Silken Prey

minute. I couldn’t have made that phone call: and I didn’t.”
    “So you’re out, if that’s what the statements show,” Lucas said. “I’m leaving my ass in your hands. I won’t mention you, and you don’t mention me, except when we spoke in public.”
    “Thank you.”
    They carried the bottles of juice back into the living room, where Grant looked at them, and muttered, almost to herself, “Almost four million.”
    Lucas: “What?”
    “That’s what they got—whoever it was. Four million. Cash, gold coins, and mostly a lot of jewelry. Diamonds, gold. The Star of Kandiyohi, which is a diamond as big as a robin’s egg, a Patek Philippe watch that I got from my grandfather, worth a quarter million dollars all by itself. . . .”
    Schiffer looked at her and said, “Okay. Agent Davenport has his crime scene. But you are a United States Senator-elect, and we have important issues to deal with. We need legal advice. Now.”
    Schiffer looked around: “Not another word, anybody. Not another word to Agent Davenport or other police officers, not until the lawyers get here.”

CHAPTER 28
    W eather usually slept hard from ten o’clock at night until six in the morning. Lucas came to bed at all kinds of times, usually between midnight and three, so when he didn’t come to bed on election night, she didn’t miss him until she woke up at six. Then she got on the phone, a cold clutch in the stomach, and when he answered, she said, “You’re not shot.”
    “No,” he said. “But there was some shooting.”
    He spent five minutes telling her about it, in detail, and at the end of it, she said, “I’m revising a rhino in two hours and I’m shaking like a leaf.” Translated: She was fixing a nose job that some other surgeon had messed up.
    “Stop shaking,” Lucas said. “I’m fine, Jenkins and Shrake are fine, Bradley and Stack are a little screwed up, but they’ll be okay, and Del is good, except that he looks like a bug.”
    Then he had to explain that.
    •   •   •
    T HE LAWYERS ARRIVED , and officially informed Lucas that there would be no further statements from the principals, until there had been extensive consultations. They said it in a long-winded way, and Lucas had to take a break from it, when a crime-scene supervisor called.
    “We’ve been out here walking the area and we’ve found what looks a lot like another grave. It’s about a hundred and fifty feet from the grave Dannon was digging, on the same track, on the same side of the road. We’ll document it and open it.”
    “Do that,” Lucas said. “It’s Tubbs.”
    •   •   •
    T HE CRIME-SCENE CREW ARRIVED in force, and started by processing the window in Taryn’s bathroom and the ground outside. They would get to the safe, but the supervisor complained to Lucas, “Why’d you let her open the safe? There might have been prints on the keypad.”
    “Given the look of the rest of it, do you really think so?” Lucas asked.
    “Well, no. But . . .”
    “No buts. If this was a real robbery, it was a pro. Like, a top pro,” Lucas said.
    “You think it wasn’t real?”
    “I’m not sure of anything,” Lucas said. He looked at his watch: “Gotta make a call. I’ll talk to you again before I leave.”
    •   •   •
    T HE SUN WAS UP, somewhere behind the clouds, but exactly where was hard to tell. In any case, it was light outside when Lucas wandered down to the end of the driveway and called the governor.
    The governor’s phone rang four times, then Henderson said, “This time of the morning, it can’t be good.”
    “About your party’s senator-elect: her top security guy murdered another one of her security people and tried to bury him by the Mississippi halfway to St. Cloud. We interrupted that and there was a shoot-out and he was killed. The crime scene has found another dug-up area nearby. I think they’ll be pulling Tubbs out of there, in the next couple of hours.”
    After a moment, the governor laughed and said, “You are a piece of work, Lucas. You and that fuckin’ Flowers, both of you. I really get my entertainment dollar’s worth.”
    “The last person who said I was a piece of work, offered to take me to bed,” Lucas said.
    “Well, I’ll pass on that,” Henderson said. Then, after a moment of silence, the governor said, “I’ll have to mediate this. I’ll have to confer with other Important People. Porter, of course, is going to lay an ostrich-sized egg. I