Silken Prey (7 page)

When Lucas finished with what he knew about Porter Smalls, Kidd said, “I need to see the hard drive.”

Lucas took it out of his jacket pocket and handed it to him.

Kidd said, “Mmm. How long did she have it before she gave it to you?”

“Half an hour,” Lucas said. “Maybe a little more.”

Kidd turned the drive in his hands, then said, “She could have done anything to it.”

“She didn’t mess with it,” Lucas said. “She’d understand the consequences.”

“Which would be?”

“She’d make an enemy out of me,” Lucas said. “She wouldn’t want that. And she knows what’s at stake here.”

Kidd thought for a couple seconds, then nodded, a quick jerk of the head. “Okay,” and then, “Come on back to the shop.”

Lucas asked, “So you’re in?”

“We’re in,” Kidd said.

•   •   •

K
IDD,
L
AUREN, AND
J
ACKSON
lived in the original oversized unit, which had a long living room overlooking the river and the Port of St. Paul, and a couple of bedrooms and bathrooms; and Kidd used the other two units as studio and computer work space. He still did some computer-related consulting, he said, as Lucas followed him back to the computer space, though ninety percent of his time was now spent painting.

Lucas stuck his head into the studio—Kidd had three landscapes under way—and then asked, “Lauren doesn’t work?”

“Not so much, anymore,” Kidd said. “Pretty much a full-time mom.”

“What’d she do when she was working?”

“Insurance adjuster,” Kidd said.

His computer desk was an old oaken library table, ten or twelve feet long, with a half-dozen computers scattered down its length. Three printers sat on an adjacent table, and a heap of cameras sat next to them. He said, “Let’s see what we’ve got here.”

•   •   •

L
UCAS CONSIDERED HIMSELF
computer literate in the sense that he could hook up computers and printers and Wi-Fi systems, and that he could use Microsoft Word, Excel, and Access, and Google and a few other programs; and he’d once owned a software company, though he had nothing to do with coding the software.

But he had no idea what Kidd was doing, other than whistling while he worked. Kidd started by plugging ICE’s hard drive into an unbranded desktop computer. He brought the system up, poked at some keys, looked at some numbers, then wandered across the workshop to a bin full of DVDs, flipped through them, chose one, brought it back, and loaded it into the computer.

“What’s that?” Lucas asked.

“It’s an inventory program. It searches for certain kinds of apps and . . . whoops. There we are.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. Let’s look at it.”

Kidd’s fingers rattled on his keyboard, and a program popped up in reader form. Lauren came in, looked at Lucas, and raised an eyebrow, and he shrugged. Lucas knew nothing about the program, except that it wasn’t very long.

After reading through it, Kidd said, “If this is what it looks like, you’re right—Smalls didn’t do it.”

It was too fast. Lucas was astonished: “What is it?”

“Watch.” Kidd pulled the DVD out of the computer, restarted the machine, and when it was up, rattled his fingers across the keyboard again. The screen instantly went blank.

“Good work,” Lauren said.

They looked at the blank screen for a moment, then Kidd reached out, picked up a computer manual, and dropped it on the keyboard. A pornographic picture popped up.

“Aw, that’s rotten,” Lauren said. “Kids.”

“That’s the file,” Lucas said. “How’d you do that?”

“Somebody wrote a little script—”

“A script?”

“Not even a program,” Kidd said. “Just a few lines of shell commands.” He paused. “How technical do you want this?”

“Just tell me what it does,” Lucas said.

“What it does is, it tells the computer, ‘If someone presses these keys all at the same time, show these photos.’ It’s more complicated than that, but it’s not . . . mmm . . . complex.”

“Show me.”

“Well, first, you have to get the script and the porn file—it’s actually a bunch of files, but they’re stored in a wrapper format—on the computer. That’s the tricky bit. You have to run the script once—just type the name or double-click it—and it installs itself so it starts on bootup.”

“Like a virus,” said Lucas.

