Silken Prey Page 19

  A battalion was apparently a mid-level unit, in size, and his particular battalion had apparently been deeply enmeshed in combat in Iraq. Dannon had gotten good efficiency marks, but Lucas wasn’t sure how exactly to evaluate them. In his own bureaucracy, good efficiency marks were subject to interpretation by insiders, and could damn with praise a little too faint.

  • • •

  BY THE TIME LUCAS went to bed, a little after two in the morning, he’d learned enough to know that Grant’s security detail could plan and carry out a murder with calculated precision and had no large problem with qualms. They would have the means, the training, the personalities that would allow them to get it done.

  If they were responsible for Tubbs’s murder, catching them would be the next thing to impossible.

  Next to impossible, he thought, as he drifted away to sleep. Next to . . .

  He opened his eyes, listened to Weather breathing beside him, then crept out of bed again, taking his phone with him, into the study, where he called Virgil Flowers. Flowers answered on the third ring and asked, “What happened?”

  “I need you up here tomorrow, early. Ten o’clock or so.”

  Flowers groaned. “You had to call me in the middle of the night to tell me that? I thought the Ape Man was out again.”

  “Sorry. I was afraid you’d be out of there at five o’clock, in your boat,” Lucas said. “I’m running out of time up here, and I need you to look at some paper. You’re the only guy I know who could do it.”

  “What?”

  “You were an army cop,” Lucas said. “See you up here.”

  Lucas hung up, went back to bed, and slept soundly.

  • • •

  THE NEXT MORNING, Weather dropped a newspaper on his back and said, “Ruffe.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “He said that the state—meaning you, though he doesn’t use your name—is investigating the possibility that Tubbs was killed to cover up the dirty trick on Smalls. The Democrats are furious, while the Republicans are outraged.”

  “So . . . no change,” Lucas said.

  “Watch your ass, Lucas,” Weather said. “The whole thing is about to lurch into the ditch.”

  • • •

  A COUPLE OF HOURS later, Virgil Flowers, a lanky man with long blond hair, put the heels of his cowboy boots on Lucas’s desk and turned over the last page of the two documents, which Lucas had printed for him. Flowers said, “You’re right. These are two goddamned dangerous guys. Carver, especially, but this Dannon wouldn’t be a pushover, either. He’d be the brains behind the operation.”

  Lucas had called Flowers in for two reasons: he was smart, and he’d been an MP captain in the army, before joining the St. Paul Police Department, and then the BCA. He normally worked the southern third of the state, except when Lucas needed him to do something else.

  “I was struggling with the gobbledygook,” Lucas said, tossing the papers on the desk. “I figured as a famous former warlord, you’d know what it was all about.”

  “I met a few of these guys in the Balkans,” Flowers said. “They’re scary. Smart, tough. Not like movie stars, not all muscled up with torn shirts. A lot of them are really pretty small guys, neat, quiet—you’d think you could throw them out the window, but you’d be wrong. Some trouble would start up, you know, and they’d get assigned a mission, they’d be really, really calm. Sit around eating crackers and checking their weapons. Contained. The army cuts them a lot of slack, because they’re very good at what they do . . . which, basically, is killing and kidnapping people.”

  “An uncommon skill set,” Lucas said.

  “Yeah. I didn’t have a lot of contact with them,” Flowers said. “They had their own compounds. They’re secretive, a lot of them get killed—they have an unbelievable mortality rate. Even with that, they stay in the military. Some of them call the army ‘Mother.’ I think they get hooked on the stress and the camaraderie. Or maybe the sense that they’re doing something really important, which they are. If they leave the military, they tend to get in trouble as civilians. Some of them, after they leave, wind up as military contractors, or working for military contractors, right back where they started. Roaming around the world, with a gun in their back pocket.”

  Lucas said, “Bob Tubbs, if he was working for the Grant campaign, might have posed some kind of danger to them. Maybe he wanted more money. Maybe he couldn’t keep his mouth shut, maybe he wanted credit for taking down a senator. Who knows?—but he may have represented some kind of danger. And you’ve got these guys right there—”

  “You don’t have a fuckin’ thing on them, do you?” Flowers asked.

