Silken Prey (5 page)

Because of that loyalty, and because of his history as an intelligence officer, she’d had him set up the shadow campaign staff—spies—to keep an eye on her opponent, Smalls. He’d also identified other possible assets: among them, Bob Tubbs.

Tubbs was a longtime Democratic political operative, and had been considered for a staff job with the regular campaign, to be eventually rejected. “He’s been involved in some unsavory election stuff, so I want to keep our distance,” Taryn told Dannon. “But also, it’s good to keep him on the outside, in case we need somebody on the outside . . . somebody who could handle something unsavory.”

The regular campaign staff, including the regular campaign manager, had no idea that the shadow staff existed.

When it had appeared that Taryn would lose despite a good, solid campaign, Dannon had met with Tubbs to discuss other possibilities. He hadn’t identified himself, except as “Mr. Smith . . . or Jones, take your pick.”

Tubbs probably wouldn’t have talked to him, if it hadn’t been for the 25K in the paper bag, and the promise of another twenty-five thousand dollars if Tubbs found a solution to the problem.

Tubbs hadn’t even needed time to think about it. “Porter Smalls has a history of sexual entanglements,” he’d told Dannon at that first meeting. Then he’d told him how that might be exploited. And that he’d need a hundred thousand dollars to pull it off. “It’s dangerous. People have to be paid,” Tubbs had said.

They met twice more: Dannon had demanded details, and names. At the last meeting, he’d handed over the other seventy-five thousand.

“Time is getting short,” he’d told Tubbs. “By the way—we expect results. We are not people to be fucked with.”

“You’ll get them,” Tubbs had said. “We’re already rolling.”

•   •   •

T
UBBS WAS A POLITICAL.

And this one time, a blackmailer.

As he walked toward Taryn Grant’s door, a rippling chill crawled up Tubbs’s back. He was about to commit a felony, blackmail,
real blackmail
, not for the first time in his life, but never before like this: the payout would be life-changing. A man had to take care of his own retirement funding, these days. Not that another felony would be a problem, if he got caught. He was already in it, up to his ears.

He reached out and rang Taryn Grant’s doorbell. He knew she was home, because he knew her schedule.

The door popped open, and,

Surprise!

“Ah, shit,” said the man inside.

“Hello, mystery man,” Tubbs said.

•   •   •

T
ARYN
G
RANT WAS THERE
with her two security men, in a robe, her hair still damp from the swim.

Tubbs said, “Look, I’ll tell you right up front. You saw what happened this morning. And I realized, my political life could be over. They could figure this out. I’m willing to go down for it and to keep my mouth shut, but I need a little more cash. I need to fund my retirement.”

Taryn asked, through gritted teeth, “How much?”

“You’ve got more money than Jesus Christ,” Tubbs said. “I’d like . . . a million. That’s what I want. I swear to you, if there’s a fall coming, I’ll take it. And I’ll never come back for another nickel.”

“Fuck you,” Taryn said. The snap in her voice caught the attention of the dogs, whose ears came forward, their noses pointed at Tubbs.

“Miz Grant—” Tubbs began.

Dannon cut him off, and said to Taryn, “Let’s take this out to the pool.”

“What are we talking about here?” Tubbs asked, looking from one of them to the other.

“We’re talking cameras,” Dannon said to him. “There aren’t any cameras around the pool.”

Tubbs nodded, and they trooped through the house, into the pool enclosure, Hansel leading, Gretel following. The pool had a wide deck with grow lights around the edges, shining sixteen hours a day on orchids, bromeliads, and palms; a tropical jungle in Minnesota. Tubbs looked around and said, “Nice.”

Taryn didn’t want to hear
nice
. She said, “You motherfucker. You’ve been well paid.”

Tubbs said, “Not well paid for what’s happening. There’ll be cops all over the place. I’ve got another person I’ve got to pay off, and this is like . . . this is a political Armageddon.”

Taryn had left an unfinished drink next to the pool, a screwdriver, half vodka and half orange juice, and she picked it up and threw back the rest of it, then said, “You don’t know what you’re messing with. You don’t do this: you get bought and you stay bought.”

“I just put you in the U.S. Senate, and I know you’re already thinking about moving up from that,
and I did it
,”
Tubbs said, his voice climbing into the alto range. “You’re losing. You’d be a loser if it weren’t for me. You’d just be—”

“Shut up,” Taryn shouted.