“Not really. You have to do it intentionally. A virus would do it by itself. Anyway, if the script is running, it’s just waiting for you to press four keys: QW with one hand, and OP with the other. If you do that, it sends the porn file to the default photo viewer—that’s actually
called
Photo Viewer in this case. It also activates the screensaver. The next person who touches the keyboard or the mouse cancels the screensaver and,
presto
. Porn right in your face.”

Kidd held the four keys and the screen blacked out. “The porn is floating under there. If I hit anything to cancel it, the porn’s right there. But. If I hit the escape key, and only the escape key . . .”

He did it, and they were back at the Windows home screen. He tapped on the keyboard, and nothing more happened.

“What you have is a script that will take you right to the porn, blank the screen, and set it up for instant retrieval,” Kidd said. “But if you need to ditch the program, you hit the escape key—specifically the escape key and nothing else. I can think of no earthly reason to set that up, if you were just looking at the porn. The only reason to do it . . .”

“Would be to set up a booby trap,” Lucas finished. “But—wouldn’t any computer investigator find that? The script? I mean, as soon as that turned up . . .”

Kidd looked at him and said, “No.”

“No?”

“No, they wouldn’t find it. My tool here chased it down. The script itself is actually fairly well hidden. My tool found it because it’s not part of any standard Windows boot protocol,” he said. “Here’s another thought. Whoever did this, whoever wrote and installed this script, knows his or
her
way around coding. This is a very tight little piece of work. I don’t think it’s something a politician would write, unless he came out of the computer industry.”

“You said his or
her
. You italicized the
her
.”

“ICE could do it—she could write this in four minutes,” Kidd said.

Lucas thought about it for a second, then said, “Nah.”

“Okay.”

•   •   •

L
AUREN SAID, “
W
AIT A MINUTE.
You’re moving too fast. If this guy is like a . . . thrill freak . . . then he might get off looking at porn while there are other people across the desk. Then if he needed to dump it really fast, he could do it. One touch . . .”

Kidd shook his head. “I see what you’re saying, but it doesn’t feel like that to me. That feels backwards. He’s got this complicated four-key press to get the file up . . . but he doesn’t need to do that. If you know the file is there, you can bring it up fast enough. Just like any work file. But the script is designed to bring it up and simultaneously hide it. Why is that?”

Lucas and Lauren both shrugged, and Kidd said, “Because it was designed so that somebody could go into his office for a few seconds and bring it up as a booby trap.”

Kidd continued: “If he was only out for thrills, he’d probably just bring it up the regular way. No reason not to. Then he’d write the script so that
any key would kill it
. If he was getting his thrills by looking at it in his office, with other people present, and then somebody unexpectedly stepped behind his desk, he’d want to kill it with any key. Now, you kill it with the escape key. But if you needed to kill it in a big hurry, you wouldn’t want to have to reach out and hit the escape key—specifically the escape key—and nothing else, to kill it. You could fumble that.”

They all thought about that for a while, then Lauren said, “Maybe.”

“Find something else,” Lucas said, flicking his fingers at the computer.

“That’ll take a little longer,” Kidd said. “I suspected something like this script was there. Anything else . . . I’ll have to dig into the file.”

“How long will that take?”

“Dunno,” Kidd said.

“Gotta be fast,” Lucas said.

“I’ll make it a priority,” Kidd said.

•   •   •

“
T
HERE’S ONE OTHER THING,”
Kidd said. “Do you have any idea
how
this was put in there?”

“Not yet.”

“That’s gonna be a problem. If the machine is on the Internet, it’s theoretically vulnerable. Even if it’s on a local network. It’s not likely, but it’s possible. But if it’s not that, and it doesn’t look like it, you’ve got a different problem. To install this quickly, you’d have to know the machine’s password. Just to run something the first time, nowadays, you need to do that.”

“That’s not a problem. Apparently everybody in the office knew it. It’s ‘Smallscampaign.’”

Kidd shook his head: “People never learn.”

Lucas had another thought: “Can you tell me if the script was written at the same time the porn file was created?”

