Silken Prey

CHAPTER 21

Flowers went to Albuquerque, and Lucas went on the raid, which wasn’t that much of a raid, as raids went.

The target house, the “red house,” halfway down Minneapolis’s south side, was owned by an obscure real estate investment group and rented to a thirty-one-year-old woman named Joan Busch, who was known by half the Minneapolis cops who worked the neighborhood. She’d once been a minor terror in the clubs, according to the Minneapolis vice cop who rode with them, but had gotten older and given up fighting.

She sold dope when she had it—marijuana—but more often, simply provided people with a warm place to party, as long as she could party along. She had a fifteen-year-old daughter who lived with a guy allegedly named Crown Royal, but, more importantly, brought in a child-support check.

“Nasty woman. Nasty,” the vice cop said. “But, she won’t let guns in her place, because she’s afraid somebody’ll shoot her nasty ass.”

Lucas and Del were in Lucas’s Lexus, with the vice cop, driving circles around the neighborhood, waiting. Lucas had supplied the BCA’s SWAT team, which had scouted the location. The raid was supposed to go at eleven o’clock, but, as usual, things came up, and people ran late, and when Lucas turned the corner at eleven-forty, he saw the first of the SWAT guys go through the front door.

“There we go,” he said.

“That door’s been busted down so many times, you could open it by breathing on it,” the vice cop said.

They parked directly in front of the house, behind a SWAT van, and Lucas, Del, and the vice cop ambled across the lawn and up the porch steps. Joan Busch was sitting on a ratty brown couch, looking both high and discouraged. Five men and a woman were facing a couple of different walls, hands on the walls, and had already been patted down. One man lay behind a couch, unmoving. The whole place smelled like weed, like an old motel room might smell of cigarette smoke.

“What happened to him?” Del asked, nodding at the unconscious man.

“He was like that when we came in,” the SWAT leader said. “He’s breathing, but he’s not waking up. We’ve got an ambulance on the way.”

“Must be Bill,” Lucas said.

All seven of the house’s inhabitants were stoned to some degree; when Lucas checked IDs, he found a Michael and a very, very white guy named Joe. The other woman, whose name was Charlotte Brown, said that she lived upstairs. Lucas told her to sit on the couch next to Busch, and then, after talking to the vice guy, they cut loose everybody except the two women, and Michael and Joe.

The freed men were taken outside one at a time by the vice guy, so that he could tell them that they were being released on his say-so, and that they owed him big time. A few minutes later, an ambulance showed up, and the unconscious guy was trundled out.

When that was done, Lucas and Del took the other four into the kitchen, one at a time, for questioning.

Michael and Busch were confused about the night that Clay was supposed to be in the house. They thought they might remember him, but were not sure exactly of the when: “That sucker comes and goes,” Busch said. “In and out all the time.”

He’d never come in the house with a gun, Busch said, “Because he knows if he do, that’s the end of him. I throw his ass out and never let him come back. Cops don’t mind a little weed, but they death on guns.”

Brown, though, remembered something about Clay trying to start a game of strip poker. “I said, ‘You so short, why’d I play strip poker with you?’ and he said, ‘Only my body short, ’cause all my growth went somewhere else.’ Made me laugh, but I said, ‘I ain’t playin’ strip poker with nobody in this house.’”

She said he was still there when she went upstairs, sometime well after midnight, but was gone when she came back down about noon.

Joe remembered him, too. “He was sleepin’ on the floor when I got up. He was snorin’ like a chain saw, you could hear him out in the street.”

That was at six o’clock in the morning, or thereabouts. “I got to be to work at eight o’clock so I set my phone at six o’clock so I could go home and get washed up. The phone went off and he never moved, he snored right through it.”

How high had Clay been the night before?

“He had this piece of hash he wanted to trade for a couple rocks, but nobody would trade him—I didn’t have any myself—so he took out his pipe and smoked it,” Joe said. “He was pretty high, best as I remember, but I don’t remember too clear.”

Was it possible that he could have gone away during the night and come back?

“Well, it’s possible, but I don’t know why he would,” Joe said. “He didn’t have any money to buy anything. All he had was that little piece of hash, wasn’t bigger than about a nickel.”

“How do you know he didn’t have any money?” Del asked.

“’Cause somebody had one little rock and wanted twelve dollars for it, and he said he could only pay later and they said, ‘Bullshit,’ and he turned his pockets out, and he didn’t have but eighty cents or something. And that little piece of hash.”

“He have a gun?”

“Not that I seen.”

• • •

WHEN THEY WERE FINISHED with them, they got their names, addresses, cell phone numbers—they all had phones—and told them not to leave town for a while. “Be the first chance you have to get a guy out of trouble, instead of in,” Del said.

Out on the sidewalk, Lucas said, “Turk will be pissed. Clay’s stoned on hash at two o’clock in the morning, and he’s sound asleep at six. He’s got no gun, and he doesn’t have enough money even to catch a bus, so how does he get to North Minneapolis from way down here?”

“That’s if everybody’s remembering the right night,” Del said. “Between the four of them, they couldn’t count to four.”

