Silken Prey (3 page)

“Even smart people—”

“Oh, horseshit,” the governor said, waving him off.

“Suicidal . . .”

“Porter goes to the emergency room if the barber cuts his hair too short,” the governor said. “He wants and expects to live forever, preferably with a big-titted, big-assed blonde sitting on his face.”

Lucas thought for a moment, then conceded the point: “That thing about the volunteer—it worries me.”

“It should,” the governor said. He kicked his feet off the desktop and said, “I want you to look into this, Lucas. But quietly. I don’t want to disturb anybody without . . . without there being something worthwhile to disturb them with.”

“One more question,” Lucas said. “This guy is a major pain in your party’s ass. Why . . . ?”

“Because it’s the right thing to do, mostly,” the governor said. “There’s something else, too. This sort of shit is going too far. Way too far. Most Republicans aren’t nuts. They’re perfectly good people. So are most of us Democrats. But this kind of thing, if it’s deliberate—it’s a threat to everybody. All you have to do is
say
‘kiddie porn’ and a guy’s career is over. Doesn’t make any difference what he’s done, what his character is like, how hard he’s worked, it doesn’t even matter if there’s proof—once it gets out in the media, they’ll repeat it endlessly, and there’s no calling it back. You could have the Archbishop of Canterbury go on TV tomorrow and say he has absolute proof that Porter Smalls is innocent, and fifty other bloggers would be sneering at him in two minutes and CNN would be calling the bishop a liar. So we’re talking about dangerous, immoral, antidemocratic stuff.”

“You’re saying the media is dangerous, immoral, and antidemocratic?”

“Well . . . yes,” Henderson said. “They don’t recognize it in themselves, but they’re basically criminals. In the classic sense of that word.”

“All right,” Lucas said.

“And, of course, there’s the other thing,” the governor said. “The less righteous thing.”

Lucas said, “Uh-oh.”

Mitford said, “We’re already hearing rumors that he was framed. That there were hints
before
anyone found the porn that something was coming on Smalls. If it turns out that some overzealous young Democratic hacker did it, if this is a campaign dirty trick . . . then there could be a lot more trouble. If that’s what happened, we need to know it first. The election’s too close to be screwing around.”

The governor added, “But the preliminary investigation has to be quiet. Invisible might be a better word.”

Mitford said, “Totally quiet. That fuckin’ tool over in the attorney general’s office wants to move into this office. He thinks prosecuting Smalls is one way to do it. If he finds out that you’re digging around, he’ll paper your ass so fast you’d think you were a new country kitchen. You’ll be working for him.”

“You don’t sound as
offended
as the governor,” Lucas said to Mitford. “About Smalls being framed.”

“I’m paid to keep my eye on the ball, so that’s what I do,” Mitford said. “Short term, there’s no benefit to us, saving an asshole like Smalls. If we get a reward, it’s gonna have to be in heaven, because we sure as shit won’t get it now. If the party found out we were trying to help Smalls, then . . . well, you know, we’re thinking about the vice presidency. On the other hand, if
we
did this, meaning
we
in the all-inclusive sense, and if that comes out, say, the Friday before the election . . .”

“I can’t afford to lose the state House,” Henderson said. He wasn’t running. He still had two years to go on his second term.

“But Smalls is in the U.S. Senate,” Lucas said. “How could that affect the state House?”

“Because our majority is too narrow. If it turns out that we tried to sabotage a U.S. Senate race, with child porn, Smalls will eat us alive in the last few days before the election. He could pump up the Republican turnout just enough that we could lose those extra three or four close-run seats. If we lose the House, and the Senate stays Republican, which it will, they’ll spend the next two years dreaming up ways to embarrass me.”

“We can’t have that,” Mitford said. “I mean, really.”

“But. If Smalls owes us, even under the rose, he’ll pay up,” the governor said. “He’s that kind of guy. He won’t go after us . . . if he owes us.”

•   •   •

“A
LL RIGHT,”
L
UCAS SAID.
He stood up. “I’ll do it.”

“Excellent,” the governor said. “Call me every day.”

“But what if he did it?” Lucas asked.

“He didn’t,” the governor said.

Lucas said, “I’m going to tell Rose Marie about it. I can’t . . . not do that.” Rose Marie was the public safety commissioner and an old friend.

The governor was exasperated: “Jesus Christ, Lucas . . .”

“I can’t not do that,” Lucas insisted.

The governor threw up his hands. “All right. When you tell her, you tell her to call me. I’ll need . . . Wait. Hell no. I’ll call her right now. You get going on this. I’d like to get something pretty definitive in, say, mmm, three days. Two would be better.”

“Man . . .”

“Go.” Henderson waved him away.

