta not like a robbery. You want to take a look?”

“Tell me where. I’ll be there.” Lucas had taken any number of calls about murders: this one had his heart thumping.

• • •

HELEN ROMAN’S SMALL HOUSE was on the outskirts of what the Minneapolis media called “North Minneapolis.” That was the approved code designation for “black people,” usually referred to, further down in the story, as the “community,” as in “community leaders asked, ‘How come you crackers never talk about white junkies getting aced in East Minneapolis?’”

Lucas left the Porsche at the curb, said hello to a patrol sergeant he’d known for twenty years or so, and crossed the lawn to the small front porch, where Cochran was sitting in an aluminum lawn chair. Cochran was a big man, fleshy-faced with a gut, and the lawn chair was his, kept in the trunk of his car, so he’d have somewhere to sit when he was working around a crime scene.

“Why’s it not like a robbery?” Lucas asked.

“Didn’t take enough stuff,” Cochran said. He was wearing gray flannel slacks, a red tie, and a blue blazer; he looked like a New York doorman. “She had quite a bit of takable stuff, lying around loose. The thing is, when something like this happens, either the shooter runs, instantly, or he stays around long enough to accomplish the mission. It’s not very often that they stay around for fifteen seconds. It’s either nothing, or five minutes. But why am I telling you that?”

“I would not be confident in that generalization when applied to a specific case,” Lucas said.

“Jeez, you know a lot of big words,” Cochran said. “If I understood them all, I agree—somebody might stay around for fifteen seconds, like this guy did, but not often.”

“You got a time for it?”

“Right around one in the morning. Actually, since you ask, about five after one. A guy was watching TV up the street, heard a shot. If that was the shot. The thing is, he said it sounded like a shotgun: a big BOOM. I asked him if he knew what a shotgun sounded like, and he said yeah, he’s a turkey hunter. But: the medical examiner’s guy tells me that it looks like Roman was shot by a small-caliber weapon, probably a .22. Inside the house. Windows and doors all closed. I’m not even sure that could be heard, five houses away.”

Lucas said, “Huh.” And, “So you haven’t figured out the boom.”

“No, but who knows? Maybe that was the shot. The ME’s guy says it looks pretty consistent with a one-o’clock shooting, the condition of the blood and the body temp.”

“Who found the body?”

“A woman named Carmen West,” Cochran said. “She puts up lawn signs for Smalls around the north end.”

“Sounds like dangerous work,” Lucas said.

“You mean because Smalls is a right-wing devil, and right-wing devils are not liked on the north side?”

“Something like that. Anyway . . .”

“Roman was supposed to be at work at six o’clock this morning,” Cochran said. “Last days of the campaign, and all that. When she didn’t show by eight, somebody at the office phoned West and asked her to knock on Roman’s door. West said the door was open. . . . She looked in, and saw Roman in the hallway. Called 911.”

“All that seems legit?”

“Yeah, it does.” Cochran pushed himself out of his chair. “Come on in, I’ll show you around.”

Lucas followed him up to the porch and Cochran said, “Notice the door.”

“Nothing there,” Lucas said, checking out the door.

“It wasn’t forced,” Cochran said. “We can’t find anything forced. Either the door was unlocked, which seems unlikely for a single woman, or the guy had a key. We talked to the neighbors, who said she didn’t have a housekeeper, and her only relative—an heir—is her daughter, who lives in Austin, Texas, and was there this morning and took our call.”

“Roman didn’t have a boyfriend?”

“Daughter says no. She said they talked once or twice a week.”

• • •

LUCAS HAD BEEN TO all kinds of murder scenes in his career, and this was like most of them: that is, like nothing in particular. Another house with a worn couch and a newer TV and personal photos on the wall. A kitchen smelling of last night’s single-serving pepperoni pizza, dishes in the kitchen sink, waiting to be washed, but now with nobody to wash them.

And, of course, a dead body in the hallway.

