Silken Prey

of her involvement. We have been through both of their town houses, and through Dannon’s safe-deposit box at Wells Fargo. We found considerable cash, but we found nothing that would implicate Senator-elect Grant in any wrongdoing.”
    “So you’re at the end of that road,” Henderson said.
    “Yes, unless something extraordinary turns up, but I don’t think that will happen.”
    Henderson said, “Okay. I want to tell everybody that I asked that Lucas be assigned to this case, because I trust him absolutely. And now I am ordering him not to speak to any media or to anyone else regarding his suspicions about anybody in this case, unless or until he has absolute proof of wrongdoing. Is that clear to everybody? Lucas?”
    “That’s clear,” Lucas said.
    Henderson turned to Smalls: “Porter.”
    Smalls said, “This is one of the most disgraceful moments in the history of American politics and I’m a student of that history, so I know. I was the victim of the most brutal character assassination ever carried out against an American politician, and the main financial sponsor of that assassination actually benefits, and goes to the Senate. Well, I’ll tell you—there are people on both sides of the Senate aisle who are frightened by what was done here. I will go to Washington for the lame-duck session, and I will talk to my friends there.”
    He looked directly at Grant: “I will tell them that I think you are guilty of the murder of three people and that you were the sponsor of the child-pornography smear, and that I think a person of your brand of social pathology—I believe you are a psychopath, and I will tell them that—has no place in the Senate. And I will continue to argue that here in Minnesota for the full six years of your term, and do everything I can to wreck any possible political career that you might otherwise have had.”
    Grant smiled at him and said, “Fuck you.”
    The governor said, “Okay, okay, Porter. Now, Taryn, do you have anything for us?”
    “No, not really. I’ll be the best senator I can be, I reject any notion that I was involved in this craziness.” She looked at Smalls: “As for you, bring it on. If you want to spend six years fighting over this, by the time we’re done, you’ll be unemployable and broke. I would have no problem setting aside, say, a hundred million dollars for a media campaign to defend myself.”
    “Fuck
you
,” Smalls said. And, “By the way, I’d like to thank Agent Davenport for his work on this. I thought he did a brilliant job, even if I wound up losing.”
    Grant jumped in: “And I’d like to say that I think Davenport created the conditions that unnecessarily led to the deaths in this case, that if he’d been a little more circumspect, we might still have Helen Roman and Carver and Dannon alive, and might be able to actually prove what happened, so that I’d be definitively cleared.”
    Smalls made a noise that sounded like a fart, and Henderson said, “Thank you for that comment, Porter.”
    After some more back-and-forth, Henderson declared the meeting over. “We all need to go back and think about what we’ve heard here today, think really hard about it. We need to start winding down the war. We don’t need anything like this to ever happen again.”
    The people at the meeting flowed out of the conference room, into the outer office, but then stopped to talk: Grant with Schiffer and Rose Marie, Smalls with Mitford. Henderson pulled Lucas aside and said, “Let’s keep the rest of the investigation very quiet. Back to quiet mode.”
    “Not much left to do,” Lucas said. “I’ll let you know if anything else serious comes up, but I think it’s over.”
    “Good job,” Henderson said. “But goddamn bloody.
Goddamn bloody.
”
    Lucas saw Green hovering on the edge of the gathering and waved her over. She came, looking a little nervously over at Grant, who was talking with Rose Marie and paying no attention to Green.
    Lucas said, “Governor, this is Alice Green, a former Secret Service agent and Ms. Grant’s security person. I think she’s a woman of integrity, and if you someday have an opening on your staff for a personal security aide . . . she’s quite effective.”
    Henderson smiled and took her hand and didn’t immediately let it go. He said, “Well, my goodness, as we wind up for this upcoming presidential season, I might very well have an opening . . .”
    Lucas drifted away, and let them