Dannon realized that she was drunker than he thought. He wrapped an arm around her and said, “Come talk to me for a minute.”

She didn’t want to go. She wanted to stay in Tubbs’s face. But Dannon pulled her along, and halfway down the pool said to her quietly, “If you give it to him, he’ll be back for more.”

“So . . . what?”

“So, slow him down,” Dannon said, leaning close to her, close enough to smell the chlorine. “Tell him you’ll work something out. We need to get him out of the house so we can talk, come up with an action plan.”

“He’s not going away, he’s never going away,” she said. “Goddamnit, how’d he track us down?”

“Well, there was really only one place that money could have come from, ultimately. Maybe he saw me in the background on one of the TV shots, or at a rally,” Dannon said, glancing back at Tubbs. “Doesn’t make any difference: he knows.”

“I’m going to tell him to fuck himself,” Taryn said.

Dannon hooked her arm as she started away. “Don’t do that. Just delay, buy some time. Buy some time . . .”

Taryn pulled free, strode back down the pool, reaching for control.

As she came up, Tubbs said, “Don’t try to screw me over. Don’t try. Just give me the money, and it’s done with. Don’t drag your feet. You guys scare me a little, so I’m going to hide out somewhere, until the election’s over. My offer here has a time limit: I want a million in a week, or I’m going to have to make an offer to the Smalls campaign.”

“I need more than a week, it takes a while to round up that much cash,” Taryn said, and despised herself for the begging tone in her voice.

“But that’s what you’ve got,” Tubbs said. “A week. I don’t care how you get it. I’m sure you could fix something up in Vegas, through one of the casinos. Just get the fuckin’ money, girlie, and get it to me.”

It was the
girlie
that did it.

She turned to Dannon, now with an icy grip on herself, and said, “We’ll get the money somehow. Get him out of here.”

•   •   •

T
HEY GOT HIM OUT
of there, with the promise of the money inside a week. When he was gone, Taryn had turned to the two security men and said, “This won’t work.”

Carver drawled, “No shit, Ms. Grant. He’ll be back in your face like a rat. Even if you lose, he’ll be back. If you win, it’ll be five million, ten million, he’ll be coming back forever. There’s not enough money to fill that black hole.”

Dannon said, “But if he talks . . . if he tries to turn us in, he’ll implicate himself. He’ll be right there in prison with us.”

Taryn shook her head. “No. I’ll tell you how this would go down. We refuse to pay, he goes to Smalls and says, ‘I can get you your Senate seat back. I want a million dollars and immunity, or I never say a thing.’ So Smalls takes it: he’s got the cash, he could fix things with the prosecutors. Tubbs gets the money up front, then he confesses, points the finger, cries for the TV cameras. He does the right thing, says his conscience couldn’t handle it. And we’re done. The prosecutors won’t care about Tubbs—he’s small change. We’re the ones they’d come for.”

They all chewed on that for a while, then Dannon looked at Carver and said, “What do you think?”

Carver said, “You
know
what I think, Doug. He isn’t going away, so I think we make him go away. If we’re careful, we can pull it off—but I’d like a little appreciation for doing it.”

Taryn looked at him: “How much appreciation?”

Carver shrugged and said, “Whatever you think.”

She touched her lip, half turned away, considering: even rich people hate to give away money. Then she turned back and said, “A hundred thousand each. All cash. As soon as it’s done.”

Carver said, “Hooah!”

Dannon was less enthusiastic: “We’ll need to do some recon. We’ll need to fix it so that we’ve got alibis.”

“You know about those things,” Taryn said. “I’m out of it. If you get caught, I’ll say I had no idea.”

The two men nodded. Dannon said, “If we get caught, there’s no reason to drag you into it. You could help us more from the outside, than if you were inside with us.”

“I hope that’s clear,” she said, looking at Carver.

He said, “Clear.”

“Then kill him,” she said.

•   •   •

D
ANNON AND
C
ARVER HAD
buried Tubbs north of the Cities, in a marsh along the Mississippi. Taryn had helped: they’d put Tubbs’s body in the back of Carver’s SUV, and drove to the town house complex where both men were living. They parked in back, and Carver called Dannon, and then Dannon called Taryn, and a few minutes later, Taryn called Dannon back. They then went on to bury the body, while Taryn drove to their apartments and sent e-mails to herself and to a friend of Carver’s, from their laptops in their respective apartments. All of that could be time-checked, if it ever came to that.