“I promise you something, Del,” Lucas said. “Helen Roman wasn’t killed by that dumbass. She was done by a pro. A guy who isn’t a small-time burglar, and who never had to make a killing look like a burglary. She was killed by Carver or Dannon.”

“Hey, I believe you,” Del said. “But a jury would have its doubts. Especially when the defense attorneys start rolling out the military hero stuff, and they will.”

“Yeah,” Lucas said. “They will. We need somebody who’s inside it.”

“Dannon or Carver.”

“Or Grant,” Lucas said.

• • •

LYING IN BED THAT NIGHT, Lucas realized that it wouldn’t be Grant. Grant was either completely innocent, or completely guilty. For her, there could be no middle ground.

As a rich woman, with her potential election to the Senate, she couldn’t admit to the slightest knowledge of anything, without losing everything. A criminal trial would be brutal, and if she were convicted, she’d be looking at life in prison—thirty years in Minnesota. Even if she were acquitted in a criminal trial, the civil trials by the murder victims’ relatives might still effectively destroy her, as O.J. Simpson had found out.

Logically, if she were guilty, nothing that Lucas could do would pry her open. And if she were innocent, she wouldn’t know anything.

Therefore, Dannon or Carver.

With Dannon, he had Quintana’s belief that Dannon was the man behind the phone call. The phone call indicated knowledge of at least the planting of the pornography on Smalls’s computer, and from there, inductively, the murders of Tubbs and Roman.

With Carver, he had nothing about the specific case, but he did have the army records that suggested that Carver could kill, and in a cold way: the army case involved the execution of bound prisoners. On the other hand, the army killings involved levels of stress and circumstance about which Lucas knew nothing. Might those killings have been somehow justified? That was, he thought, possible.

Sister Mary Joseph—Elle—thought he should go after Dannon, because he was the thinker, and if you convinced him he was in trouble, he might decide to negotiate. On the other hand, she thought, Carver would simply stonewall.

But the army records, and the possibility that publicity might force the army to reopen the case, were a powerful pry-bar. In a sense, Carver had already been found to have murdered people, and if that were pushed into the open, he might already be eligible for a long, unpleasant prison term.

He rolled around, thinking about it, and rolled some more, got up, drank some milk, sat in his underwear in the living room, and finally went back to bed.

Pry-bar. Carver.

• • •

ELECTION DAY.

In the dawn’s early light, he rolled out of bed when he felt Weather moving, and she said, “You had a bad night.”

“Push coming to shove,” Lucas said.

“When are you going to push?” she asked.

“Today, I think. There’s no time left.”

“Take your gun with you,” she said. And, “God, I hate it when I think things like that. Take your gun with you, because somebody might try to kill you and you might have to kill them.”

“Yeah. Well.” He had nothing to say; and he would take his gun. He always did.

“How’re you going to start?”

“By trusting somebody I have no really good reason to trust,” he said.

• • •

WHILE WEATHER WENT IN the bathroom, Lucas walked downstairs to his study and called Alice Green. She came up on the second ring, sounding a little sleepy:

“Yes?”

“Lucas Davenport, the much-loved cop.”

“I think Taryn talked to the governor about you,” Green said. “Tried to get you fired.”

“Yeah? What’d he say?”

“Not to be vulgar, but the phrase ‘Go shit in your hat’ comes to mind.”

“With a person of the governor’s refinement, I’m sure that phrase never occurred to him,” Lucas said.

“This is probably not the time to discuss it, but I wouldn’t mind being on his security detail,” Green said. “I understand he doesn’t have female security at the moment.”

“I could ask him, Alice, but I don’t think it’s extremely likely,” Lucas said.

“He’s got something against women?”

“No, but his wife does,” Lucas said. “You’re far too good-looking to pass the test.”

“Nothing to be done about that, I guess, unless you want to come over and punch me in the face,” Green said.

“What I’d like to do,” Lucas said, “is meet you somewhere to talk, before you go on the job today.”

“Will this get me fired?” she asked.

“Maybe. I’d try to keep you out of it, but if it’s a murder . . .”

“The thing is, disloyalty in one job might keep me from getting any other job.”

“I’m trying to tell you the truth,” Lucas said. “I can’t absolutely guarantee that it wouldn’t get out.”

After a moment, she said, “There’s a Caribou Coffee halfway between my place and Taryn’s. I could meet you there at seven-fifteen. I’m on the job at eight.”

“I’ll see you then,” Lucas said.

• • •

ALICE GREEN WAS DRESSED in green when Lucas arrived: a green blouse the color of her eyes, a much darker green jacket in a kind of knobby fabric, and black slacks that appeared to be form-fitting until you looked closely. She was paying for a cup of coffee, and Lucas looked closely, and realized that everything she wore was functional, nice-looking but tough, rather than luxurious, and well suited to a fight; the jacket was long enough and loose enough to conceal a pistol.

She paid, walked toward a far corner; saw him, nodded, but kept going. Lucas got a Diet Coke and checked the other customers before he walked over to her table, where she was blowing on a paper cup full of dark coffee. She said, “If anybody I know comes in, I’ll have to shoot you.”

