John Sandford - Silken Prey

“It’s my lunch,” Morris said. “I’m thinking about eating it early.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m starving to death, that’s why,” Morris said. “My wife’s got me on a food-free diet.”

“You are looking pretty trim,” Lucas lied, since he needed a favor.

“Bullshit. I only started yesterday,” Morris said. Then his brow beetled, and he said, “Say, you don’t work here.”

“I need to see the Tubbs file.”

“Ah, man,” Morris said. “Of the twelve million things I didn’t need to hear this morning, that is number one. Davenport wants to see the Tubbs file.”

“You’re working it?”

“Nothing to work.”

“So let me see the file,” Lucas said. “I may have some suggestions.”

“That’s my greatest fear,” Morris said. “After the contents of my lunch bag, of course.”

• • •

LUCAS PAGED THROUGH the thin file, sitting at Morris’s desk, peering at his computer. Tubbs hadn’t been seen after Friday evening. Tubbs’s mother had called St. Paul on Saturday afternoon to report him missing. Not much had been done—a couple cops went around and knocked on his apartment door, and asked a few questions of his neighbors, who hadn’t seen him. His mother had shifted into high hysteria on Sunday, complaining to St. Paul that her son must have been kidnapped.

According to Mrs. Tubbs, Tubbs was supposed to pick her up and go shopping on Saturday, but hadn’t shown, and hadn’t called to say he wouldn’t make it. Mom said he’d never done that in his life. On Sunday, he was supposed to take her to Mass, but hadn’t shown up then, either. She couldn’t get him at home or on either of his two cell phones, and she’d been trying since Saturday morning.

The cops checked with AT&T and found that he hadn’t used either his home or his cell phones, nor had he used his credit cards, which was when they began to take the old woman’s complaints seriously: Tubbs had never, in a credit card record going back ten years, gone two days without using one. He paid for everything with a card, his mother said. He hardly used cash at all, because you couldn’t deduct invisible business expenses, and almost all of Tubbs’s expenses were business.

On Sunday afternoon, Tubbs’s mother let the cops into his apartment for a look around. One of the cops said that it was apparent that he’d recently been sexually involved, as there were stains on the bedsheets. Samples had been taken. There was no sign of forced entry, or violence.

On Monday morning, there were a couple of stories in the local newspapers, based on calls by Tubbs’s mother. The stories hadn’t shaken him loose, nor had he begun to use his credit cards.

“You think he’s dead?” Lucas asked Morris.

“That’s what I think,” Morris said.

“What about his apartment?”

“What about it?”

“Close it out yet?” Lucas asked.

“Not yet,” Morris said. “You want to look around?”

“Yes.”

“You’d have to get an okay from Tubbs’s mother, but you’ll get it. She’s frantic,” Morris said. “Why are you interested?”

“If I told you, you’d have to change your name and move to New Zealand,” Lucas said.

“Seriously . . .”

“I’m a little serious,” Lucas said. “I’m doing a political thing and you really don’t want to know about it. And it probably has nothing to do with Tubbs. If it does, I’ll tell you, first thing.”

“First thing?”

“Absolutely,” Lucas said.

Morris reached out and touched his lunch sack, and said, “She made me a BLT. With motherfuckin’ soy bacon.”

“Jesus, that’s not good,” Lucas said. “Motherfuckin’ soy bacon?”

“That’s the way us black people talk,” Morris said.

“What about Tubbs’s apartment?” Lucas asked.

“I’ve got a key,” Morris said. “Let’s call the old lady. If you find anything . . .”

“First thing,” Lucas said.

Morris called Tubbs’s mother, explained that a high-ranking agent from the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension would like to check out the apartment, and was immediately given an okay. Morris gave him the key, said, “Use it wisely,” and agreed to send an electronic copy of the Tubbs file to the BCA, where Lucas could look at it.

Lucas thanked him, and headed across town to the river, not to Tubbs’s apartment but to Kidd’s.

• • •

KIDD OWNED HALF A FLOOR in a redbrick restoration condo overlooking the Mississippi. Lucas had visited him a few times, and had watched the condo grow. Kidd had started with a single large unit, added a second one a few years later, and finally, during the great real estate crash, picked up a third unit for nearly nothing. He also owned a piece of the underground parking garage, where he kept a couple of cars and a boat.

Lucas rode up to Kidd’s floor in a freight elevator that smelled of oranges and bananas and paint and maybe oil, walked down the hall and knocked on Kidd’s hand-carved walnut door, which Kidd said he’d copied from some Gauguin carvings. Lucas wouldn’t have known a Gauguin carving if one had bit him on the ass, so when told about it, he’d just said, “Hey, that’s great,” and felt like an idiot.

• • •

LAUREN OPENED THE DOOR, a slender woman, not tall, with red hair and high cheekbones and a big smile: “Lucas, damnit, you need to come around more often. Why don’t you jack up Weather and let’s go to dinner? I need to get out. So does she.”

She pecked him on the cheek and then Kidd came up, chewing on a hot dog bun with no dog. He was wearing jeans and a paint-flecked military-gray T-shirt stretched tight across his shoulders. And gold-rimmed glasses.

“New glasses,” Lucas said.

“Yeah. When I’m working, I walk away from the painting, then I walk right up close, and then I walk away again,” Kidd said. “You know, figuring it out. I began to realize I wasn’t seeing the close-up stuff so well.”

“Getting old,” Lucas said.

“I’m a year older than you,” Kidd said. “I just turned fifty.”

“Yeah . . . I’m not looking forward to it.”

Kidd shrugged. “Forty-five was a little tough. Fifty, I didn’t notice.”

“Didn’t even remember,” Lauren said, nudging Kidd with her elbow. “Jackson and I popped a surprise party on him, and he didn’t even know what it was for, at first.”

Jackson was their son, who was five, named after some dead New York painter. They drifted into the living room, and Lucas told them about Letty and Sam and the baby, and they talked about schools and other domestic matters. Then Kidd asked, “So what’s up?”

Lucas: “You’ve read about Porter Smalls?”

Kidd: “Yeah. Good riddance.”

Lucas: “He might be innocent.”

Lauren: “Oh, please.”

Kidd: “Huh. Tell me about it.”

• • •

LUCAS TOLD HIM ABOUT the computer, and Kidd listened carefully, eyes fixed on Lucas’s face. Kidd was a couple of inches shorter than Lucas, but was wider across the shoulders, and narrower through the hips: a wrestler. He’d lost an athletic scholarship when he’d dragged an abusive coach out of his office and forced his head through the bars of a railing around the field house balcony. They’d had to call the fire department to get the coach free, and around the field house, Kidd had been both a hero and a persona non grata. Not that it mattered much: the Institute of Technology hired him as a teaching assistant, and paid him more than he’d gotten from the scholarship.

When Lucas finished with what he knew about Porter Smalls, Kidd said, “I need to see the hard drive.”

Lucas took it out of his jacket pocket and handed it to him.

Kidd said, “Mmm. How long did she have it before she gave it to you?”