Silken Prey

with mud, their trousers wet above the knees. Del had a scrape above one eye. Lucas said to Jenkins, “Get your flashers on, block the road. Figure out what county we’re in, and call the sheriff’s office and get some deputies down here.”
    To Shrake: “Call the duty officer and get a crime-scene crew on the way. Tell them to bring lights—lots of lights. Tell them to hurry.”
    And to Bradley and Stack: “You two put your guns away. Decock them but leave them in the same condition, don’t reload them. Stay around the car, don’t approach the body.”
    To Del: “Come on. We’ve got to check on Carver.”
    “Hope to hell Carver’s down there,” Del said. “Be a hell of a note if Dannon was out digging black dirt for his flower garden.”
    •   •   •
    T HEY HURRIED ALONG THROUGH the night, turned the corner down the dirt track, to Dannon’s truck. They shone lights in the window, without touching the truck, but it was empty. They then stepped carefully through the brush back to the spot where they’d heard Dannon digging. There was a hole in the ground, and beside it, a bulky body with a plastic bag on the head. “That’s him,” Lucas said. “I’m not gonna touch the bag.”
    “You think Tubbs is out here?” Del asked.
    “I’d bet on it, but I’m not looking around here now,” Lucas said, shining the light down on his shoes. The ground was damp, but not actually swampy where he was standing.
    “One thing about November,” Del said, shining his flash up into the sky. “No bugs.”
    “Yeah, that’s one thing about it,” Lucas said. “Let’s go back and wait for the crime-scene people.”
    •   •   •
    T HEY HAD THREE SHERIFF’S cars at the scene in twenty minutes, one blocking the road, the other down by the mouth of the dirt track, one with the BCA group. The crime-scene truck arrived a few minutes after three-thirty, and took charge of the scene, along with the sheriff’s deputies. They also took charge of the women’s pistols.
    After they’d walked the crime-scene crew through the entire action, and marked the critical bits, Lucas ordered the two women and Shrake and Jenkins back to BCA headquarters: “I want full preliminary reports from everyone, start to finish, with timelines. Right now, tonight. When you’re done, cross-check them, then get some sleep. We’ll meet tomorrow at one o’clock in the afternoon and figure out the bureaucratics. Jane and Sarah, you did good. The guy murdered at least three people in cold blood, and if you hadn’t shot him, he’d have killed you and taken one of the cars. Nobody could have asked for more.”
    Lucas called the BCA duty officer and asked him to send another crew to cover Dannon’s and Carver’s apartments. “Seal them off at a minimum.”
    The four of them coughed and shuffled their feet and talked for a minute or two, before going to their vehicles, to trundle back up the road. By that time, both the area around Dannon and the area around Carver were bathed in work light, and one of the crime-scene people was making a movie of the shooting area.
    Del asked, “We’re staying?”
    “We might have to come back, but right now, we’re going to talk to Taryn Grant.”
    “You think she knew about this?”
    “I . . .” Lucas had to stop and think. “I’d give you six-to-five that she did. No better than that. We have nothing with her name on it. If she’s involved, we’ll have to find something in Dannon’s apartment. Probably not Carver’s.”
    •   •   •
    B Y THE TIME THEY got back to town, it was after five o’clock, not even a hint of the dawn. They dropped off I-94 onto I-494 at the western edge of the metro area, then turned off and headed deeper west, into the lake neighborhoods. When they got to Grant’s house, they found the street deserted; no well-wishers, no TV trucks. There were a few lights in the house, and two security guards at the driveway.
    Lucas and Del got out of Lucas’s truck and walked up the driveway. The guards moved down to block them, and Lucas pulled out his ID and said, “We’re with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. We need to wake Ms. Grant. Now.”
    One of the guards looked at the ID with his flashlight and said, “You got it . . . but I think she’s still awake. There are still some people here.”
    Del asked, “Any more of you guys around?”
    “Yeah, one guy behind the house, he moves back and forth across the