“Fuck
you
,” Smalls said. And, “By the way, I’d like to thank Agent Davenport for his work on this. I thought he did a brilliant job, even if I wound up losing.”
Grant jumped in: “And I’d like to say that I think Davenport created the conditions that unnecessarily led to the deaths in this case, that if he’d been a little more circumspect, we might still have Helen Roman and Carver and Dannon alive, and might be able to actually prove what happened, so that I’d be definitively cleared.”
Smalls made a noise that sounded like a fart, and Henderson said, “Thank you for that comment, Porter.”
After some more back-and-forth, Henderson declared the meeting over. “We all need to go back and think about what we’ve heard here today, think really hard about it. We need to start winding down the war. We don’t need anything like this to ever happen again.”
The people at the meeting flowed out of the conference room, into the outer office, but then stopped to talk: Grant with Schiffer and Rose Marie, Smalls with Mitford. Henderson pulled Lucas aside and said, “Let’s keep the rest of the investigation very quiet. Back to quiet mode.”
“Not much left to do,” Lucas said. “I’ll let you know if anything else serious comes up, but I think it’s over.”
“Good job,” Henderson said. “But goddamn bloody.
Goddamn bloody.
”
Lucas saw Green hovering on the edge of the gathering and waved her over. She came, looking a little nervously over at Grant, who was talking with Rose Marie and paying no attention to Green.
Lucas said, “Governor, this is Alice Green, a former Secret Service agent and Ms. Grant’s security person. I think she’s a woman of integrity, and if you someday have an opening on your staff for a personal security aide . . . she’s quite effective.”
Henderson smiled and took her hand and didn’t immediately let it go. He said, “Well, my goodness, as we wind up for this upcoming presidential season, I might very well have an opening . . .”
Lucas drifted away, and let them talk.
• • •
O
THER BITS OF THE CASE
fell to the roadside, one piece after another.
The Minneapolis Police Department showed little appetite for investigating itself concerning the possibility that dozens of its personnel had been viewing child porn as a form of recreation. A few scraps of the story got out, and there were solemn assurances that a complete investigation would be done, even as the administration was shoveling dirt on it. Quintana, no dummy, apologized to everybody, while hinting that he’d have to drag it all out in the open if anything untoward happened to him. He took a reprimand and a three-day suspension without pay, and went back on the job.
Knoedler, the Democratic spy, got lawyered up, and the lawyers quickly realized that everything could be explained by the Bob Tubbs–Helen Roman connection, and there were no witnesses to the contrary. They put a “Just Politics” label on it, and it stuck.
Clay, the suspect in the Roman murder, was freed, and Turk Cochran, the Minneapolis homicide detective, mildly pissed about that, gave Lucas’s cell phone number to Clay and told him to check in at least once a week and tell Lucas what he was up to. Clay started doing that, leaving long messages on Lucas’s answering service when the call didn’t go through, which threatened to drive Lucas over the edge.
• • •
T
WO WEEKS AFTER
the shootings, a few days after the meeting in the governor’s office, Dannon’s aunt came from Wichita, Kansas, to Minneapolis, to sign papers that would transfer Dannon’s worldly goods to her. She was his closest relative, as his parents had died twenty years earlier in a rural car accident, and he’d left no will that anybody could find.
The crime-scene people told Lucas that she would be at his apartment to examine it and to sign an inventory, and Lucas stopped by for one last look. A BCA clerk was there, with the inventory, and Lucas found nothing new to look at. The aunt, after signing the inventory, gave him a box covered with birthday-style wrapping paper; the box had been unwrapped, and opened.
“I think you should give this to that woman, the senator,” the aunt said. Her name was Harriet Dannon.
Lucas took out a sterling silver frame. Inside was a news-style photo of Grant on the campaign, shaking hands with some young girls, with Dannon looming in the background. The frame was inscribed, “I’ll always have your back. Love, Doug.”
“I never thought he was a bad man,” Harriet Dannon said. “But I mostly knew him as a boy. He was a Boy Scout. . . . I never thought . . .”
• • •
L
UCAS DIDN’T QUITE KNOW
why Harriet Dannon thought
he
should give the picture to Grant, but he took it, and back outside, thought,
Might as well.
