Silken Prey

hear.”
    “She’s not sleeping with him, too?”
    “Oh, no. She’s definitely the officer type. In fact, I’m a little surprised by the thing with Dannon. When I say ‘officer type,’ I’m talking generals, not captains. But, maybe it’s just sex.”
    “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.
    •   •   •
    T HE EXCHANGE KEPT L UCAS 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
    A fter 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