Silken Prey (23 page)

Quintana shook his head. “You can take my phone, but these guys are way too smart to be using their own phone. I’d give you ten to one that it’s a disposable.”

“That’s why we need to catch them with it. We’ll be monitoring the call and the location it comes from,” Lucas said. “I’ll probably get back to you tonight. Where you gonna be?”

“Without my cell . . . I’ll probably go home if Buck is done talking to me. I’ve got a landline there.”

“Okay. You sit there, wait for my call,” Lucas said. “You go along with all of this, I’ll testify on your side in any kind of proceedings.”

Quintana nodded. “I’ll do that.”

He passed Lucas his cell phone, and Lucas said, “If you’ll all excuse me . . . I gotta run.”

As he headed for the door, Quintana called, “You believe me, right?”

Lucas paused at the door, then said, “No, not the whole story. Not even very much of it. But I believe the phone number.”

•   •   •

T
HEN HE HAD
a lot to do. From his car, as he headed back across town to the BCA, he called Jenkins and told him to find Shrake: “I know it’s Sunday, but I need you to babysit some people for me. Only until tonight. I need to know where they are, all the time.”

“How complicated is this going to be?”

“Not complicated. You have to tag a campaign caravan.” He told Jenkins to find out where Taryn Grant was going to be, described Dannon and Carver. “It’s those two guys you’ve got to stay with. I want you to go separately so if they split up, you can follow both of them. But they should stick pretty close to Grant for as long as I need you to watch them.”

“Good enough,” Jenkins said.

•   •   •

L
UCAS HAD TO MAKE
some calls, first to the director, and then the deputy director, and between them they found a technician who was willing to come in and set up the phone monitoring system. When he got there, the tech came up to Lucas’s office and said, “We don’t usually need a subpoena for Verizon, if we just want a location, but I’ll check with them first. That’s not usually a problem, though.”

“Then get it going,” Lucas said.

He was a little cranked: if this worked out, there’d be somebody in the bag by midnight. He called Jenkins: “Where are you guys?”

“Grant’s up in Anoka. We’re on the way. Then she’s going to St. Cloud for an eight-o’clock appearance and then back home. Probably back in the Cities between ten and midnight.”

“Keep me up to date,” Lucas said.

Lucas called Quintana: “It’ll be late—I’ll probably come get you around nine or ten o’clock.”

Lucas needed something to eat. He called Weather to find out what the food situation was, and was told that the housekeeper was making her patented mac & cheese & pepperoni. “I’ll be there,” he said.

He was pulling his jacket on when Virgil Flowers called: “I was talking to Barney and he didn’t know what you were up to, but he said you might use my help. I’m down in Shakopee. I can either go home, or head your way.”

“My house,” Lucas said. “Helen’s making her mac and cheese and pepperoni.”

“What happened to that vegetarian thing you guys were doing?”

“Ah, that only lasted a month or two. Besides, pepperoni isn’t meat—it’s cheese made by pigs,” Lucas said. “Anyway, we’ll be going out later. I’ll tell you about it when you get there.”

He called Weather and told her that Flowers was coming to dinner, and she said, “We got plenty.”

Which was true: the mac and cheese and pepperoni usually went on for the best part of a week.

•   •   •

L
UCAS GOT HOME,
changed into jeans, a wool vest over a white dress shirt, and an Italian cotton sport coat, blue-black in color that would be excellent, he thought, for nighttime shoot-outs. It hadn’t yet been tested for that. When he got back downstairs, Flowers had come in, wearing a barn coat, jeans, and carrying a felt cowboy hat. His high-heeled cowboy boots made him an inch taller than Lucas.

“There better not be a fuckin’ horse in my driveway,” Lucas said.

A bit later, Lucas took a call from the BCA tech, who said they were set with Verizon, and they could give him a real-time location as soon as Lucas called the other phone, which, as it happened, also used Verizon. There’d been no calls on the phone for two days; the last call had been to Quintana’s number.

They all ate together at a long oblong dinner table, Flowers and Letty happily gabbing away—Flowers, a part-time writer with a developing reputation, had done a biographical piece about Letty that had been published in
Vanity Fair
, with photographs by Annie Leibovitz. They were all now dear friends, Annie and Letty and Virgie.

