"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."

THEY 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.

DANNON AND CARVER 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."