Silken Prey

this place. Tell Jamie we’ll send him a note.”
    “You believe him?”
    “He’s pretty obviously a miserable dirtbag liar and a piece of low-life scum, but, he had a lot of detail,” Lucas said.
    Clay said, “Hey, I’m sitting right here.”
    Lucas said, “Just kiddin’.”
    •   •   •
    B ACK OUTSIDE, Del called a friend on the Minneapolis narcotics squad and asked about the chance of a raid that evening on Joan What’s-Her-Name’s, and was told that it’d be a problem: too many people were off, and overtime and everything. Del asked if Minneapolis would mind a BCA raid, and after a little talk, everybody agreed that it would be okay. One of the Minneapolis guys, who was working anyway, would ride along.
    Lucas told Del, “Set it up. Late as you can—we’d like to get the same cast of characters, if we can.”
    “Probably go for eleven o’clock,” Del said.
    Lucas went home for supper and found Virgil Flowers sitting at his kitchen table, a black felt cowboy hat to one side; he was drinking a Leinie’s.
    “How was Albuquerque?” Lucas asked. Flowers should have been arriving there in an hour.
    “You got me a ticket on Delta,” Flowers said. “What do you
think
happened?”
    “The plane broke?”
    “Exactly. They’re bringing another one in from Chicago. Revised departure time is ten o’clock, assuming that the replacement plane makes it this far. They’re probably bringing it in on a truck. Anyway, I won’t be interviewing anybody tonight. Since your house was close by . . . and I hadn’t had dinner . . .”
    “We’re having meat loaf,” Weather said.
    Flowers said, “Mmmm, mmm.”
    •   •   •
    A T DINNER, Weather asked Lucas for a summary of the case. He put his fork down and said, “Nothing’s clear. One of Grant’s bodyguards, or both of them working together, probably killed Tubbs and probably killed Helen Roman.”
    “Are you going to clear it up tomorrow?”
    “No. I might
know
something tomorrow, but whether I’ll have a court case . . . whether I’ll
ever
have a court case . . . that, I can’t say.”
    “If you find out tomorrow before four o’clock, call me,” Weather said. “Otherwise, I’m going to vote for Taryn Grant.”
    “I already did,” Flowers said. “I mailed in my ballot last week.”
    Lucas said, “The thing that plagues me is, she might
know
something. She might even be involved.”
    “Do you care that much? You’re as cynical about government as anyone I’ve ever known,” Weather said.
    “I’m not
that
cynical,” Lucas said. “I’m cynical about the fact that there are so many little payoffs going around all the time, so many little deals, that the legislature is greased by corruption.”
    “I think you overstate the problem.”
    “No, he doesn’t,” Flowers said. “The legislature runs on corruption. But a killer in the U.S. Senate . . . an actual murderer? The prospect is the tiniest bit disturbing.”

CHAPTER 21
    F lowers went to Albuquerque, and Lucas went on the raid, which wasn’t that much of a raid, as raids went.
    The target house, the “red house,” halfway down Minneapolis’s south side, was owned by an obscure real estate investment group and rented to a thirty-one-year-old woman named Joan Busch, who was known by half the Minneapolis cops who worked the neighborhood. She’d once been a minor terror in the clubs, according to the Minneapolis vice cop who rode with them, but had gotten older and given up fighting.
    She sold dope when she had it—marijuana—but more often, simply provided people with a warm place to party, as long as she could party along. She had a fifteen-year-old daughter who lived with a guy allegedly named Crown Royal, but, more importantly, brought in a child-support check.
    “Nasty woman. Nasty,” the vice cop said. “But, she won’t let guns in her place, because she’s afraid somebody’ll shoot her nasty ass.”
    Lucas and Del were in Lucas’s Lexus, with the vice cop, driving circles around the neighborhood, waiting. Lucas had supplied the BCA’s SWAT team, which had scouted the location. The raid was supposed to go at eleven o’clock, but, as usual, things came up, and people ran late, and when Lucas turned the corner at eleven-forty, he saw the first of the SWAT guys go through the front door.
    “There we go,” he said.
    “That door’s been busted down so many times, you could open it by breathing on it,” the vice cop said.
    They