Silken Prey

CHAPTER 28

Weather usually slept hard from ten o’clock at night until six in the morning. Lucas came to bed at all kinds of times, usually between midnight and three, so when he didn’t come to bed on election night, she didn’t miss him until she woke up at six. Then she got on the phone, a cold clutch in the stomach, and when he answered, she said, “You’re not shot.”

“No,” he said. “But there was some shooting.”

He spent five minutes telling her about it, in detail, and at the end of it, she said, “I’m revising a rhino in two hours and I’m shaking like a leaf.” Translated: She was fixing a nose job that some other surgeon had messed up.

“Stop shaking,” Lucas said. “I’m fine, Jenkins and Shrake are fine, Bradley and Stack are a little screwed up, but they’ll be okay, and Del is good, except that he looks like a bug.”

Then he had to explain that.

• • •

THE LAWYERS ARRIVED, and officially informed Lucas that there would be no further statements from the principals, until there had been extensive consultations. They said it in a long-winded way, and Lucas had to take a break from it, when a crime-scene supervisor called.

“We’ve been out here walking the area and we’ve found what looks a lot like another grave. It’s about a hundred and fifty feet from the grave Dannon was digging, on the same track, on the same side of the road. We’ll document it and open it.”

“Do that,” Lucas said. “It’s Tubbs.”

• • •

THE CRIME-SCENE CREW ARRIVED in force, and started by processing the window in Taryn’s bathroom and the ground outside. They would get to the safe, but the supervisor complained to Lucas, “Why’d you let her open the safe? There might have been prints on the keypad.”

“Given the look of the rest of it, do you really think so?” Lucas asked.

“Well, no. But . . .”

“No buts. If this was a real robbery, it was a pro. Like, a top pro,” Lucas said.

“You think it wasn’t real?”

“I’m not sure of anything,” Lucas said. He looked at his watch: “Gotta make a call. I’ll talk to you again before I leave.”

• • •

THE SUN WAS UP, somewhere behind the clouds, but exactly where was hard to tell. In any case, it was light outside when Lucas wandered down to the end of the driveway and called the governor.

The governor’s phone rang four times, then Henderson said, “This time of the morning, it can’t be good.”

“About your party’s senator-elect: her top security guy murdered another one of her security people and tried to bury him by the Mississippi halfway to St. Cloud. We interrupted that and there was a shoot-out and he was killed. The crime scene has found another dug-up area nearby. I think they’ll be pulling Tubbs out of there, in the next couple of hours.”

After a moment, the governor laughed and said, “You are a piece of work, Lucas. You and that fuckin’ Flowers, both of you. I really get my entertainment dollar’s worth.”

“The last person who said I was a piece of work, offered to take me to bed,” Lucas said.

“Well, I’ll pass on that,” Henderson said. Then, after a moment of silence, the governor said, “I’ll have to mediate this. I’ll have to confer with other Important People. Porter, of course, is going to lay an ostrich-sized egg. I don’t see how Grant can stay on as a senator, and frankly, that’s about the best possible outcome I could have imagined.”

“How’s that?” Lucas asked.

“Guess who would appoint her replacement?” Henderson said. “I’d have Porter Smalls out of my hair and a new senator who would be wildly happy about supporting me for a better job . . . if somebody goes looking for, say, a vice president.”

“That hadn’t occurred to me,” Lucas said.

“Because you’re not a natural politician,” the governor said. He laughed again. “This is the kind of thing that makes life interesting.”

“Unless you’re Dannon. Or Carver.”

“Well, yeah, I suppose,” the governor said. “I’ll assign somebody to say a prayer for them.”

• • •

AFTER THAT, IT WAS a lot of crime-scene stuff, lawyers and political wrangling. Tubbs was dug up and after a nasty autopsy, he was reburied. He’d been hit on the head with a heavy, rounded object like a baseball bat. Death had not been quick.

They found the smear of blood that Tubbs had left in Dannon’s car. Unfortunately, the crime-scene tech who found it, and sampled it, unknowingly destroyed the scrawled TG—for Taryn Grant—that Tubbs had hoped they’d see. DNA proved that Tubbs had been in Dannon’s car, but they already knew that Dannon or Carver had killed him. So Tubbs’s last, fading, flickering effort came to nothing.

