Silken Prey Page 28

  “All right,” Lucas said. “Do you have a phone number for Carver?”

  “Yes. He’s already at the house, by the way. He’ll be with Taryn until three o’clock, when he gets a couple hours off, to get ready for tonight. If you need to meet with him privately, you could call him while she’s speaking. She has four brief appearances today, mostly for the television cameras, and for a couple of blogs. Then they’ll head back and watch the results come in.”

  “Any idea about times?”

  She took a piece of paper out of her bag and pushed it across the table. “I made a copy of her schedule. I’d call at one of the first two events—the schedule there is pretty hard. Later in the day, the timetable tends to slip.”

  “All right,” Lucas said. “Thank you. Uh, do you have Carver’s double-secret cell-phone number?”

  “I do.” She pulled back the paper with the schedule on it, took a pen out of her bag, and wrote the number on the paper. “Don’t tell him where you got it.”

  “I won’t,” Lucas said.

  “Did you find out what Carver did in the army? Is that what you’ve got on him?”

  Lucas’s eyebrows went up. “You know about that?”

  “I don’t know what it is, but I know something bad happened,” Green said. “I suspect people wound up dead. I tried to find out, but I’m told it’s all very classified.”

  “How about that,” Lucas said.

  She gazed at him for a moment, then said, “But you know?”

  He smiled: “That’s classified.”

  She smiled back. “You’re a piece of work, Davenport. If it weren’t for Weather, I’d take you to bed.”

  “If it weren’t for Weather, I’d go,” Lucas said.

  • • •

  THE EXCHANGE KEPT LUCAS warm all the way out to the car. He’d jump off a high building before he betrayed Weather, but a little extracurricular flirtation kept the blood circulating; not that all of it went to the brain.

  Green asked Lucas not to call Carver until at least Grant’s first appearance of the day. “I want it to be in Carver’s head that I was around when you called. A little psychological insurance that he doesn’t think of me, when he wonders how you got the number for his phone. He’s a scary guy.”

  “I can do that,” Lucas said. “And you lay low. It should be over in another day or two, one way or another.”

  She said, “I feel like it’s gotta happen today. Everything is coming down to today. Taryn’s snap polls say she’s up, but it’s really, really close, and Smalls may be narrowing the lead. It feels to me like everything’s going to end tonight, when the votes come in.”

  CHAPTER 22

  After leaving Green, Lucas went back to BCA headquarters in St. Paul and rounded up Del, Shrake, and Jenkins. After talking with Henry Sands, the director, he got the green light to borrow four more male and two female agents from other sections. They’d work in two shifts; he would have preferred to use Virgil Flowers to lead the second shift, but Flowers was still in New Mexico. Instead, he assigned the second shift to Bob Shaffer, a lead investigator with whom he’d worked on other cases.

  He got the working group together in a classroom and briefed all nine of them on the entire Smalls/Tubbs investigation, and told them about his planned approach to Carver.

  “One of the problems we’re facing is that these two guys are probably tougher than any of us, and very experienced in killing, very cool about it,” Lucas said. “What I’m going to do is try to drive a wedge between them, which could create an explosive situation. Could create an explosive situation—but it might not do anything at all. There’s no way to tell what will happen. We’re going to spend today, tonight, and tomorrow monitoring Carver, and Dannon, too. If nothing happens before then, it’s probably a bust.”

  When he was done, one of the agents, Sarah Bradley, raised a hand and asked, “If you really get Carver jammed up with this army case, and if he’s armed, what happens if he goes off on you?”

  “He’s too experienced to go off on me, I think,” Lucas said. “If we hook up at a restaurant or coffee shop—that’s what I’m thinking—it’d be too public. He might leave ahead of me, go storming out of the place, and then try to back-shoot me, I suppose, but I don’t see that, either. He’ll want to think about it.”

  “But this army thing—it sounds impulsive, like he cracked,” Bradley said. “If he cracked then, he could crack again.”

