Silken Prey (20 page)

L
ucas was up early the next morning, went for a run, got home and called his part-time researcher, a woman named Sandy. He told her that he needed her to work on a semi-emergency basis. He wanted all the names she could find for Carver’s last military unit, and said he was especially interested in people who were no longer with the military. “Check the social media—all your usual sources. If you find anybody, I want to know what they’re doing.”

He’d just gotten out of the post-run shower when Turk Cochran called from Minneapolis Homicide.

Cochran said, “Hey, big guy. The word is, you’ve been snooping around city hall, trying to figure out if somebody over here supplied Porter Smalls’s kiddie porn.”

“You calling to confess?”

“Yeah, I did it with my little laptop. No wait, I meant my little lap dance, not laptop. Is this call being recorded?”

“What’s up, Turk?” Cochran hadn’t called simply to crack wise.

“What I meant to say is, some really bad person broke into Helen Roman’s house last night and shot her to death. I was told that this particular murder might be of interest to yourself.”

“Helen Roman?” For a moment, Lucas drew a blank. He
knew
that name. . . . “
Helen Roman?
Smalls’s secretary? Somebody killed her?”

“That’s what I’m saying. Looks sorta like a robbery, but sorta not like a robbery. You want to take a look?”

“Tell me where. I’ll be there.” Lucas had taken any number of calls about murders: this one had his heart thumping.

•   •   •

H
ELEN
R
OMAN’S SMALL HOUSE
was on the outskirts of what the Minneapolis media called “North Minneapolis.” That was the approved code designation for “black people,” usually referred to, further down in the story, as the “community,” as in “community leaders asked, ‘How come you crackers never talk about white junkies getting aced in East Minneapolis?’”

Lucas left the Porsche at the curb, said hello to a patrol sergeant he’d known for twenty years or so, and crossed the lawn to the small front porch, where Cochran was sitting in an aluminum lawn chair. Cochran was a big man, fleshy-faced with a gut, and the lawn chair was his, kept in the trunk of his car, so he’d have somewhere to sit when he was working around a crime scene.

“Why’s it
not
like a robbery?” Lucas asked.

“Didn’t take enough stuff,” Cochran said. He was wearing gray flannel slacks, a red tie, and a blue blazer; he looked like a New York doorman. “She had quite a bit of takable stuff, lying around loose. The thing is, when something like this happens, either the shooter runs, instantly, or he stays around long enough to accomplish the mission. It’s not very often that they stay around for fifteen seconds. It’s either nothing, or five minutes. But why am I telling
you
that?”

“I would not be confident in that generalization when applied to a specific case,” Lucas said.

“Jeez, you know a lot of big words,” Cochran said. “If I understood them all, I agree—
somebody
might stay around for fifteen seconds, like this guy did, but not often.”

“You got a time for it?”

“Right around one in the morning. Actually, since you ask, about five after one. A guy was watching TV up the street, heard a shot. If that was
the
shot. The thing is, he said it sounded like a shotgun: a big BOOM. I asked him if he knew what a shotgun sounded like, and he said yeah, he’s a turkey hunter. But: the medical examiner’s guy tells me that it looks like Roman was shot by a small-caliber weapon, probably a .22. Inside the house. Windows and doors all closed. I’m not even sure that could be heard, five houses away.”

Lucas said, “Huh.” And, “So you haven’t figured out the
boom
.”

“No, but who knows? Maybe that
was
the shot. The ME’s guy says it looks pretty consistent with a one-o’clock shooting, the condition of the blood and the body temp.”

“Who found the body?”

“A woman named Carmen West,” Cochran said. “She puts up lawn signs for Smalls around the north end.”

“Sounds like dangerous work,” Lucas said.

“You mean because Smalls is a right-wing devil, and right-wing devils are not liked on the north side?”

“Something like that. Anyway . . .”

“Roman was supposed to be at work at six o’clock this morning,” Cochran said. “Last days of the campaign, and all that. When she didn’t show by eight, somebody at the office phoned West and asked her to knock on Roman’s door. West said the door was open. . . . She looked in, and saw Roman in the hallway. Called 911.”

“All that seems legit?”

“Yeah, it does.” Cochran pushed himself out of his chair. “Come on in, I’ll show you around.”

Lucas followed him up to the porch and Cochran said, “Notice the door.”