•   •   •

R
OSE
M
ARIE
R
OUX HAD
been a cop, then a lawyer and prosecutor, then a state senator, then the Minneapolis chief of police, and finally, the commissioner of public safety under Henderson. She had jurisdiction over a number of law enforcement agencies, including the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. She viewed Lucas as both a friend and an effective tool for achieving her policy goals, not all of them involving crime-fighting. She’d gotten him his job at the BCA.

Rose Marie’s husband was ten years older than she was, and when he’d retired, he talked her into dumping the suburban Minneapolis house in favor of a sprawling co-op apartment in downtown St. Paul. Lucas gave the governor a few minutes to talk to her, and then, as he walked back to his car, called her himself.

“You at home?”

“Yeah, come on down. I’ll buzz you into the garage.”

•   •   •

L
UCAS HAD BEEN TO
the apartment often enough that he knew the routine; buzzed into the garage, he parked in one of the visitors’ slots and took the elevator to the top floor. Rose Marie’s husband opened the door; he was holding the
Times
in one hand and a piece of jelly toast in the other. “She’s out on the deck,” he said.

“You raked the leaves off the deck yet?”

“Thank God for the penthouse—not a leaf to be seen,” he said.

Rose Marie, wrapped in a wool shawl, was sitting on a lounge chair, smoking a cigarette; nicotine gum, she said, was for pussies. She was a short woman, going to weight, with an ever-changing hair color. Lucas liked her a lot.

When Lucas stepped out on the deck, she said, “I appreciate what you did, bringing me into it. This will be interesting, all the way around. Although it has a downside, of course.”

She crushed the cigarette out on a ceramic saucer by the side of the chair. As Lucas sat down facing her, she asked, “How much do you like your job?”

“It’s okay. Been doing it for a while,” Lucas said.

“If this kind of thing happens too often, you’ll get pushed out,” Rose Marie said. “It’s inevitable.”

Lucas shrugged. “I do it because it’s interesting. This assignment’s interesting. If I wasn’t doing this, I’d be chasing chicken thieves in Black Duck.”

Rose Marie said, “I keep thinking about what I’m going to do when this job is over. If Elmer makes vice president, he’ll take care of both of us. If he doesn’t, then I’m unemployed, and you probably will be, too.”

“That’s a cheerful thought,” Lucas said.

“Gotta face facts,” Rose Marie said. “We’ve both had a good run. But I don’t feel like retiring, and you’re way too young to retire. We’re both financially fine, but what the fuck do we do? Become consultants? I don’t feel like running for anything.”

“I haven’t spent a lot of time worrying about it,” Lucas said.

“You should,” Rose Marie said. “Even if Elmer makes vice president, I’m not sure you’d want what he could get you. I’d be fine, because I’m basically a politician, I could work in D.C., or for his office here. But you . . . I don’t know what you’d do. I don’t think you’d want to wind up as some FBI functionary. Or Elmer’s valet.”

“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.”

•   •   •

L
UCAS 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.

L
ucas 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.”

•   •   •

S
MALLS 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.”

“The governor tells me you didn’t do it,” Lucas said.

“Of course I didn’t,” Smalls snapped, his glasses glittering in the sun. “For one thing, I’m not damn fool enough to leave a bunch of kiddie porn on an office computer, with all kinds of people walking in and out. The idea that I’d do that . . . that’s
insulting.
”

“We talked about that,” Lucas said. “The governor and I.”

“And that rattlesnake Mitford, no doubt,” Smalls said.

Monica came out with a bottle of Diet Coke and a glass with ice. She’d overheard the last part of the conversation, and said, “I promise you, Mr. Davenport, Dad’s
not
a damn fool.”

Lucas poured some Coke, took a sip, said “Thanks” to Monica and asked Smalls, “What do you know about this volunteer? Has she got anything against you? Did you have any kind of personal involvement with her?”

“No. That’s another thing I’m not damn fool enough to do. Not since Clinton. If I were going to play around, there are lots of good-looking, smart, discreet adult women available. I really wouldn’t have a problem.”

“People sometimes get entangled—”

“Not me,” Smalls said. He started to say something more, but then looked up at his daughter and grinned and said, “Monica, could you get me a beer? Or wait, no. I don’t want a beer. This talk could get embarrassing, so . . . sweetie . . . could you just go away?”

“You sure you want to be by yourself, with a cop?” Monica asked.

“I think I can handle it,” Smalls said. She patted him on the shoulder and walked back into his house, and down the stairs. When she was gone, Smalls said, “She’s a lawyer, too. A pretty good one, actually.” They both thought about that for a second, then Smalls said, “Look: I’ve done some fooling around. Got caught, too. Not by the morality police. It was worse than that: the old lady walked in on me.”

“Ouch.”

“Twice. The last time, she had her lawyer with her.”

“Ahh . . .”