  Lucas said, “That’s not the feeling I got. I got the feeling that the army was talking about a cold series of executions. He thought he could get away with it. Either that nobody would know, or that none of his platoon would tell, or that if somebody did, he’d be covered. He was partly right—they kicked him out but didn’t prosecute. The point is, it seems to me that he . . . thought about it. At least a bit.”

  “That’s what you think, but not what you know,” Bradley said. “I’m not so much worried about you. If he shoots you in the coffee shop . . . then he’d have to kill the witnesses. And he could do that. He’s essentially already done it once.”

  Lucas hadn’t considered that, and said, “Huh.”

  “You’d be better off with a couple more guns in the shop,” Bradley said. “Probably Jane and me. He doesn’t sound like the type to be looking at women as potential combatants: he’d be too macho for that.”

  Jane was the other female agent, Jane Stack.

  Lucas said, “Let me think about it.”

  Shrake said, “Sarah’s exactly right. The rest of us look too much like cops, except Del, and he’d recognize Del. Let’s put Sarah and Jane in.”

  Lucas eventually agreed, and divided the group in two. “I don’t know when I’ll be talking to him, but I expect it’ll be late afternoon or evening. As soon as I find out, the first shift sets up. We’ll monitor the meeting—I’ll be wearing a wire—and then we’ll take him all the way through the day, until he goes to bed. This could be a very long night, with the election. As soon as we’re sure that the night’s over, Bob and his guys will pick him up, take him all day tomorrow, and then the first shift picks him up again tomorrow evening. We’re all clear on overtime. As soon as we leave here, the first shift should go on home, or wherever, get your shopping done, get something to eat . . .”

  When the bureaucratic details were handled, they broke up. Del, Shrake, and Jenkins followed him back to his office, where they talked some more about the surveillance aspects. A tech would put a tracking bug on Carver’s vehicle, and Del would try to get one on Dannon’s, if he could do it without being seen.

  “The big question is: Is he gonna talk, or is he gonna stonewall, or is he gonna shoot, or is he gonna run?” Jenkins said.

  “That’s four questions,” Shrake said. “It irritates me that you can’t count.”

  • • •

  THEY WERE STILL AT IT when Flowers called from Albuquerque. Lucas put him on the speaker phone.

  “I talked to Rodriguez, and he seems like a pretty straight guy. He’s going to school here, he’s got a wife and a couple of kids. He’s willing to make a formal statement if we need it. It’s about what we thought, with a couple of other things . . .”

  “Do tell,” Jenkins said.

  Rodriguez told Flowers that military intelligence sources had pinpointed what they thought would be a meeting between two rival Taliban chieftains in a border village. How that intelligence was developed, Rodriguez didn’t know for sure, but he suspected the original tip came from a paid Afghani source in the village, and that had been backed up by electronic intelligence—the army had been monitoring the relevant Taliban cell phones.

  In any case, Carver’s unit, which included Rodriguez, and was basically made up of a couple of officers and a bunch of NCOs, had been dropped five kilometers from the meeting site. The soldiers had followed a little-used ridge path into the village. The house where the meeting was to take place had been spotted by the informant, who’d placed a tiny multi-mirrored reflector, similar to those used
on golf course pins, on the roof of the place.

  When the attack team had gotten close enough, they’d illuminated the village—which was made up of forty or so houses built on the edge of an intermittent stream—with infrared light, and had spotted the sparkle of the reflector.

  They’d entered the house at three o’clock in the morning, in a raid pretty much like any police raid. They’d found the Taliban asleep on an assortment of beds and air mattresses and on the floor.

  One of the men had tried to resist and was shot and killed. The others had not resisted and were frisked and cuffed at both the hands and the feet and made to lie facedown on the floor, Rodriguez said.

  When they’d launched the raid, they’d simultaneously called for helicopter support, which was waiting. But within minutes after the men in the house had been subdued, the raiders began taking heavy fire from neighboring houses.