Then . . . nothing much had happened until the St. Paul papers reported that the police were looking for Tubbs, and feared foul play. And now the report that a new investigator was on the job.

When Dannon broke that news—that the new guy, Davenport, was a killer—she said, “Ah, God,” and “Let’s talk later. I need to go for a swim, and Alice’ll be here in a minute. Let’s talk tonight.”

“I’m not sure we should talk later,” Dannon said. “I think we ought to
stop
talking about it and focus on our ignorance. We don’t know what happened with the porn, we don’t know what happened with Tubbs, we don’t know anything. If you can convince yourself of that, that you don’t know anything . . . it’ll be much easier to sell it to the cops.”

“Focus on our ignorance.” She didn’t quite grasp the concept. She’d never been ignorant.

“Yeah. Just rewind back before we talked to Tubbs and think what your head was like,” Dannon said. “Then think about the newspaper stories and think about your reaction to them. What you would have thought about them, if you didn’t know what really happened. Then, when the cops come, if they come, you’re confused about it all. A little scared. You ask questions, you suggest answers, you’re all over the place. But basically, ignorant. Just delete Tubbs from your mind. You don’t know him. You never knew him.”

“I’ll have to think about it, but I can do that,” Taryn said.

“Of course you can,” Dannon said. “But don’t think about ways to trick them or outsmart them. Just focus on your ignorance. You don’t
know
anything, but you’re willing to speculate, and you’d like some information from them—to hear what they think.”

“What about you and Carver?”

“We can handle it,” Dannon said. “We’ve spent half our lives lying to cops, of one kind or another. Nobody else on the staff knows. Might not be a bad idea for us to stay away completely . . . unless they ask for us.”

“Let’s do that,” Taryn said. “Maybe you two could start doing some advance security work.”

“I’ll talk to Ron,” Dannon said. He heard high heels, and said, “Here comes Alice.”

•   •   •

T
WENTY MINUTES LATER,
T
ARYN
was sitting on the edge of the pool, wearing a conservative one-piece bathing suit. Alice Green, a lithe, handsome woman in her late thirties, relaxed in a chaise, reading the
Star Tribune
, while the dogs sat at her feet. The dogs were the world’s most efficient burglar alarm. If anyone tried to enter the pool area, the dogs would be looking at them. If Taryn told them to attack, they’d tear that person apart, no questions asked.

Taryn slipped into the water, shivered, and started swimming laps. The exercise blanked her mind for the first two hundred yards, but after she got into the rhythm of it, she began reliving Tubbs’s visit, and what happened next: not to obsess about it, but to cultivate her ignorance, as Dannon called it.

The two men had been gone for four hours, altogether, and when they’d come back, muddy and tired, they told a sleepless Taryn that they’d gone way up the Mississippi toward St. Cloud, found a fisherman’s track that led to the river, and carried the body well off the track and buried it deep.

“Just about killed ourselves out there in the dark,” Carver said. “He’s gone. Put a few concrete blocks on top of him, just in case.”

“In case of
what
?” Taryn asked, fascinated in spite of herself.

“Well . . . body gases,” Carver said. “The ground was a little wet, you wouldn’t want him popping up.”

A few miles back toward the Twin Cities, they’d detoured down a side road, and threw Carver’s carefully cleaned baseball bat into the roadside ditch. “Couldn’t find it again ourselves, even if we had to,” Dannon said, as they drove away in the dark.

•   •   •

T
ARYN KEPT SWIMMING, TWENTY
laps, thirty, touching the lap counter at the west end of the pool after every second turn.

She had to think seriously about Carver and Dannon. Dannon was well under control—he’d been her security man for four years, and for all four years had hungered for her. Not just for sex. He was in love with her. That was useful. Carver was cruder. He didn’t want her total being, he just wanted to fuck her. If she wasn’t available, somebody else would do. So her grip on him was more precarious.

And the problem with Carver was, he was more of an adventurer than Dannon.

Dannon was happy to handle her security, and was good at it. He read about it, he knew about alarms and randomizing patrols and evasive driving, and all the rest. He took courses. She’d had a lover, a semi-dumb guy as anxious to get into her money as into her pants, and when she was done with him, he wouldn’t go away. Dannon had talked to him, and the guy had moved to Des Moines. No muss, no fuss.