John Sandford - Silken Prey

Quintana: “Even if she was, what would he do about it?”

Tubbs: “Put her ass on a plane to Austin, Texas. He’s got a buddy in the Texas legislature who’ll give her a job, and his old lady won’t be able to find her.”

Quintana: “Why doesn’t he do that anyway?”

Tubbs: “Because it’ll cost an arm and a leg. If she’s not the one, he won’t do it. The other thing is, he doesn’t want to ask the girl, because he’s afraid it’ll change things. And she might decide to ask for a little cash herself. If she’s the one. All he wants to do is know .”

Lucas asked, “You gave him the file?”

Quintana shook his head. “No. All I did was sit at the computer and call up the file. I knew what he was talking about, the girl, because it went back to Tom Morgan’s case three years ago.

“I showed him the picture, and he asked me to enlarge it, the best shot of her face. He looked at it and then he said, “Close, but no cigar. She’s not the one.”

Marion: “Then what?”

“I closed the file and he said thanks, and he went away.”

Marion: “Didn’t give you a little schmear?”

“No, no. Nothing like that,” Quintana said. “Look, this was a fast favor for a guy. Didn’t look at the porn, didn’t do any of that. A favor for a guy big in the legislature. You know how that works.”

“You believed all that bullshit?” Marion asked.

Quintana shook his head: “It looks bad now, but yeah, I believed him. Like I said, I knew him forever.”

Lucas said, “If you didn’t give him the file, how’d he get it?”

Quintana shook his head. “I don’t know for sure. But I’ve got my suspicions.”

“Like what?”

“He was standing behind me when I signed on,” Quintana said. “He might have seen my password . . . it’s . . . this sounds even stupider . . . it’s ‘yquintz.’ And I mean, he was right there. Once you’ve got the password, you can get in even from outside, if you need to. After I signed on, I looked up the file. He saw that, too.”

Marion said, “Unbelievable.”

Quintana ran his hands through his hair. “Yeah, I know. Oldest goddamn trick in the book,” Quintana said. “I never saw it. I mean, all he wanted to do was look at one face.”

Lucas mostly didn’t believe it, but was willing to buy it if he got anything that would aim him at Carver and Dannon. He asked, “What was this information you got?”

“Yesterday I was working over on Upton—we think there might be a high-ticket whorehouse over there, don’t tell anybody. Anyway, I was sitting in my car taking down tag numbers and taking pictures of these girls coming and going, and I get this phone call. The guy says that he bought the pornography file from Tubbs and Tubbs said he got it from me. I say, ‘That’s bullshit, I didn’t give him anything.’

“The guy says, ‘Well, he said he got it from you, and I think he might have told a woman over in Smalls’s office. And he might’ve told her about me, too. She’s the one who put the porn in. Nobody knows who I am, but somebody needs to go over and talk to this woman, this Helen Roman. Like a cop. Needs to ask her where the porn came from, and where it went.’

“I said, ‘I didn’t give anybody any porn. Who is this, anyway?’

“He said, ‘A guy who doesn’t like Porter Smalls.’

“I said, ‘I don’t like Porter Smalls either, but I didn’t give a thing to Tubbs.’

“The guy says, ‘Look, all you have to do is check with her.’

“I say, ‘Not me.’

“Then the guy hangs up,” Quintana said.

“And you’ve got the phone number,” Lucas said.

Quintana nodded: “I do.” He dug in his pocket and handed Lucas a slip of notepaper, with a phone number on it.

Lucas took the paper, and Marion said, “I’m gonna need that.”

Lucas nodded, took out a pen and a pocket notebook, and wrote the number down, and passed the original slip back to Marion. “I’m going to run down the number and look at the activity on that phone,” Lucas said. “If this is real, it could be a serious break.”

“I just hope I get credit for it,” Quintana said.

Meers said, “That’s pretty much the story. A simple request from a friend, to help out a guy in the legislature. If you go after a guy for that, we wouldn’t have a police department left.”

Marion said, “You know the problem, though: it’s not important unless it becomes important. Ray’s now all tangled up in what could be a double murder case. One way or another . . .”

Quintana said, “Come on. If I hadn’t told you, you’d never have found out. I could’ve lied. Instead, I came right in, as soon as I worked it out. I even gave you what Lucas said could be a break. A serious break.”

Marion looked at Lucas and asked, “What’s the BCA think?”

Lucas said, “This is all on you guys. Do what’s best: I don’t care. I just want the phone number.” He looked at Quintana: “Where’s the phone they called you on?”

“In my pocket.” He fished it out: an iPhone.

“I’m going to need to take it with me. I need to take it to our lab, we’ll get in touch with your . . . Who’s your service provider?”

“Verizon.”

“We’ll get in touch with Verizon, and when we know where our targets are, we’re going to want you to call them,” Lucas said.

Quintana shook his head. “You can take my phone, but these guys are way too smart to be using their own phone. I’d give you ten to one that it’s a disposable.”

“That’s why we need to catch them with it. We’ll be monitoring the call and the location it comes from,” Lucas said. “I’ll probably get back to you tonight. Where you gonna be?”

“Without my cell . . . I’ll probably go home if Buck is done talking to me. I’ve got a landline there.”

“Okay. You sit there, wait for my call,” Lucas said. “You go along with all of this, I’ll testify on your side in any kind of proceedings.”

Quintana nodded. “I’ll do that.”

He passed Lucas his cell phone, and Lucas said, “If you’ll all excuse me . . . I gotta run.”

As he headed for the door, Quintana called, “You believe me, right?”

Lucas paused at the door, then said, “No, not the whole story. Not even very much of it. But I believe the phone number.”

• • •

THEN HE HAD a lot to do. From his car, as he headed back across town to the BCA, he called Jenkins and told him to find Shrake: “I know it’s Sunday, but I need you to babysit some people for me. Only until tonight. I need to know where they are, all the time.”

“How complicated is this going to be?”

“Not complicated. You have to tag a campaign caravan.” He told Jenkins to find out where Taryn Grant was going to be, described Dannon and Carver. “It’s those two guys you’ve got to stay with. I want you to go separately so if they split up, you can follow both of them. But they should stick pretty close to Grant for as long as I need you to watch them.”

“Good enough,” Jenkins said.

• • •

LUCAS HAD TO MAKE some calls, first to the director, and then the deputy director, and between them they found a technician who was willing to come in and set up the phone monitoring system. When he got there, the tech came up to Lucas’s office and said, “We don’t usually need a subpoena for Verizon, if we just want a location, but I’ll check with them first. That’s not usually a problem, though.”

“Then get it going,” Lucas said.

He was a little cranked: if this worked out, there’d be somebody in the bag by midnight. He called Jenkins: “Where are you guys?”

“Grant’s up in Anoka. We’re on the way. Then she’s going to St. Cloud for an eight-o’clock appearance and then back home. Probably back in the Cities between ten and midnight.”