John Sandford - Silken Prey

“Find something else,” Lucas said, flicking his fingers at the computer.

“That’ll take a little longer,” Kidd said. “I suspected something like this script was there. Anything else . . . I’ll have to dig into the file.”

“How long will that take?”

“Dunno,” Kidd said.

“Gotta be fast,” Lucas said.

“I’ll make it a priority,” Kidd said.

• • •

“THERE’S ONE OTHER THING,” Kidd said. “Do you have any idea how this was put in there?”

“Not yet.”

“That’s gonna be a problem. If the machine is on the Internet, it’s theoretically vulnerable. Even if it’s on a local network. It’s not likely, but it’s possible. But if it’s not that, and it doesn’t look like it, you’ve got a different problem. To install this quickly, you’d have to know the machine’s password. Just to run something the first time, nowadays, you need to do that.”

“That’s not a problem. Apparently everybody in the office knew it. It’s ‘Smallscampaign.’”

Kidd shook his head: “People never learn.”

Lucas had another thought: “Can you tell me if the script was written at the same time the porn file was created?”

“Good thought,” Kidd said. He rattled the keys for a while, peered at the screen, and said, “Yeah. They were. And . . . uh-oh.”

“What?”

“Interesting.” He said it like computer freaks do when they’re preoccupied.

“What?” Lucas asked.

He got a minute of silence, then:

“This is an unusual collection,” Kidd said. “When people create a porn collection, they almost always collect the pieces separately, because everybody’s tastes are different. But here, every file was downloaded all at once. That’s unusual.”

“But what does that mean?”

“Don’t know. It’s possible that he made the collection on a different computer, put it on a thumb drive, and carried it over to his office, but it’s also possible . . .”

“That somebody brought it to his office and loaded them all at once,” Lucas said.

“Man, it feels like something dirty happened here,” Kidd said. “This is just not right.”

“Keep pushing,” Lucas said.

“I’ll call you,” Kidd said.

Lucas took Smalls’s employee list out of his pocket. “When you get tired of checking out the porn thing, could you look up some people for me? I don’t know how to do this, and ICE said you’re really good at databases.”

• • •

WHEN LUCAS LEFT KIDD’S apartment, he called the governor: “We have some early indications that Smalls was set up.”

“Could you prove it in court?”

“No. Couldn’t prove he was set up, but we might get him acquitted . . . but that’s purely a negative thing. Doesn’t say he’s innocent.”

“Keep working,” Henderson said, and he was gone.

• • •

LUCAS HEADED BACK to the BCA building to look at the St. Paul homicide file on Tubbs. That done, he’d go over to Tubbs’s apartment. Then he’d harass the hell out of Kidd until he’d unwrapped the hard drive from top to bottom.

The case was getting interesting.

Eight days to the election, and counting.

CHAPTER 6

The St. Paul file on the Tubbs disappearance didn’t quite convince Lucas that Tubbs had been murdered, but he thought it probable. The physical evidence was nonexistent, and the circumstantial evidence ambiguous, although the longer Tubbs remained missing, the more likely it was that he was dead.

The circumstantial evidence included the fact that Tubbs called his mother on an almost daily basis, and hadn’t called her since he disappeared; that his credit cards hadn’t been used, and that he used the cards for even the most minor purchases, including daily bagel breakfasts at a Bruegger’s bagel bakery on Grand Avenue; and that he’d missed a number of appointments that would have been important to him.

On the other hand, he’d disappeared once before, so completely that he’d made the newspapers. Ten years earlier, he’d flown to Cancún for a wedding, intending to come back two days later. Instead, he’d apparently gone on an alcoholic bender and had not surfaced for a week. Before he showed up, it had been widely speculated that he’d gone swimming alone and had been eaten by a shark.

He’d never disappeared again, and after that alcoholic episode, he’d signed up with Alcoholics Anonymous. Abstinence only lasted a few weeks before he’d started drinking again, but he’d controlled it, as far as anyone knew.

Still, there was the possibility that he was facedown in a motel room somewhere.

Lucas didn’t believe that, but it was possible.

• • •

WHEN HE’D FINISHED READING the file, Lucas put on his jacket, got his keys, stopped at a candy machine for a pack of Oreos, then drove south to University Avenue, and over to Tubbs’s apartment building.

He’d just found a parking spot when his cell phone rang. He looked at the screen: Kidd.

“Yeah?”

“How bad do you cops hate Smalls?” Kidd asked.

“I don’t hate him at all,” Lucas said. “I didn’t vote for him, but there was nothing personal about it.”

Kidd said, “When I started looking him up, I found out that he doesn’t like public employee unions. Any public employee unions, including police unions. He wants to outlaw them. He debated the head of the Minneapolis union on public television, the Almanac program.”

“He’s a right-winger,” Lucas said. “This is a surprise?”

“No, what’s a surprise is, I think the porn file might have come out of a police department,” Kidd said.

Lucas wasn’t sure he’d heard that right: “What are you talking about?”

“A part of it may have come out of evidentiary files. There’s some text with most of the photos, the usual pedophile bullshit. Then there’s one says, ‘Left to right, unknown adult male, unknown adult male, Mark James Trebuchet, thirteen, unknown female, Sandra Mae Otis, fifteen.’ That’s the only one with text, but there are about five photos related to that one. I looked them up, those kids—I had to do a little excavating in the juvenile files—and found out that both of them were involved in a prostitution ring busted three years ago by the Minneapolis cops. I assume evidentiary photos wouldn’t just be turned loose on the Internet.”

“Ah, fuck me,” Lucas said.

“I thought you’d be pleased,” Kidd said.

“Fuck me. I gotta think about this,” Lucas said. “If anybody—anybody—got wind of this, the whole goddamn state would blow up.”

“No, it wouldn’t. The whole goddamn media-political complex would get its knickers in a twist, and then, after a lot of screaming and slander, life would go on,” Kidd said. “You gotta keep some perspective.”

“I’ll tell you something, Kidd—that might be true if you’re an artist,” Lucas said. “But if you’re a cop, what you see is endless finger-pointing, investigative commissions, legislative inquiries, accusations of obstruction of justice, perjury . . .”

“. . . misfeasance with a corncob . . .”

“Yeah, go ahead and laugh,” Lucas said. “Listen, keep working this. You think the Smalls file came out of Minneapolis?”

“I have no idea—but those two kids were involved with Minneapolis police. I could dig out the complete juvenile files, if you need them.”

“Do that. Uh, how do you do that? I thought they were sealed.”

Kidd slid past the question: “Oh, you know. Anyway, what I can’t figure out is why the photos of these kids would be inserted in the middle of a child-porn file . . . unless maybe the cops got the file when they busted the prostitution ring. And then annotated it? I don’t know, that sounds weird.”