Silken Prey (32 page)

She said, “What? Why would I . . .” She turned to look behind her and called, “Marjorie . . . Marjorie.”

One of her campaign people, a short woman in a blue dress, shouldered her way through the crowd; she was carrying a clipboard, a huge tote bag, and two purses.

Taryn said to her, “Give me my purse.”

The woman handed the purse over. Someone in the crowd tugged on Lucas’s jacket, and he half turned and saw Bradley there. She put a hand to her ear, miming a handset, and mouthed, “Right now.” Bradley eased back into the crowd and Taryn was saying, “Where’s my phone? Marjorie, where’s my phone?”

“I . . . I . . . I don’t know.” Marjorie looked frantic. “I never saw a phone.”

“It was in there,” Taryn said. “I put it there.”

“You did not send me a text message?” Lucas asked her, virtually speaking into her ear. They looked like they were dancing.

She said, “No, no . . .”

Lucas backed away, and Taryn looked after him, puzzled, then dug through her purse again, while talking to Marjorie, and Schiffer began to urge her through the crowd. Lucas got to the edge of the ballroom and stepped behind one of the TV-set stands, put the handset to his face and said, “This is Lucas: What’s up?”

Shrake came back instantly: “Carver’s truck is moving, it’s leaving downtown. Jenkins and I are on it, but we’re gonna need help.”

Jenkins said, “I was parked in the bottom of the garage, near the exit. I don’t think it’s Carver in the truck: I think it’s Dannon.”

“Where’s Carver?”

“Don’t know.”

Del came up: “Dannon’s truck is still in the garage. Maybe they switched vehicles.”

“Okay,” Lucas said. “Jane, Sarah, have you seen Carver?”

Stack came back. “I haven’t, not since before you came up. He went in the back . . .”

Bradley said, “I saw Dannon maybe ten minutes ago, going into the back.”

Lucas said, “Okay, you guys take off, help Shrake and Jenkins. Chase them down. Lights and sirens until you get close, then hang back and follow, okay?”

“Gotcha,” Stack said.

Lucas asked, “Del, you’re pretty sure Dannon’s truck is still in the garage?”

“Yeah,” Del said.

“Okay. Work your way up the parking ramp, see if you can spot him or Carver or the truck. I’m going into the back, see if I can chase them down.”

“What’s going on?” Del asked.

“I don’t know—but Shrake, Jenkins, don’t lose that car. Don’t let it get too far ahead of you, either. I want you to be able to see it, if it stops.”

“That’s a risk,” Shrake said. “He could spot us.”

“I trust your professionalism that that won’t happen,” Lucas said.

“Thanks a lot,” Jenkins said. “Shrake, I’m right behind you. Take a right.”

“Taking a right,” Shrake said.

“We need to get those goddamn women up here,” Jenkins said.

“We’re coming, we’re coming,” Bradley said.

•   •   •

L
UCAS BADGED HIS WAY
into the back. Taryn and her closest campaign people, including Green, were going through in a cluster, heading for a back elevator that would take them to the parking ramp. Taryn never looked back but Green did; she nodded and went on. Lucas hurriedly checked the back area—no Carver—and then took the stairs down to the parking ramp.

He arrived just as the elevator did. Green took the lead, and they walked over to the truck that Dannon had been driving, and Green took the wheel. Schiffer got in the passenger side and Taryn in the back, and the rest of the crew broke for different vehicles, and Lucas, still not seeing Carver, ran toward the truck carrying Green.

As he did that, Del pulled onto the floor and paused. Lucas ran up to Green’s window and she rolled it down and Lucas asked, “Where’s Carver?”

Green said, “He and Dannon headed back to the house. We’re having an after-party, they’re setting up there.”

Lucas was unhappy about that, but nodded, and Taryn called, “Where’s my phone?”

“Don’t know,” Lucas said, and he turned and walked down the ramp toward Del’s car, putting the handset to his head: “Jenkins . . . I’ve been told that Carver and Dannon were going together out to Grant’s house. Are you sure they weren’t both in the car?”

“Man, they had to stop at the pay booth, and I was right there. There was a lot of light behind them, coming through the windows. There was only one guy in the car, and that was Dannon. Unless Carver was on the floor or something.”

“Goddamnit,” Lucas said. “You think you could buzz him?”

“Yeah. Once.”

“Is Shrake close enough to pick him up after you buzz him?”

Shrake: “We’re on 94 North, I’m about a quarter mile behind Jenkins. I could do it for a while, but he’s driving right at fifty-five. If I hang back here, he could get suspicious. We need Jane and Sarah right now.”

Bradley: “We’re getting on the ramp now. . . . We’re coming.”