• • •

LUCAS GOT STATEMENTS from everybody and Alice Green had been telling the truth: at the time Grant went to the bedroom with Dannon, Green had been assigned to the door, and could be seen doing that on the security tapes. Connie Schiffer, in particular, had been curious about Grant and Dannon leaving the party, heading back to the bedroom, and had exchanged looks with Green.

One other politician, arriving late to congratulate the new senator, spoke to Green at the door, and remembered that Grant had not been in the room when he got there. He asked for her, and a moment later she reappeared from the direction of the bedroom, to give him a hug.

The tapes of the bedroom showed nothing, because the room started out dark. Then there was a flicker of light, apparently when Grant walked into the room, and she’d reached out (automatically, she said) and hit the privacy switch, which turned the cameras off. A minute later, she hit the privacy switch again (again, she said, an automatic reflex) and turned the cameras back on as she left. She left the door open, so there was a bit of light, and then a short time later, the door mysteriously closed again, killing the light. There was nothing more on the tape for several hours, when Grant got back from the hotel and hit the privacy switch on the way to the bathroom.

The next people on the tape were Grant, Lucas, Del, and the others, going down to investigate the bedroom.

All of that supported what both Grant and Green had said, except on one point: Grant hadn’t been in the bedroom long enough to get to the bathroom and pee, not unless she’d set the women’s North American land-speed record for micturition. Nor had she reported the cut-out windows, which seemed impossible to miss. The toilet was in a separate booth, and the window was right overhead. But she was sticking to her story, saying that she hadn’t bothered to turn the light on in the bathroom and was in a hurry and simply hadn’t noticed the windows. In reality, Lucas suspected she’d gone back to talk with Dannon, but didn’t want to admit it, because the next thing Dannon did was kill Carver.

He also suspected the robbery had taken place when the door mysteriously closed, because that must have been when the phone was stolen; and after the party had gone to the hotel for the victory celebration, the house had been closed and the dogs turned loose.

He further suspected that Green, or possibly Carver, could have had something to do with the robbery: probably through an accomplice. He thought that because they monitored the security cameras, and if Grant had ever forgotten to turn the cameras off, could have seen her opening the safe; they probably knew something about the contents of the safe, and that it would be well worth hitting; and they knew about the security measures outside. Also, both Green and Carver had his phone number.

He still didn’t understand why either one would call him with the message from “Taryn.”

That made no sense at all.

• • •

ONE OF THE CRIME-SCENE crew had found what appeared to be two small imprints under the arborvitae bush below the bathroom window. One looked like an impression from the outer edge of a hand; the other just a little curve in the dirt, possibly the impression of a heel. He’d taken photos of both.

When he showed the photos to Lucas, he said, “We’re not sure that they are what I think they are. I couldn’t testify to it . . . I mean, I could say what I think, but any good defense attorney would tear my ass off.”

“Cut the crap: What do you think?”

“The curves are small . . . like a small hand and a small heel. Like they were made by a woman.”

Somebody with large balls, like an ex–Secret Service woman, Lucas thought. Could Green have cut the windows out earlier in the day, to make way for an accomplice? But that seemed unlikely. Why would she think that Grant wouldn’t be going back to pee, and wouldn’t notice the cut-out windows?

• • •

THE POLITICAL WRANGLING WAS more amusing than anything. The governor called, laughing again, a week after the murders hit the newspapers, and said, “Well, I called and told our senator-elect what all the Important People said, and she said I should write it all down on a piece of paper, roll it into a sharp little cone, and shove it where the sun don’t shine. She’s not quitting.”

“Jesus, I thought she had to, from what I’ve been reading,” Lucas said.

“With a billion dollars, you don’t have to do much of anything you don’t want to, and she doesn’t want to quit,” the governor said. “If she does a few million in political advertising over the next six years, nobody’ll even remember this little dustup. So, we’re moving right along to the important stuff, like revising the estate tax.”

“That’s the end of it?”

“Not quite. I’ve invited Grant to a little confab in my office tomorrow, with Porter Smalls. Mitford will be there, and her campaign manager, and I’d like you to sit in. And I’ll get Rose Marie to come along.”

“Why is that?”

“Because I want everybody clear on what happened here, and why everybody did what they did—including you and me,” the governor said.

