John Sandford - Silken Prey

“Might not be any. I’d tell them exactly what happened when I entered the apartment, where I looked and what I did, and here’s the evidence. I wouldn’t have to mention that it was my second trip there . . . that I took the stuff out, copied it, and then put it back. After all, the docs are all in the public record.”

Henderson nodded, and closed his eyes. Then he said, “The murder.”

“I’d want to stay on that,” Lucas said.

“I’d insist. This thing will leak five minutes after you call St. Paul, and there’s gonna be a shit storm. I’ll be outraged, and you’ll be my minister plenipotentiary to the investigation. That’ll give us a reason for these . . . conferences.”

“That’ll work, I think,” Lucas said.

They sat there for a minute, then Henderson said, “There’s the elephant in the room . . . that we haven’t talked about.”

Lucas nodded: “Who did it. Who killed Tubbs.”

“If he’s dead.”

“Yeah, if he’s dead. But . . . it feels like it.”

“ Why it was done . . . should lead you to who did it,” Henderson said. “A lot of people hate Smalls, but the most obvious beneficiary is Taryn Grant.”

“But hiring a killer is a problem, no matter how much money you have,” Lucas said. “The best model for that is the movie Fargo —idiots hiring idiots. From what I’ve read about her, she’s not an idiot.”

“She’s not,” Henderson agreed. “But it could be somebody working on her behalf. Or somebody who thinks he’s working on her behalf. A psycho.”

“I’ll talk to her,” Lucas said. “As the investigation spreads out, she’d be an obvious person to interview. I’ll take a look and see what we can find out about her.”

“Another thing: we need to manage the news release. We know it’ll leak, we need to be out front on that.”

“That’s what Mitford’s for,” Lucas said. “Just make sure he gives me a heads-up before the shit hits the fan.”

“I will. Now about your book . . .” Henderson said. He patted the bound printout that Lucas had given him.

“Into the grinder,” Lucas said.

• • •

AT TEN MINUTES AFTER nine o’clock that night, Roger Morris, the St. Paul homicide detective, wearing a purple velour tracksuit and Nike Air running shoes, stuck his head into Tubbs’s apartment and called, “Where are you?”

“In the bathroom,” Lucas called back.

Morris found Lucas on his knees, looking at papers he was pulling out of two white plastic sewer pipes. Morris tipped his head back and closed his eyes and said, “Fuck me with a parking meter. We missed it.”

“Yeah, well . . . I looked in there and wondered, why would you drain a sewer up , in a two-story building?” Lucas said.

“So what is it?”

“Papers, money, and three computer thumb drives,” Lucas said. “You can have the money and the papers. The thumb drives . . . finders keepers. I’ve got a guy waiting for me at the BCA computer lab.”

“ We got a computer lab—”

“Ours is better,” Lucas said. “This stuff just might blow the ass off the legislature. . . . These papers, the ones I can read, suggest that some of our beloved politicians are on the take.”

“That’s a motive on the Tubbs killing,” Morris said. “Seriously, man, it’s my murder investigation—”

“I want those thumb drives at the BCA,” Lucas said. “You’ll get the contents—I’ll drive you over there, and we’ll give you a receipt. I’ll tell you what, Roger, I’m only looking at Tubbs for one reason: the kid who found that porn said Tubbs had been hanging around the Smalls campaign, and might have had the opportunity to put it on Smalls’s computer. I looked close at the Smalls porn, the stuff from your computer lab, and there’s some involvement there that you don’t want to deal with. I don’t want to deal with it, either, but you really don’t.”

“Like what?”

“Like one of the photos may have come out of the Minneapolis cops,” Lucas said. “Maybe the whole file did. Maybe some cops were trying to get rid of Smalls. Maybe Tubbs was killed to seal off the connection.”

“No, no,” Morris said. A few seconds later, “You don’t have to drive me—I’ll follow you over. I want that receipt. You can keep the papers and the money, too. But I want copies of every single goddamn document on my computer tomorrow morning.”

“Fast as I can get it to you, Roger,” Lucas said. “I promise.”

CHAPTER 7

Lucas got the contents of Tubbs’s hidey-hole into the BCA lab, and the tech there, called in on overtime, loaded up the files and began printing out the documents. When he found the porn file, he asked, “What about this trash?”

“Aw, man,” Lucas said. They dialed into the file, and he switched to full drama mode: “Aw, Jesus Christ.”

He’d given Morris a receipt for the pile of evidence and Morris had gone home with the promise of complete access in the morning. Now Lucas called him at home and said, “You might want to get over here.”

“What happened?”

“We pretty much confirmed that Tubbs–porn connection,” Lucas said. “He’s got the file on one of these thumb drives.”

“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” Morris said.

• • •

WHEN MORRIS ARRIVED, THE first thing he asked Lucas was, “If this file was a setup, if Tubbs did it, and if Tubbs was killed the same day the file was found . . . that night . . . then he’d have had to go to Smalls’s office that morning. Right? He couldn’t have put it on the day before.”

“That’s right,” Lucas said.

“I’ll tell you what: you can check us on this, but we backtracked Tubbs, to see who he’d talked to, and where he’d been, the day he disappeared, and that night. He didn’t go to Smalls’s campaign office. We’ve accounted for all his time back a couple of days, and he wasn’t there.”

“Then . . . he had to have an associate.”

“Who might’ve gotten scared when he saw how crazy this whole thing got,” Morris said. “It might’ve started out as a dirty trick, and all of a sudden, people are talking about multiple felonies and Smalls is going nuts on TV. He figures if it comes out, who put the file on Smalls’s computer, he’s heading for prison. So he talks to Tubbs, one thing leads to another . . . and bang .”

“That seems reasonable,” Lucas said, because it was.

They talked about the possibilities as Lucas walked Morris up to the lab, where Lucas said to the lab tech, “You need to call the St. Paul computer lab guy. There’s got to be some trigger for the porn file booby trap. Between the two of you, I want you to find it tonight, so Roger and I know what it is when we come in tomorrow.”

“That’s a tall order,” the tech said.

“That’s your problem,” Lucas said. “It’s gotta be there: find it.”

To Morris: “I want to show you this one group of photos.” He ran through the file, found the pictures of Otis and the others in the group sex, and tapped the caption. “These were the pictures that were presented in court. Unless you believe that the Minneapolis cops are posting this stuff on the Internet, then they had to come out of the Minneapolis computer system. In fact, I was told by this girl”—he tapped Otis’s face—“that the photos presented in court were on paper, and were seized when the cops raided the porn operation. I’m thinking . . . this had to come out of Minneapolis’s evidence file. I mean, look at the caption: that’s cop stuff.”

Morris rubbed his forehead: “You’re saying somebody in Minneapolis helped Tubbs set up Smalls?”

“It’s a possibility,” Lucas said.