John Sandford - Silken Prey

Henderson was wearing soft tan slacks and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, and boat shoes. He said, “Give me one sentence to crank up my enthusiasm for being here.”

Lucas sat on a wooden chaise with waterproof cushions, took a sip of the beer, thought for a few seconds, then said, “Bob Tubbs had the porn before it was unloaded on Smalls, and was probably murdered to shut him up.”

The governor stared at him for a few seconds, then said, “Oh, shit.”

Lucas pushed on: “I went into Tubbs’s apartment, legally, with the approval of Tubbs’s mother and the investigator from the St. Paul Police Department. I searched the place, and pretty much because of my superior intelligence . . .”

“. . . goes without saying . . .”

“. . . I found Tubbs’s hideout cache, which St. Paul hadn’t found,” Lucas said.

“Why didn’t they find it?” Henderson asked.

“Because he hid it in a weird place, and when they opened it up, they found just what they expected to find.” He told Henderson about the pipes, and how he belatedly realized that they’d hardly be draining upward.

“And in the pipes . . .” Henderson prompted.

“I found a gun, a wad of papers, plus some money, cash, and three thumb drives. I opened the thumb drives and found exactly the same porn file—exactly the same—as the one the cops found on Smalls’s computer. There’s a remote possibility—remote in my mind, anyway—that the file went from Smalls to Tubbs. That Tubbs found out that there was a porn file on Smalls’s computer, went in, stole it, and is, or was planning to, blackmail Smalls. So Smalls, or one of his henchmen, killed him. There’s a much better possibility that it went the other way—from Tubbs to Smalls’s computer. We know that Tubbs occasionally dropped by Smalls’s campaign office.”

“Let’s look at the first possibility,” Henderson said; he was a lawyer. “Why don’t you think Tubbs was blackmailing Smalls?”

“Because there’s nothing on the file, or in the other documents on the thumb drives, that mentions the porn or Smalls. He’d have no way to tie it to Smalls—all he had was the file itself. Why would anyone believe it came from Smalls, or anyone else, for that matter? If he tried to go public with it, Smalls would just blow it off as an egregiously vicious smear by a Democratic operative who’d been involved in other dirty tricks.”

“Is there any reason to think it could be a blackmail file?”

“Only one that I could think of,” Lucas said. He patted his bound copies: “Because it seems likely that Tubbs may have been involved in other blackmail operations. Maybe not for money, maybe for influence. So he might have been a practiced blackmailer.”

Henderson nodded: “So what’s the other side? Why do you think it went Tubbs to Smalls, that Tubbs planted it on Smalls’s computer?”

“Couple of reasons,” Lucas said. “If it had really been Smalls’s file, he probably would have paid Tubbs off. He’d have done it in a way that Tubbs couldn’t come back on him—filmed it, or done it with trusted witnesses. That way, if the file ever showed up again, Tubbs at least would go down for blackmail.”

He continued: “The other reason is, just look what happened. A guy who does dirty tricks is involved, somehow, with a really dirty trick, which could change an important election. He might have been paid for it. Maybe a lot. So if you take the simplest, straightforward answer to a complicated question . . .”

“Occam’s razor . . .”

Lucas nodded. “. . . the file was going from Tubbs to Smalls. A straightforward political hit.”

“So, what you’re saying is, Tubbs probably took the thumb drive to Smalls’s office, and when Smalls was gone, inserted the file.”

“Yes. Or more likely, an associate of his did. Whatever happened, for either side, Tubbs was probably murdered to shut him up. Neither one of us is going to be able to avoid that . . . fact,” Lucas said.

“I wouldn’t avoid the fact,” Henderson said, “but that doesn’t mean that I don’t think it could use some management.”

“I agree,” Lucas said. He added, “The thumb drives included a lot of other stuff. I printed it out—it’s all documents, with a few photos. I annotated them, best I could, and bound it up.”

• • •

HE HANDED THE BOOK to Henderson, who weighed it in his hands and then turned to the first page. He thumbed through it for a few minutes, then, in a distracted voice, asked, “You know how to make a G-and-T?”

“Sure.”

“Could you get me another? Lean hard on the G.”

Lucas went and made the drink, and then brought it back, and the governor took it without looking up, and Lucas pulled off his shoes and leaned back on the chaise and drank his beer and stared out into the dark over the river valley. He could see stars through a break in the trees: winter could arrive any second, although there was no sign of it.

A minute or so later, Henderson chuckled and said, “Jean Coutee . . . I wondered where she got that Jaguar. Poor as a church mouse, all workingman’s rights and anti-this-and-that . . . and she took the money and bought a fuckin’ Jag.”

And fifteen minutes after that, Henderson sighed and shut the book, and handed it back to Lucas. “Am I in there . . . anywhere?”

“No.”

“I don’t mean as a crook, because I’m not. But am I mentioned? Am I going to court?”

“You’re not even mentioned,” Lucas said.

“Okay. That’s okay.”

“There’s another thing that worries me,” Lucas said. “That porn file. There’re a lot of photos and most of them have some text. But one of the files seems likely to have come from a police evidence file. From Minneapolis.”

“What? Police?”

“I don’t know the connection, or how it got in the bigger file,” Lucas said. “I suspect it came from the police. The question is, did the Minneapolis cops, or probably one cop, give the file to Tubbs, in an effort to destroy Smalls? If they did, is it possible—”

“That a cop killed Tubbs? So that he wouldn’t rat them out if he got caught?”

“Or maybe they realized he wasn’t reliable,” Lucas said. “The thing is, Smalls and the cops, and Minneapolis in particular, did not get along. Smalls wanted to outlaw public employee unions. The unions saw him as a deadly enemy. When I look into this, that’s going to be one aspect of the case,” Lucas said.

“Which makes it even a bigger stink bomb,” Henderson said.

“It’d be good to keep you out of this . . . in an operative sense,” Lucas said.

“Absolutely.”

“I might have to perjure myself, but only lightly and not really significantly,” Lucas said. “The only two people who’d ever know would be you and me. . . .” And Kidd and Lauren and Marvel and John, but they should be safe enough, Lucas thought. He wasn’t telling any real lies, he was just warping time a bit.

The governor didn’t quail at the idea of perjury, he simply asked, “What are we talking about?”

“I put everything back. The St. Paul cops don’t know I’ve already been to the apartment. I put everything back, and call the lead investigator, and tell him that I’ve been there for an hour. When they arrive, I’ll be sitting there, looking at the paper. . . . I’ll insist on taking it to the BCA computer lab. Nobody there knows what I’ve been up to. They’d find all this stuff, and the porn, Smalls would be cleared, a couple of crooks might go down. I noticed that one of them is a pretty close ally of yours.”

“Fuck him,” Henderson said. “He’s a goddamned criminal, sucking on the public tit. I never saw that in him. But where’s the perjury in this?”