“Nothing there,” Lucas said, checking out the door.

“It wasn’t forced,” Cochran said. “We can’t find
anything
forced. Either the door was unlocked, which seems unlikely for a single woman, or the guy had a key. We talked to the neighbors, who said she didn’t have a housekeeper, and her only relative—an heir—is her daughter, who lives in Austin, Texas, and was there this morning and took our call.”

“Roman didn’t have a boyfriend?”

“Daughter says no. She said they talked once or twice a week.”

•   •   •

L
UCAS HAD BEEN TO
all kinds of murder scenes in his career, and this was like most of them: that is, like nothing in particular. Another house with a worn couch and a newer TV and personal photos on the wall. A kitchen smelling of last night’s single-serving pepperoni pizza, dishes in the kitchen sink, waiting to be washed, but now with nobody to wash them.

And, of course, a dead body in the hallway.

Roman was flat on her back, her hands crossed on her chest. She had a slash across her face, which Cochran thought might have come from a gun sight. Her eyes were closed, which was better than open, for the cops, anyway; for Roman, it made no difference. “It looks like the shooter encountered her in the hallway, hit her with the gun, then shot her,” Cochran said.

“Or vice versa.”

“Could be. Can’t tell her posture when she was hit, because the bullet’s still inside. No exit, no trajectory.” As he spoke, Lucas heard a gust of laughter, from somewhere behind the house: children playing.

“Goddamnit. I need to talk with her,” Lucas said, looking down at the body. “I mean, we could have either a multiple murderer, or a freakin’ weird coincidence.”

“I might be able to help you with that, with the one-or-the-other,” Cochran said. He squatted, carefully, dug inside his jacket for a pencil, and pointed the pencil at a patch of black fabric under one of her arms. “See that? That’s a man’s glove. It’s pinned under her. There’s only one glove, nothing else like it in the house. We’re thinking . . .”

“Could be the killer’s.”

“Yeah. Either pulled off, or dropped out of a pocket,” Cochran said. “Anyway, there’s gonna be all kinds of DNA in it. If we get lucky . . .”

If they got lucky, they’d get a cold hit from the Minnesota DNA bank. All felons in Minnesota were DNA-typed.

“How soon?”

“Tomorrow morning. It’ll be our top priority,” Cochran said.

“I may send you a couple of swabs.”

“Yeah?”

“Maybe,” Lucas said.

•   •   •

L
UCAS SAW A TOTE BAG
sitting by the corner of the bed, and what appeared to be the silvery corner of a laptop poking out of it. “Would you mind taking the laptop out and turning it on?”

Cochran said, “No, I don’t mind. . . . It doesn’t seem too connected to the shooting scene. But it should have been stolen.” He slipped the laptop out and said, “This isn’t good.”

“What?”

“It’s a Mac PowerBook, like mine. The first screen you come to is gonna want a password.”

“Let’s give it a try,” Lucas said. Cochran didn’t want to put it down on anything the killer might have touched, so they carried it back outside, and he handed the laptop to Lucas and sat down in his lawn chair. Lucas sat on the stoop below him and turned it on. When they got to the password, Lucas asked, “What was the daughter’s name?”

“Callie . . . Roman.”

Lucas typed “Callie” into the password slot, and the computer opened up.

“Christ, it’s like you’re a detective,” Cochran said.

Lucas went to the e-mail and started scrolling backwards. He found a BLTUBBS on the second page down, turned to Cochran and said, “It’s not a robbery.”

“Do tell?”

“Well, maybe not. But if it is, we really are ass-deep in coincidence.”

He found a half-dozen messages from Tubbs in the past three weeks. Tubbs and Roman had been talking about something, but the messages were never specific. “Call you this evening . . .” and “Where will you be tonight?”

The replies were as short and nonspecific as the questions. The only thing that might mean something was a note from Tubbs that said: “Got the package. Talk to you tonight. Call me when you get home.” The message was sent four days before the porn popped up on Smalls’s computer. The last access of the pornography on the Minneapolis police computers had been five days before.

Lucas asked Cochran, “Cell phone?”

He shook his head. “No cell phone, but she didn’t have a landline, either. The killer took the cell. Like he should have taken the computer,” Cochran said. “You want to give me the whole rundown on this?”

