John Sandford - Silken Prey

“Then . . . that guy could be the killer,” Morris said.

Lucas shrugged.

Morris watched Lucas for a moment, then switched directions: “Have you looked at the document files?”

“I’m getting them printed now,” Lucas said. “It looks like it’s the same as the other papers—blackmail stuff, cover-your-ass files, whatever. A lot of corrupt bullshit.”

Morris considered for a moment, then said, “We need a conference. We need the heavies on this. I’ll call you tomorrow at eight o’clock—”

“Nine would be better,” Lucas said.

“Nine o’clock, and we’ll both have lists of who should be in the conference.”

“It’s a plan,” Lucas said.

He and Morris spent a half hour flicking through the document files, and then through the porn files, looking for any other clue to its origin, but found nothing new. When they were done, Morris said, “Nine o’clock tomorrow.”

• • •

LUCAS WENT HOME: he’d successfully covered his ass, he thought. Now it should be a straightforward murder investigation, and they already had several pieces of the puzzle.

Morris was a competent investigator, and more than competent: but he didn’t have everything that Lucas had, and Lucas couldn’t give him some of it. He really had to stay on the case, Lucas thought. He wanted to stay on it. It was getting intense, and he liked intense.

Liked it enough that he got up early to think about it. And at nine o’clock the next morning, in jeans and T-shirt, he’d already finished a Diet Coke and a plate of scrambled eggs, and his list of who should be at the conference. His list: Henry Sands, director of the BCA; Rose Marie Roux, commissioner of public safety; Rick Card, St. Paul chief of police; Morris; and himself. He was trying to remember who would call whom, when his phone rang. He picked it up, looked at the screen.

The governor: “Everything cool?” Henderson asked.

“Yes. We’re going bureaucratic, to blur everything over. The St. Paul homicide detective on the Tubbs case, and I, are going to convene a conference with Sands and Rose Marie and the St. Paul chief, lay it all out, and then just start a straight criminal investigation. Maybe parcel some of it out to the attorney general . . . but we’ll see what Rose Marie has to say about that. You should stay clear.”

“Keep me informed.”

• • •

MORRIS CALLED A MINUTE LATER, with his list. He had the same list as Lucas, less Rose Marie, and with the addition of the Ramsey County attorney.

He agreed with Lucas on Rose Marie, but Lucas argued against the county attorney: “That guy is owned by Channel Three. If he’s in the conference, we might as well put it on television.”

“Man, my computer guy printed out those document files and left them for me, and I gotta tell you, it’s gonna be political, and it’s gonna be ugly. The names in these things . . . they scare the shit out of me. I think we need lawyers. Lots of lawyers. The more the better. These docs aren’t for cops.”

“I’ll take a look as soon as I go in this morning,” Lucas said. “But we’re cops, so it’s okay to have a conference about a possible crime. Nobody can criticize us for that. Then we let Rose Marie and Rick figure out who to bring in, for the political stuff. We can just focus on the murder.”

They went back and forth, and eventually Morris said, “I knew you had a sneaky streak, but I didn’t know it was this sneaky. But okay, let’s do it your way. I’ll declare a big-ass emergency and try to get a conference at noon or one o’clock, here in St. Paul.”

“Do it,” Lucas said.

• • •

THE MEETING WAS SET for eleven o’clock, the only mutual time they could all find, in the chief’s office in St. Paul. Lucas had a couple of hours, so he called Brittany Hunt, the volunteer who’d discovered the porn file. She was driving to the Mall of America. She was no longer employed, she said, but not too worried about it.

“I talked to my adviser and she said that exposing a criminal like Smalls was a lot more important than my campaign work.” She was worried about meeting Lucas without her father present, but he told her that he just had a couple of quick questions that weren’t about her at all. “I need to gossip,” he said.

She agreed to make a quick detour and meet him at a sandwich shop off Ford Parkway, five minutes from his house. He changed into a suit and tie, then drove over to the sandwich shop, where he found her eating a fried egg sandwich on a buttermilk biscuit. Lucas got a glass of water and sat down across the table from her.

“I was famished,” she said.

“So eat.” Lucas leaned toward her and pitched his voice down. “Tubbs . . . did he have any special friends in Smalls’s campaign?”

She cocked her head and licked a crumb of biscuit off her lower lip, then asked, “You mean, was he sleeping with anybody?”

Lucas said, “Well, any kind of close friend.”

She said, “You know . . . I don’t know. But I can tell you how to find out. There’s a guy there, Cory, mmm, I don’t really know his last name, he works in the copy room. He’s the biggest gossip in the world. He knows everything. ”

“Cory.”

“Yes. He’s not really part of the campaign staff, he was hired to do the printing and copying. They do a lot of that. He knows everything. Ask Helen Roman. She’s the campaign manager, she’ll know where to find him.”

“Sounds like a good guy to know,” Lucas said.

“Yeah. If you like gossip, and we all do.” She burped, then looked toward the counter. “I could use another one of those sandwiches. I haven’t eaten since the day before yesterday.”

• • •

SMALLS’S CAMPAIGN OFFICE was off I-94 on the St. Paul side of the Mississippi, ten minutes away. Lucas went there, found Helen Roman, the office manager, who said that Cory Makovsky worked in the distribution center, at the end of the hall. Lucas went there, where he found Makovsky talking excitedly on his cell phone. When Lucas tried to get his attention, Makovsky held up a finger, meaning “Wait one,” and gushed a revelation “He’d just seen it online from People , there really isn’t any doubt that she’s pregnant,” into the phone.

Lucas looked pointedly at his watch, and Makovsky frowned and said to the phone, “Hang on a sec,” and to Lucas, “What?”

Lucas said, “I’m an agent with the BCA. Did you murder Bob Tubbs?”

Makovsky took that in for a few seconds, then said hastily into the phone, “I gotta get back to you, Betty.”

When Lucas had Makovsky’s attention, he asked, “Did you kill him?”

Makovsky, who’d gone a little pale, said, “Of course not. Who told you I did?”

“Nobody. I just wondered,” Lucas said. Then: “I was told you might have some information I need. Do you know if Bob Tubbs had a special friend of some kind . . . a lover, maybe . . . in Senator Smalls’s campaign office?”

Makovsky’s eyes widened, and his voice dropped to a whisper: “Is that the story Smalls is putting out?”

“No—that’s the question I’m asking. Did Tubbs have a special friend?”

“I don’t know,” Makovsky said, with real regret in his voice. “I realize I should know, but I don’t. I could ask around.”

“Could you do that?” Lucas asked. He dug a card out of his pocket, wrote a number on the back, and said, “If you hear anything, call me.”

“I’ll do that,” Makovsky said, his eyes bright. Lucas believed him; and two minutes after he called Lucas, the word would probably be tweeted, or Twittered, or whatever that was. Probably to People .

• • •

WHEN HE LEFT the campaign office, Lucas had ten minutes to get down to the St. Paul Police Department, just enough time to retrieve his car and be marginally late. When he got there, he found he was the first person from outside the department to arrive.