Lucas sat down: “I need to talk to Carver, alone, I think. I’ve found a lever that might convince him to talk with me. I’ll call him unless you think it would be a terrible idea.”

She considered for a moment and then said, “Well, it would be a terrible idea, but talking to either one of them, Dannon or Carver, would be a terrible idea. I assume you’ve got your back against the wall.”

“It’s my last shot,” Lucas said. “I’m almost certain that Dannon was involved in placing the porn on Smalls’s computer. If Tubbs and Roman were killed to cover that up, then it’s at least possible that he was acting alone and Carver could give me some insight into how to get him. Or, it’s possible that Carver cooperated, but would take a plea. Also, I’ve got something on Carver that might convince him to cooperate. So, I’m looking at Carver.”

“I doubt that he’ll crack,” Green said. “He’ll stonewall. So will Dannon, for that matter. There’s not much choice there.”

Stonewall. She picked the same word as Elle had. “If you had to make a choice . . . which one would you choose?” Lucas asked.

She thought for a moment, sipping at the coffee, and finally said, “If I had to choose, I guess I’d have to agree with you: I’d go with Carver, if you’ve got some leverage. He’s not as smart as Dannon. It’s barely possible that you might confuse him enough to get something. I don’t think that would be the case with Dannon. Also, Dannon’s got another reason to stonewall: Taryn has started sleeping with him. If you take him down, she’d go down, too. At least, he’ll see it that way. So he’ll stonewall.”

“It’ll be tough either way,” Lucas agreed.

“I’d say you’ve got no chance with Dannon, no matter how involved he is, and you’ve got a five percent chance with Carver. Or two percent.”

“Off the top of your head . . . what are the chances that Grant knows what they did? That she’s involved, that she directed it or approved it?”

Green shook her head: “She’s a smart woman. I’d be surprised if she was involved. But . . . and I say but . . . she’s obviously a sociopath. It wouldn’t bother her that people died to get her into the Senate. It would bother her that she could go to prison for it. She’s made that calculation, too. That’s why she gets so angry when she sees you.”

Lucas nodded, and said, “Okay,” then leaned forward, his forearms on the table. “If I drive a wedge between Dannon and Carver, what would happen?”

“I don’t know. They’re colleagues, but not exactly friends,” Green said. “Dannon is somewhat . . . disparaging . . . when it comes to Carver, because Carver was a sergeant, an enlisted man, and Dannon was an officer. He treats me more as an equal because I was with the Secret Service. Carver feels it. It pisses him off.”

“What’s Carver’s relationship with Grant?”

“He’s become . . . overly familiar. I don’t know what happened, but yesterday I heard him call her ‘honey,’ when he thought they were alone. I pretended not to hear.”

“She’s not sleeping with him, too?”

“Oh, no. She’s definitely the officer type. In fact, I’m a little surprised by the thing with Dannon. When I say ‘officer type,’ I’m talking generals, not captains. But, maybe it’s just sex.”

“All right,” Lucas said. “Do you have a phone number for Carver?”

“Yes. He’s already at the house, by the way. He’ll be with Taryn until three o’clock, when he gets a couple hours off, to get ready for tonight. If you need to meet with him privately, you could call him while she’s speaking. She has four brief appearances today, mostly for the television cameras, and for a couple of blogs. Then they’ll head back and watch the results come in.”

“Any idea about times?”

She took a piece of paper out of her bag and pushed it across the table. “I made a copy of her schedule. I’d call at one of the first two events—the schedule there is pretty hard. Later in the day, the timetable tends to slip.”

“All right,” Lucas said. “Thank you. Uh, do you have Carver’s double-secret cell-phone number?”

“I do.” She pulled back the paper with the schedule on it, took a pen out of her bag, and wrote the number on the paper. “Don’t tell him where you got it.”

“I won’t,” Lucas said.

“Did you find out what Carver did in the army? Is that what you’ve got on him?”

Lucas’s eyebrows went up. “You know about that?”

“I don’t know what it is, but I know something bad happened,” Green said. “I suspect people wound up dead. I tried to find out, but I’m told it’s all very classified.”

“How about that,” Lucas said.

She gazed at him for a moment, then said, “But you know?”

He smiled: “That’s classified.”

She smiled back. “You’re a piece of work, Davenport. If it weren’t for Weather, I’d take you to bed.”

“If it weren’t for Weather, I’d go,” Lucas said.

• • •

THE EXCHANGE KEPT LUCAS warm all the way out to the car. He’d jump off a high building before he betrayed Weather, but a little extracurricular flirtation kept the blood circulating; not that all of it went to the brain.

Green asked Lucas not to call Carver until at least Grant’s first appearance of the day. “I want it to be in Carver’s head that I was around when you called. A little psychological insurance that he doesn’t think of me, when he wonders how you got the number for his phone. He’s a scary guy.”

“I can do that,” Lucas said. “And you lay low. It should be over in another day or two, one way or another.”

She said, “I feel like it’s gotta happen today. Everything is coming down to today. Taryn’s snap polls say she’s up, but it’s really, really close, and Smalls may be narrowing the lead. It feels to me like everything’s going to end tonight, when the votes come in.”