Roman was flat on her back, her hands crossed on her chest. She had a slash across her face, which Cochran thought might have come from a gun sight. Her eyes were closed, which was better than open, for the cops, anyway; for Roman, it made no difference. “It looks like the shooter encountered her in the hallway, hit her with the gun, then shot her,” Cochran said.

“Or vice versa.”

“Could be. Can’t tell her posture when she was hit, because the bullet’s still inside. No exit, no trajectory.” As he spoke, Lucas heard a gust of laughter, from somewhere behind the house: children playing.

“Goddamnit. I need to talk with her,” Lucas said, looking down at the body. “I mean, we could have either a multiple murderer, or a freakin’ weird coincidence.”

“I might be able to help you with that, with the one-or-the-other,” Cochran said. He squatted, carefully, dug inside his jacket for a pencil, and pointed the pencil at a patch of black fabric under one of her arms. “See that? That’s a man’s glove. It’s pinned under her. There’s only one glove, nothing else like it in the house. We’re thinking . . .”

“Could be the killer’s.”

“Yeah. Either pulled off, or dropped out of a pocket,” Cochran said. “Anyway, there’s gonna be all kinds of DNA in it. If we get lucky . . .”

If they got lucky, they’d get a cold hit from the Minnesota DNA bank. All felons in Minnesota were DNA-typed.

“How soon?”

“Tomorrow morning. It’ll be our top priority,” Cochran said.

“I may send you a couple of swabs.”

“Yeah?”

“Maybe,” Lucas said.

• • •

LUCAS SAW A TOTE BAG sitting by the corner of the bed, and what appeared to be the silvery corner of a laptop poking out of it. “Would you mind taking the laptop out and turning it on?”

Cochran said, “No, I don’t mind. . . . It doesn’t seem too connected to the shooting scene. But it should have been stolen.” He slipped the laptop out and said, “This isn’t good.”

“What?”

“It’s a Mac PowerBook, like mine. The first screen you come to is gonna want a password.”

“Let’s give it a try,” Lucas said. Cochran didn’t want to put it down on anything the killer might have touched, so they carried it back outside, and he handed the laptop to Lucas and sat down in his lawn chair. Lucas sat on the stoop below him and turned it on. When they got to the password, Lucas asked, “What was the daughter’s name?”

“Callie . . . Roman.”

Lucas typed “Callie” into the password slot, and the computer opened up.

“Christ, it’s like you’re a detective,” Cochran said.

Lucas went to the e-mail and started scrolling backwards. He found a BLTUBBS on the second page down, turned to Cochran and said, “It’s not a robbery.”

“Do tell?”

“Well, maybe not. But if it is, we really are ass-deep in coincidence.”

He found a half-dozen messages from Tubbs in the past three weeks. Tubbs and Roman had been talking about something, but the messages were never specific. “Call you this evening . . .” and “Where will you be tonight?”

The replies were as short and nonspecific as the questions. The only thing that might mean something was a note from Tubbs that said: “Got the package. Talk to you tonight. Call me when you get home.” The message was sent four days before the porn popped up on Smalls’s computer. The last access of the pornography on the Minneapolis police computers had been five days before.

Lucas asked Cochran, “Cell phone?”

He shook his head. “No cell phone, but she didn’t have a landline, either. The killer took the cell. Like he should have taken the computer,” Cochran said. “You want to give me the whole rundown on this?”

• • •

LUCAS SHUT DOWN the computer and handed it back to Cochran, stood up, dusted off the seat of his pants, leaned against the porch banister, and told him about the investigation, leaving out only what was necessary. When he was done, Cochran said, “You never talked to her? I mean, you talked to her, but you didn’t interview her?”

Lucas rubbed his face and said, “Man, it’s like the old joke. Except the joke’s on me.”

“What joke?”

“The one about the guy who rolls a wheelbarrow full of sawdust out of a construction site every night.”