  “The choppers included a gunship, and Rodriguez said that from the air, they could see what looked like muzzle flashes from dozens of weapons,” Flowers said. “That was not supposed to happen. They realized pretty quickly that they weren’t going to be able to haul a bunch of bound prisoners out of there, so they decided to run for it.”

  The attacking team did a hopscotch retreat back along the ridge, to where they could be picked up by the Blackhawk transport helicopters, with the gunships keeping the Taliban shooters out of their hair.

  “Rodriguez and Carver were supposed to be the last men out of the house,” Flowers said. “Carver carried a SAW—that’s a light machine gun—and he went last because he could really lay down a big volume of covering fire. Rodriguez went, but then he heard smaller-arms firing from the house, and ran back because he thought some of the Taliban had gotten inside and Carver would need help. What he found was, Carver had executed the prisoners, shooting them in the head with his personal sidearm, a nine-millimeter Beretta. Rodriguez didn’t have time to investigate, or anything, this all happened in a few seconds, and then they were running for their lives. When they got back to their base, he reported what he’d seen. He was kinda freaked out. Carver denied it, said that some Taliban had broken through the back of the house, and if any prisoners were dead, they were killed in the firefight. Rodriguez said that the gunships had video, and the video didn’t show an attack on the back of the house, but it could have happened. Eventually . . . well, you know what happened. The army got rid of Carver and Rodriguez both.”

  Rodriguez could have stayed in, Flowers said, but after reporting Carver’s action, thought he’d never be trusted again by the special ops people. “That’s all Rodriguez was interested in—special ops. He didn’t want to be in a regular outfit. But he said that he’d heard other things about Carver—that Carver had always been the first to shoot, that there was at least one other incident—Rodriguez called it an incident—in which civilians had been killed, and nobody had done anything about it. Rodriguez says that Carver was a killer, and that a lot of other people knew it, and that quite a few of them didn’t like it. So, they got rid of him.”

  “Covered it up,” Lucas said.

  “Yeah, that’s what it amounted to, although I don’t know what kind of investigation could have been done, given the situation,” Flowers said. “Still, I think you might be able to threaten Carver with exposure, tell him that he’ll wind up in Leavenworth, and he might believe you. I’m not sure that there’s any possibility of a real follow-through on that. At least, not in time to do any good in your case.”

  “All right,” Lucas said. “You recorded all of this?”

  “Yeah, of course. If you want me to, I could stay here, transcribe it, and get Rodriguez to sign it.”

  “Do that,” Lucas said. “But try to get back tonight or tomorrow morning. We might need to stick the document up Carver’s nose.”

  “Probably gonna be tomorrow morning,” Flowers said. “I don’t think I’ll get the docs done in time to catch the afternoon plane.”

  “Then get the docs,” Lucas said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  • • •

  DEL, SHRAKE, AND JENKINS watched Lucas make notes, and five minutes later call Carver. Carver came up on the phone almost instantly. He said, “Yeah.”

  “This is Davenport, the cop that’s been following you around.”

  “How’d you get this number?”

  “I’m a cop,” Lucas said. “I need to talk to you. I need to talk to you right away, and somewhere private, where Dannon and Grant aren’t around.”

  “I don’t think I want to do that,” Carver said, and the line went dead.

  “Well, shit,” Lucas said.

  “You’re a smooth talker,” Del said.

  “I wonder if he’s got a smartphone,” Lucas said. He sent a text: “Six executed in Afghanistan. Want to hear the governor talking about it on TV? Take the call.”

  He sent it, and got back “delivered” a second later. Ten seconds after that, Carver took the second voice call and said, “What kind of bullshit is this?”

  “You know what kind of bullshit it is. It’s Leavenworth bullshit,” Lucas said. “Now, you need to take a little time off this afternoon, go out for a cup of coffee. There’s an obscure Caribou Coffee a couple miles from Grant’s house. Give me a time.”

  After a moment of silence, Carver said, “Three o’clock.”

