Silken Prey

money, as Tubbs had. He might suspect that Dannon would come after him, because Dannon was in love with her. But would that frighten him? Could Dannon take him? And if it got all bloody, and somebody tried to make a deal with the police, to trade her in . . . what would happen?
    She had to think about it. Was Dannon loyal enough to take out Carver if she asked him to? Was Carver smart enough to set up a booby trap that would snap on them, if they took him out? Might he already have done so?
    But thinking about it was hard. Ever since Tubbs had gone away, she’d had trouble tracking. But she had to track.
    Because now, she was winning the election, up three points and climbing.
    •   •   •
    S HE HIT THE COUNTER at the end of the pool, and a big red LED “40” popped up. Forty laps, a thousand yards, a little more than half a mile.
    She climbed out of the pool, and Alice, who’d been watching the counter, was waiting with a towel.
    “You’d have been a good agent,” Alice said. “Smart, terrific condition.”
    “Thank you,” Taryn said. “I’m not sure I could handle the guns. I don’t like guns.”
    “We had a saying in the service,” Alice said. “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. Guns just make it really, really easy.”
    “Too easy, if you ask me,” Taryn said. “When I get to the Senate, I’ll try to do something about that. I always feel bad when I read about people being killed. It’s usually so senseless. You know, ‘The bell tolls for thee,’ or whatever.”

CHAPTER 5
    W hen Lucas woke Monday morning, the first thing he did was check the window: blue sky. Excellent. Another good day. People had been talking about bad weather coming in, but he didn’t know when it was supposed to arrive.
    And, thank God, they were through the weekend. Working on a Sunday was a pain in the ass, with everybody gone. Today, there’d be a lot going on: no more matinee movies.
    He’d start with the volunteer who found the porn, he thought as he got dressed. He picked out a medium-blue wool suit that he’d thought would look awful at the time the salesman suggested it, but that had become one of his cool-weather favorites. He tried several ties, finally choosing a red-and-blue check with a turquoise thread in it, which went nicely with his eyes. Black lace-up shoes from Cleverley of London, for which he’d been measured during a European trip two years earlier, finished the ensemble.
    The volunteer’s family, the Hunts, lived in Edina, an affluent Minneapolis suburb. Lucas took the Porsche, because it would feel at home there. He took ten minutes driving across town, and after a few minutes of confusion caused by the Porsche’s outdated navigation system, found the Hunts’ home: another sprawling brick ranch, at the end of a woody cul-de-sac.
    •   •   •
    B RITTANY H UNT MET L UCAS at the door, her mother a step behind. Lucas was amazed: they looked almost exactly alike, and that was like Doris Day in 1960. Lucas hadn’t yet been born in 1960 to get the full Doris Day effect, but he’d seen her often enough on late-night television. . . .
    “I’m Brittany,” Brittany said, offering her hand in a firm shake. “I’m the one who outed him.”
    “I’m her mother, Tammy,” her mother said. “Friends call me Tam.” She had perfect white teeth and sparkled at Lucas, and she smelled of Chanel on a Monday morning at home.
    They led the way inside and a sliding door banged shut in the back. A man in an open-necked white shirt and khakis padded through the living room and thrust out his hand and said, “Jeff Hunt.”
    They wound up seated on a semicircular couch in a conversation pit in front of a flagstone fireplace. Lucas said, “So tell me what happened.”
    Brittany told him, and it was exactly what she’d told the St. Paul cops. When she finished—she’d stood by the computer until the cops got there—Lucas turned to Jeff and said, “You called the cops right away?”
    “Instantly,” he said. “First of all, you can’t let people get away with this kind of stuff. Second of all, I was worried about Brit. What if he’d come back and found her standing there, with that stuff on the screen? I mean, this is the end of everything for him. What if he’d gotten violent?”
    “I don’t understand why they haven’t arrested him yet,” Tam said. “He’s such a monster. I mean, children.”
    “There are some questions,” Lucas said. “But unless