Lucas said, “Jenkins, go ahead and buzz him. We need to know if both of them are in there.”

Lucas walked down to Del’s car and Del opened the passenger-side door and asked, “What are we doing?”

“I can’t find Carver. Nobody’s waiting for him, because they think he already went.”

“Is it possible he split?”

“You mean, called a cab or took a bus?”

“Okay, that doesn’t seem likely,” Del said.

Lucas looked at the phone message again:
Dannon will kill Carver tonight at the hotel and bury him in the perfect graveyard. Best wishes, Taryn.

“He could be dead,” Lucas said.

“That would take balls the size of the Goodyear blimp,” Del said.

“I might have put Carver in the shit,” Lucas said. “I was trying to drive a wedge between them, but what if he said something, or made some kind of threat, and they decided they needed to get rid of him immediately? What if he tried to blackmail them? What if he gave them a deadline?”

“Then . . .” Del said.

Lucas said, “Let’s go back to my car.”

“You’re going after them?”

“We’re both going,” Lucas said. “We don’t need to track Green. But if Dannon killed Carver, he’s going to dump him. We need to be there—we need everybody to be there.”

“I could drive,” Del said.

“They’re too far ahead of us,” Lucas said. “I need to drive.”

“Goddamnit. I hate it when you drive,” Del said. “I get so puckered up that I’ve got to pull my asshole back out with a nut pick.”

“Thanks for the image,” Lucas said. “Let’s go.”

T
hey left Del’s car in the garage and took off in Lucas’s Lexus, lights and siren, Lucas turning the corner and busting the red light and then off through traffic to I-94, Del braced against collision, hanging on to his seat-belt strap with one hand, the other hand braced against the dashboard.

“Ask them where Dannon is at,” Lucas said, as they rolled onto the interstate.

Del got on the handset, and Shrake came back with a mileage marker and Del said, “They’ve got seventeen miles on us.”

“But they’re going fifty-five and we’re going ninety-five.” Lucas did some math in his head and said, “We’ll be catching up two-thirds of a mile every minute, so we’ll catch them in more or less twenty-five minutes. That’s not fast enough.”

He dropped the hammer and the big Lexus groaned as it edged past a hundred miles an hour, then to a hundred and five.

“How do you do that?” Del asked.

“Do what?”

“That math?”

“The same way you would have done it, if you’d had nuns beating fractions into your head in third, fourth, and fifth grades,” Lucas said.

“How fast will it take us to catch them at a hundred and five?”

“Uh, about . . . five-sixths of a mile every minute . . . we’re about sixteen miles behind them now . . . you take sixteen divided by five and multiplied by six . . . about nineteen and one-fifth minutes . . . more or less.”

“How do you know it’s five-sixths of a mile every minute?”

“Because sixty miles an hour is a mile a minute. We’re going fifty miles an hour faster than they are, and that’s five-sixths of sixty . . . so we catch up five-sixths of a mile every minute.”

“Well, hell, even I could do that.”

“Yeah, if you knew how.”

•   •   •

J
ENKINS CALLED.
“There’s one guy in the truck. I came up fast with my high lights on and illuminated the truck, then passed him in a hurry, like I was an asshole. There’s only one guy in the truck.”

Lucas took the handset from Del: “Get as far out in front of him as you have to, to lose his headlights. Then find a side road and dodge off on it, until he passes. Then get behind again. Where in the hell are Jane and Sarah?”

“Jane is a mile behind Shrake, and I’m right behind her,” Bradley said. “I’m going to start falling back in case she has to pass Dannon.”

Shrake said, “I’m gonna have to pass in the next couple of minutes. I’m coming up on him.”

Stack: “I’ll tell you what—he’s not going to Taryn Grant’s place. Not unless he’s taking the way-scenic route.”

•   •   •

T
HAT’S THE WAY IT
went for sixteen minutes. At four minutes, Shrake had to pass. He also reported one person at the wheel, and that he was sure it was Dannon. Stack moved up until she was running a half-mile behind Dannon, and Jenkins, coming off a side road, fell in behind Stack and ahead of Bradley. Bradley passed him, so that Jenkins could hang back longer. By then they were well up I-94, running parallel to the Mississippi River.

At sixteen minutes, Jenkins called to say that he could see Lucas’s flashers. Lucas turned off the lights and eased off the gas. They passed Monticello, the city lights spreading off to the right, toward the Mississippi, and then plunged back into the dark. Five minutes later, he came up behind Jenkins and dropped his speed to fifty-five. They ran like that for another fifteen minutes, and as Stack was coming up on Dannon, she called and said, “I think he’s getting off at the exit. . . . He’s getting off. I’m going straight.”