• • •

THE NEXT AFTERNOON, they all got together at the Capitol, in the governor’s conference room: Henderson, Grant, Smalls, Mitford, Rose Marie, Lucas, Connie Schiffer, and Alice Green, still working as Taryn’s security.

For a political gathering, there was a remarkable lack of even symbolic amity. The governor shook hands with everybody, but nobody shook hands with anybody else.

The governor sat at the head of the conference table, cleared his throat, and said, “I don’t expect all of us to be pals after this, but I’d at least like to get things clear for everybody. Senator-elect Grant has, of course, made it clear that she didn’t have anything to do with the rogue security people on her campaign staff, and in fact feels that she was being set up for long-term blackmail by those same people. In any case, she will not resign and will take her seat in the Senate in January.”

Smalls said, “I think that—”

The governor: “Shut up for a minute, will you, Porter? Let me finish.”

“I just—”

“You’ll have your chance,” Henderson said. He looked at Taryn Grant and asked, “Setting aside all the BS aimed at the media, am I correct that this is your position?”

Grant nodded: “Yes.”

Connie Schiffer started to say, “I think we all know that Senator Smalls—”

The governor interrupted: “No. Be quiet. We don’t want any of that. So we know that Senator-elect Grant will take her seat in the Senate. I’ll now turn to Lucas Davenport, the lead investigator in this case. Lucas, do you have any issues that you will continue to pursue?”

Lucas said, “There are several small mysteries about the whole case that I’d like to resolve, and some minor entanglements—for example, Minneapolis still has to decide what to do about the files that were used to frame Senator Smalls. But at this moment, I see no further possibility for arrests or prosecutions involving anyone in this room. I will tell you that I suspect that Senator-elect Grant is not telling us all that we need to know to effectively close out this case. I have no proof of that, and I see no way to get any proof, unless it turns out that either Douglas Dannon or Ronald Carver has somewhere left behind some evidence of her involvement. We have been through both of their town houses, and through Dannon’s safe-deposit box at Wells Fargo. We found considerable cash, but we found nothing that would implicate Senator-elect Grant in any wrongdoing.”

“So you’re at the end of that road,” Henderson said.

“Yes, unless something extraordinary turns up, but I don’t think that will happen.”

Henderson said, “Okay. I want to tell everybody that I asked that Lucas be assigned to this case, because I trust him absolutely. And now I am ordering him not to speak to any media or to anyone else regarding his suspicions about anybody in this case, unless or until he has absolute proof of wrongdoing. Is that clear to everybody? Lucas?”

“That’s clear,” Lucas said.

Henderson turned to Smalls: “Porter.”

Smalls said, “This is one of the most disgraceful moments in the history of American politics and I’m a student of that history, so I know. I was the victim of the most brutal character assassination ever carried out against an American politician, and the main financial sponsor of that assassination actually benefits, and goes to the Senate. Well, I’ll tell you—there are people on both sides of the Senate aisle who are frightened by what was done here. I will go to Washington for the lame-duck session, and I will talk to my friends there.”

He looked directly at Grant: “I will tell them that I think you are guilty of the murder of three people and that you were the sponsor of the child-pornography smear, and that I think a person of your brand of social pathology—I believe you are a psychopath, and I will tell them that—has no place in the Senate. And I will continue to argue that here in Minnesota for the full six years of your term, and do everything I can to wreck any possible political career that you might otherwise have had.”

Grant smiled at him and said, “Fuck you.”

The governor said, “Okay, okay, Porter. Now, Taryn, do you have anything for us?”

“No, not really. I’ll be the best senator I can be, I reject any notion that I was involved in this craziness.” She looked at Smalls: “As for you, bring it on. If you want to spend six years fighting over this, by the time we’re done, you’ll be unemployable and broke. I would have no problem setting aside, say, a hundred million dollars for a media campaign to defend myself.”

“Fuck you,” Smalls said. And, “By the way, I’d like to thank Agent Davenport for his work on this. I thought he did a brilliant job, even if I wound up losing.”

Grant jumped in: “And I’d like to say that I think Davenport created the conditions that unnecessarily led to the deaths in this case, that if he’d been a little more circumspect, we might still have Helen Roman and Carver and Dannon alive, and might be able to actually prove what happened, so that I’d be definitively cleared.”

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.

Lucas would sit in his office chair for a while every day, and stare out his window, which overlooked a parking lot and an evidence-deposit container, and run his mind over the Grant case. He didn’t really care about Grant’s jewelry, but the phone call plagued him.

