Silken Prey

that direction.
    But the reprimand could cover a lot of territory. Carver, he thought, might very well have killed either the wrong person, or too many of them. With Carver’s medals, experience, and training, Lucas thought it unlikely that he’d been kicked out for rolling a joint.
    •   •   •
    I N A LOT OF WAYS, the records for Douglas Damien Dannon were parallel to Carver’s. Dannon had been in the military for six years, leaving as a captain, honorably discharged. There was nothing in the records to indicate that he’d been pushed out.
    Like Carver, he’d spent most of his service time in either Iraq or Afghanistan. He’d won the Bronze Star for bravery under fire, had been wounded by a roadside bomb during the initial invasion of Iraq. After a couple of years as an infantry lieutenant, he’d been assigned to a mobile intelligence unit, and then later, to an intelligence unit at a battalion headquarters. Lucas wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, and spent some time looking up words like
battalion
,
company
,
brigade
, and
division
.
    A battalion was apparently a mid-level unit, in size, and his particular battalion had apparently been deeply enmeshed in combat in Iraq. Dannon had gotten good efficiency marks, but Lucas wasn’t sure how exactly to evaluate them. In his own bureaucracy, good efficiency marks were subject to interpretation by insiders, and could damn with praise a little too faint.
    •   •   •
    B Y THE TIME L UCAS went to bed, a little after two in the morning, he’d learned enough to know that Grant’s security detail could plan and carry out a murder with calculated precision and had no large problem with qualms. They would have the means, the training, the personalities that would allow them to get it done.
    If they were responsible for Tubbs’s murder, catching them would be the next thing to impossible.
    Next to impossible
, he thought, as he drifted away to sleep.
Next to . . .
    He opened his eyes, listened to Weather breathing beside him, then crept out of bed again, taking his phone with him, into the study, where he called Virgil Flowers. Flowers answered on the third ring and asked, “What happened?”
    “I need you up here tomorrow, early. Ten o’clock or so.”
    Flowers groaned. “You had to call me in the middle of the night to tell me that? I thought the Ape Man was out again.”
    “Sorry. I was afraid you’d be out of there at five o’clock, in your boat,” Lucas said. “I’m running out of time up here, and I need you to look at some paper. You’re the only guy I know who could do it.”
    “What?”
    “You were an army cop,” Lucas said. “See you up here.”
    Lucas hung up, went back to bed, and slept soundly.
    •   •   •
    T HE NEXT MORNING, Weather dropped a newspaper on his back and said, “Ruffe.”
    “What’d he say?”
    “He said that the state—meaning you, though he doesn’t use your name—is investigating the possibility that Tubbs was killed to cover up the dirty trick on Smalls. The Democrats are furious, while the Republicans are outraged.”
    “So . . . no change,” Lucas said.
    “Watch your ass, Lucas,” Weather said. “The whole thing is about to lurch into the ditch.”
    •   •   •
    A COUPLE OF HOURS later, Virgil Flowers, a lanky man with long blond hair, put the heels of his cowboy boots on Lucas’s desk and turned over the last page of the two documents, which Lucas had printed for him. Flowers said, “You’re right. These are two goddamned dangerous guys. Carver, especially, but this Dannon wouldn’t be a pushover, either. He’d be the brains behind the operation.”
    Lucas had called Flowers in for two reasons: he was smart, and he’d been an MP captain in the army, before joining the St. Paul Police Department, and then the BCA. He normally worked the southern third of the state, except when Lucas needed him to do something else.
    “I was struggling with the gobbledygook,” Lucas said, tossing the papers on the desk. “I figured as a famous former warlord, you’d know what it was all about.”
    “I met a few of these guys in the Balkans,” Flowers said. “They’re scary. Smart, tough. Not like movie stars, not all muscled up with torn shirts. A lot of them are really pretty small guys, neat, quiet—you’d think you could throw them out the window, but you’d be wrong. Some trouble would start up, you know, and they’d get assigned a mission, they’d be