“So I
can
be a fool, but not the kind of damn fool I’d have to be if I were guilty of this kiddie porn stuff,” Smalls said. “I think before I jump. The women I’ve been involved with, they’re pretty good gals, for the most part. They knew what they were getting into, and so did I. That sort of thing, for a guy at my level, is okay. Elmer couldn’t get away with it, anymore, but I’m not quite as visible as the governor. The other thing is, political people are pretty social, and they knew what the situation was between Brenda and me. So, looking outside was considered okay, as long as it was discreet.”

“I get that,” Lucas said. “I guess.”

“But some things are not okay,” Smalls said. “Going after volunteers—the young ones—is not okay. A relationship with a lobbyist is not okay. I wouldn’t look at kiddie porn, even if I were bent that way, which I’m not. If I were interested in drugs, which I’m not, I wouldn’t snort cocaine or smoke pot around witnesses, at a party. I wouldn’t chisel money from my expense accounts. You know why I wouldn’t do any of that? Because I’m not stupid. I’m not stupid, and I’ve seen all that stuff done by people who were supposedly smart, and they got caught, and some of them even went to jail. If I were to do any of that, and get caught, I’d feel like an absolute moron. That’s one thing I won’t tolerate in myself. Moronic behavior.”

“All right,” Lucas said. “So this volunteer . . .”

“To tell you the truth . . .” Smalls was already shaking his head. “I believe her. I think she’s telling the truth.”

“Yes?”

“Yup. It sort of baffles me, but I believe her,” Smalls said. “I’m not a hundred percent sure of her, but mostly, I think somebody planted that porn on my computer. People are always going in and out of my office. I think somebody went in there, called it up, and walked back out. Then she walked in . . .”

“But how’d they know she’d toss the files on the keyboard?”

“How do we know this was the only time they tried it?” Smalls asked. “Maybe they did this ten times, just waiting for somebody to touch the keyboard. But the thing is, her story is too stupid. I keep coming back to stupidity, and whoever did this to me isn’t entirely stupid. But the way
she
says it happened, this volunteer, this girl . . . it’s too stupid. If
she’s
the one who did it, I’d think she would have made up a better story.”

Lucas shook his head. “Unless your office is a lot more public than I think it is—”

Smalls held up a hand: “Stop right there. Wrong thinking. The thing is, it
is
public,” he said. “It’s a temporary campaign office, full of rented chairs and desks and office equipment. I hardly ever go there, but technically, it’s mine. I have another office, the Senate office. In that office, my secretary would monitor people coming and going. Nobody would get in the private office without her knowing, and watching them every minute. There’s classified stuff in there. In the campaign office, there are staff people going in and out all the time.”

“You think a staff person might have been involved?” Lucas asked.

“Had to be. There are undoubtedly a couple of devoted Democrats around—just as . . . and this is off the record . . . just as there are a couple of pretty devoted Republicans over in Taryn Grant’s campaign staff.”

“Spies.”

“If you want to be rude about it,” Smalls said. “So you get a couple of young people as spies, and some of them are a little fanatical about their status, and about helping one party or the other win. So, yeah, somebody on the staff. That’s a good possibility. A probability.”

“The computer didn’t have any password protection?”

“Yes, of course it did. Want to know what it was? It was ‘Smallscampaign.’”

“Great.”

“Yeah.”

Lucas asked, “Do you know what happened to it? Your computer?”

“The St. Paul police have it,” Smalls said.

“You think you could get access to it?” Lucas asked.

“Maybe. Probably. I don’t know if I could get to the computer itself, but we should be able to get a duplicate of the hard drive, which would give you everything relevant,” Smalls said.

Lucas nodded. “Okay. You’re innocent, right?”

“Yes.”

“So: call your attorney,” Lucas said. “Today. Right now, on Sunday. Tell him that you want to duplicate the hard drive to start preparing a defense. Take it to court if you have to, but get the hard drive for me. If you have to go to court, you argue that you will be irreparably harmed, with only a week to the election, if you’re not allowed to see what you’re accused of. You’ll get it. When they give you access, call me, and I’ll send somebody down to monitor the copy process.”

“Somebody from your company?”

“No. It’ll be a computer expert named Ingrid Caroline Eccols—everybody calls her ICE, for her initials,” Lucas said. “She’s an independent contractor, and she knows this kind of thing, inside and out.”

“A hacker?”

“Not exactly,” Lucas said. “She does a little bit of everything. She’s worked for law enforcement agencies, from time to time, and the St. Paul crime lab folks know her. I think she may have worked on the other side, too. I do trust her, when she says she’ll take a job. The key thing is, when it comes to copying the drive, she won’t miss anything. There won’t be any games. She’ll get everything there is to get.”

“John Shelton is my attorney,” Smalls said. “I’ll get him going. You get this ICE.”

“Another thing: I need a list of everybody who works for and around the committee. Send it to my personal e-mail.” Lucas took out a business card and a pen, wrote his e-mail address on the back of it, and handed it to Smalls.

“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.”

•   •   •

A
LTHOUGH IT WAS
S
UNDAY,
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.”

•   •   •

L
UCAS 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.