“I don’t know that one,” Cochran said.

Lucas said, “The security guy keeps checking and checking and checking the wheelbarrow, thinking the guy had to be stealing something. Never found anything hidden in the sawdust, and nobody cared about the sawdust. Couple of years later, they bump into each other, and the security guy says, ‘Look, it’s all in the past, you can tell me now. I know you were stealing something. What was it?’ And the guy says, ‘Wheelbarrows.’”

Lucas continued, “I was convinced that the person who set the trap had to have been planted on the Smalls campaign, which meant somebody new—a volunteer, or a new hire. I interviewed all the likely suspects. But she’s one of his oldest employees. I talked to her every time I went there, and it never occurred to me to question her.”

“She was the wheelbarrow.”

“Yeah. She was the fuckin’ wheelbarrow. Right there in front of my eyes.”

“Fuckin’s right,” Cochran said. “C’mere. I got a special surprise.”

He heaved himself out of his chair and Lucas followed him back into the house and into the bedroom. Cochran took a plastic glove out of his jacket pocket, pulled it on, and opened the bottom drawer on the bedside table. He took out a framed photograph and turned it in his gloved hand so Lucas could see it in the light from the bedroom window.

Helen Roman, at least ten years younger, sitting on Porter Smalls’s lap in a poolside chaise, somewhere with palm trees. Drinks on the deck below the chair.

Lucas looked at Cochran, who nodded: “Jilted lover?”

“At least. Several times by now,” Lucas said. He looked around the bedroom, and out the door into the lonely little dilapidated house, and thought about Smalls’s resort out on the lake. “She must have been pissed. You know what I’m sayin’?”

• • •

WORD OF ROMAN’S DEATH was going to get out soon enough, but Cochran hadn’t begun any notifications, other than the daughter. The woman who found the body had been sequestered, and hadn’t called the campaign or anyone else.

Lucas told Cochran that he was going to talk to Smalls, and Cochran nodded, but when Lucas called, Smalls’s phone clicked over to the answering service, as Smalls had warned him it often might. He turned it off when he was speaking, and he’d said he’d be speaking almost constantly in the week before the election. Lucas phoned Smalls’s headquarters and was told that the senator was, at that moment, appearing at a Baptist megachurch in Bloomington, on the south side of the metro area.

Lucas got the address, plugged it into his nav, and took off. On the way, he called Grant, and was again forwarded to the answering service. He’d gotten Grant’s campaign manager’s number, called that, and got Schiffer. “Where’s Ms. Grant?” he asked, after identifying himself.

“Is there a problem?”

“You might say so. I need to meet with Ms. Grant and her security people, especially Douglas Dannon and Ronald Carver. I assume Ms. Green will be there as well?”

“Well, Carver isn’t with us. . . . I suppose we can call him, if it’s urgent.”

“It’s urgent. Where are you?”

“I’m in Afton. We’re setting up for a rally in the park and a luncheon. Taryn’s in Stillwater right now, she’ll be going to Bayport in, mmm, fifteen minutes, and Lakeland at eleven-fifteen and Afton at noon.”

“How about Afton at eleven-thirty?”

“I’ll tell her to push everything up a bit, if it’s really urgent. We’ll be in the park. Look for the TV trucks.”

“It’s urgent. I’ll see you at eleven-thirty in the park.”

He made one more call, to the governor, who answered with a “What now?”

“Somebody murdered Porter Smalls’s secretary last night,” Lucas said. “Smalls had a sexual relationship with her and broke it off. Years ago, though. She was probably the one who set up the trigger on the computer.”

Long silence. Then, “Jesus, Lucas, who killed her?”

“I have some ideas . . . but now I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Lucas said. “I wanted to let you know, though: the whole thing might be headed over the cliff, again.”

“Think I’ll go to North Dakota. There are some border issues to deal with.”

“Not a bad idea,” Lucas said.

