Silken Prey

up.”
    “What does Turk have on him?”
    “Cold hit on DNA. Found a glove under the victim’s body,” Lucas said. “Pretty conveniently under the victim’s body. But unless James gets a break, he’s done. You know what it’s like to argue with DNA.”
    “Let me check around,” Moore said. “Unless you’re telling me a big fat one, I’ll get Dan to go over there and sit in with you.”
    “Aw, not Dan, for Christ’s sakes, I hate that little snake,” Lucas said.
    “Really? All right, let me look around. . . . I got Nancy Bennett. How about Nancy?”
    “She’s fine. Also a snake, but a much better-looking one.”
    “Give her an hour. She’ll have to do a little pre-interview, find out what’s what.”
    “He’s already asked for an attorney.”
    “Give us an hour.”
    Lucas spent forty-five minutes writing a long memo to Flowers, who’d get it either in the airport lounge or in the air. He sent along Sandy’s memo on Rodriguez, and asked Flowers to get anything on the type and level of violence in which Carver had been involved, and what had happened on the last mission. He wanted details.
    Forty minutes after he’d called the public defender, Moore called back and said, “Nancy’s at the jail. She’ll wait for you.”
    Del called: “Irma says she doesn’t know if they were in there. She doesn’t think Carver, she’s not sure about Dannon, because she says there’s a lot of guys who look like him. In fact, there’s one sitting here right now.”
    “Okay. It was worth the try. Listen. Meet me at the Hennepin jail.”
    •   •   •
    B ENNETT AND C LAY were waiting in an interview room when Lucas and Del walked in. Bennett was a tall, thin, dark-haired woman wearing a jacket-and-pants combination that wouldn’t show dirt. Clay saw Lucas and said, “This is the sucker who hit me.”
    “Is that right?” Bennett asked.
    “Yeah. He was running. I used just enough violence to restrain him,” Lucas said. “He got an owie on his wrist.”
    “Coulda got hurt,” Clay said.
    Bennett ignored that and said to Lucas, “I don’t want to hear any bullshit about who did what to whom. Listen to what he has to say and take off. I got other things to do.”
    “We’ll listen, anyway,” Lucas said.
    She nodded at Lucas, then said to Del, “Those look like last month’s jeans, Del. You forget to change on the first?”
    Del said, “Don’t be a twit.”
    “A what?”
    “A twit.”
    She showed a sliver of a smile. “Well played.”
    •   •   •
    C LAY, ACCORDING TO C LAY, had spent Saturday evening, from around eight o’clock until the next morning, at a recreational facility called Joan What’s-Her-Name’s, and Del asked, “The red house?”
    “That’s it.”
    “How many people were there?”
    “You know . . . coming and going,” Clay said.
    “How many were staying?”
    “The usual ones. The one called Mike, and Larry. Larry was there, lost his shoes somewhere, spent the whole time walking around in his socks. Chuck. This really, really white guy named Joe. He was so white it hurt my eyes to look at him. . . . A guy named Dave went through, he was a white guy, too, another guy named Bill was passed out on the couch the whole time. A couple of chicks . . .”
    They were playing cards, he said. They tried to get the chicks to play strip poker. “She strips and then you poke her, heh-heh.”
    Nobody else laughed, so he shrugged and said, “They didn’t play, they just wanted to, you know, get high.”
    He’d been there all night, he said. He’d gotten high with what he brought with him, because he didn’t have any money, and then went to sleep on the floor in a back room. There was somebody else in there with him, but he didn’t know who. “All I know is, I was sleeping under a window with a crack at the bottom and when I got up in the morning, I was freezing and it felt like my bones was breaking.”
    Larry was still there when he woke up, still high; Bill was still passed out, and might have been dead. Somebody should check. Chuck was lifting a weight in the kitchen: it was a dumbbell, and there was only one, so he was changing hands with it, and was drinking Campbell’s Tomato Soup straight out of the can.
    They pulled as many details as they could from him, and when they were done, Lucas turned to Bennett and said, “We’re going to check on this. See if the deputies will put him in the drunk tank by himself, at least until we go into