John Sandford - Silken Prey

The chief, Morris, and a lab tech were sitting around, drinking coffee, talking about a recent controversial tasing. A Bloomington cop’s wife had woken angry in the middle of the night, and had used his duty Taser to tase her sleeping husband in the area sometimes called the gooch . He was now claiming a major disability—sexual dysfunction caused by a city-owned instrument—and was seeking to be retired at full pay. He was twenty-seven.

“I’ll tell you what,” Morris said, holding his coffee cup with his pinkie finger properly out in the air, “That boy won’t be sleeping easy with a woman again, no matter who she is.”

Commissioner of Public Safety Rose Marie Roux walked in and caught the last of that, and she asked, “Who was that?”

“Talking about the Bloomington tasing,” Lucas said.

“Oh, yeah,” she said. She took a chair, and plopped her purse on the chief’s desk. “The guy who got it in the gooch.”

Henry Sands, the BCA director, showed up a minute later, took the last chair, and Rose Marie asked, “So what’s up? Or, I sorta know what’s up, but what’s new, and why is it an emergency?”

Morris said, “Lucas and I found a bunch of stuff in Bob Tubbs’s apartment—you all know Tubbs, and know we’re investigating his disappearance as a possible murder. Well, the stuff we found suggests that Tubbs planted the kiddie porn on Senator Smalls’s computer. There’s the theoretical possibility that he found it on Smalls’s computer, and was using it to blackmail him, but Lucas and I don’t believe that. . . . We think he was killed to eliminate him as a witness to whoever supplied the porn to get Smalls. It’s possible that the kiddie porn came through the Minneapolis Police Department, so the killer could be a cop.”

“Holy shit,” the chief said.

“Plus,” Morris continued, “in the same hideout where we found the kiddie porn—the porn was on a thumb drive—we found a bunch of other papers and copies of public documents which pretty much prove that seven serving state senators and representatives have committed a wide range of felonies, along with six former senators and representatives who are no longer in office, and a half-dozen bureaucrats who were paid off for arranging contracts.”

There was a long silence while the VIPs looked at the ceiling, sideways, and at the carpet, then, “That’s just the fuckin’ cherry on the cake, isn’t it?” Rose Marie said to everybody, the disgust showing on her face. “That’s just the fuckin’ cherry.”

“What we need from you all,” Morris concluded, “is for you to tell us what to do. I mean, we have to continue the Tubbs investigation. We can be pretty sure now that he was murdered—we’ve got a hell of a pile of motives. But there’s a lot of political stuff.”

“I need to see copies of everything,” Rose Marie said.

“Got it at the BCA,” Lucas said. “I can send it over.”

Card said, “I need to see it, too.”

“I’ve got a copy for you,” Morris said.

Rose Marie held her index finger in the air, asking for silence as she thought for a moment, then: “Here’s what I’d suggest. The corruption stuff goes to the attorney general, and he can have some of his under-employed young lawyers look at it. And we need to talk to Senator Smalls’s attorneys right away. Smalls may be a suspect in the murder, if the porn was taken from him and he was being blackmailed. But if I understand you correctly, you think there’s a much greater possibility that Tubbs put the porn on Smalls’s computer, in which case, Smalls is being unfairly demonized as a pervert a week before a critical election. We have to tell him what we know, and then let Smalls do what he can with it.”

Lucas chipped in: “I don’t think the porn was taken from Smalls. It’s a logical possibility, which is why we mention it, but . . . it’s like one percent. I think he was framed.”

“Okay. More reason to talk to him soon,” Rose Marie said.

Sands said to Rose Marie, “You can handle the politics. I think that’s proper. But the Tubbs murder . . . and what comes out of it, a definite finding on how the porn got on Smalls’s computer . . . is that St. Paul? Or is that us? St. Paul has been handling the case, and Detective Morris seems to have done an excellent job so far.”

The chief never tried to catch that hot potato—he just let it fly by.

“It’s you,” he said. “I’ll be goddamned if this department is going to investigate the Minneapolis department. That seems to be one of the critical questions, where the porn came from, and you guys have jurisdiction in Minneapolis. We don’t.”

“That’s true,” Sands began. “However—”

Rose Marie jumped in: “Henry, give it to Lucas.”

Sands took a deep breath and said, “We’ve got federal funding being talked about right now. No matter what happens here, whether Smalls or Grant wins the election, we’re gonna piss somebody off. The funding comes right through the Senate Office Building.”

The chief said, “We got the same problem, big guy.”

“Yeah, but it’s a few pennies, relatively,” Sands said. “I’m talking about another building and putting a major lab out in Worthington.”

Rose Marie said again, to both of them, “Lucas has it. Everybody agree? Lucas has it.”

The chief sat back and smiled, and Lucas said, “Okay.”

• • •

ROSE MARIE, SANDS, AND LUCAS walked out to the parking lot together, and after Sands took off, Rose Marie said to Lucas, “You should call Elmer and see if he’s the one who wants to break the news on Smalls. If he doesn’t, I will—but we need to move now. We need to catch the five-o’clocks.”

The five-o’clocks—the early-afternoon news.

“I’ll call right now,” Lucas said. He clicked up the governor’s number on his cell phone, and Henderson answered on the third ring. Lucas told him what the group had decided, and Henderson said, “Tell Rose Marie to take the press conference. I’ll call Porter now, and tell him what’s coming.”

He clicked off and Lucas relayed the word to Rose Marie. She said, “I’ll set up a press conference for three o’clock. I’ll be calling you from my hairdresser’s for the background: just e-mail me a few tight paragraphs on the whole thing. Goddamnit, I was hoping Smalls would go down.”

“Maybe he still will,” Lucas said.

“Maybe,” she said. “Taryn is cute, smart, and she’s got more money than Elmer.”

“Okay . . .”

“So how are you going to handle the investigation? Now that it’s public?”

“Don’t know yet,” Lucas said. “I’m thinking about it.”

• • •

LUCAS WALKED OVER to his car and climbed in, and his phone went off: Porter Smalls. Lucas answered and Smalls said, “Thank you. I just talked with Elmer. I owe you big-time and I don’t forget.”

“That makes me a little nervous,” Lucas said. “I don’t want to be owed: this is my job.”

“I don’t care. I owe you,” Smalls said.

When Smalls got off the phone, Lucas called Kidd: “Did you ever get a chance to look at that list of campaign members?”

“Should be in your e-mail,” Kidd said. “There are only a dozen who might be serious contenders. There are two people of particular interest. Daniel MacGuire and Rudy Holly. MacGuire is gay and has run a gay Republicans group, but Smalls has been against gay marriage, so . . . And MacGuire is also a depressive and has anger-management issues, and is taking medication for both. Holly is a conspiracy theory guy, going back to the Clinton years and that whole blow-job business. I’ve seen some stuff he’s put on some conspiracy sites, and the thing is, he’s nuts.”