• • •

THE MEGACHURCH HAD PARKING for perhaps a thousand cars, and on this Sunday morning, there were probably twelve hundred jammed into the lot. Lucas walked into the entry and saw Smalls standing at a rostrum at the front of the church.

He’d apparently finished his talk and was answering questions. Lucas threaded his way through the crowded pews to the front, and stood waiting until Smalls saw him. When Smalls turned his way, Lucas tipped his head toward the back, and Smalls nodded at him and then said, “You know, folks, I could stand here and talk all day, but I’ve got another rally I’ve got to go to. You can reach me online with any more questions, and I can promise, you’ll get an answer. Let’s take two more questions. The lady in front, with the green blouse . . .”

Five minutes later, led by a security man, with another one trailing behind, and his campaign manager walking beside him, Smalls headed for a side door. Lucas walked that way. Smalls waited at the door until he caught up, and then led the way into a back hallway.

Lucas said, “We need to talk privately.”

Smalls said, “It can’t be good news.”

“No . . .”

Smalls said, “Hang on,” and walked back to the people who’d come through the door behind them, spoke to one, who pointed down the hall. Smalls walked back to Lucas and said, “Come on. I’d like Ralph to come along.”

Ralph Cox was his campaign manager. He was a tall, ruddy-faced man with curly black hair and overlong sideburns. Lucas nodded to Smalls and said, “That’s up to you,” and followed Smalls down the hall to an office. Smalls opened the door, and the three of them stepped inside.

Lucas pushed the door shut and asked, “You had an affair with Helen Roman?”

After a long pause, Smalls said, “Years ago.”

“Did she think that it might lead to something permanent?” Lucas asked.

“What’s going on? Is she the one who pushed the porn?”

“Would she have reason to?” Lucas asked.

Smalls wet his lower lip with his tongue, then said, “She was . . . disappointed when I broke it off. Pretty unhappy. I tried to make it up to her by overpaying her on the secretary’s job. There might have been some bad feeling at the time, but . . . that was years ago.”

Cox asked, “What happened? Have you arrested her?”

“She was murdered last night,” Lucas said.

Smalls staggered, as though he’d been struck. He reached behind himself, found an office chair, and sank into it. “My God. Helen?”

“She was struck in the head, the face, then shot with a small-caliber pistol,” Lucas said. “It looks at least superficially like a robbery, but I think . . . it’s related. I opened her computer and found notes from Tubbs. They’re cryptic—follow-ups on personal conversations. They don’t mention porn. They don’t even mention you. But Tubbs mentions that he’s got some kind of package, and that’s just a couple of days before somebody dropped the porn into your computer. Anyway, they had some kind of relationship. . . . I mean, maybe not sexual, but at least conversational. And it seemed like, conspiratorial.”

Cox said to Smalls, “We’ve got to get on top of this, and right now. We’ve got to give it a direction. There are two possibilities—that Tubbs and the Democrats led her into it, for purely political reasons, and that she was killed by a coconspirator, or that she dumped the porn to ruin you, because she was bitter about the broken relationship. We’ve got to hit the Tubbs angle hard. We’ve got to steer it—”

“Shut up for a minute. You can talk about that later,” Lucas said to him. Back to Smalls: “You said she was disappointed. How disappointed? You think she might have done the porn?”

“I don’t know . . . maybe. Maybe she was a little resentful. I didn’t think so for a long time, but in the last couple of years, she’s been getting more and more distant.”

“Ah, Jesus Christ on a crutch,” Cox said.

Smalls: “Watch your mouth, Ralph. We’re in a church. If they heard you . . .”

“Sorry. But for God’s sakes, Porter, if this comes out the wrong way, the TV people will dig up every woman you’ve ever slept with, and from what I understand, there’s a lot of them.”

Lucas said, “Could we—”

Cox jumped in again. “I’m gonna leave you guys to talk. I gotta call Marianne and get something going. We got no time for this, no time.”

And he was out the door.