He kept going over it and over it and over it, how somebody else could have worked it, and then one day he thought, Kidd could monitor the security cameras. And he thought, No way Kidd could get his shoulders through that bedroom window. And Lucas thought, Had there been a twinkle in Kidd’s eye when, speaking of Lauren’s previous career, he’d said, “Insurance adjuster”?

He thought about Lauren, and he thought she was far more interesting than an insurance adjuster. She seemed more interesting than that. . . .

He looked up her driver’s license and found she’d taken Kidd’s name when they married. Without any real idea of where he was going, he idly looked up their marriage license, and found that her maiden name had been Lauren Watley.

Then he checked her employment records. . . .

And there, back, way back, he found that she’d worked as a waitress at the Wee Blue Inn in Duluth, where the owner was a guy named Weenie.

• • •

LUCAS KNEW ALL ABOUT Weenie. He was, at one time, Minnesota’s leading fence and criminal facilitator. Everybody knew that, but he’d never been convicted of a crime after an arrest for a string of burglaries as a teenager, and a short spell in the youth-offender facility.

Never arrested because he only dealt with high-end stuff, the stuff taken by the top pros; he didn’t deal with guns or anyone who routinely used violence. Just the good stuff. If you needed to change two pounds of gold jewelry into a stack of hundred-dollar bills, Weenie could do it for you, for twenty percent. If you needed to cut open a safe, he knew a machinist who could do that for you.

And Lauren had worked as a waitress for . . . fifteen years, sometimes, it seemed, under the name LuEllen. Fifteen years? Lucas laughed: that was not possible.

Not possible. He knew her that well.

What was possible was that Weenie provided her with an employment record, wrote off her salary while sticking the money in his pocket. In the meantime, she was off doing whatever she did. . . .

Lucas wasn’t exactly sure what that was, but he now had an idea . . . an itch that needed to be further scratched.

• • •

A MONTH AFTER the shoot-out with Dannon, on a crisp, bright, dry December day, Lucas got in his 911 and aimed it north on I-35, and let it out a little. He went through Duluth at noon, stopped at the Pickwick on the main drag, ate meat loaf and mashed potatoes, and then cruised on up to Iron Bay, a tiny town off Lake Superior.

Iron Bay had once been the home for workers at a taconite plant, and when the plant went down, so did the town. At one time, a house could be bought for ten thousand dollars, and many had been abandoned. The town had seen better days since, but it was not yet a garden spot.

Lucas threaded his way through a battered working-class neighborhood, and finally pulled into the driveway of a small ranch-style house. A heavy old man named James Corcoran came to the door, sucking on a cigarette, and said, “That car is a waste of money, in my opinion. You shoulda gone for the Boxster. All the ride, half the price.”

“Got hooked on the looks,” Lucas said, checking out his car. “A Boxster is nice, but you know . . . a 911 is a 911.”

“Come on in,” the old man said. “You want a beer?”

“Sure.”

• • •

THEY SAT IN THE living room and Corcoran, who’d once been the town’s only cop, said, “So, Lauren Watley. I do remember that girl and I hope she’s all right.”

“Married to a millionaire artist,” Lucas said.

“Good for her, good for her,” the old man said. “Her dad was one of the bigger jerks in town. Smart guy, engineer at the factory, but when he lost his job, he packed up, put it all in the car, and took off. Never looked back, as far as I know. Took every last cent, too. Janice Watley woke up one morning and didn’t have enough cash to buy cat food.”

“How old was Lauren at the time?”

“Don’t really know,” Corcoran said. “Junior high school, I guess. After her old man took off, the family went on welfare, and child support, but hell, that was nothing. Then, we started having some break-ins around town. Whoever was doing it knew what was going on, who had what, and where it was. For a long time, it was only money. But then, there was a guy here who ran the only thing in town that was worth a damn, a payday loan company. He had a coin collection, and it disappeared. Probably worth fifty grand.”

“You thought Lauren was doing it?”

“You know, it was one of those small-town things,” Corcoran said. “Everybody knew what their situation was over there. They had no money. Janice couldn’t find a job . . . hell, nobody could find a job after the plant went down. So they were hurting. But they weren’t hurting enough. They found the money for a used car. They paid cash for things . . . and the feeling was, money was coming from somewhere.”

