Silken Prey

he had two thoughts.
    The first was that Porter Smalls, in vowing to smear Grant with other members of Congress, was pissing into the wind. He could go to the lame-duck session and complain all he wanted about Taryn Grant, but nothing would be done, because Grant was a winner. In Lucas’s opinion, a good part of the Congress seemed to suffer from the same psychological defects that afflicted Taryn Grant—or that Taryn Grant enjoyed, depending on your point of view. Their bloated self-importance, their disregard of anything but their own goals, their preoccupation with power . . .
    Not only would Taryn Grant fit right in, she’d be admired.
    The second thought: He was convinced that Grant was involved in the killings—not necessarily carrying them out, but in directing them, or approving of them. Once a psychopathic personality had gotten that kind of rush, the kind you got from murder, he or she often needed another fix.
    So: he might be seeing Taryn Grant again.
    He would find that interesting.
    •   •   •
    A COUPLE MORE WEEKS slipped by.
    A mass shooting in Ohio wiped everything else out of the news, and the whole election war began to slip into the rearview mirror.
    Flowers arrested the Ape Man Rapist of Rochester, a former cable installation technician, at the Mayo Clinic’s emergency room. He’d tangled with the wrong woman, one who had a hammer on the side table next to her bed. And though the rapist was wearing his Planet of the Apes Halloween monkey head, it was no match for her Craftsman sixteen-ounce claw. After she’d coldcocked him, she made sure he couldn’t run by methodically breaking his foot bones, as well as his fibulas, tibias, patellas, and femurs. Flowers estimated he’d be sitting trial in three months, because he sure wouldn’t be standing.
    Lucas would sit in his office chair for a while every day, and stare out his window, which overlooked a parking lot and an evidence-deposit container, and run his mind over the Grant case. He didn’t really care about Grant’s jewelry, but the phone call plagued him.
    He kept going over it and over it and over it, how somebody else could have worked it, and then one day he thought,
Kidd could monitor the security cameras.
And he thought,
No way Kidd could get his shoulders through that bedroom window.
And Lucas thought,
Had there been a twinkle in Kidd’s eye when, speaking of Lauren’s previous career, he’d said, “Insurance adjuster”?
    He thought about Lauren, and he thought she was far more interesting than an insurance adjuster. She
seemed
more interesting than that. . . .
    He looked up her driver’s license and found she’d taken Kidd’s name when they married. Without any real idea of where he was going, he idly looked up their marriage license, and found that her maiden name had been Lauren Watley.
    Then he checked her employment records. . . .
    And there, back, way back, he found that she’d worked as a waitress at the Wee Blue Inn in Duluth, where the owner was a guy named Weenie.
    •   •   •
    L UCAS KNEW ALL ABOUT Weenie. He was, at one time, Minnesota’s leading fence and criminal facilitator. Everybody knew that, but he’d never been convicted of a crime after an arrest for a string of burglaries as a teenager, and a short spell in the youth-offender facility.
    Never arrested because he only dealt with high-end stuff, the stuff taken by the top pros; he didn’t deal with guns or anyone who routinely used violence. Just the good stuff. If you needed to change two pounds of gold jewelry into a stack of hundred-dollar bills, Weenie could do it for you, for twenty percent. If you needed to cut open a safe, he knew a machinist who could do that for you.
    And Lauren had worked as a waitress for . . . fifteen years, sometimes, it seemed, under the name LuEllen.
Fifteen years?
Lucas laughed: that was not possible.
    Not possible. He knew her
that
well.
    What
was
possible was that Weenie provided her with an employment record, wrote off her salary while sticking the money in his pocket. In the meantime, she was off doing whatever she did. . . .
    Lucas wasn’t exactly sure what that was, but he now had an idea . . . an itch that needed to be further scratched.
    •   •   •
    A MONTH AFTER the shoot-out with Dannon, on a crisp, bright, dry December day, Lucas got in his 911 and aimed it north on I-35, and let it out a little. He went through Duluth at noon, stopped at the Pickwick