"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."

TWENTY MINUTES LATER, TARYN 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.

TARYN 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.

On the night Tubbs was killed, Taryn had given each of the men a hundred thousand dollars in cash and gold, as a "thank you."

Dannon had carefully stashed his in a safe-deposit box. Carver, on the other hand, had asked for a day off. "The money just burns a hole in my pocket," he confessed. "I'd like to hop a plane for Vegas, if you don't mind."

That had been a Friday night. He'd left Saturday morning and had gotten back Sunday night, most of the money gone. Dannon said later he'd blown it on hookers, cocaine, and craps and felt that he'd gotten his money's worth.

So Carver sought risk, while Dannon tried to minimize risk. That made Carver a loose cannon, and given her involvement, she didn't need any cannons to be loose.

She thought for a few minutes about what would happen if, for example, Carver tried to squeeze her for money, as Tubbs had. He might suspect that Dannon would come after him, because Dannon was in love with her. But would that frighten him? Could Dannon take him? And if it got all bloody, and somebody tried to make a deal with the police, to trade her in ... what would happen?

She had to think about it. Was Dannon loyal enough to take out Carver if she asked him to? Was Carver smart enough to set up a booby trap that would snap on them, if they took him out? Might he already have done so?

But thinking about it was hard. Ever since Tubbs had gone away, she'd had trouble tracking. But she had to track.

Because now, she was winning the election, up three points and climbing.

SHE HIT THE COUNTER at the end of the pool, and a big red LED "40" popped up. Forty laps, a thousand yards, a little more than half a mile.

She climbed out of the pool, and Alice, who'd been watching the counter, was waiting with a towel.

"You'd have been a good agent," Alice said. "Smart, terrific condition."

"Thank you," Taryn said. "I'm not sure I could handle the guns. I don't like guns."

"We had a saying in the service," Alice said. "Guns don't kill people, people kill people. Guns just make it really, really easy."

"Too easy, if you ask me," Taryn said. "When I get to the Senate, I'll try to do something about that. I always feel bad when I read about people being killed. It's usually so senseless. You know, 'The bell tolls for thee,' or whatever."

CHAPTER 5

When Lucas woke Monday morning, the first thing he did was check the window: blue sky. Excellent. Another good day. People had been talking about bad weather coming in, but he didn't know when it was supposed to arrive.

And, thank God, they were through the weekend. Working on a Sunday was a pain in the ass, with everybody gone. Today, there'd be a lot going on: no more matinee movies.

He'd start with the volunteer who found the porn, he thought as he got dressed. He picked out a medium-blue wool suit that he'd thought would look awful at the time the salesman suggested it, but that had become one of his cool-weather favorites. He tried several ties, finally choosing a red-and-blue check with a turquoise thread in it, which went nicely with his eyes. Black lace-up shoes from Cleverley of London, for which he'd been measured during a European trip two years earlier, finished the ensemble.

The volunteer's family, the Hunts, lived in Edina, an affluent Minneapolis suburb. Lucas took the Porsche, because it would feel at home there. He took ten minutes driving across town, and after a few minutes of confusion caused by the Porsche's outdated navigation system, found the Hunts' home: another sprawling brick ranch, at the end of a woody cul-de-sac.

BRITTANY HUNT MET LUCAS at the door, her mother a step behind. Lucas was amazed: they looked almost exactly alike, and that was like Doris Day in 1960. Lucas hadn't yet been born in 1960 to get the full Doris Day effect, but he'd seen her often enough on late-night television... .

"I'm Brittany," Brittany said, offering her hand in a firm shake. "I'm the one who outed him."

"I'm her mother, Tammy," her mother said. "Friends call me Tam." She had perfect white teeth and sparkled at Lucas, and she smelled of Chanel on a Monday morning at home.

They led the way inside and a sliding door banged shut in the back. A man in an open-necked white shirt and khakis padded through the living room and thrust out his hand and said, "Jeff Hunt."

They wound up seated on a semicircular couch in a conversation pit in front of a flagstone fireplace. Lucas said, "So tell me what happened."

Brittany told him, and it was exactly what she'd told the St. Paul cops. When she finished-she'd stood by the computer until the cops got there-Lucas turned to Jeff and said, "You called the cops right away?"

"Instantly," he said. "First of all, you can't let people get away with this kind of stuff. Second of all, I was worried about Brit. What if he'd come back and found her standing there, with that stuff on the screen? I mean, this is the end of everything for him. What if he'd gotten violent?"

"I don't understand why they haven't arrested him yet," Tam said. "He's such a monster. I mean, children."

"There are some questions," Lucas said. "But unless something changes, it looks like the Hennepin County attorney is planning to take it to the grand jury next week, unless the attorney general takes it away."