John Sandford - Silken Prey

Lucas said, “Rose Marie will be calling you in a minute or so. Maybe she can explain things more clearly than I have.”

“Fuck a bunch of Rose Marie,” Connolly shouted. “I’ll put wheels on that bitch and roll her right into the Mississippi.”

Lucas called Rose Marie, who said she’d call Connolly. Connolly called back five minutes later and said, “It might be possible that we can work something out.”

“Is Rose Marie in the Mississippi?” Lucas asked.

“Fuck you.”

• • •

LUCAS CALLED ICE and asked her to gently and with great diplomacy set up an appointment with the Minneapolis systems manager. While he was waiting for ICE to get back to him, he called the duty officer and asked him to get him a good phone number for Taryn Grant. He was sitting in his office, with his feet up on his desk, waiting for callbacks and thinking about how he’d sequence his various visits, when Del stopped in, took a chair, and said, “I bought a Harley.”

“Oh, Jesus . . .”

“What? I had one before.”

“You were in your twenties,” Lucas said. “If you had to lay one down now, they’d be picking you up with a sponge.”

“I’m not going on any big rides. . . . It’s gonna be a warm-weather bike, just rolling around town on the local streets,” Del said. “Besides, most Harley guys are my age. Or older.”

“And you know what? They’re getting picked up with sponges.”

Jenkins came in and when Del told him about the Harley, they slapped hands and Jenkins said, “I’d have one myself, if they weren’t such pieces of shit.”

“Says the owner of a personal Crown Vic.”

Shrake showed up a few minutes later, and they talked about the Harley, and Shrake said, “That fuckin’ Flowers used to ride, right after he got out of the army. He had some sorta crotch rocket, though, not a Harley. I remember him showing up at crime scenes on it, when he was working for St. Paul. He had hair down his back, he looked like Wild Bill Hickok.”

After another couple of minutes, Jenkins said to Lucas, “I’m hearing rumors that the Geheime Staatspolizei doesn’t like the fact that you’re working directly for the governor, and bailing out Smalls. I hear you’re about to slap a search warrant on the Minneapolis cops, and that’s got everybody steppin’ and fetchin’.”

In Jenkins’s personal lexicon, the Geheime Staatspolizei comprised the BCA’s top management. It was also the proper name of the German Gestapo, though he probably wasn’t pronouncing it correctly—not that Lucas knew for sure.

Lucas explained that a compromise had been worked out with Minneapolis, and that he’d be working in cooperation with the city’s Internal Affairs unit.

“That doesn’t help much,” Del said. “I’ll tell you what, my friend. You’re not doing yourself a lot of good around here, hanging out with the politicians. The knives are coming out.”

“Fuck ’em,” Lucas said. “It’s a murder case. I’ll break it and the tunes will change.”

“No, they won’t,” Shrake said. “Everybody will agree that you did a great job and then they’ll stab you in the back. It’s the tall poppy syndrome.”

“I’ll take care,” Lucas said.

“You already haven’t,” Del said.

• • •

WHEN THEY’D GONE, Lucas got Taryn Grant’s office phone number, called it and spoke to a secretary, who went away for a moment, then came back and said, “Ms. Grant is in her car. I’m forwarding your call directly to her.”

When Grant came on—she had the kind of voice he’d always liked, low and husky, like Weather’s—he said, “I’m working on the investigation of the child pornography found on Senator Smalls’s computer, and also the disappearance of a political operative named Bob Tubbs. I need to talk to you about the situation.”

“I’ve already made a public statement to the media.”

“I know, I saw it. But I have a few questions for you, and I also need to brief you on the status of the investigation,” Lucas said. “Time is so short, before the election, we want to be sure everybody is informed.”

“I’ll be home between six and six-forty-five tonight, but then I have campaign visits to make.”

“I’ll see you then,” Lucas said. “If you could give me your address . . .”

• • •

ICE CALLED: “I talked to the systems manager over in Minneapolis, and we’re on for three o’clock. I’m familiar with their equipment. I didn’t tell him exactly what we are going to do, you know . . . just in case they might try to ditch it.”

“Good. The chief knows what we’re doing, so they might be able to figure it out, but they don’t have the number, as far as I know.”

• • •

WHEN LUCAS got to the Minneapolis Police Department’s ugly, obsolete, purple-stone headquarters in downtown Minneapolis, ICE was sitting with her feet up on the systems manager’s desk, talking about old times at what was once called the Institute of Technology at the University of Minnesota.

A sergeant named Buck Marion sat in a corner, reading a free newspaper; Marion was with the Minneapolis Internal Affairs unit, and nodded at Lucas. One of Marion’s predecessors had gotten Lucas thrown off the Minneapolis police force, for beating up a pimp.

Lucas listened to ICE and the systems manager ramble along, then shook his head, and ICE asked, “What?”

“Nothing like a long, rambling C++ story,” Lucas said, not trying to hide a yawn. “Fascinating.”

“We’re intellectuals,” ICE explained. “Anyway, Larry’s going to help us look for the files. We were waiting for you.” Larry Benson was the systems manager.

“Then let’s do it,” Lucas said.

ICE explained that they wouldn’t be using the specific byte size, but would enter a narrow range that the file should fall into, even if an item or two were missing. ICE leaned over Benson’s shoulder and fed him the file size number, and he entered the number range into his system. They all watched as the system thought it over, and then spat out twelve returns. “Twelve returns,” ICE said. “Interesting.”

Lucas almost blurted out that Kidd had found only four. Before he could, Benson said, “Let’s take a look.”

He opened them, one by one, on top of each other. Eight of them were irrelevant. Four of them, just as Kidd said, showed an identical opening set of child porn. “Man, I hate to think this shit is floating around in there,” Benson said. “One file . . . it’s pretty open access, if you know what to look for.”

“Any way to tell who has accessed them?” Lucas asked.

“Not really. Well, I can tell you pretty sure in one case, but not the other three. Tom Morgan, Lieutenant Morgan, opened them, let me see, about eight times, all in about a four-day period a little more than three years ago, in August.”

Lucas said, “There was a trial right then. Probably for trial purposes. He was one of the people who testified.”

Benson said, “The other three sets of files were accessed by three different machines. Each machine accessed only one file, but multiple times.”

Marion: “Who’s assigned to the machines?”

Benson shook his head. “They’re office machines. Maybe somebody uses them most of the time, but the rest of the time, anybody could do it.”

ICE reached out and tapped the computer screen. “Look at this: this machine accessed the file four hundred and eighteen times over three years. They never quit looking at it . . . they’re still looking at it.”

• • •

ICE AND BENSON STARTED working through it, and Marion said to Lucas, “This is gonna be a disaster. I don’t know what’s gonna happen if it turns out that a hundred guys were looking at this stuff.”