Silken Prey

Kidd.
    MacGuire, a big, square guy with short curly red hair, denied any knowledge of anything that Tubbs had been doing, and was out-front with his gay issues. But, he said, he had no real problem working with Smalls, as conservative as Smalls was. “Senator Smalls is conservative on social issues, and I lean the other way, except on guns—I’m pro-gun, to use the shorthand. But I’m
very
conservative on financial and economic issues. Something has to be done to get the country back on an even economic keel. That’s what I work on for the senator. Social issues, I’m not so involved with that. He is against gay marriage, and I’m for it, but we joke about it, you know? He’s not really anti-gay, per se—he’s got several gays on his staff, men and women both, and when one of them got married to her partner, he sent along a nice wedding present. So . . . it’s complicated. But I think of him as a friend. And there are a hell of a lot of worse guys in the Senate than Smalls, and Taryn Grant doesn’t seem a hell of a lot more understanding about gay issues than he is.”
    Lucas dug for opinions about other staffers, and MacGuire shrugged him off.
    “This whole thing is a mystery—I have no idea who’d want to set the senator up. I mean, on the staff. Maybe we’ve got a spy somewhere, I don’t know. But it’s not me.”
    “We need to know who it is, if he or she is there,” Lucas said. “That person’s life could be in danger from the same people who killed Tubbs . . . unless he or she did it. Then, that’d mean you’re working with a cold-blooded killer.”
    “Okay. I’ll think about it,” MacGuire said. “I’m not lying to you here, I really don’t know—but I’ll think about it, and ask around.”
    •   •   •
    R UDY H OLLY, the conspiracy theory guy, thought Tubbs had been taken off because he’d been behind the dirty trick involving the porn. “The Republicans in this state rarely do well . . . but now, all of a sudden, they are doing well. The Dems are frantic. I believe that there’s a force out there, funded by union money, that is putting pressure on people . . . probably set up the porn thing, then killed Tubbs to cover up. It seems so obvious. . . .”
    He went on like that for a while, and before he was done, Lucas had dismissed him as being ineffectually goofy, although his ideas about the killing were roughly the same as Lucas’s own. Holly said he had no idea who on the staff might have been involved with Tubbs, or might be working as a spy.
    •   •   •
    S ALLY F EY SHRANK in her office chair when Lucas asked the question, her shoulders turning in, her neck seeming almost to shorten, as though she were trying to pull her head into a turtle shell. She looked up at Lucas and said, “Robert and I had an ambiguous relationship. . . .”
    She was twisting her hands, as she spoke. She was a slight woman, who might have been attractive if she’d done anything to make it so. But she didn’t: her clothing—she wore dresses—might have come from the 1950s. She wore neither jewelry nor makeup, but did wear square, clunky shoes. She looked at Lucas from under her eyebrows, and at an angle, as though she were worried that he might strike her.
    Lucas tried to be as soft as he could be; it wasn’t his natural attitude. “Ambiguous . . . how? Was this a sexual relationship?”
    “Yes. Twice. I mean, we . . . yes, we slept together twice. When he went away, wherever he went, it’s hard to believe that he might be dead, because he was so upbeat when I last saw him. . . . Anyway, I thought maybe the police would ask me about him, but nobody did, and I didn’t know what to do about that. I was scared. . . . I didn’t know what happened to him, and when he didn’t call me Saturday or Sunday, I thought he wasn’t interested anymore.”
    “When was the last time you heard from him?” Lucas asked.
    “Friday night, about . . . nine o’clock,” she said.
    “And when did you last see him?”
    “Friday night . . . about nine o’clock. I didn’t stay over.” Her eyes roamed the small office, meeting Lucas’s eyes only with difficulty. “I just . . . visited for a while, and went home.”
    “Then people began looking for him, and you didn’t say anything?”
    “Well . . . yes. I did think I should,” Fey said. “But one day came and went, and nothing happened, and nobody seemed to really know where he was,