“But there was no proof.”

“No proof. Lauren got to be in high school, and then this coin collection disappeared. The owner’s name was Roger Van Vechten. He sued the insurance company, because they only wanted to give him thirty thousand, and he wanted fifty. But that was later. Right after the coins disappeared, I happened to be in Duluth, for something else entirely, buying something, I can’t remember what . . . anyway, I see little Lauren coming out of the Wee Blue Inn. You know the guy there . . .”

“Weenie . . .”

“Yeah. Dead now,” Corcoran said. “He was the biggest fence in the Upper Midwest. Everybody knew it. The question was, what was Lauren doing coming out of the Wee Blue Inn? I thought I knew the answer to that and followed her back to Iron Bay, and we got to her house and I braced her. Made her turn her pockets out. She had two dollars and some change. I checked the car . . .”

“You had a warrant?”

Corcoran laughed, and then started coughing. When he recovered, he said, “Oh, hell, no. That was a different time, up here. I just did what needed to be done. Anyway, I checked her, and she was pissed, but she didn’t have a thing. Said she went down there to apply for a waitress job. I said, ‘Lauren, you ain’t no waitress.’ And she said, ‘Jim, you never been poor.’ She called me ‘Jim,’ when everybody else her age would have been calling me ‘Mr. Corcoran.’ She was fifteen and all grown up.”

“I’ve known women like that, girls like that,” Lucas said, thinking of his Letty.

“But that wasn’t the kicker,” Corcoran said. “The kicker was, we had some rednecks out here who made a connection down in the Cities, and got the local cocaine franchise. One day, I borrowed a couple deputies from the sheriff and we raided them, and we got a half-kilo of coke and eight thousand dollars in cash. I locked it up in the evidence cage at the police department, which was on the side of city hall. That night, somebody cracked the back door on city hall, slick as you please, broke through the drywall into the police annex, cut the lock on the cage, and took the cash and the coke. I know goddamned well it was Lauren and I didn’t have one speck of evidence. I just looked at her and I could see it in the way she looked back at me: she thought it was funny. She was getting back at me for bracing her.”

Lucas smiled, and said, “Yeah, I can see her doing that.”

“You got something on her?” Corcoran asked.

“Exactly what you got,” Lucas said. “A belief.”

“And not a speck of evidence.”

“Not a speck,” Lucas said.

“Well, good for her,” Corcoran said. “I always liked that girl.”

On the way out of town, Lucas stopped at the only gas station to get a Diet Coke and whatever kind of Hostess Sno Ball imitation they had, and found himself looking at a rack of postcards.

• • •

A COUPLE OF DAYS later, Lauren and Kidd were going out for a late lunch, and they stopped in the bottom hallway to check the mail. Lauren took a postcard out of the mailbox and Kidd asked, “Anything good?”

“It’s a postcard from Lucas. . . . It says, ‘Glad you’re not here.’” With a puzzled look on her face, she turned it over and found a photo looking out over Iron Bay and Lake Superior.

“Oh, shit,” she said, stricken.

“What?”

“Lucas knows.”

• • •

FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, wrapped in warm winter jackets, she and Kidd stood side by side on the Robert Street bridge, looking down at the dark waters of the Mississippi.

Kidd said, “This is the only time since I knew you, all those years, that you ever kept anything that they could stick you with.”

“Because it’s gorgeous,” she said. A gold watch dangled from her fingers. “It’s a Patek Philippe, from 1918. I’ve looked it up—it could be worth anything up to a quarter million.”

“And it would hang you, if anybody ever saw it,” Kidd said.

“I know,” she said. “But I refuse to give it back to a killer.”

“It’s a shame, though,” Kidd said.

“Would you do it if it was a Monet?”

“Jesus Christ, no,” Kidd said. “If it was a Monet . . . I’d . . . I’d . . .”

“You’d never drop it in the river,” Lauren said. She relaxed her fingers, and the watch dropped like a golden streak through the gray light of winter, and a quarter million dollars disappeared into the black water below the bridge.

“That’s it,” Lauren said, dusting her hands off. “Not a speck of evidence, now.”

“Not a speck,” Kidd said, hooking an arm through hers. “C’mon, little housewifey. Let’s go get a cheeseburger.”

• • •

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