  “Not a fuckin’ thing,” Lucas said. “Which is why I brought you in. I want you to tell me: if a guy disappears without a trace, and you have these two guys hanging around . . . what are the chances?”

  “You don’t need me to figure that out. You already have,” Flowers said, kicking his feet off the desk. “You just want me to say you’re right.”

  “Am I right?”

  “Probably. What are you going to do about it?”

  “Will I ever get any evidence against them?”

  “Not unless something weird happens,” Flowers said. “Listen, let me tell you. Strange things happen in combat areas. Unpleasant things have to be done . . . and somebody has to do them. But those things can’t be pulled out in the open. The do-gooders would be screaming to high heaven and careers would be wrecked. You know, ‘That’s not how we do things in America.’ Well, you know, sometimes it is. Look at bin Laden: he was executed, not killed in a gunfight. Everybody knows that, but he was so big, there’s a national collective agreement not to mention it. When something like that happens, people like Carver are holding the gun. There was no way to hide the bin Laden thing, but in other cases . . . they have to hide what they did. The army knows, but it doesn’t know. Even the do-gooders in the Congress know, but they don’t want to hear it. It’s like the guys in Vice, or Narcotics. They’re like you, really. Sometimes, strange things need to get done.”

  “Okay.”

  “Now, I don’t know what Carver did that got him kicked out, but it was serious, and he was lucky,” Flowers said. “I’d say it’s about ninety–ten that if he’d done the same thing as a cop, whatever it was, he’d have gone to prison. Whatever he did, he had to go—but at the same time, the army took care of him.”

  “What if I subpoenaed some colonel in here to get specific about what he did?”

  Flowers snorted. “Never happen.”

  Lucas said, “We go to federal court—”

  “It would take you ten years before you saw the guy’s face, and then he wouldn’t be able to remember anything specific,” Flowers said. “I’m not kidding you, Lucas. It wouldn’t happen.”

  “So what do I do?” Lucas asked.

  Flowers stood up and yawned and stretched. “I don’t know. Sneak around. Plot. Manipulate. Lie, cheat, and steal. Do what the army did—settle it off the record. Or, forget it.”

  “I got one senator, one governor, and one would-be senator pointing guns at my head.”

  “If they take you down, can I have your job?” Flowers asked.

  Lucas didn’t smile. He said, “Careful what you wish for, Virg.”

  Virgil: “Hey. I wasn’t serious.”

  “I am,” Lucas said.

  Lucas took Flowers to lunch, and they talked about it some more, and about life in general. Flowers had recently come off a case where he’d run down four out of five murderers. Three of them had been killed—none of them by Flowers—one was in Stillwater for thirty years, and one was walking around free. Flowers had been unhappy about the one who walked—and Lucas had argued that he’d done as much as he could, and that overall, justice had been served, even if the law hadn’t gotten every possible ounce of flesh.

  Now Flowers was arguing the same thing back to him. If Dannon and Carver had killed Tubbs, Lucas wouldn’t find out about it except by accide
nt. If justice were to be done, it would have to be extrajudicial.

  “You think I should push them into a gunfight?” Lucas asked, only half-jokingly.

  “Oh, Jesus, no. It’d be fifty-fifty that you’d lose,” Flowers said. “If you took on both of them, it’d be seventy-thirty.”

  Lucas said nothing.

  “Of course, if you did lose, at least you’d die knowing that I’d be here to take care of Weather,” Flowers said.

  “It’s good to know you have friends,” Lucas said.

  • • •

  WHEN FLOWERS LEFT—he said he was headed for the St. Croix River to check out possible environmental crimes, which meant that he was going fishing—Lucas went back to the BCA and shut his office door, sat in the chair where Flowers had been sitting, and put his feet up in the same spot.

  If Dannon and Carver had been involved in the murder of Tubbs (if Tubbs had been murdered—the small possibility that he hadn’t been wriggled away at the back of his thoughts), there were two possibilities: that one of them had done it on his own, and the other didn’t know about it; or, more likely, that both of them were involved.

