Silken Prey

stepped inside, leaving the door cracked open. He took the pistol out of his pocket, waited for his eyes to fully adjust, saw a movement at the corner of his eye. A cat slipped away into the dark hallway, looking back at him.
    When he was sure that nothing was moving, he took a telephone from his pocket, selected a quiet old song, “Heart of Glass” by Blondie, and turned it on. The music tinkled out into the dark, quiet, pretty . . . disturbing.
    A woman’s voice: “Hello? Is there somebody there? I’m calling the police.”
    He thought,
No, she isn’t
.
    “Hello?”
    The hallway light clicked on, and the music played on.
    He heard her footfalls in the hallway, and then she appeared, wearing a cotton nightgown.
    Dannon shot her in the heart.
    For Taryn.
    He didn’t look at the woman’s face as she stepped back, stricken, put her hand to her chest, and said, “Awwww . . .” He reached out with his plastic-gloved hand, hit her in the face with the barrel of the pistol and she went down. Her feet thrashed, and he waited, and waited, and she went still. He stepped over her, walked down the hall to the bedroom, turned on the light, and took her purse, and tipped over a small jewelry case, took her cell phone, which was on the bed stand.
    He’d been inside for about a minute, and the clock in his head said he should leave. He went back through the hall, checked the woman’s still body.
    She was gone, no question of it. He fished a plastic bag out of his jacket pocket, shook out a glove, carefully rolled her body back, slipped the glove beneath it, and then let the body roll back in place. Okay. This was all right.
    Ninety seconds after he entered the house, he was out. He walked two blocks to his car, started up, then cruised as quietly as he could past the woman’s house. As he passed by, he picked up a cigarette lighter and a cherry bomb from the passenger seat, lit the cherry bomb, and dropped it out the window. He was a hundred yards up the street when he heard it go off.
    He did that because, at that moment, Carver was at Dannon’s town house, sending an e-mail to Grant, under Dannon’s name. When he’d done that, Carver would go back to his own town house, wait a few minutes, then make a phone call to a Duluth hotel, to see if they’d found a Mont Blanc pen. Then he’d go browse pens on Amazon and eBay. There’d be time stamps on all of that, if the cops came looking.
    Two minutes after that, he dropped the thoroughly clean gun into a nearly full trash dumpster behind a restaurant. It would be at the landfill the next day. He took the money and credit cards out of the purse and threw the purse into a patch of weeds.
    The plastic bag went in another dumpster, a mile from his apartment. The credit cards went down a sewer, the cash in his pocket.
    Clean hit.

CHAPTER 17
    L ucas was up early the next morning, went for a run, got home and called his part-time researcher, a woman named Sandy. He told her that he needed her to work on a semi-emergency basis. He wanted all the names she could find for Carver’s last military unit, and said he was especially interested in people who were no longer with the military. “Check the social media—all your usual sources. If you find anybody, I want to know what they’re doing.”
    He’d just gotten out of the post-run shower when Turk Cochran called from Minneapolis Homicide.
    Cochran said, “Hey, big guy. The word is, you’ve been snooping around city hall, trying to figure out if somebody over here supplied Porter Smalls’s kiddie porn.”
    “You calling to confess?”
    “Yeah, I did it with my little laptop. No wait, I meant my little lap dance, not laptop. Is this call being recorded?”
    “What’s up, Turk?” Cochran hadn’t called simply to crack wise.
    “What I meant to say is, some really bad person broke into Helen Roman’s house last night and shot her to death. I was told that this particular murder might be of interest to yourself.”
    “Helen Roman?” For a moment, Lucas drew a blank. He
knew
that name. . . . “
Helen Roman?
Smalls’s secretary? Somebody killed her?”
    “That’s what I’m saying. Looks sorta like a robbery, but sorta not like a robbery. You want to take a look?”
    “Tell me where. I’ll be there.” Lucas had taken any number of calls about murders: this one had his heart thumping.
    •   •   •
    H ELEN R OMAN’S SMALL HOUSE was on the outskirts of what the Minneapolis media called