Silken Prey (33 page)

He ran a hundred yards down the channel, heedless of the sounds of his footfalls, breathing hard. . . .

•   •   •

L
UCAS WAS ON THE ROAD,
moving faster than Dannon, but at the wrong angle—Dannon, though in the swamp, was cutting diagonally across the right angle of the gravel road and the dirt track. Lucas could tell more or less where he was because of the brilliant lights of the cops behind him, and the sound of Dannon’s thrashing in the brush. Then the thrashing stopped, and Lucas stopped, trying to figure out where he’d gone.

•   •   •

B
RADLEY AND
S
TACK HEARD
him coming. Stack whispered, “I’m going to hit the car lights.”

“Okay.”

Stack reached to the light switch, to the left of the steering wheel, and waited, waited, trying to judge the distance, and when it seemed that he might be close enough,

Flipped the switch.

And Dannon was there, covered with mud, clothes hanging wet from his body, a bloody patch on his head, mouth hanging open. He had a gun in his hand and as Stack stepped to the left of Bradley, he brought it up and Bradley screamed, “Drop the gun,” and he didn’t, he brought it higher . . .

The women shot him.

Later, it would turn out that they’d each fired four times, though neither was counting, and of the eight shots, had hit him five times.

Two of the shots would have been wounding; two of the shots would have killed him in seconds or minutes; one of them went through his throat and severed his spinal cord, and Dannon went down like Raggedy Andy.

L
ucas not only heard the gunfire, but saw it. He was at right angles to the confrontation, running back to the cars, saw the lights go on, and then behind the lights, the sound of the gunfire and the flicker of the muzzle flashes. The women were both shooting 9mm weapons, and the flashes were small, even in the dark night. He shouted, “Davenport coming in . . .”

Running as hard as he could, he was there in fifteen seconds. The two women were still by the cars, guns pointed at Dannon’s body. Lucas came up, and Bradley said, her voice cool, “He had a gun, he pointed it at us.”

Lucas nodded once, said into his handset, “You guys get to the closest road, he’s down.”

He did that as he stepped over to Dannon’s body and checked it. He was on his side; blood pooling around him, his gun still gripped in his hand.

Lucas backed away, and Jenkins ran up and looked at the body.

He said, “Who . . . ?”

Bradley said, “We did.”

“Jesus,” Jenkins said.

Del and Shrake came up and stopped beside Jenkins; all three of them were covered with mud, their trousers wet above the knees. Del had a scrape above one eye. Lucas said to Jenkins, “Get your flashers on, block the road. Figure out what county we’re in, and call the sheriff’s office and get some deputies down here.”

To Shrake: “Call the duty officer and get a crime-scene crew on the way. Tell them to bring lights—lots of lights. Tell them to hurry.”

And to Bradley and Stack: “You two put your guns away. Decock them but leave them in the same condition, don’t reload them. Stay around the car, don’t approach the body.”

To Del: “Come on. We’ve got to check on Carver.”

“Hope to hell Carver’s down there,” Del said. “Be a hell of a note if Dannon was out digging black dirt for his flower garden.”

•   •   •

T
HEY HURRIED ALONG THROUGH
the night, turned the corner down the dirt track, to Dannon’s truck. They shone lights in the window, without touching the truck, but it was empty. They then stepped carefully through the brush back to the spot where they’d heard Dannon digging. There was a hole in the ground, and beside it, a bulky body with a plastic bag on the head. “That’s him,” Lucas said. “I’m not gonna touch the bag.”

“You think Tubbs is out here?” Del asked.

“I’d bet on it, but I’m not looking around here now,” Lucas said, shining the light down on his shoes. The ground was damp, but not actually swampy where he was standing.

“One thing about November,” Del said, shining his flash up into the sky. “No bugs.”

“Yeah, that’s one thing about it,” Lucas said. “Let’s go back and wait for the crime-scene people.”

•   •   •

T
HEY HAD THREE SHERIFF’S
cars at the scene in twenty minutes, one blocking the road, the other down by the mouth of the dirt track, one with the BCA group. The crime-scene truck arrived a few minutes after three-thirty, and took charge of the scene, along with the sheriff’s deputies. They also took charge of the women’s pistols.

After they’d walked the crime-scene crew through the entire action, and marked the critical bits, Lucas ordered the two women and Shrake and Jenkins back to BCA headquarters: “I want full preliminary reports from everyone, start to finish, with timelines. Right now, tonight. When you’re done, cross-check them, then get some sleep. We’ll meet tomorrow at one o’clock in the afternoon and figure out the bureaucratics. Jane and Sarah, you did good. The guy murdered at least three people in cold blood, and if you hadn’t shot him, he’d have killed you and taken one of the cars. Nobody could have asked for more.”