  “Good. And I’ll tell you, Ron, we are going to put some serious shit on you. We’re also going to give you a way out. All of that gets canceled if you talk to Dannon or Grant. They’re the targets in this. We’ve already got a guy willing to swear that Dannon set up the porn deal for Grant. You can walk, or you can get added to the list. I’ll see you at three, and we’ll decide which it is.”

  Lucas clicked off without giving him a chance to answer.

  • • •

  THEY HAD TIME to kill, and with one thing and another, killed it. The two women were going in with briefcases and spiral binders and carefully coordinated suits: real estate agents. Lucas would be wearing a wire, monitored from a van with a plumber’s logo on the side, and a real phone number for anyone who needed plumbing services. Jenkins and Shrake would be nearby, but out of sight in separate cars, listening to the conversation on their own radios.

  When Carver arrived, a tech who was riding in the plumbing van would try to place a battery-powered GPS tracker on Carver’s car, if he could do it without being seen. When Carver left, he’d be tracked by Jenkins and Shrake, who would be well out of sight, running on parallel roads where they could. Lucas and the two women would follow in separate cars.

  Del would watch Dannon. If he had an opportunity, he’d place another GPS tracker on Dannon’s vehicle.

  Since Lucas had been in the same coffee shop that morning, talking to Green, he knew the layout of the place. He told the two women agents, Stack and Bradley, to park as close as they could to the coffee shop’s door, hoping that would push Carver away from a parking place that he could see from the shop, and give the technician a good chance to install the tracking bug.

  The women were to take a table on the left end of the semicircular seating area, out of sight from where Lucas would take a table, on the far right end.

  • • •

  AND THAT’S WHAT they all did.

  The two women went in at ten minutes of three, ordered a Northern Lite Salted Caramel Mocha and a large Americano, and two cranberry scones, put their briefcases on the floor by their ankles, tops open, guns right there, and opened a notebook full of pictures of houses.

  Lucas arrived five minutes later, and as he did, Shrake called: “He’s here, across the street behind the BP station. He’s watching you.”

  “All right. I’m going in. If he pulls out a deer rifle, shoot him,” Lucas said.

  “Will do.”

  Lucas went in, saw the two women at the table on the right, got a Diet Coke and another scone, and walked down to the left, an empty table near the restroom door. His phone rang and Shrake said, “He’s coming,” and a s
econd later, “He’s parking on the side.”

  Carver slouched along the outside walk, pushed through the door. He was wearing a dark blue nylon shell over a cotton sweater, black slacks, and boots. He looked around the room, his gaze pausing on each of the people at the tables, on the servers, and finally to Lucas. Lucas nodded. Carver turned away, stepped up to the counter, got a large cup of black coffee, and Lucas thought, Scalding hot coffee.

  Carver was a big guy, thick through the chest, but moved easily, comfortable with his size. Lucas wondered, if it came to a fistfight, if he could take him; and he decided he could. Lucas watched as Carver got his coffee and crossed to Lucas’s table, put the coffee on the table, and sat down and asked, “What is this bullshit?”

  Lucas said, “I know goddamned well that either you or Dannon killed Tubbs and Roman. I thought about it for a while, and decided that it’d be either Dannon by himself, or both of you together. I don’t know where Grant comes in, if she’s even aware of it. I need somebody to talk to me about it. I picked you.”

  “I have no idea of what you’re talking about—”

  “I hope that’s not true, because whether or not it is, I’m going to hurt you. I got the records from the investigation into the shootings in Afghanistan, and I’ve got a guy who can put them on the political agenda. I think I can get the army to pull you back in—they can do that, for crimes committed under their jurisdiction—and I think I can get you sent to Leavenworth. I’m not sure I can do all that, but I think I can. And I will, unless you talk to me.”

  “There’s nothing to talk about,” Carver said. “The army cleared me. Those people were killed by Taliban firing through the windows, blind firing—”

  “The report says there are witnesses who say otherwise. We’ve got video shot from an Apache . . . is that right? An Apache? A helicopter gunship? They have night-camera video from every angle on that house you raided, and nobody’s shooting into it, not in a way that would hit people lying on the floor.”