  What about Grant? Did she know? He considered that for a while, and finally concluded that there was no way to tell. If she did know, or if she suspected, she’d be the weak link. He’d be tempted to go after her under any normal circumstances, but the circumstances were anything but normal. With a razor’s-edge election coming up, any suggestion by a police official that she might know about a murder could tip the balance. And with no evidence on which to base the probe, that police officer could be in a lot of trouble if his suggestion didn’t pan out.

  For practical purposes, he’d have to confine his investigation to Dannon and Carver.

  He thought about them for a while—about what Flowers had seen in their records—and then picked up his phone. The woman on the other end said, “It’s been a while.”

  “You got time for tea?” Lucas asked.

  “A social occasion? Trading information about old friends, and who’s been up to what?”

  “We can do that, too.”

  They took tea at a Thai place on Grand Avenue. Sister Mary Joseph was exactly Lucas’s age; they’d walked hand in hand to kindergarten, when she was simply Elle. She might well have been, Lucas thought, when he thought about it, the first female he’d loved, though they’d gone through life on radically different paths. She’d chosen the nunnery and he’d chosen the craziest possible contact with the world.

  But their paths had continued to cross: she’d become a professor of psychology at the University of St. Patrick and the College of St. Anne, and because of Lucas, had taken an interest in criminal pathology. She’d worked in most of the state’s prisons, including those for the criminally insane.

  Lucas got to the Thai place first, and she came in ten minutes later. In the early years she’d worn a full habit, and had persisted for years after most nuns had gone to modern dress. She’d finally changed over, and now wore what Lucas called “the drabs”: brown or gray dresses and long stockings with a little brown coif stuck on top of her head like the vanilla twist on a Dairy Queen cone.

  She slid into the booth opposite him and asked, “What’s the problem?”

  “How you doing, Elle?”

  “I’m doing fine, but I’m running a little late.”

  Lucas told her about Dannon, Carver, and Grant, about what he thought and what Flowers thought. He paused while she ordered a cup of chai, and he got a second Diet Coke, and then continued. When he finished, she took a sip of tea, then said, “You know there are no guarantees.”

  “Of course.”

  “Go after Dannon,” she said. “Dannon is the thinker and probably a manipulator. He’ll try to figure a way out. Carver would consider that unmanly. He’d clam up, and if necessary, take one for the team. He’d sit there and say, ‘Prove it.’ Dannon might say the same thing, but he’d be looking for a way out.”

  “Dannon wouldn’t take one for the team.”

  She made a moue, then said, “There’s one exception. If he is, in fact, in love with Ms. Grant, he might take one for her . . . if she’s involved. If he thinks Carver acted alone, he might also turn on Carver. Not because he wanted to, but to protect Ms. Grant.”

  Lucas said, “A hero.”

  “Yes. In his own eyes. Have you considered the possibility that Ms. Grant was involved in the killing?”

  “I have, but there’s no way to know. I can see Dannon or Carver doing it, but Grant, with all that she’s got going for her, and the campaign . . . it seems nuts.”

  “Yes, but step back,” Elle said. “Consider that fact that if they were going to take the risk of playing this dirty trick on Senator Smalls, she almost had to know about it—that something was up. Maybe not the details. When Tubbs disappeared, she most likely would make an . . . assumption. She probably would have asked some questions. Whether anybody would answer her, I don’t know. That depends on all the different personalities involved.”

  Lucas explained that he didn’t feel that he could go directly after her: that it would be unfair if she was innocent, and that too much was on the line.

  “So go after Dannon . . . but ask that she be there when you question him. He might not give up much, but keep an eye on her. On her reaction. Is she astonished that anyone would think that Dannon could do it? Or is she worried? Does she try to protect him, or does she throw him under the bus? Does she feel like she can’t throw him under the bus? That could tell you a lot, and it’d be a private session. Nothing leaking to the press.”

  • • •

  ELLE WAS ON HER WAY to a piano recital, so Lucas walked her back to her car, and they agreed she’d come over to Lucas’s house the following week for dinner. When she was gone, he wandered along the street, looking into windows, thinking about the possibilities, and a couple of blocks down the street took a call from the governor: “I saw the piece in the paper this morning,” Henderson said. “Was that you, trying to break something loose?”

