John Sandford - Silken Prey

“Maybe it won’t be necessary to bring it up,” Lucas suggested.

“It’ll be necessary,” Marion said. “The chief will be inside my shirt, wanting to know what we found. You’ve probably got to tell your boss. Once that’s done, it’ll get away from us. If it was only us four . . . but it’s not.”

Lucas said, “You’re probably right. I’m sorry.”

ICE said, “All right. Machine One is in Vice, and that machine apparently dealt with the original files, and that’s where a variety of files was grouped into one, and that’s where the first duplicate was made. The duplicate had the same name as the original, but with a version number, Version Two. That was probably a legit backup. Machine Two is also in Vice, and somebody made a second duplicate on that machine, and saved it under a completely new name. That’s the one that has been accessed by Machine Three, the four hundred and eighteen accesses. Machine Three never made a dupe. Machine Four accessed the original file, but only twice. Machine Four is in Vice.”

“What’s the latest date?” Lucas asked.

“Machine Three has had sixteen accesses in the last month,” ICE said. “Both of the Machine Four accesses were last year.”

“We’ve got to nail them all down,” Marion said.

Lucas said, “This whole Smalls-porn thing feels improvised to me. It doesn’t feel like something that was planned out a year ago. So . . . it probably came off Machine Three. Where’s that one?”

Benson said, “It’s here, in the building. Down in Domestics.”

“How many people in Domestics?”

Benson shrugged, but Marion said, “About twelve or fifteen, counting the shrinks. Seven sworn officers, two or three support people, and the shrinks. Some of the shrinks are part-time, but they’d have access.”

“Is there any way to see who signed on the machine and what they did? What they looked at?” Lucas asked.

Benson shook his head. “The only way you could figure that out, would be if Machine Three was in somebody’s locked office. But Domestics is an open bay, with people coming and going. The only way to tell would be to observe . . . figure out who was on that machine at what time.”

“But all this is in the past,” Lucas said. “How would we do that?”

“We can’t,” Benson said.

“What we can do,” Marion said, “is bust some balls.”

“Gotta be soon,” Lucas said. “Smalls is about halfway off the hook, but the media doesn’t like him, so he’s only halfway off. They’re already saying that Rose Marie never said he was innocent.”

“I need to talk to the chief,” Marion said to Lucas. “What’re you doing this evening?”

“Talking with a really hot chick,” Lucas said.

“ Hot chick . . . that expression is so disco, so 1979,” ICE said, with disdain.

Marion, Benson, and Lucas all looked at each other, and then Lucas shrugged and said, “Not for cops.”

• • •

THEY HAD BENSON SAVE the files and the information they’d turned up to a new, confidential file, and then ICE took off, after Lucas thanked her: “You’ll get the bill at your office,” she said.

Marion went to see the chief, and Lucas walked down to the training office. Tom Morgan, the lieutenant who’d put together the original file, and had testified in the child porn case, was now the training officer. The new job could either be a matter of grooming a cop for a move upward, or a dead end for a guy who wasn’t going anywhere; in Morgan’s case, Lucas didn’t know which it was.

Morgan was poking at a computer keyboard when Lucas knocked on his doorjamb. He turned in his chair and his face fell, and he said, “Lucas. Goddamnit, I was afraid you’d show up here.”

Lucas said, “Really.”

“Yeah, everybody in the building is hiding out, afraid you’re gonna want to talk to them. The word’s all over the place.”

“I only talked to the chief . . . and Marion. And Larry Benson . . .”

“Might as well have driven down the hall in a sound truck,” Morgan said. He reached back, caught a wheeled guest chair, and shoved it toward Lucas. “Sit down and tell me about it.”

Lucas explained the situation, and when he was finished, Morgan said, “Well, that’s about what I heard. I’ll tell you what, though. When we busted that place, the Pattersons’, they weren’t putting the files on the Internet. They were too smart to do that. If you wanted pictures from them, you’d get them by FedEx, and they’d be on paper. The Internet was only used for contacts. When we got them, we scanned the paper photos into the system, because that was the only way we had to coordinate them with everything else, for the court case. But they were a separate file. Nobody had access but the people who were working the case. And they should never have been aggregated with other files.”

“What are the chances that somebody saw an opportunity for a little private enterprise? Put the files together and then sell them?” Lucas asked.

“I’d say . . . slim to none,” Morgan said. “The thing is, the files were down in Vice, and nobody had access to them but us vice guys. And one thing we all knew, and most cops know now, is that cops and snitches are all over the place on kiddie porn. They’re everywhere. Guys spend their spare time browsing the ’net, looking for it, looking for a bust. You buy kiddie porn off the ’net, you’re gonna lose your job, probably get divorced, and probably go to prison. The vice guys . . . they wouldn’t mess with it. It’s more dangerous than dealing drugs. Way more. And there’s less money in it.”

“So you’re saying whoever took it wasn’t trying to make a buck, and it didn’t get loose somehow.”

Morgan shook his head: “Nope. Sad as I am to say it, I’d bet those pictures came straight out of here. Straight out of our system.”

Lucas asked, “You hear any rumors of guys looking at porn?”

“Lucas, you know how it is. You worked here, for how long? You hear some guys might be looking at porn, some guys might be getting their knobs polished by the street girls, that some guys have a little too much cash, that some cocaine’s gone astray . . . you hear all that crap. And most of it’s crap. Backbiting bullshit.”

That was true enough. The brotherhood of cops was fairly tight from the outside, but from the inside, it was more like a bureaucratic knife fight.

They talked for a while longer, about various possibilities, then Lucas looked at the wall clock and said, “I gotta roll. Thanks for the conversation.”

Morgan asked, “Is the stuff gonna hit the fan?”

“Not if Robin handles it right,” Lucas said. “What you need is a lot of promises and a big cloud of smoke . . . and then hope something blows up somewhere, and makes the media stampede that way.”

CHAPTER 12

Dannon and Taryn were both on their feet, in the library, feeling the stress, and Dannon said, “We don’t know anything. We’re amazed that people are talking to us. Who is Tubbs?”

She nodded. “I worked on it last night before I went to bed. I can do it. But I have to have my head in the right place.”

“I’ll be outside with Carver. Green will be in the monitor room. We want him to see Green, but not us.”

“Yes,” she said. She frowned. “What are we talking about, anyway?”

“Exactly.” He nodded, and left.

A minute later, her walkie-talkie function buzzed, and Alice Green said, “We’ve got a Porsche at the gate.”

• • •

LUCAS WATCHED THE GATE roll back and caught the two clear lenses, and two black glassy spots, one of each on the stone gate pillars, on either side of the driveway. Camera lenses and infrared alarm sensors. The security would be excellent. And the hard drives on the security cameras could be gotten with a search warrant: something to know.