•   •   •

L
UCAS SHUT DOWN
the computer and handed it back to Cochran, stood up, dusted off the seat of his pants, leaned against the porch banister, and told him about the investigation, leaving out only what was necessary. When he was done, Cochran said, “You never talked to her? I mean, you talked to her, but you didn’t interview her?”

Lucas rubbed his face and said, “Man, it’s like the old joke. Except the joke’s on me.”

“What joke?”

“The one about the guy who rolls a wheelbarrow full of sawdust out of a construction site every night.”

“I don’t know that one,” Cochran said.

Lucas said, “The security guy keeps checking and checking and checking the wheelbarrow, thinking the guy had to be stealing something. Never found anything hidden in the sawdust, and nobody cared about the sawdust. Couple of years later, they bump into each other, and the security guy says, ‘Look, it’s all in the past, you can tell me now. I know you were stealing something. What was it?’ And the guy says, ‘Wheelbarrows.’”

Lucas continued, “I was convinced that the person who set the trap had to have been planted on the Smalls campaign, which meant somebody new—a volunteer, or a new hire. I interviewed all the likely suspects. But she’s one of his oldest employees. I talked to her every time I went there, and it never occurred to me to question
her
.”

“She was the wheelbarrow.”

“Yeah. She was the fuckin’ wheelbarrow. Right there in front of my eyes.”

“Fuckin’s right,” Cochran said. “C’mere. I got a special surprise.”

He heaved himself out of his chair and Lucas followed him back into the house and into the bedroom. Cochran took a plastic glove out of his jacket pocket, pulled it on, and opened the bottom drawer on the bedside table. He took out a framed photograph and turned it in his gloved hand so Lucas could see it in the light from the bedroom window.

Helen Roman, at least ten years younger, sitting on Porter Smalls’s lap in a poolside chaise, somewhere with palm trees. Drinks on the deck below the chair.

Lucas looked at Cochran, who nodded: “Jilted lover?”

“At least. Several times by now,” Lucas said. He looked around the bedroom, and out the door into the lonely little dilapidated house, and thought about Smalls’s resort out on the lake. “She must have been pissed. You know what I’m sayin’?”

•   •   •

W
ORD OF
R
OMAN’S DEATH
was going to get out soon enough, but Cochran hadn’t begun any notifications, other than the daughter. The woman who found the body had been sequestered, and hadn’t called the campaign or anyone else.

Lucas told Cochran that he was going to talk to Smalls, and Cochran nodded, but when Lucas called, Smalls’s phone clicked over to the answering service, as Smalls had warned him it often might. He turned it off when he was speaking, and he’d said he’d be speaking almost constantly in the week before the election. Lucas phoned Smalls’s headquarters and was told that the senator was, at that moment, appearing at a Baptist megachurch in Bloomington, on the south side of the metro area.

Lucas got the address, plugged it into his nav, and took off. On the way, he called Grant, and was again forwarded to the answering service. He’d gotten Grant’s campaign manager’s number, called that, and got Schiffer. “Where’s Ms. Grant?” he asked, after identifying himself.

“Is there a problem?”

“You might say so. I need to meet with Ms. Grant and her security people, especially Douglas Dannon and Ronald Carver. I assume Ms. Green will be there as well?”

“Well, Carver isn’t with us. . . . I suppose we can call him, if it’s urgent.”

“It’s urgent. Where are you?”

“I’m in Afton. We’re setting up for a rally in the park and a luncheon. Taryn’s in Stillwater right now, she’ll be going to Bayport in, mmm, fifteen minutes, and Lakeland at eleven-fifteen and Afton at noon.”

“How about Afton at eleven-thirty?”

“I’ll tell her to push everything up a bit, if it’s really urgent. We’ll be in the park. Look for the TV trucks.”

“It’s urgent. I’ll see you at eleven-thirty in the park.”

He made one more call, to the governor, who answered with a “What now?”

“Somebody murdered Porter Smalls’s secretary last night,” Lucas said. “Smalls had a sexual relationship with her and broke it off. Years ago, though. She was probably the one who set up the trigger on the computer.”

Long silence. Then, “Jesus, Lucas, who killed her?”

“I have some ideas . . . but now I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Lucas said. “I wanted to let you know, though: the whole thing might be headed over the cliff, again.”