“Who’s Marianne?” Lucas asked.

“Media,” Smalls said. He pushed himself out of his chair. “I’ll tell you, Lucas, this is pretty much the end, for me. Ralph can do all the media twisting he wants, but it ain’t gonna work.”

“There’s something else going on,” Lucas said. He hesitated, thinking that he might be about to make a mistake. “It’s possible that if Tubbs was working for the Grant campaign that he was killed to break the connection between the porn and the Grant campaign. And that the same people who killed him, killed Roman.”

Smalls waved him off, with a hand that looked weary. “Yeah, yeah, but I’ll tell you what, Lucas. Political campaigns don’t have killers on their staffs. End of story.”

Lucas looked at him, didn’t say a word.

Smalls peered back, then said, “What?”

Lucas shrugged.

“What, goddamnit? Are you . . . Grant doesn’t have a killer . . . ?” He was reading Lucas’s face, as a politician can, and he said, “Jesus Christ, what’d you find out?”

“Watch the language,” Lucas said. “This is a church.”

“Don’t hassle me, Lucas. This is my life we’re talking about.”

“Grant has these two bodyguards,” Lucas said. “They were involved in some very rough stuff in Iraq and Afghanistan. One of them was pushed out of the army for something he did there. He killed a bunch of people he shouldn’t have—executed them. Including a couple of kids. I talked to an ex-army guy, a BCA guy now, who understands these things, and he said these guys essentially specialized in killing and kidnapping.”

Smalls took off his glasses, rubbed his face with his hands. “I . . . This is really hard to believe.”

“I know. I’ll tell you what, when you spend your life doing investigations, you become wary of coincidences. Because they happen. It’s possible that there was a dirty trick, followed by two killings, at a critical moment in a political campaign, and it’s all purely a coincidence that the person who most benefits had two killers standing around. I personally am not ready to believe that.”

“What’re you gonna do?”

“I’m gonna go jack them up. But they’re smart, and I have no evidence. None. If they tell me to blow it out my ass, well . . .”

“Killers,” Smalls said. “I tell you, politics has gotten rougher and rougher, but I never thought it could come to this. Never. But maybe . . . Now that I think about it, maybe it was inevitable.”

• • •

LUCAS TOOK OFF FOR AFTON. Afton was a small town, one of the oldest in Minnesota, built on the wild and scenic river that separated Minnesota from Wisconsin. The river was gorgeous in the summer and early fall and at mid-winter, after the freeze; less so in the cold patch of November or the early rains of March. But this day, though November, was particularly fine.

Lucas went to the University of Minnesota on a hockey scholarship, but since you couldn’t major in hockey—and his mother peed all over the idea, suggested by the coaches, that he major in physical education—he wound up in American studies, a combination of American literature, history, and politics. He did well in it, enjoyed it, and since it was commonly used as a pre-law major, he thought about becoming a lawyer like a number of his classmates.

After all the bullshit was sorted through, a levelheaded professor suggested that he try police work for a year or so. He could always go back to law school, or even go to law night school, if he didn’t like the cops—and the time on the street would be invaluable for certain kinds of law practice.

Lucas joined the Minneapolis cops, and never looked back: but the four years in American studies stuck with him, especially the literature. He thought Emily Dickinson was perhaps the best writer America had ever produced; but on this day, heading east out of the Cities, then south down the river, he thought of how some of the writers, Poe and Hemingway in particular, used the weather to create the mood and reflect the meanings of their stories.

Poe in particular.

Lucas could still quote from memory the first few lines of “The Fall of the House of Usher”: During the whole of a dull, dark and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. . . .

And Lucas thought what a literary conceit that all was: he’d gone to a murder scene on a beautiful fall day, and heard children laughing outside. And why not? The murder had nothing to do with them, and old people died all the time.