  “Not necessarily,” Lucas said. “Listen, what would you think about the idea of suspending the investigation until after the election? If Grant is involved, we could take her down even if she got elected. But I’m starting to worry about the fairness of it all.”

  “Let me worry about that,” the governor said. “Do you have any indication that the Grant campaign was involved in . . . Tubbs’s disappearance?”

  “No proof. But Grant has a couple of killers working for her.” Lucas filled him in on Dannon and Carver.

  “Okay. You keep pushing, but no more press,” Henderson said. “No more talking with Ruffe. No comments to anyone. I will have a press conference, and I will tell everybody that I spoke to the lead investigator in the case—that would be you—and that while you have established that the child porn was an attack on Senator Smalls, and that he almost certainly is innocent, that there is, at this point, no indication that the Grant campaign was involved. I will say that it appears likely that Tubbs was working alone, out of a personal animus toward Smalls. I’ll ask Porter to back me up. He’ll do that.”

  “Why do you think he’d do that? He’s pretty goddamn angry,” Lucas said.

  “Because I’ll call him before the press conference, and I’ll tell him what I propose to say, and tell him if he doesn’t back me up, I won’t have the press conference,” Henderson said. “The press conference will get him in the clear in tomorrow morning’s papers and TV, which he desperately needs.”

  “All right. I’ll keep it quiet.”

  “Attaboy. This thing is going to work out, Lucas. For us. It really shouldn’t matter whether we get the killer this week or in two weeks. What matters right now is to try to square up this election. Let’s focus on that: you do what you do, and let me try to get things straight with the voters.”

  “That sounded like something your weasel wrote,” Lucas said.

  “Who do you think taught him his stuff? If anything new eru
pts, call me, first.”

  • • •

  A LITTLE LATER, as he was driving back to his house, he took another call, this one from Kidd. “I’m not too far from your place. You got time for a walk?”

  “I’m on my way there, now,” Lucas said. “What’s up?”

  “Let’s talk about it when I get there. Radios make me nervous.”

  Lucas realized he was talking about cell phones, and said, “See you there.”

  Lucas had just pulled into his garage when Kidd showed up, driving a Mercedes SUV. Lucas said, “Fat ride. That’s spelled P-H-A-T.”

  Kidd: “Wrong century, pal. Phat was about 1990.”

  “That’s the second time one of you computer people told me I was outdated.”

  “Well, you gotta keep up,” Kidd said. He paused, looked up at the sky, then said, “You know, I take that back. Really, maybe you don’t need to keep up. Maybe keeping up is for idiots.”

  “Let’s take that walk,” Lucas said.

  They strolled up Mississippi River Boulevard, taking their time. Kidd asked, “You get anything out of those army docs?”

  “I had one of my guys look at them—he’s ex-army, an MP captain. He said Dannon and Carver are dangerous guys.”

  “He’s right,” Kidd said. He had his hands in his pockets and half turned to Lucas. “I want to tell you some stuff, but I don’t want it coming back to me, or showing up in court. It’s for your information—and I’m giving it to you because I trust you, and because you may need it.”

  “You didn’t stick up a 7-Eleven store?”

  “Worse,” Kidd said. “I stole military secrets.”

  “I got no problem with that,” Lucas said. “What’d they say?”

  “After I pulled those docs out of the record center, I did some more digging around,” Kidd said. “It turns out, there’s a classified report on what happened with Carver. There was no way I could get it to you by ‘mistake.’”

  “Okay.”

  “The short version of it is, he and a squad of special operations troops flew into a village in southern Afghanistan in two Blackhawks, with a gunship flying support. They were targeting a house where two Taliban leadership guys were hiding out with their bodyguards. They landed, hit the house, there was a short fight there, they killed one man, but they’d caught the Taliban guys while they were sleeping. They controlled and handcuffed the guys they were looking for, and had five of their bodyguards on the floor. Then the village came down on them like a ton of bricks. Instead of just being the two guys with their bodyguards, there were like fifty or sixty Taliban in there. There was no way to haul out the guys they’d arrested—there was nothing they could do but run. They got out by the skin of their teeth.”