Lucas: “Jenkins, pull off and kill your lights. Sarah, keep going behind Jane, turn around as soon as you can.”

As Jenkins moved to the shoulder, Lucas pulled over behind him, then fished an iPad out of the seat pocket behind Del.

Jenkins, looking at the GPS tracker, called: “He’s gone right, he’s headed down toward the river.”

Lucas thought,
Perfect graveyard.
He called back, “Wait one,” brought the iPad up, went to Google Earth, got a satellite view of the area and said, “There’s no bridge down there. It’s not a dead end, just a bunch of back roads.”

Jenkins: “Let’s go to the top of the overpass.”

“Go,” Lucas said, and they waited until a couple of cars passed, then ran dark to the overpass and up the exit ramp, and pulled off at the top. In the distance, probably a mile away, they could still see Dannon’s taillights. He seemed to be moving slowly, tentatively. Lucas went back to Google Earth, pulled up a measuring stick. He hopped out of the Lexus and carried the iPad to Jenkins’s car, and stood by the driver’s-side window.

“He’s about one-point-two miles in,” Jenkins said, looking at the monitor for the GPS bug.

Lucas enlarged the satellite view, then stretched the measuring tape down the map. There was nothing on the map at 1.2 miles, but at 1.4, there was a minor track going off to the left, probably gravel or dirt, along the river.

They watched the monitor and the iPad, and at 1.4, the taillights disappeared, but they could see the faint streak of headlights, now running parallel to both the highway and the river. Two-tenths of a mile down the side road, Dannon stopped. Below them, on the highway, Shrake did an illegal U-turn across the interstate median, and came up the ramp; a minute later, he was followed by both Bradley and Stack.

When they were up, they got out of their cars and gathered around Lucas, who said, “We’re going to head down to that intersection. About one-point-four miles. No lights. When we’re there, we’ll go in on foot. He’s about two-tenths of a mile in, probably three or four hundred yards. I want Sarah and Jane to stay with the cars.”

“I want to go in,” Stack said.

And Bradley: “I do, too.”

“I don’t have time to argue,” Lucas said. “The fact is, we’ll be on foot, and you don’t have the shoes for it. If he sees us coming, he could come busting out of there in that truck, and we’ll be in trouble. We need somebody in the cars who can take him, if it comes to that. Jenkins, Shrake, Del, and I have all done this before, and we’ve all been in gunfights. You two haven’t. So, you stay with the cars. End of story. Let’s load up and go.”

•   •   •

T
HE TWO WOMEN WEREN’T
happy about it, but they did it.

Jenkins had a pair of night-vision goggles, and the most experience with them. He’d lead. All six of the cops had LED flashlights, big 135-Lumen Streamlights. They all loaded up and started down the side road, running dark, except for taillights, following Jenkins.

The countryside was densely wooded, with breaks for the occasional farmstead and backwoods house; and with the clouds, black as a coal mine. Lucas could barely see the road in front of him, and took it slowly, at twenty miles an hour, watching Jenkins’s taillights, feeling for the right edge of the tarmac with his tires.

“At twenty miles an hour, how long does it take to go one-point-four miles?” Del asked.

“You’d go a mile in three minutes,” Lucas said. “You’d go the rest of the way in four-tenths of three minutes. Three minutes is one hundred and eighty seconds, and one-tenth of that is eighteen seconds. Four-tenths would be seventy-two seconds. So, four minutes and twelve seconds.”

“How big a grave can you dig in four minutes and twelve seconds?”

“Don’t have the math on that one,” Lucas said.

•   •   •

A
T A LITTLE MORE
than 1.3 miles on Lucas’s odometer, they saw the road going left, which looked like a darker tunnel on a black sheet. Jenkins pulled off to the left side of the road, Lucas edged off behind him, and the others followed. They all climbed out into the cold night, and Lucas whispered, “No talking. This guy might have experience night-fighting. Spread out, don’t shoot each other. Stay on the road. No noise.”

The four men moved off, spread across the road like gunfighters in an old spaghetti western; and, Lucas thought, they
were
gunfighters, every one of them. Jenkins was the lead man, with two to his left, one to his right, in a V, like a bunch of Canada geese headed south.

Lucas was counting steps. Two hundred and eighty slow steps down the road, and they could hear Dannon working, the rhythmic
chh! chh! chh! chh!
of a spade digging into damp earth, but they couldn’t see him.

•   •   •

W
HEN
D
ANNON WAS IN
the army, he’d served as company level and battalion level intelligence officer. In the latter job, in Afghanistan, he’d serviced a dozen sources in villages scattered around the forward operating base. They would call into the cell number and leave messages, which the native translator would render into English. Most of it was inconsequential—this guy or that guy had come or gone, and he was Taliban or an Arab or whatever. Arabs were always interesting, because they were rare and sometimes important. Most times, they were kids from Saudi or Jordan looking to make their bones, wandering across the landscape like itinerant skateboarders; but sometimes interesting. The Americans usually tried to pick up the Arabs.