Lucas called the BCA duty officer and asked him to send another crew to cover Dannon’s and Carver’s apartments. “Seal them off at a minimum.”

The four of them coughed and shuffled their feet and talked for a minute or two, before going to their vehicles, to trundle back up the road. By that time, both the area around Dannon and the area around Carver were bathed in work light, and one of the crime-scene people was making a movie of the shooting area.

Del asked, “We’re staying?”

“We might have to come back, but right now, we’re going to talk to Taryn Grant.”

“You think she knew about this?”

“I . . .” Lucas had to stop and think. “I’d give you six-to-five that she did. No better than that. We have nothing with her name on it. If she’s involved, we’ll have to find something in Dannon’s apartment. Probably not Carver’s.”

•   •   •

B
Y THE TIME THEY
got back to town, it was after five o’clock, not even a hint of the dawn. They dropped off I-94 onto I-494 at the western edge of the metro area, then turned off and headed deeper west, into the lake neighborhoods. When they got to Grant’s house, they found the street deserted; no well-wishers, no TV trucks. There were a few lights in the house, and two security guards at the driveway.

Lucas and Del got out of Lucas’s truck and walked up the driveway. The guards moved down to block them, and Lucas pulled out his ID and said, “We’re with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. We need to wake Ms. Grant. Now.”

One of the guards looked at the ID with his flashlight and said, “You got it . . . but I think she’s still awake. There are still some people here.”

Del asked, “Any more of you guys around?”

“Yeah, one guy behind the house, he moves back and forth across the yard.”

•   •   •

T
HEY WALKED UP TO
the front door, rang the bell. Del scratched his neck and looked at the yellow bug light and said, “I
feel
like a bug.”

“You look like a bug. You fall down out there?”

“About four times. We weren’t running so much as staggering around. Potholes full of water . . . I see you kept your French shoes nice and dry.”

“English. English shoes . . . French shirts. Italian suits. Try to remember that.”

“Makes my nose bleed,” Del said.

The door opened, and Green looked out: she was still fully dressed, including the jacket that covered her gun and the fashionable shoes that she could run in.

She took a long look at Del, and asked, “Where’re Dannon and Carver?”

“Dead,” Lucas said. “Where’s Grant?”

“In the living room.”

“You want to invite us in?”

She opened the door, and they stepped inside, and followed her to the living room.

Grant was there, still dressed as she had been on the stage; she was curled in an easy chair, with a drink in her hand, high heels on the floor beside her. Schiffer was lying on a couch, barefoot; a couple of Taryn’s staff people, a young woman and a young man, were sitting on the floor, making a circle. Another man, heavier and older, was sitting in a leather chair facing Grant. Lucas didn’t recognize him, but recognized the type: a guy who knew where all the notional bodies were buried, a guy who could get the vice president on the telephone.

When Lucas came in, behind Green, Grant stood up, putting her drink aside, and asked, “What? What now?”

“Your pal Dannon murdered your pal Carver and took his body out in the countryside to bury it. We were tracking him, and when we approached him at the grave he was digging, he tried to shoot it out. He’s dead.”

There was a moment of utter silence: Schiffer seemed to be the most affected, as she got to her feet, her face gone white, a hand at her throat.

Grant recovered first, and asked, “What . . . does that mean?”

“We were hoping you could help us with that,” Lucas said.

“I don’t know what that means,” Grant said.

“You sent me a message earlier tonight . . .” Lucas began.

Grant put up a hand: “No. No, I didn’t. I already told you that.”

Lucas took his phone out of his pocket, called up the message, stepped up to her and said, “Here’s the message. Is this your phone number?”

She looked at the message and the number, and said, “That’s not right. That’s crazy.”

“Is that your phone number?”

“Yes, but my phone, I can’t find my phone. It’s gone. Somebody took it out of my purse. Marjorie had my purse . . .”

She looked at the woman on the floor, who said, “I was really careful with the purse. It was zipped up.”

Lucas said, “The call came in at ten-oh-six. You were still here at ten-oh-six, weren’t you?”

Grant looked at Schiffer, who said, “Yes . . . we were still here. We left for the hotel around ten-fifteen.”

Grant said, “Then the phone call came from here. My purse was back in the bedroom. In fact . . .” She looked at Schiffer. “In fact, you called me while I was back there.”

They stared at each other for a moment, then Schiffer said, “That’s right,” dug around in her bag, pulled out her phone, and said, “I made that call at nine-fifty-eight. What’s that . . . eight minutes before you got the message?”

“There was nobody in the bedroom but me. I went back there to get ready to go,” Grant said. To Schiffer: “I got the call from you . . . I put my phone back in my bag. My bag was on the chest of drawers.”