Leibovitz had taken a bunch of pictures of Lucas, too, but the magazine had used only one. Lucas thought it made him look like a midwestern prairie preacher from the nineteenth century. As for the friendship, he thought Letty and Virgie were getting a little too dear. The issue came up before dinner, and Weather told him he was losing it if he thought Flowers had untoward ideas about Letty.

“When it comes to being around women, I wouldn’t trust that guy further than I could spit a Norwegian rat,” Lucas had grumbled.

“Why? Because he reminds you so much of your younger self?” she’d asked.

“Maybe,” Lucas had said. “But not that much younger.”

“He’s not interested in Letty,” Weather had declared.

“Okay,” Lucas said. “How about in you?”

“Don’t be absurd,” she’d said, ostentatiously checking her hair in the mirror.

•   •   •

A
FTER DINNER,
Lucas and Virgil went to Lucas’s study, with Letty perching on a side chair, and Lucas briefed him about the situation. “Basically,” Flowers summed up, “we’ve got nothing, but if their phone’s GPS says that they’re in a certain spot, you think that’s good enough for a search and seizure.”

“I know it is, because there’s been another case just like it,” Lucas said. “It was in LA, but the federal court refused to order the evidence set aside.”

“And so this could prove that these two highly trained killers were involved with the porn, and we know for sure that they’ve got guns.”

“Uh-huh.”

Virgil thought about that and said, “Okay.”

They’d sat down to eat at seven, had finished with the food and talk at eight, and at eight-thirty, sitting in the den, Lucas took a call from Jenkins. “This is going to wind up sooner than I thought,” Jenkins said. “She finished talking, the TV is pulling out, now she’s going around mixing with the kids, but that’s not going to last long, once the TV is gone. I think we’ll be out of here in fifteen minutes, and then it’s an hour back to her place.”

He said to Flowers, “Let’s go. Excuse me—I meant, ‘Saddle up.’”

“Yeah,” Virgil said, getting his hat.

“Don’t let him push you around,” Letty told Virgil. “That hat looks good on you. Not everybody could pull it off, but you can.”

“Thank you, sweetheart,” Flowers said, and he and Lucas were out the door.

They took Flowers’s truck, and as they backed out of the driveway, Lucas noticed that Flowers was smiling.

“What’s the shit-eating grin about?” Lucas asked.

“Ah, I love pimping you about Letty. And Weather, for that matter.”

“I don’t mind, as long as you keep your hands off Helen and that mac and cheese and pepperoni,” Lucas said.

•   •   •

J
ENKINS CALLED TO SAY
that Taryn Grant’s caravan consisted of three cars. The first carried what appeared to be three lower-ranking campaign people, one of whom was probably the media liaison. The second car was a big American SUV, and carried Grant, a short, heavyset woman, and one of the bodyguards; from Lucas’s description, he thought it was probably Carver. The third car carried the other bodyguard, Dannon, and a thin woman who was apparently also security.

“Alice Green, ex–Secret Service,” Lucas said. “Where are you guys?”

“Shrake is out front, I’m a quarter mile back, with four cars between us.”

“Stay in touch,” Lucas said. “Let me know for sure when they hit 494.”

Quintana lived in Golden Valley, a first-ring suburb west of Minneapolis. He was standing on his front porch when Lucas and Virgil arrived. He got in the backseat, and Lucas introduced Flowers. Quintana said, “I appreciate the chance.”

“Like I said, it’s up to Minneapolis what they do about this,” Lucas said. “But you kinda blew it, Ray.”

“I know that,” Quintana said. “But tell me you don’t do a little off-the-record relationship stuff. I thought Tubbs might be something for me: a guy to know.”

“I understand that,” Lucas said. “I don’t buy all that other stuff.”

“Ahhh . . .” Quintana shut up and looked out the side window.

After a couple minutes of silence, Virgil said to Lucas, “At least we know he’s not lying to us now.”

“How’s that?” Lucas asked.

“His lips aren’t moving.”

Quintana began laughing in the backseat, and then Lucas and Virgil started.

•   •   •

T
HEY PULLED INTO
a mostly empty strip mall parking lot a mile from Grant’s house. The streets were good between the mall and her house, and they could be there in a couple of minutes. They talked about Tubbs and Roman, but not about Quintana’s problem.

“I wish that motherfucker Tubbs wasn’t dead,” Quintana said. “Then I could kill him myself.”

Lucas asked Flowers how his most recent romance had been going.

“I think it’s gone,” Flowers said. “We’re apparently friends, now.”