The actual pickups were done by special ops people. Dannon had gone along on a number of the operations, when there was space available—the commander encouraged staff people to get out in the weeds—and had twice been involved in firefights with the targets. Both times, they’d been kids, and both times, killed.

But.

Except for the fights themselves, it had always been high-tech: sources fingering the targets, live calls when a target was leaving a village, tracking them from gunships, then closing them down.

He’d never used a GPS tracker, and it never occurred to him that there might be one on his truck. He’d never been tailed, and though he’d watched his rearview mirror, looking for cars that were pacing him, it never occurred to him that cars that overtook him and disappeared in the distance were the watchers. He’d never thought that night-vision goggles could be used against him.

He’d never been snuck up on in the dark.

But.

He’d sat on nighttime ambushes, every sense digging into the dark, and as he dug Carver’s grave, that was operating on some level. At one point, a few minutes after he started digging into the reeds in the swampland, he picked up what seemed to be a vibration. He stopped digging and walked out to the road, and peered in the dark toward the turnoff. Nothing but darkness.

He turned back, navigating with a taped flashlight, a thin needle of light showing him the path.

He worked for another five minutes, and then felt another chill. What
was
that?

There was no specific noise, other than the engines from the interstate, a mile away, but there was something under that . . . an unidentifiable pattern . . .

He didn’t feel foolish at all: the special ops people always had said that when you had a feeling, pay attention to it; most times, it was nothing. The other time, if you hadn’t paid attention, it would kill you. So he paid attention, sitting, no longer digging. The burial site, near where they’d put Tubbs down, was off a gravel track, down a path that led to the river, and then off the path fifteen yards.

Lots of zigs and zags.

He was invisible, he thought. He sat, listening, listening . . .

And heard the crunch of gravel.

No. Imagined he heard the crunch of gravel? He wasn’t sure. He slipped his gun out of its holster, pressed the safety forward.

Duckwalked out to the path to the river.

•   •   •

A
MINUTE OFF THE TRACK,
Lucas felt Del’s arm slow him down, and pull him in. They bunched up and Jenkins whispered, “His truck is twenty-five or thirty feet in front of us. I think he’s off to the right, right by the truck.”

Lucas said, “Keep the lights handy. Light him up if you see him.”

They moved on, up to the truck; and then a few steps beyond. Lucas heard the crunch of gravel and put out a hand to Del, who was to his left, stopping him in his tracks. Del did the same, to Jenkins, and Jenkins to Shrake. They all froze, and listened, peering into the blackness.

Three of them could see nothing; but there was some kind of faint, faint noise coming from the front. Jenkins saw Dannon edge into the path, a gun in his hand.

Jenkins had his flashlight in his left hand. He pointed it at Dannon’s eyes, pointed his pistol, and without warning, turned it on.

Dannon was there, thirty feet away, pinned by the dazzling light like a frog on a tenth-grader’s dissection tray. Unlike those frogs . . .

Jenkins shouted, “Freeze, freeze or we’ll shoot.”

. . . Unlike those frogs, Dannon leaped sideways back into the swamp reeds and then, scrambling on his hands and knees, still clinging to his pistol, began running mindlessly through the brush.

The cops all turned on their lights and played them through the brush, and caught flashes of Dannon, the movement of the swamp weeds and brush as he tore through them, and Lucas shouted, “Jenkins, Shrake, Del, go after him, take care, take care . . .”

Lucas turned and in the light of his own flash, ran back up the dirt track toward the gravel road, pulled his handset and said, “Sarah, Jane, he’s coming right at you. Watch out, watch out, he’s on foot, I think he’s coming for the road. . . .”

•   •   •

N
OTHING AT ALL WENT
through Dannon’s head. He’d had some escape and evasion classes, and one of the basics was simply to put distance between yourself and your pursuer. Distance was always good; distance gave you options. He didn’t think about it, though, he just ran, fast and as hard as he could, and he was in good shape.

Good shape or not, he fell three or four times—he wasn’t counting—and the small shrub and grasses tore at him and tried to catch his feet; he went knee-deep into a watery hole, pulled free, and ran on, looking back once. He was out of the light, now, he was gaining on them, he was almost there . . .

And he broke free into the road. He couldn’t see it, except as a kind of dark channel in front of him. The lights were now a hundred yards back, but still coming, and he ran down the dark channel. When he got far enough out front, he’d cut across country again, and then maybe turn down toward the river. . . .