He was not far from her house, and he drove over, pulled into the driveway, pushed the call button.
A full minute later—there may have been some discussion, he thought—the gate swung back. He got out, walked to the front door, which opened as he approached. Alice Green was there: “What’s up?”
“Closing out Dannon’s town house. Is Senator Grant in?”
“She’s waiting in the library. With the dogs.”
Lucas reached inside his sport coat and touched his .45, and Green grinned at him. “Won’t be necessary,” she said. And very quietly: “Thanks for the governor. That’s going to work out.”
“Careful,” he said.
• • •
G
RANT WAS IN THE LIBRARY
, sitting in the middle of the couch with the two dogs at her feet, one on either side of her; like Cleopatra and a couple of sphinxes, Lucas thought.
He walked in and she asked, “What do you want?”
“I was over at Dannon’s apartment, we’re closing it out. He left this: I guess he never had a chance to give it to you.”
She looked at the photo, and then the inscription, then tossed it aside on the couch. “That’s it?”
Very cold,
Lucas thought. “I guess,” he said. He turned to walk away, and at the edge of the room, turned back to say, “I know goddamn well that you were involved.”
She said not a word, but smiled at him, one long arm along the top of the couch, a new gold chain glowing from her neck. If a jury had seen the smile, they would have convicted her: it was both a deliberate confession and a smile of triumph.
But there was no jury in the room. Lucas shook his head and walked away.
• • •
I
N THE CAR,
backing out of the driveway, he had two thoughts.
The first was that Porter Smalls, in vowing to smear Grant with other members of Congress, was pissing into the wind. He could go to the lame-duck session and complain all he wanted about Taryn Grant, but nothing would be done, because Grant was a winner. In Lucas’s opinion, a good part of the Congress seemed to suffer from the same psychological defects that afflicted Taryn Grant—or that Taryn Grant enjoyed, depending on your point of view. Their bloated self-importance, their disregard of anything but their own goals, their preoccupation with power . . .
Not only would Taryn Grant fit right in, she’d be admired.
The second thought: He was convinced that Grant was involved in the killings—not necessarily carrying them out, but in directing them, or approving of them. Once a psychopathic personality had gotten that kind of rush, the kind you got from murder, he or she often needed another fix.
So: he might be seeing Taryn Grant again.
He would find that interesting.
• • •
A
COUPLE MORE WEEKS
slipped by.
A mass shooting in Ohio wiped everything else out of the news, and the whole election war began to slip into the rearview mirror.
Flowers arrested the Ape Man Rapist of Rochester, a former cable installation technician, at the Mayo Clinic’s emergency room. He’d tangled with the wrong woman, one who had a hammer on the side table next to her bed. And though the rapist was wearing his Planet of the Apes Halloween monkey head, it was no match for her Craftsman sixteen-ounce claw. After she’d coldcocked him, she made sure he couldn’t run by methodically breaking his foot bones, as well as his fibulas, tibias, patellas, and femurs. Flowers estimated he’d be sitting trial in three months, because he sure wouldn’t be standing.
Lucas would sit in his office chair for a while every day, and stare out his window, which overlooked a parking lot and an evidence-deposit container, and run his mind over the Grant case. He didn’t really care about Grant’s jewelry, but the phone call plagued him.
He kept going over it and over it and over it, how somebody else could have worked it, and then one day he thought,
Kidd could monitor the security cameras.
And he thought,
No way Kidd could get his shoulders through that bedroom window.
And Lucas thought,
Had there been a twinkle in Kidd’s eye when, speaking of Lauren’s previous career, he’d said, “Insurance adjuster”?
He thought about Lauren, and he thought she was far more interesting than an insurance adjuster. She
seemed
more interesting than that. . . .
He looked up her driver’s license and found she’d taken Kidd’s name when they married. Without any real idea of where he was going, he idly looked up their marriage license, and found that her maiden name had been Lauren Watley.
Then he checked her employment records. . . .
And there, back, way back, he found that she’d worked as a waitress at the Wee Blue Inn in Duluth, where the owner was a guy named Weenie.