Green stepped over to Grant and took her by the arm and said, “One second . . .” She pulled Grant off to one side, twenty feet away, stood with her back to Lucas and the rest of the group, and whispered directly into Grant’s ear. Grant looked at her, then nodded, came back and said, “I’d like to alter that statement a bit. Doug Dannon escorted me back there. We didn’t talk, I just wanted some privacy to pee. I was alone when Connie called, and I dropped my phone back in my purse and came straight out here. Then when we were ready to go, I went back and got my purse.”

“Can we look at the bedroom?” Lucas asked.

Schiffer said, “Maybe we ought to have a lawyer.”

Lucas: “There’s a very good chance . . . actually, it’s not a chance, it’s a certainty, that this is a crime scene. Somebody called me on Ms. Grant’s phone, who had knowledge that Dannon was planning to kill Carver. As he did. A lawyer might tell you not to talk, but he can’t keep us away from a crime scene.”

Schiffer shrugged, and Grant said, “I don’t care, anyway. This is . . . awful. Awful! This is insane! The bedroom . . .”

She walked back toward the bedroom wing, and Lucas, Del, Schiffer, Green, and the others followed. Halfway down the hall, Lucas looked back and said, “I don’t want anyone here except Ms. Grant.”

Grant said to Lucas, “I want witnesses. You have lied to me and worked for Smalls since the beginning of this thing, and I wouldn’t put it past you to frame me. I want witnesses. I want Connie and Alice with me.”

Lucas said, “I did not . . .” Then he stopped and nodded. “Ms. Green and Ms. Schiffer. Nobody else. Do not touch a thing. Stand in the doorway where you can see and hear, but do not touch anything. Do not touch the door or the doorknobs or anything else.”

They stepped inside the bedroom and Grant pointed to her left and said, “I went in there to use the bathroom. My purse was right here, on the dresser.” She pointed at the dresser. “Doug was out in the hall. Nobody could have gotten past him, without him knowing. And I don’t know why a, a . . . confederate . . . of his would call to say he was planning to kill Ron. Anyway, I used the bathroom, and came out, and as I came out, the phone rang, and I talked to Connie, and then put the phone back in the purse and went out. With Doug . . .”

When they’d entered the bedroom, Del had slid off to the left to clear the bathroom. He came back and listened to Grant’s narration. When she finished, he asked, “When you were in the bathroom, did you notice anything unusual? Did you look out the window?”

“Out the window? No, I didn’t look out . . . Why?”

“Because the window seems to be missing,” Del said.

•   •   •

L
UCAS HAD BEEN INVOLVED
in any number of clusterfucks in his working life, but the one at Grant’s house was notable. They all went to look at the window, which was, without a doubt, missing. Then they trooped around to the backyard, where they found three separate sheets of glass lying under an arborvitae.

Lucas said, “Why would—”

Taryn put a hand to her lips and said, “Could they get in the safe?”

“What safe?” Del asked.

They trooped back inside, and Taryn reached behind a side table and did something, and a bookcase rotated out from the wall. They all looked at the safe, which was closed. She said, “Would you turn away for a minute?” and they did, and turned back when she said, “Okay,” and turned the heavy handle that worked the safe locks.

She pulled the door open and looked into a safe that was completely empty.

In the silence, she stumbled backward, staring at the empty steel hole in the wall, and screamed, “No! No! No!”

Lucas was looking at her face when she opened the safe, and in his estimation, there was no chance that she was faking the reaction. Not even if she was crazy; not even if she’d known the safe was empty, and had rehearsed.

No chance.

•   •   •

L
UCAS MOVED EVERYBODY
out to the living room, and sat them down, and called the BCA duty officer again, and told him what had happened. He said, “You’ve got people spread all over the metro area.”

“Leave the Dannon and Carver apartments. Seal them up—we can get to them later. Right now, I need a crew here. Get them moving.”

Grant was pacing the living room, hands to her face. Everybody else sat without talking. Green went into the kitchen to get something to drink, and Lucas followed her. She handed him a personal-sized bottle of orange juice, opened one for herself, and asked, “Is there any possible way to keep me out of this? As an informant? I need the work.”

“If you don’t have a problem with the possibility of a little perjury,” Lucas said.

“I don’t, because I never told you anything meaningful,” she said.

“I keep thinking, the one person who may have had access to that phone, and who might have been aware of the whole Dannon-Carver situation, and who might have been willing to warn me . . . was you.”

“But I didn’t. And when we give our statements, you’ll find that I was right on the door when Taryn went back to the bedroom with Doug. I was monitoring the door, and the comings and goings, every minute. I couldn’t have made that phone call: and I didn’t.”