John Sandford: Silken Prey

“I’ll do it this afternoon,” Smalls said.

“Do it right away,” Lucas said. “I need all the help I can get from you, or I’ll spend a lot of time sitting on my ass.”

“Let me tell you another little political thing,” Smalls said. “The Democrats have me right where they want me. My opponent is young, good-looking, about a hundred times richer than I am, and is running a good campaign. Her problem was, I was going to beat her by six points, 53 to 47 or thereabouts, before the child porn thing happened. She might have cut a point off that. Now, she’s going to take me down, probably 52 or 53 to 48 or 47. My core constituency will sit on its hands if they think I’m guilty of this child porn thing. I’m already hearing that.”

“I knew some of that,” Lucas said.

“But here’s the thing,” Smalls said, leaning toward Lucas: “The Democrats don’t need to get me indicted, or to be guilty. They just need the accusation out there, with the attorney general running around, looking under rocks. If I’m innocent, they’ll be perfectly happy to apologize for all of this, about an hour after I lose the election. ‘That really wasn’t right about old Porter Smalls. . . .’ So to do me any good, you pretty much have to find out what happened. Not just that I’m probably innocent. ‘Probably’ won’t cut it. We need to hang somebody, and in the next five days or so.”

Lucas didn’t say that his mission wasn’t to save Smalls’s career; he just said, “Okay.”

“Damn. I’ll tell you what, Davenport, you may have done the worst possible thing here,” Smalls said.

“Hmm?”

“Elmer says you’re really, really good. You’ve given me a little hope. Now I’ve got further to fall.”

• • •

ALTHOUGH IT WAS SUNDAY, Lucas decided to stop back at the BCA headquarters, on his way home. He walked through the mostly empty building up to his office, where he found an e-mail from Smalls, saying that he’d talked to his attorney, who would go after the hard drive that afternoon. He asked Lucas to put ICE in touch with the attorney. Lucas called ICE, who said she’d take the job, “though I don’t like working for a wing-nut.”

“You’re not working for a wing-nut,” Lucas said. “You’re working for democracy in America.”

“For two hundred dollars an hour. Let’s not forget that.”

• • •

LUCAS SPENT AN HOUR at BCA headquarters, looking at e-mailed reports on investigations that his people were running, but nothing was pressing. Del, Shrake, and Jenkins were trying to find a designer drug lab believed to be in the Anoka area, and Virgil Flowers was seeking the Ape-Man Rapist of Rochester. Lucas wrote notes to them all that he’d be working an individual op for a couple of weeks, but he’d be in touch daily.

While he was doing that, an e-mail came in from Smalls, saying that he wouldn’t have the list of campaign employees and volunteers until late in the day. Lucas then tried to call the young woman who’d discovered the porn, and was told by her mother that she was at a friend’s house at Cross Lake, and wouldn’t be back before midnight. Lucas arranged to meet her the next morning at her home in Edina.

That done, he made a call to the St. Paul cops, got shifted around to the home phone of a cop named Larry Whidden, of the narcotics and vice unit. Whidden was out in his backyard, scraping down the barbecue as an end-of-season chore. Lucas asked to see his investigative reports, and Whidden said, “As far as I’m concerned, you can look at everything we got, if the chief says okay. It’s pretty political, so I want to keep all the authorizations very clear.”

Lucas called the chief, who wanted to know why Lucas was interested. “Rose Marie asked me to take a look,” Lucas said. “To monitor it, more or less. No big deal, but she wants to stay informed.”

“Politics,” the chief said.

“Tell you what, Rick,” Lucas said, “how did you get appointed?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Politics,” Lucas said. “It is what it is.”

“Funny. Okay. But I’ll tell you what, this whole thing ranks really high on my badshitometer. If Smalls is guilty, he could still do a lot of damage thrashing around. If he’s innocent, he’s gonna be looking for revenge, and he’s in exactly the right spot to get it.”

“All the more reason for somebody like yourself to spread the responsibility around,” Lucas said.

“I’d already thought of that,” the chief said. “I’ll call Whidden.”

Whidden called Lucas five minutes later and said, “I can go in later and Xerox the book for you, but you’re gonna have to wait awhile. I got my in-laws coming over. Why don’t you come by at six? You want to look at the porn, I can have Jim Reynolds come in.”

• • •

SO LUCAS HAD RUN out of stuff to do. He tried to think about it for a while, but didn’t have enough material to think about. He called home, and nobody answered—they were still out shopping for superhero costumes for Sam. He left a message that he’d probably be home at seven o’clock. That done, he went out to a divorced guys’ matinee, to catch the Three Stooges movie he’d missed when it came by in the spring. The divorced guys were scattered around the theater as always, single guys with popcorn, carefully spaced apart from each other, emitting clouds of depression like smoke from eighties’ Volkswagen diesel.

Despite that, Lucas laughed at the movie from the moment a nun got poked in the eyes and fell on her ass; took him back to his childhood, with the ancient movies on the obscure TV channels. And Jesus, nuns getting poked in the eye? You’d have to have a heart of pure ice not to laugh at that.

• • •

HE WAS OUT OF the movie at five-thirty, called ahead to St. Paul, and at five-forty-five, he parked at the St. Paul Police Department, in the guest lot. He walked inside, had a friendly chat with the policewoman in the glass cage, and was buzzed through to the back, where he found Whidden leaning against the wall, sucking on a Tootsie Pop.

Whidden said, “This way,” and led him down to Vice, where he took a fat file off an unoccupied desk and said, “Copy of what we got. Want to look at the porn?”

“Maybe take a peek,” Lucas said.

He followed Whidden down to the lab, where Jim Reynolds, a very thin man in a cowboy shirt, was looking at a spreadsheet. He saw Lucas and Whidden, stood up and said, “Over here,” and to Lucas, “Thanks for the overtime.”

“No problem. Christmas is coming.”

Reynolds took them to a gray Dell desktop computer. “Smalls is getting a court order for a copy of the hard drive,” he told them. “It’ll be here first thing tomorrow.”

“He’s denying any knowledge,” Lucas said. “What do you think?”

“I’ve usually got an opinion,” Reynolds said. “But this thing is a little funky. I don’t know.”

“Funky, how?”

“The circumstances of the discovery,” Reynolds said. “When you get into it, you’ll see.”

Whidden said, “I’m sixty-five percent that he’s guilty. But, if I was on the jury . . . I don’t think I’d convict him.”

Reynolds brought up the porn file: the usual stuff, for kiddie porn: young boys and girls having sex with each other, young boys and girls with adults. Nothing new there, as kiddie porn went.

Lucas asked, “How much is there?”

“Several hundred individual images and thirty-eight video clips,” Reynolds said. “Some European—we’ve seen them before—and some, we don’t know where it comes from. We haven’t looked at it all, but what we’ve seen, it’s pretty bad stuff.”

“What about this volunteer, the whole thing about throwing some papers on the keyboard?” Lucas asked.