• • •
L
UCAS KNEW ALL ABOUT
Weenie. He was, at one time, Minnesota’s leading fence and criminal facilitator. Everybody knew that, but he’d never been convicted of a crime after an arrest for a string of burglaries as a teenager, and a short spell in the youth-offender facility.
Never arrested because he only dealt with high-end stuff, the stuff taken by the top pros; he didn’t deal with guns or anyone who routinely used violence. Just the good stuff. If you needed to change two pounds of gold jewelry into a stack of hundred-dollar bills, Weenie could do it for you, for twenty percent. If you needed to cut open a safe, he knew a machinist who could do that for you.
And Lauren had worked as a waitress for . . . fifteen years, sometimes, it seemed, under the name LuEllen.
Fifteen years?
Lucas laughed: that was not possible.
Not possible. He knew her
that
well.
What
was
possible was that Weenie provided her with an employment record, wrote off her salary while sticking the money in his pocket. In the meantime, she was off doing whatever she did. . . .
Lucas wasn’t exactly sure what that was, but he now had an idea . . . an itch that needed to be further scratched.
• • •
A
MONTH AFTER
the shoot-out with Dannon, on a crisp, bright, dry December day, Lucas got in his 911 and aimed it north on I-35, and let it out a little. He went through Duluth at noon, stopped at the Pickwick on the main drag, ate meat loaf and mashed potatoes, and then cruised on up to Iron Bay, a tiny town off Lake Superior.
Iron Bay had once been the home for workers at a taconite plant, and when the plant went down, so did the town. At one time, a house could be bought for ten thousand dollars, and many had been abandoned. The town had seen better days since, but it was not yet a garden spot.
Lucas threaded his way through a battered working-class neighborhood, and finally pulled into the driveway of a small ranch-style house. A heavy old man named James Corcoran came to the door, sucking on a cigarette, and said, “That car is a waste of money, in my opinion. You shoulda gone for the Boxster. All the ride, half the price.”
“Got hooked on the looks,” Lucas said, checking out his car. “A Boxster is nice, but you know . . . a 911 is a 911.”
“Come on in,” the old man said. “You want a beer?”
“Sure.”
• • •
T
HEY SAT IN THE
living room and Corcoran, who’d once been the town’s only cop, said, “So, Lauren Watley. I do remember that girl and I hope she’s all right.”
“Married to a millionaire artist,” Lucas said.
“Good for her, good for her,” the old man said. “Her dad was one of the bigger jerks in town. Smart guy, engineer at the factory, but when he lost his job, he packed up, put it all in the car, and took off. Never looked back, as far as I know. Took every last cent, too. Janice Watley woke up one morning and didn’t have enough cash to buy cat food.”
“How old was Lauren at the time?”
“Don’t really know,” Corcoran said. “Junior high school, I guess. After her old man took off, the family went on welfare, and child support, but hell, that was nothing. Then, we started having some break-ins around town. Whoever was doing it knew what was going on, who had what, and where it was. For a long time, it was only money. But then, there was a guy here who ran the only thing in town that was worth a damn, a payday loan company. He had a coin collection, and it disappeared. Probably worth fifty grand.”
“You thought Lauren was doing it?”
“You know, it was one of those small-town things,” Corcoran said. “Everybody knew what their situation was over there. They had
no
money. Janice couldn’t find a job . . . hell, nobody could find a job after the plant went down. So they were hurting. But they weren’t hurting enough. They found the money for a used car. They paid cash for things . . . and the feeling was, money was coming from somewhere.”
“But there was no proof.”
“No proof. Lauren got to be in high school, and then this coin collection disappeared. The owner’s name was Roger Van Vechten. He sued the insurance company, because they only wanted to give him thirty thousand, and he wanted fifty. But that was later. Right after the coins disappeared, I happened to be in Duluth, for something else entirely, buying something, I can’t remember what . . . anyway, I see little Lauren coming out of the Wee Blue Inn. You know the guy there . . .”
“Weenie . . .”
“Yeah. Dead now,” Corcoran said. “He was the biggest fence in the Upper Midwest. Everybody knew it. The question was, what was Lauren doing coming out of the Wee Blue Inn? I thought I knew the answer to that and followed her back to Iron Bay, and we got to her house and I braced her. Made her turn her pockets out. She had two dollars and some change. I checked the car . . .”