Silken Prey (21 page)

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

“Not a bad idea,” Lucas said.

•   •   •

T
HE 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.”

•   •   •

L
UCAS TOOK OFF FOR
A
FTON.
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.

•   •   •

T
HE
G
RANT 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.