John Sandford: Silken Prey

“No.”

“Well. Sooner or later, your name will be connected to this job,” Rose Marie said. “Whether or not it pans out. If the attorney general doesn’t jump you for the prosecution, Porter Smalls will come after you for the defense. A lot of people in the Department of Public Safety and over at the BCA don’t like this kind of thing, the political stuff. And you’ve been doing a lot of it. When I’m not here to protect you, when Elmer’s not here . . .”

“Ah, it’s all right, Rose Marie,” Lucas said. “I’ve been fired before. Stop worrying about it.”

“Yeah.” She peered at him for a moment, then asked, “What are you going to do? About Smalls?”

“Try to keep it quiet, as long as I can,” Lucas said.

“How are you going to do that?” she asked.

“Haven’t worked it out yet. I’ve got a few ideas, but you wouldn’t want to hear them.”

“No. Actually, I wouldn’t.”

“So. Moving right along . . .” Lucas stood up.

Rose Marie said, “I’ll talk to Henry. Make sure he has a feel for the situation.” Henry Sands was director of the BCA and had been appointed by Henderson. If he knew Henderson was behind Lucas’s investigation, he’d keep his mouth shut. Unless, of course, he could see some profit in slipping a word to a reporter. He didn’t much like Lucas, which was okay, because Lucas didn’t much like him back.

“Good,” Lucas said. “And hey—relax. Gonna be all right.”

“No, it won’t,” she said. “I can almost guarantee that whatever it is, it won’t be all right.”

• • •

LUCAS STARTED BACK DOWN to the car, still thinking it over. Rose Marie was probably right about the political stuff. Even if you were on the side of the Lord, the politics could taint you. Which created a specific problem: there was at least one man at the BCA who’d be invaluable to Lucas’s investigation—Del Capslock. Del had contacts everywhere, on both sides of the law, and knew the local porn industry inside out.

The problem was, Del depended on his BCA salary, and all the benefits, for his livelihood. He had a wife and kid, and was probably fifteen years from retirement. Everybody in the BCA knew that he and Lucas had a special relationship, but that was okay . . . as long as Lucas didn’t drag him down.

Lucas didn’t particularly worry about himself. Back in the nineties, he’d been kicked out of the Minneapolis Police Department and had gone looking for something to do. He’d long had a mildly profitable sideline as a designer of pen-and-paper role-playing games, which had gone back to his days at the university. After he left the MPD, he’d gotten together with a computer guy from the university’s Institute of Technology. Together they created a piece of software that could be plugged into 911 computer systems, to run simulations of high-stress law-enforcement problems.

Davenport Simulations—the company still existed, though he no longer had a part of it—had done very well through the nineties, and even better after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Instead of one simulation aimed at police departments, they now produced dozens of simulations for everything from bodyguard training to aircraft gunfight situations. When the management bought Lucas out, he walked away with enough money to last several lifetimes.

He was rich. Porter Smalls was rich. The governor was really rich, and for that matter, so was Porter Smalls’s opponent; even the volunteer who’d started the trouble was rich, or would be. Rich people all over the place; gunfight at the one-percent corral.

Anyway, he was good, whatever happened. If the Porter Smalls assignment turned into a political quagmire, he could always . . . putter in the garden.

Del couldn’t.

Lucas popped the doors on the 911 and stood beside the open door for a minute, working through it.

Del was out of it. So were his other friends with the BCA.

Which left the question, who was in, and where would he get the intelligence he would need? He had to smile at the governor’s presumption: get it done, he’d said, in a day or two, and keep it absolutely private. He didn’t care how, or who, or what. He just expected it to be done, and probably wouldn’t even think about it again until Lucas called him.

CHAPTER 3

Lucas decided to go right to the heart of the problem and start with Porter Smalls. He called the number given him by Mitford, and was invited over. Smalls lived forty-five minutes from downtown St. Paul, on the east side of Lake Minnetonka.

His house was a glass-and-stone mid-century, built atop what might have been an Indian burial mound, though the land was far too expensive for anyone to look into that possibility. In any case, the house was raised slightly above the lake, with a grassy backyard, spotted with old oak and linden trees.

Lucas was met at the door by a young woman who said she was Smalls’s daughter, Monica. “Dad’s up on the sunporch,” she said. “This way.”

Lucas followed her through a quiet living room and down a hall, then up a narrow, twisting stairway. Lucas noted, purely as a matter of verifying previous information, that she was both big-titted and big-assed, as well as blond, so Henderson’s description of Smalls’s sexual preferences were showing some genetic support.

At the top of the stairs, she said, “Dad’s out there,” nodding toward an open door, and asked if Lucas would like something to drink.

Lucas said, “Anything cold and diet?”

“Diet Coke,” she said.

“Excellent.”

“Is Mrs. Smalls around?” Lucas asked.

“If by ‘around’ you mean the Minneapolis loft district with her Lithuanian lover, then yes.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t have asked,” Lucas said.

“No, that’s all right,” she said cheerfully. “It’s been in the papers.”

• • •

SMALLS WAS SITTING ON a draftsman’s stool on the open sunporch, looking out over the lake through a four-foot-long brass telescope. He was wearing faded jeans and an olive-drab, long-sleeved linen shirt under an open wool vest.

Lucas thought he looked less like a right-wing politician than like a professor of economics, maybe, or a poet. He was a small man, five-seven or five-eight, slender—no more than a hundred and fifty pounds—and tough-looking, like an aging French bicycle racer. He wore his white hair long, with tortoiseshell glasses over crystalline blue eyes.

Lucas knocked on the doorjamb and said, “Hello,” and Smalls turned and said, “There you are,” and stood to shake Lucas’s hand. “Elmer said you’d be coming around.”

“You want me?” Lucas asked.

“I’ll take anything I can get, at this point,” Smalls said. He pointed at a couple of wooden deck chairs, and they sat down, facing each other. Before going to the telescope, Smalls had apparently been reading newspapers, which were stacked around the feet of his chair. “What do you think? How fucked am I?”

Lucas thought about Weather and said, “My wife was watching TV this morning, as she was getting ready to go out, and the story came up, and she said, ‘Smalls is truly fucked.’”

Smalls nodded. “She may be right. She would be right, if I were guilty. . . . Your wife works?”

“She’s a surgeon,” Lucas said.

“And you made a couple of bucks in software,” Smalls said.

“Yes, I did. You’ve been looking me up?”

“Just what I can get through the Internet,” Smalls said. He reached down, picked up an iPad, flashed it at Lucas, dropped it again on the pile of paper. “You think you can do me any good?”

“If I proved you were innocent, would it do you any good?” Lucas asked.

Smalls considered for a moment, staring over the lake, pulling at his lower lip. Then he looked up and said, “Have to be fast. Nine days to the election. If you don’t find anything before the weekend, I couldn’t get the word out quickly enough to make a difference. I need to be at the top of the Sunday paper, at the latest. My opponent has more money than Jesus, Mary, and Joseph put together, along with a body that . . . never mind. Of course, even if I lose, it’d be nice if I weren’t indicted and sent to prison. But I don’t want to lose. I don’t deserve to lose, because I’m being framed.”