Silken Prey

Corvettes, all in a line, tops down on a fine blue-sky day, the women in the passenger seats all older blondes, one after the other.
    And why not? Life doesn’t have to be a long patch of misery. There was plenty of room for blondes of a certain age, to ride around in seventies Corvettes, like they’d done when they were girls; a few beers at Lerk’s Bar, and then a dark side street with a hand up their skirts. That was still welcome, wasn’t it?
    He’d made himself smile with all the rumination. He really ought to lighten up more, Lucas thought, as the last of the Corvettes went past. Hell, what are a couple more killers in a lifetime full of them? And he liked hunting, and what better day to do it than a fine blue day in the autumn of the year, with not a cloud in the heavens, when riding through a singularly beautiful tract of country, in a Porsche with the top down?
    Fuck a bunch of E. A. Poe.
    And
his Raven.
    •   •   •
    T HE G RANT CARAVAN had pulled to the side of the street in what passed for downtown Afton. A small crowd was hanging around in the park across the street, and a cable TV station was setting up a small video camera in front of a bandstand. Grant and her people were apparently in an ice cream parlor.
    Lucas dumped the Porsche and started across the street to the parlor. As he did, Alice Green came out the front door and moved to one side, and nodded toward Lucas; then Grant came out the door holding an ice cream cone, squinted at him in the sunlight, and licked the cone as he came up.
    Lucas thought, Some women shouldn’t be allowed to lick ice cream cones, because it threw men into a whole different mental state. . . .
    Schiffer came out of the ice cream parlor, also licking an ice cream cone, with markedly less effect; she was followed by a tall, bullet-headed man with fast eyes who Lucas suspected was one of the bodyguards; his eyes locked on Lucas. Then another man came out, smaller than the first, but with the same fast eyes, and the same quick fix on Lucas. Lucas wanted to put a hand on his .45, but instead, called, “Ms. Grant—glad you had the time.”
    “What’s so urgent?” she asked.
    “These two gentlemen,” Lucas said, flicking a finger at Carver and Dannon. “Are they Misters Carver and Dannon?”
    Grant turned, as if checking, then turned back and said, “Yeah,” and nibbled on the cone, which looked like a cherry-nut, one of Lucas’s favorites.
    “Then let’s find a place where we can talk,” Lucas said.
    “Courtyard,” Green said, nodding toward an empty outdoor dining space to the left of the ice cream parlor. “You don’t want to talk to me?”
    “Not at the moment,” Lucas said. “You might keep people away? Even other staffers. This is sort of private.”
    Green nodded; Schiffer said, “I’m going to listen in.”
    They moved over to the empty space, Green hovering on the periphery, listening. Lucas said, “One of Porter Smalls’s secretaries was murdered last night. Shot to death in her house, in Minneapolis. I went through her laptop and she’d been corresponding in a fairly cryptic way with Bob Tubbs before he disappeared, and just before the pornography popped up on Smalls’s computer.”
    He’d been watching Carver and Dannon, and nothing moved in their eyes, which Lucas thought interesting, because he thought something should have.
    Grant said, “Well, that’s awful, but what does it have to do with us?”
    “Tubbs is dead, I’m almost certain of it, at this point, and now Helen Roman has been murdered. It was all done very well, from a professional-killing standpoint. Most people who kill for money are fools and idiots and misfits. This doesn’t appear to be the work of fools.”
    Grant said, “Yeah, yeah,” and made a rolling motion with one forefinger—
moving right along
—as she simultaneously took another nibble of the cherry-nut.
    “Well, it’s possible that she put the porn on Smalls’s computer to get revenge on him,” Lucas said. “They’d had some personal disagreements, apparently. But if that was what it was, a personal matter, why would anybody kill her? Or Tubbs?”
    “Well, I don’t know,” Grant said. “Are you sure she was killed for that reason? Because it had something to do with Smalls?”
    Lucas was forced to admit it: “No. Not absolutely sure. But pretty sure. The other possibility is that the people who paid for the porn to be dumped on Porter Smalls, knowing that doing so