Twisted Prey (Lucas Davenport #28)
John Sandford
1
Tired?”
Porter Smalls looked across the front seat at the driver. The summer foliage was dark around the Cadillac Escalade as they rolled up the dirt lane. The South Branch of the Potomac River snaked along below them; the windows were down, and the muddy/fishy odor of the river filled the car.
“A bit—in a good way,” Cecily Whitehead said.
Whitehead had taken a cold shower in the cabin’s well water shortly before they left, and dabbed on a touch of Chanel No. 5 as she dressed. The combined odor of the two scents was more than pleasant, it was positively erotic.
“I’ll drive, if you want,” Smalls offered. He was a small man, like his name, thin and fit, looked like he might have spent time on a mountain bike. He had white hair that curled down over the collar of his golf shirt, too-white veneered teeth, and rimless made-for-television glasses over pale blue eyes.
“No, I’m fine,” Whitehead said. She buckled her seat belt over her shimmery slip dress that in earlier days might have gotten her arrested if she’d worn it out of the bedroom. “You finished the wine—if we got stopped for some reason . . .”
“Right,” Smalls said.
He kicked the seat back another couple of inches, crossed his hands across his stomach, and closed his eyes.
* * *
—
ABOVE THEM, in the trees, a man had been watching with binoculars. When the silver SUV rolled down the driveway, past the mailbox, and made the left turn onto the dirt lane, he lifted a walkie-talkie to his face and said, “I’ll be home for dinner.”
A walkie-talkie, because if nobody within three miles was on exactly the same channel at exactly the right time, there’d be no trace of the call; nothing for even the NSA to latch onto. Nor would there be any trace of the five rapid clicks he got back, acknowledging the message.
He was on foot, with his pickup spot a half mile away. He’d walked in on a game trail, and he walked out the same way, moving slowly, stopping every hundred feet to watch and listen. He’d never sat down while on watch, and had remained standing, next to the gnarly gray bark of an aging ash: there’d be no observation post for anyone to find, no discarded cigarette butts or candy wrappers with DNA on them. He’d worn smooth-soled boots: no tread marks in the soft earth.
He was a professional.
* * *
—
U.S. SENATOR PORTER SMALLS owned a cabin in the hills of West Virginia, two and a half hours from Washington, D.C.—close enough to be an easy drive, far enough to obscure activities that might need to be obscured.
He and Whitehead, one of his wife’s best friends—his wife was back in Minnesota—had locked up the place and headed back to D.C. as the sun wedged itself below the horizon on a hot Sunday afternoon. The timing was deliberate: they would enjoy the cover of darkness when she dropped him off at his Watergate condo.
Smalls and Whitehead had spent an invigorating two days talking, about political philosophy, history, horses, money, life, and mutual friends, while they worked their way through Smalls’s battered ’80s paperback copy of The Joy of Sex.
Smalls was married, Whitehead not, but she drove the car because of a kind of Washington logic concerning sex and alcohol. A little light adultery, while not considered a necessarily positive thing in Washington, was certainly not to be compared, as a criminal offense, with a DWI. Banging an adult male or live woman might—maybe—get you a paragraph on a Washington Post blog. God help you if Mothers Against Drunk Driving jumped your elective ass.
So Whitehead drove.
A fifty-year-old political junkie and Republican Party moneywoman, Cecily Whitehead was thin and tanned and freckled, with short dark hair so expertly colored you couldn’t tell that it had been, the occasional strands of gray lending it a sly verisimilitude. She had a square chin, making her look a bit like Amelia Earhart. Like Earhart, she flew her own plane—in Whitehead’s case, a twin-engine Beechcraft King Air. She owned a mansion on one of Minneapolis’s lakes, and a two-thousand-acre farm south of the Twin Cities on which she raised Tennessee Walkers.
Smalls’s wife didn’t know for sure that Whitehead was sleeping with her husband, and the topic had never come up. For the past four years, Smalls’s wife had been living with her Lithuanian lover, in a loft in downtown Minneapolis, a topic that had come up between them any number of times.
Lithuanians were known as the sexual athletes of Northern Europe. Smalls was aware of that fact but no longer cared what his wife did as long as she didn’t do it in the streets. Actually, he hoped she was happy, because he was still fond of her, the mother of his children. He made a mental note to take her to dinner the next time he was in the Twin Cities.
* * *
—
“BE THERE BY TEN,” Whitehead said.
“I’ve got that dimwit Clancy at noon,” Smalls said, not opening his eyes.
“Dim but persistent,” Whitehead said. “He told Perez that if Medtronic gets the VA deal, Abbott will have to cut jobs in his district. Perez believes him. It might even be true.”
“Tough shit,” Smalls said. “If Abbott gets it, Medtronic might have to cut people. That ain’t gonna happen. Not when Porter Smalls knows that our beloved majority leader has that backdoor job at Rio Javelina.”
“If you ever mention that to him, he’ll find some way to stick something sharp and nasty up your rectum.”
Smalls smiled. “Why, CeeCee . . . you don’t think I’d ever actually mention it to him, do you?”
Whitehead squeezed his knee. “I hope to hell not. No, I don’t think you’d do that. How are you gonna let him know that you know?”
“Kitten will think of something,” Smalls said.
Whitehead smiled into the growing darkness, their headlights ricocheting through the roadside trees. Kitten Carter, Smalls’s chief of staff, would think of something. She and Whitehead talked a couple of times a week, plotting together the greater glory of the U.S.A. in general and Porter Smalls in particular.
Whitehead was a lifelong yoga enthusiast and show horse competitor. She had a strong body, strong legs and arms, and, for a woman, large, strong hands. She wheeled the Escalade up the track faster than most people might have, staining the evening air with dust and gravel. She’d spent much of her life on farms, shoveling horseshit with the best of them, driving trucks and tractors, and knew what she was doing, keeping the twenty-two-inch wheels solidly in the track’s twin ruts.
A half mile down the river, the track crossed a state-maintained gravel road, and with a bare glance to her left, she hooked the truck to the right and leaned on the gas pedal.
* * *
—
A FEW MINUTES LATER, they topped a hill, and in the distance, Whitehead could see a string of lights on a highway that would take them to the interstate that would take them into Washington. The river still unwound below them, below a long slope, the last fifty feet sharpening into a bluff.
A minute later, Whitehead said, “What an asshole. This jerk is all over me.”
“What?” Smalls had almost dozed off. Now he pushed himself up, aware that the SUV was flooded with light. He turned in his seat. A pickup—he thought it was a pickup, given the height of the headlights—wasn’t more than fifteen or twenty feet behind them, as they rolled along the gravel at fifty miles an hour.
He said, “I don’t like this.”