Now he, the hunter, was headed south to tackle a couple of probable killers, a fairly grim task; but over here, to the right of the highway as he went by, a man was washing down his fishing boat, preparing it for winter storage; and coming down the road toward him, a half-dozen old Corvettes, all in a line, tops down on a fine blue-sky day, the women in the passenger seats all older blondes, one after the other.

And why not? Life doesn’t have to be a long patch of misery. There was plenty of room for blondes of a certain age, to ride around in seventies Corvettes, like they’d done when they were girls; a few beers at Lerk’s Bar, and then a dark side street with a hand up their skirts. That was still welcome, wasn’t it?

He’d made himself smile with all the rumination. He really ought to lighten up more, Lucas thought, as the last of the Corvettes went past. Hell, what are a couple more killers in a lifetime full of them? And he liked hunting, and what better day to do it than a fine blue day in the autumn of the year, with not a cloud in the heavens, when riding through a singularly beautiful tract of country, in a Porsche with the top down?

Fuck a bunch of E. A. Poe.

And his Raven.

• • •

THE GRANT CARAVAN had pulled to the side of the street in what passed for downtown Afton. A small crowd was hanging around in the park across the street, and a cable TV station was setting up a small video camera in front of a bandstand. Grant and her people were apparently in an ice cream parlor.

Lucas dumped the Porsche and started across the street to the parlor. As he did, Alice Green came out the front door and moved to one side, and nodded toward Lucas; then Grant came out the door holding an ice cream cone, squinted at him in the sunlight, and licked the cone as he came up.

Lucas thought, Some women shouldn’t be allowed to lick ice cream cones, because it threw men into a whole different mental state. . . .

Schiffer came out of the ice cream parlor, also licking an ice cream cone, with markedly less effect; she was followed by a tall, bullet-headed man with fast eyes who Lucas suspected was one of the bodyguards; his eyes locked on Lucas. Then another man came out, smaller than the first, but with the same fast eyes, and the same quick fix on Lucas. Lucas wanted to put a hand on his .45, but instead, called, “Ms. Grant—glad you had the time.”

“What’s so urgent?” she asked.

“These two gentlemen,” Lucas said, flicking a finger at Carver and Dannon. “Are they Misters Carver and Dannon?”

Grant turned, as if checking, then turned back and said, “Yeah,” and nibbled on the cone, which looked like a cherry-nut, one of Lucas’s favorites.

“Then let’s find a place where we can talk,” Lucas said.

“Courtyard,” Green said, nodding toward an empty outdoor dining space to the left of the ice cream parlor. “You don’t want to talk to me?”

“Not at the moment,” Lucas said. “You might keep people away? Even other staffers. This is sort of private.”

Green nodded; Schiffer said, “I’m going to listen in.”

They moved over to the empty space, Green hovering on the periphery, listening. Lucas said, “One of Porter Smalls’s secretaries was murdered last night. Shot to death in her house, in Minneapolis. I went through her laptop and she’d been corresponding in a fairly cryptic way with Bob Tubbs before he disappeared, and just before the pornography popped up on Smalls’s computer.”

He’d been watching Carver and Dannon, and nothing moved in their eyes, which Lucas thought interesting, because he thought something should have.

Grant said, “Well, that’s awful, but what does it have to do with us?”

“Tubbs is dead, I’m almost certain of it, at this point, and now Helen Roman has been murdered. It was all done very well, from a professional-killing standpoint. Most people who kill for money are fools and idiots and misfits. This doesn’t appear to be the work of fools.”

Grant said, “Yeah, yeah,” and made a rolling motion with one forefinger—moving right along—as she simultaneously took another nibble of the cherry-nut.

“Well, it’s possible that she put the porn on Smalls’s computer to get revenge on him,” Lucas said. “They’d had some personal disagreements, apparently. But if that was what it was, a personal matter, why would anybody kill her? Or Tubbs?”

“Well, I don’t know,” Grant said. “Are you sure she was killed for that reason? Because it had something to do with Smalls?”