“That’s not necessarily the kiss of death,” Quintana said from the backseat, and they talked about that for a while.

Jenkins called when the caravan got off I-94 and headed south on I-494, and then when it got off I-494 and headed west. Lucas called the tech and said, “I’m making the call.”

And at that moment, as he hung up on the tech and prepared to call the unknown phone, another call from Jenkins came in. “Man, we got a problem. We got a problem.”

“What?”

“I got a cop car on my ass, and so does Shrake. The caravan has pulled over ahead of us. Shit! They made us. I gotta talk to this cop.”

“Goddamnit, where are you?” Lucas asked.

He got the location, and told Flowers to go that way, and then made the call on Quintana’s phone and handed it to Quintana. It rang, and rang, and rang, with no answer. The tech called and said, “We’ve got a location for you. The phone’s at Hampshire Avenue North and Thirtieth.”

“What?”

“It’s at Hampshire Avenue North and Thirtieth. There’s a park there.”

Lucas asked, “Where in the hell is that?”

“Well, if you’re at Grant’s house, it’s about eight miles east. As the crow flies.”

“Sonofabitch,” Lucas said.

“What’re we doing?” Flowers asked.

“Got no choice, now. We’ll try to shake them, see if anything comes loose,” Lucas said.

He turned around in his seat and said to Quintana, “I’m going to point out these guys and tell you to look at them. Like you’d seen them before. I want you to take a long look, then come over and mutter at me. Don’t let them hear what you’re saying.”

“I never saw them,” Quintana said.

“Ray, for Christ’s sakes, I’m trying to shake ’em. We’re doing a pageant.”

Quintana cracked a smile. “All right.”

“What do you want me to do?” Flowers asked, as they turned a corner and saw the lights on the squad cars.

“Well, given the way you’re dressed, you could ask me if I want them hog-tied,” Lucas said.

“Don’t take it out on me,” Flowers said. “I’m not the one who . . .”

“. . . poked the pup,” Quintana said.

“Shut up,” Lucas snarled, no longer in the mood for humor.

•   •   •

W
HEN THEY CAME UP
on the lights, the street was full of cops and politicians. Flowers turned on his own flashers, and a cop who started toward them stopped and put his hands on his hips. Lucas, Flowers, and Quintana got out, and the cop waited for them to walk up, and then asked, “Any chance you’re the BCA?”

“BCA and Minneapolis police,” Lucas said.

At that moment, Taryn Grant, who was in the street with a half-dozen campaign workers and her security people, came steaming toward them and shrieked, “I knew it was you. I knew it.”

“Shut up,” Lucas said, but without much snap.

“This is the last straw.” She was wildly angry; her blond hair had come loose from whatever kind of spray had been keeping it neat, and was fluttering over her forehead. Her campaign manager, Schiffer, took her arm and tried to pull her back, and Grant pulled free.

Dannon, Carver, and Green had come up behind Grant. Lucas turned to Quintana and said, “Take a look.”

Quintana, with the unpleasant grittiness of a vice cop, stepped up close to Carver and looked him straight in the face for a long beat; then stepped over to Dannon and did the same thing. Neither man turned away, but they didn’t like it.

“Who’s this guy, and what does he want?” Dannon asked.

“I’m a cop,” Quintana said. “You got a problem with that?”

“I don’t like somebody standing two inches in front of my face breathing onions on me,” Dannon said. “So back off.”

Quintana did. Carver nodded at Flowers and asked, “Why’s there a cowboy with you?”

“Lucas might’ve wanted you hog-tied,” Flowers said. “He thought I’d be the guy to do it.”

Carver stared at Flowers for a minute, then asked, “You in the military?”

“Yeah, for a while.”

“Officer?”

“Yeah.”

“MP?”

“Yeah.”

“I thought so,” Carver said.

Quintana had stepped over to Lucas and said, in a low tone, “I can’t hardly believe it, but I think it really is that second guy I talked to.” He looked back over his shoulder at Dannon and Carver and said, “The smaller one. He’s got that funny accent—Texas. Like George Bush.”

Dannon stepped toward them and said, “We gave you those DNA samples.”

Lucas nodded and squared off with Grant. “We’ve got two days before the election and this whole thing is coming to a boil. We’re watching everybody, because we don’t want anybody else to show up dead: there have been two murders so far. We don’t need a third.”