Silken Prey

basically, ignorant. Just delete Tubbs from your mind. You don’t know him. You never knew him.”
    “I’ll have to think about it, but I can do that,” Taryn said.
    “Of course you can,” Dannon said. “But don’t think about ways to trick them or outsmart them. Just focus on your ignorance. You don’t
know
anything, but you’re willing to speculate, and you’d like some information from them—to hear what they think.”
    “What about you and Carver?”
    “We can handle it,” Dannon said. “We’ve spent half our lives lying to cops, of one kind or another. Nobody else on the staff knows. Might not be a bad idea for us to stay away completely . . . unless they ask for us.”
    “Let’s do that,” Taryn said. “Maybe you two could start doing some advance security work.”
    “I’ll talk to Ron,” Dannon said. He heard high heels, and said, “Here comes Alice.”
    •   •   •
    T WENTY MINUTES LATER, T ARYN was sitting on the edge of the pool, wearing a conservative one-piece bathing suit. Alice Green, a lithe, handsome woman in her late thirties, relaxed in a chaise, reading the
Star Tribune
, while the dogs sat at her feet. The dogs were the world’s most efficient burglar alarm. If anyone tried to enter the pool area, the dogs would be looking at them. If Taryn told them to attack, they’d tear that person apart, no questions asked.
    Taryn slipped into the water, shivered, and started swimming laps. The exercise blanked her mind for the first two hundred yards, but after she got into the rhythm of it, she began reliving Tubbs’s visit, and what happened next: not to obsess about it, but to cultivate her ignorance, as Dannon called it.
    The two men had been gone for four hours, altogether, and when they’d come back, muddy and tired, they told a sleepless Taryn that they’d gone way up the Mississippi toward St. Cloud, found a fisherman’s track that led to the river, and carried the body well off the track and buried it deep.
    “Just about killed ourselves out there in the dark,” Carver said. “He’s gone. Put a few concrete blocks on top of him, just in case.”
    “In case of
what
?” Taryn asked, fascinated in spite of herself.
    “Well . . . body gases,” Carver said. “The ground was a little wet, you wouldn’t want him popping up.”
    A few miles back toward the Twin Cities, they’d detoured down a side road, and threw Carver’s carefully cleaned baseball bat into the roadside ditch. “Couldn’t find it again ourselves, even if we had to,” Dannon said, as they drove away in the dark.
    •   •   •
    T ARYN KEPT SWIMMING, TWENTY laps, thirty, touching the lap counter at the west end of the pool after every second turn.
    She had to think seriously about Carver and Dannon. Dannon was well under control—he’d been her security man for four years, and for all four years had hungered for her. Not just for sex. He was in love with her. That was useful. Carver was cruder. He didn’t want her total being, he just wanted to fuck her. If she wasn’t available, somebody else would do. So her grip on him was more precarious.
    And the problem with Carver was, he was more of an adventurer than Dannon.
    Dannon was happy to handle her security, and was good at it. He read about it, he knew about alarms and randomizing patrols and evasive driving, and all the rest. He took courses. She’d had a lover, a semi-dumb guy as anxious to get into her money as into her pants, and when she was done with him, he wouldn’t go away. Dannon had talked to him, and the guy had moved to Des Moines. No muss, no fuss.
    On the night Tubbs was killed, Taryn had given each of the men a hundred thousand dollars in cash and gold, as a “thank you.”
    Dannon had carefully stashed his in a safe-deposit box. Carver, on the other hand, had asked for a day off. “The money just burns a hole in my pocket,” he confessed. “I’d like to hop a plane for Vegas, if you don’t mind.”
    That had been a Friday night. He’d left Saturday morning and had gotten back Sunday night, most of the money gone. Dannon said later he’d blown it on hookers, cocaine, and craps and felt that he’d gotten his money’s worth.
    So Carver sought risk, while Dannon tried to minimize risk. That made Carver a loose cannon, and given her involvement, she didn’t need any cannons to be loose.
    She thought for a few minutes about what would happen if, for example, Carver tried to squeeze her for