Silken Prey

much as he could, and that overall, justice had been served, even if the law hadn’t gotten every possible ounce of flesh.
    Now Flowers was arguing the same thing back to him. If Dannon and Carver had killed Tubbs, Lucas wouldn’t find out about it except by accident. If justice were to be done, it would have to be extrajudicial.
    “You think I should push them into a gunfight?” Lucas asked, only half-jokingly.
    “Oh, Jesus, no. It’d be fifty-fifty that you’d lose,” Flowers said. “If you took on both of them, it’d be seventy-thirty.”
    Lucas said nothing.
    “Of course, if you
did
lose, at least you’d die knowing that I’d be here to take care of Weather,” Flowers said.
    “It’s good to know you have friends,” Lucas said.
    •   •   •
    W HEN F LOWERS LEFT— he said he was headed for the St. Croix River to check out possible environmental crimes, which meant that he was going fishing—Lucas went back to the BCA and shut his office door, sat in the chair where Flowers had been sitting, and put his feet up in the same spot.
    If Dannon and Carver had been involved in the murder of Tubbs (if Tubbs
had
been murdered—the small possibility that he hadn’t been wriggled away at the back of his thoughts), there were two possibilities: that one of them had done it on his own, and the other didn’t know about it; or, more likely, that both of them were involved.
    What about Grant? Did she know? He considered that for a while, and finally concluded that there was no way to tell. If she did know, or if she suspected, she’d be the weak link. He’d be tempted to go after her under any normal circumstances, but the circumstances were anything but normal. With a razor’s-edge election coming up, any suggestion by a police official that she might know about a murder could tip the balance. And with no evidence on which to base the probe, that police officer could be in a lot of trouble if his suggestion didn’t pan out.
    For practical purposes, he’d have to confine his investigation to Dannon and Carver.
    He thought about them for a while—about what Flowers had seen in their records—and then picked up his phone. The woman on the other end said, “It’s been a while.”
    “You got time for tea?” Lucas asked.
    “A social occasion? Trading information about old friends, and who’s been up to what?”
    “We can do that, too.”
    They took tea at a Thai place on Grand Avenue. Sister Mary Joseph was exactly Lucas’s age; they’d walked hand in hand to kindergarten, when she was simply Elle. She might well have been, Lucas thought, when he thought about it, the first female he’d loved, though they’d gone through life on radically different paths. She’d chosen the nunnery and he’d chosen the craziest possible contact with the world.
    But their paths had continued to cross: she’d become a professor of psychology at the University of St. Patrick and the College of St. Anne, and because of Lucas, had taken an interest in criminal pathology. She’d worked in most of the state’s prisons, including those for the criminally insane.
    Lucas got to the Thai place first, and she came in ten minutes later. In the early years she’d worn a full habit, and had persisted for years after most nuns had gone to modern dress. She’d finally changed over, and now wore what Lucas called “the drabs”: brown or gray dresses and long stockings with a little brown coif stuck on top of her head like the vanilla twist on a Dairy Queen cone.
    She slid into the booth opposite him and asked, “What’s the problem?”
    “How you doing, Elle?”
    “I’m doing fine, but I’m running a little late.”
    Lucas told her about Dannon, Carver, and Grant, about what he thought and what Flowers thought. He paused while she ordered a cup of chai, and he got a second Diet Coke, and then continued. When he finished, she took a sip of tea, then said, “You know there are no guarantees.”
    “Of course.”
    “Go after Dannon,” she said. “Dannon is the thinker and probably a manipulator. He’ll try to figure a way out. Carver would consider that unmanly. He’d clam up, and if necessary, take one for the team. He’d sit there and say, ‘Prove it.’ Dannon might
say
the same thing, but he’d be looking for a way out.”
    “Dannon wouldn’t take one for the team.”
    She made a moue, then said, “There’s one exception. If he is, in fact, in love with Ms. Grant, he might take one for