John Sandford - Silken Prey

Kidd said, “I’ll tell you what. I’ll take a very conservative, safe approach. If I can get the stuff without a problem, without setting anything off, I’ll do it. I won’t take any risks. But if you use it, how’ll you explain it?”

“You could dump it to my e-mail, anonymously. I’ll figure out a way to explain it that’ll keep you clear.”

“I’m already not clear—people already know that I’m involved in this thing,” Kidd said.

“What if I put in an official request for the records, with the army?” Lucas suggested. “They’ll take it under advisement, but they won’t give them to me. If you could find a way to ship the records out of the army’s database, like there was a slipup . . .”

“Oh, boy . . .”

“I’ll start calling the army the first thing in the morning. If you can help me out, that’d be good. If you can’t, you can’t.”

“Oh, boy . . .”

“And there’s another thing,” Lucas said. “Something I doubt you could do.”

“Lucas, my man, you originally just wanted a little help protecting the American Way . . .”

“I know, I know. But here’s the thing. Taryn Grant’s got this terrific security system. Cameras all over the place, inside and out. At one time, the photography went out to the cloud, saved for a month. In the last couple of days, somebody cut that to forty-eight hours. They did that about forty-eight hours after Tubbs disappeared. I’m wondering, what if Tubbs showed up at Grant’s place, and ran into something with one of these security guys?”

“You want me to find the recordings?” Kidd asked.

“If you can.”

“Do you know which cloud?” Kidd asked. “There are lots of clouds.”

“I don’t know jack shit,” Lucas admitted.

“Do you know her cell phone number?”

“Well . . . yeah, I do know that.”

“Give it to me,” Kidd said. “It’s a start, if she monitors the system from her phone.”

• • •

LUCAS WENT HOME.

Weather and Letty were curious, and Lucas kept them updated on his cases, but he had nothing to tell them. He did describe the meeting with Grant, and Weather said, “She sounds more interesting than I would have expected. Educated.”

“She is. And she may have gotten a guy murdered.”

“And she may not have,” Weather said. “Something for you to think about.”

• • •

LUCAS SPOKE TO the governor later that evening. The attorney general, the governor said, was all over the papers taken from Tubbs’s apartment. “I suggested he investigate them thoroughly, at least until the election was over and done with. That way, he’ll have the full attention of the press. He saw the wisdom of that.”

“So I don’t have to worry about him being in my hair . . .”

“At least not for a week,” Henderson said. “What’d you think of Grant?”

“Smart and tough,” Lucas said.

“She could be president someday, if you don’t drag her down.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Lucas asked.

“I’m just sayin’, my friend. Keep me up to date.”

• • •

LUCAS GOT TO THE OFFICE early the next morning, conscious of the time difference between Minneapolis and Washington, and began calling the Pentagon. He spent two hours talking to a variety of captains, majors, and colonels—somehow missing lieutenant colonels—and got nothing substantial, except the feeling that everybody dreaded making a mistake. He did get pointed to online request forms, which he dutifully filled out and submitted, and backed those with direct e-mails to the captains, majors, and colonels, reiterating his requests for information.

When he was done, he had no information, but had laid down a solid record of information requests. Now if Kidd came through . . .

Lucas thought about spies, and with no particular place to push, eventually drove over to Smalls’s campaign headquarters and talked to Helen Roman, Smalls’s campaign secretary, who sent him down the hall to a guy named John Mack, the deputy campaign manager. He was, Roman told him, in charge of operations.

Mack said that he knew Bob Tubbs by sight, and may have said hello at the candy machine, but had never had a real conversation with him. “He’s a bit older than I am—we’re not contemporaries. I don’t know what we’d have in common. We’re not even with the same political party.”

“Even without knowing him, but just knowing what he did . . . knowing what you do . . .”

“Maybe I should take the Fifth,” Mack said.

“C’mon, man, gimme a little help . . . Give Smalls a little help.”

Mack repeated that he didn’t know anything about spying, but just as an intellectual exercise . . .

Tubbs’s accomplice would have had one of three motives for trying to dump Smalls, Mack said: (1) financial—he might have been paid; (2) ideological—he wanted Smalls dumped because he hated his politics; or (3) personal—he (or she) was a close friend or lover of Tubbs; or he (or she) was a personal enemy of Smalls.

If it were (3), it seemed likely that the accomplice would also be older. Perhaps not exactly Tubbs’s or Smalls’s contemporary, but most of the volunteers were college kids, and unlikely to be close enough to either man to do something as ugly as dropping the child pornography on Smalls, simply at Tubbs’s say-so.

Could be (2) ideological, Mack said, although the volunteers were vetted before they were given any real responsibility. “But the thing is, if they planted this thing in Porter’s computer, they don’t have to have any responsibility. All they need is access,” Mack said. “I have no idea how many office keys are floating around, but it’s quite a few, and the place is empty late at night.”

Or he said, it could be (1) financial . . . though if it were financial, how would Tubbs have made the approach to the accomplice, or spy? He could probably have done it only through personal knowledge of the accomplice, and that would loop right back to (3): a personal relationship.

So Lucas was probably looking for somebody a bit older, Mack said, or a reckless, ideologically driven youngster, whom Tubbs would have to have known. Was it possible that Tubbs had recruited a spy for Taryn Grant’s campaign, then enlisted him to do the pornography dump?

“Grant says she didn’t know Tubbs, and she seems smart enough that she probably wouldn’t lie about it . . . especially if we could find out about it,” Lucas told Mack. “Anyway, I believed her. She probably didn’t know him.”

“I’ll tell you what—if an operator like Tubbs knew about a spy in our campaign, other Democrats would know about it, too,” Mack said. “I think you might be going around threatening the wrong people.”

“I wasn’t threatening you,” Lucas said.

“Then why am I sweating?”

• • •

LUCAS WAS MULLING IT all over as he walked out to his car, and as he popped the door lock, took a call from Marion, the Minneapolis internal affairs cop.

“Just an update: I’ve been tearing up Domestics this morning. I don’t have any proof, but I’ve got a half-dozen names, and whoever copied that porn for Tubbs is probably on the list.”

“How’d you get the names?” Lucas asked.

Marion explained that he’d started with the people he’d considered least likely to be involved, and with the threat of felonies hanging over their heads, they’d been cooperative. He’d been looking for people who’d been seen using the Domestics computer at unlikely times, alone or in small groups, or had been unhappy to be seen using it and had quickly signed off when a new face turned up at the office.

“There are five guys and one woman who may—and I say ‘may’—have been looking at the porn repeatedly. I think all six probably were . . . kind of like a little club down there that knew about it. Two of the shrinks had heard rumors about child porn on city computers. That’s where I got the names.”