Silken Prey

hadn’t told you, you’d never have found out. I could’ve lied. Instead, I came right in, as soon as I worked it out. I even gave you what Lucas said could be a break. A
serious
break.”
    Marion looked at Lucas and asked, “What’s the BCA think?”
    Lucas said, “This is all on you guys. Do what’s best: I don’t care. I just want the phone number.” He looked at Quintana: “Where’s the phone they called you on?”
    “In my pocket.” He fished it out: an iPhone.
    “I’m going to need to take it with me. I need to take it to our lab, we’ll get in touch with your . . . Who’s your service provider?”
    “Verizon.”
    “We’ll get in touch with Verizon, and when we know where our targets are, we’re going to want you to call them,” Lucas said.
    Quintana shook his head. “You can take my phone, but these guys are way too smart to be using their own phone. I’d give you ten to one that it’s a disposable.”
    “That’s why we need to catch them with it. We’ll be monitoring the call and the location it comes from,” Lucas said. “I’ll probably get back to you tonight. Where you gonna be?”
    “Without my cell . . . I’ll probably go home if Buck is done talking to me. I’ve got a landline there.”
    “Okay. You sit there, wait for my call,” Lucas said. “You go along with all of this, I’ll testify on your side in any kind of proceedings.”
    Quintana nodded. “I’ll do that.”
    He passed Lucas his cell phone, and Lucas said, “If you’ll all excuse me . . . I gotta run.”
    As he headed for the door, Quintana called, “You believe me, right?”
    Lucas paused at the door, then said, “No, not the whole story. Not even very much of it. But I believe the phone number.”
    •   •   •
    T HEN HE HAD a lot to do. From his car, as he headed back across town to the BCA, he called Jenkins and told him to find Shrake: “I know it’s Sunday, but I need you to babysit some people for me. Only until tonight. I need to know where they are, all the time.”
    “How complicated is this going to be?”
    “Not complicated. You have to tag a campaign caravan.” He told Jenkins to find out where Taryn Grant was going to be, described Dannon and Carver. “It’s those two guys you’ve got to stay with. I want you to go separately so if they split up, you can follow both of them. But they should stick pretty close to Grant for as long as I need you to watch them.”
    “Good enough,” Jenkins said.
    •   •   •
    L UCAS HAD TO MAKE some calls, first to the director, and then the deputy director, and between them they found a technician who was willing to come in and set up the phone monitoring system. When he got there, the tech came up to Lucas’s office and said, “We don’t usually need a subpoena for Verizon, if we just want a location, but I’ll check with them first. That’s not usually a problem, though.”
    “Then get it going,” Lucas said.
    He was a little cranked: if this worked out, there’d be somebody in the bag by midnight. He called Jenkins: “Where are you guys?”
    “Grant’s up in Anoka. We’re on the way. Then she’s going to St. Cloud for an eight-o’clock appearance and then back home. Probably back in the Cities between ten and midnight.”
    “Keep me up to date,” Lucas said.
    Lucas called Quintana: “It’ll be late—I’ll probably come get you around nine or ten o’clock.”
    Lucas needed something to eat. He called Weather to find out what the food situation was, and was told that the housekeeper was making her patented mac & cheese & pepperoni. “I’ll be there,” he said.
    He was pulling his jacket on when Virgil Flowers called: “I was talking to Barney and he didn’t know what you were up to, but he said you might use my help. I’m down in Shakopee. I can either go home, or head your way.”
    “My house,” Lucas said. “Helen’s making her mac and cheese and pepperoni.”
    “What happened to that vegetarian thing you guys were doing?”
    “Ah, that only lasted a month or two. Besides, pepperoni isn’t meat—it’s cheese made by pigs,” Lucas said. “Anyway, we’ll be going out later. I’ll tell you about it when you get there.”
    He called Weather and told her that Flowers was coming to dinner, and she said, “We got plenty.”
    Which was true: the mac and cheese and pepperoni usually went on for the best part of a week.
    •   •   •
    L UCAS GOT HOME, changed into jeans, a