Lucas was forced to admit it: “No. Not absolutely sure. But pretty sure. The other possibility is that the people who paid for the porn to be dumped on Porter Smalls, knowing that doing so involves a number of felonies, are breaking the link between themselves and the pornography. Breaking the link very professionally. I did the obvious: I looked for professional killers. The only ones I could find”—Lucas nodded at Carver and Dannon—“are employed by you.”

“What!” Schiffer blurted, not a question.

Lucas had been watching Carver and Dannon again, and again, their eyes were blank; if they’d been lizards, Lucas thought, a nictitating membrane might have dropped slowly across them.

“That . . .” Grant waved her arms dismissively. “I really do have to talk to somebody about you. Professional killers? They’re decorated war veterans. Were you in the military? Did you—”

Dannon interrupted her, and said to Lucas, “We had nothing to do with anything like that. We’re professional security guys, end of story. If you have any evidence of any sort, bring it out: we’ll refute it.”

“I want to have a crime-scene guy take DNA samples from you,” Lucas said. “Doesn’t hurt, nothing invasive—”

“DNA?” Grant sputtered. “You know what—”

“It’s okay with us,” Dannon said, and now there was something in his eye, a little spark of pleasure, a job well done. Lucas thought, This isn’t good.

Grant snapped at Dannon: “Don’t interrupt. I know that you had nothing to do with this, I know the DNA will come back negative, but don’t you see what he’s doing? When the word gets out that my bodyguards have been DNA-typed in a murder case? This guy is working for Smalls—”

“No. I’m not,” Lucas said. “I guarantee that nothing about the DNA samples will get out before the election. I’ll get one guy to take the samples and I’ll read him the riot act. He will not say a word, and neither will I. If word gets out, I’ll track it, and if it’s my guy, I’ll see that he’s fired and I’ll try to put him in jail.”

Grant, Schiffer, Carver, and Dannon exchanged glances, and then Grant said to Dannon, “You’ve got no problem with this?”

“No. It’s probably what I’d do in his place.” He showed a thin white smile: “Because, you know, he’s right. We are trained killers.”

He poked Carver in the ribs with an elbow, and Carver let out a long, low, rambling laugh, one of genuine amusement, and . . . smugness. Lucas thought, They know something.

• • •

WITH THEIR CASUAL ACQUIESCENCE to the DNA tests, Lucas was left stranded. He asked some perfunctory questions—where were you last night at one o’clock? (At our apartments.) Did anyone see you there? (No.) Any proof that you were there? (Made some phone calls, moved some documents on e-mail.) Can we see those? (Of course.) Did you know either Tubbs or Roman? (No.)

Lucas walked away and made a call, asking them to wait, got hold of a crime-scene specialist, and made arrangements for Carver and Dannon to be DNA-typed.

He went back to them and said, “We’d like you to stop in at BCA headquarters on your way back through St. Paul, anytime before five o’clock. You’ll see a duty officer, tell him that you’re Ronald and Douglas—you won’t have to give your last name or any other identifier—and that you’re there at my request, Lucas Davenport’s request, to be DNA-typed. A guy will come down to do the swabs. This will take one minute, and then you can take off. The swabs will be marked Ronald and Douglas, no other identifiers.”

Carver and Dannon nodded, and Grant said, “What a crock,” and tossed the remains of her ice cream cone into a trash can. “If you’re done with us, I’m going to go shake some hands. I’ll tell you what—nothing about this better get out.”

“It won’t,” Lucas said. To Carver and Dannon: “Don’t go anywhere.”

Grant led her entourage across the street, with Green lingering behind. She said to Lucas, “Interesting.”

“They did it,” Lucas said. “You take care, Alice.”

“I can handle it,” she said.

“You sure? You ever shot anyone?”

“No, but I could.”

Lucas looked after Dannon and Carver: “If it should come to that—and it could, if they think you might have figured something out—don’t give them a chance. If you do, they’ll kill you.”