Murder. Scandal. Politics. And one billionaire heiress so dangerous in so many ways. An explosive Lucas Davenport thriller from #1 New York Times bestselling author John Sandford. All hell has broken loose in the capital. An influential state senator has been caught with something very, very nasty on his office computer. The governor can’t believe it—the senator’s way too smart for that, even if he is from the other party. Something’s not right. As Davenport investigates, the trail leads to a political fixer who has disappeared, then—troublingly—to the Minneapolis police department itself, and most unsettling of all, to a woman who could give Machiavelli lessons in manipulation. She has very definite ideas about the way the world should work—along with the money, ruthlessness, and cold-blooded will to make it happen. Praise for John Sandford’s Prey Novels   “Relentlessly swift...genuinely suspenseful...excellent.”— Los Angeles Times   “Sandford is a writer in control of his craft.”— Chicago Sun-Times   “Excellent...compelling...everything works.”— USA Today   “Grip-you-by-the-throat thrills...a hell of a ride.”— Houston Chronicle   “Crackling, page-turning tension...great scary fun.”— The New York Daily News   “Enough pulse-pounding, page-turning excitement to keep you up way past bedtime.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune   “One of the most engaging characters in contemporary fiction.”— Detroit News   “Positively chilling.”— St. Petersburg Times   “Just right for fans of The Silence of the Lambs .”— Booklist   “One of the most horrible villains this side of Hannibal.” —Richmond Times-Dispatch   “Ice-pick chills...excruciatingly tense...a double-pumped roundhouse of a thriller.” —Kirkus Reviews John Sandford is the pseudonym for the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist John Camp. He is the author of twenty-six Prey novels, most recently Extreme Prey ; four Kidd novels; nine Virgil Flowers novels; three YA novels coauthored with his wife, Michele Cook; and three stand-alones, most recently Saturn Run . CHAPTER 1 Squeak. Tubbs was half-asleep on the couch, his face covered with an unfolded Star Tribune . The overhead light was still on, and when he’d collapsed on the couch, he’d been too tired to get up and turn it off. The squeak wasn’t so much consciously felt, as understood : he had a visitor. But nobody knocked. Tubbs was a political. In his case, political wasn’t an adjective, but a noun. He didn’t have a particular job, most of the time, though sometimes he did: an aide to this state senator or that one, a lobbyist for the Minnesota Association of Whatever, a staffer for so-and-so’s campaign. So-and so was almost always a Democrat. He’d started with Jimmy Carter in ’76, when he was eighteen, stayed pure until he jumped to the Jesse Ventura gubernatorial revolt in ’98, and then it was back to the Democrats. He’d never done anything else. He was a political; and frequently, a fixer. Occasionally, a bagman. Several times—like just now—a nervous, semi-competent black mailer. Tubbs slept, usually, in the smaller of his two bedrooms. The other was a chaotic offi ce, the floor stacked with position papers and reports and magazines, with four overflowing file cabinets against one wall. An Apple iMac sat in the middle of his desk, surrounded by more stacks of paper. A disassembled Mac Pro body and a cinema screen hunkered on the floor to one side of the desk, along with an abandoned Sony desktop. Boxes of old three-and-a-half-inch computer disks sat on bookshelves over the radiator. They’d been saved by simple negligence: he no longer knew what was on any of them. The desk had four drawers. One was taken up with current employment and tax files, and the others were occupied by office junk: envelopes, stationery, yellow legal pads, staplers, rubber bands, thumb drives, Post-it notes, scissors, several pairs of fingernail clippers, Sharpies, business cards, dozens of ballpoints, five or six coffee cups from political campaigns and lobbyist groups, tangles of computer connectors. He had two printers, one a heavy-duty Canon office machine, the other a Brother multiple-use copy/fax/scan/print model. There were three small thirty-inch televisions in his office, all fastened to the wall above the desk, so he could work on the iMac and watch C-SPAN, Fox, and CNN all at once. A sixty-inch LED screen hung on the living room wall opposite the couch where he’d been napping. Squeak. This time he opened his eyes. Tubbs reached out for his cell phone, punched the button on top, checked the time: three-fifteen in the morning. He’d had any number of visitors at three-fifteen, but to get through the apartment house’s front door, they had to buzz him. He frowned, sat up, listening, smacked his lips; his mouth tasted like a chicken had been roosting in it, and the room smelled of cold chili. Then his doorbell blipped: a quiet ding-dong . Not the buzzer from o