“Good thought,” Kidd said. He rattled the keys for a while, peered at the screen, and said, “Yeah. They were. And . . . uh-oh.”

“What?”

“Interesting.” He said it like computer freaks do when they’re preoccupied.

“What?”
Lucas asked.

He got a minute of silence, then:

“This is an unusual collection,” Kidd said. “When people create a porn collection, they almost always collect the pieces separately, because everybody’s tastes are different. But here, every file was downloaded all at once. That’s unusual.”

“But what does that mean?”

“Don’t know. It’s possible that he made the collection on a different computer, put it on a thumb drive, and carried it over to his office, but it’s also possible . . .”

“That somebody brought it to his office and loaded them all at once,” Lucas said.

“Man, it feels like something dirty happened here,” Kidd said. “This is just not right.”

“Keep pushing,” Lucas said.

“I’ll call you,” Kidd said.

Lucas took Smalls’s employee list out of his pocket. “When you get tired of checking out the porn thing, could you look up some people for me? I don’t know how to do this, and ICE said you’re really good at databases.”

•   •   •

W
HEN
L
UCAS LEFT
K
IDD’S
apartment, he called the governor: “We have some early indications that Smalls was set up.”

“Could you prove it in court?”

“No. Couldn’t prove he was set up, but we might get him acquitted . . . but that’s purely a negative thing. Doesn’t say he’s innocent.”

“Keep working,” Henderson said, and he was gone.

•   •   •

L
UCAS HEADED BACK
to the BCA building to look at the St. Paul homicide file on Tubbs. That done, he’d go over to Tubbs’s apartment. Then he’d harass the hell out of Kidd until he’d unwrapped the hard drive from top to bottom.

The case was getting interesting.

Eight days to the election, and counting.

T
he St. Paul file on the Tubbs disappearance didn’t quite convince Lucas that Tubbs had been murdered, but he thought it probable. The physical evidence was nonexistent, and the circumstantial evidence ambiguous, although the longer Tubbs remained missing, the more likely it was that he was dead.

The circumstantial evidence included the fact that Tubbs called his mother on an almost daily basis, and hadn’t called her since he disappeared; that his credit cards hadn’t been used, and that he used the cards for even the most minor purchases, including daily bagel breakfasts at a Bruegger’s bagel bakery on Grand Avenue; and that he’d missed a number of appointments that would have been important to him.

On the other hand, he’d disappeared once before, so completely that he’d made the newspapers. Ten years earlier, he’d flown to Cancún for a wedding, intending to come back two days later. Instead, he’d apparently gone on an alcoholic bender and had not surfaced for a week. Before he showed up, it had been widely speculated that he’d gone swimming alone and had been eaten by a shark.

He’d never disappeared again, and after that alcoholic episode, he’d signed up with Alcoholics Anonymous. Abstinence only lasted a few weeks before he’d started drinking again, but he’d controlled it, as far as anyone knew.

Still, there was the possibility that he was facedown in a motel room somewhere.

Lucas didn’t believe that, but it was possible.

•   •   •

W
HEN HE’D FINISHED READING
the file, Lucas put on his jacket, got his keys, stopped at a candy machine for a pack of Oreos, then drove south to University Avenue, and over to Tubbs’s apartment building.

He’d just found a parking spot when his cell phone rang. He looked at the screen: Kidd.

“Yeah?”

“How bad do you cops hate Smalls?” Kidd asked.

“I don’t hate him at all,” Lucas said. “I didn’t vote for him, but there was nothing personal about it.”

Kidd said, “When I started looking him up, I found out that he doesn’t like public employee unions. Any public employee unions, including police unions. He wants to outlaw them. He debated the head of the Minneapolis union on public television, the
Almanac
program.”

“He’s a right-winger,” Lucas said. “This is a surprise?”

“No, what’s a surprise is, I think the porn file might have come out of a police department,” Kidd said.

Lucas wasn’t sure he’d heard that right: “What are you talking about?”

“A part of it may have come out of evidentiary files. There’s some text with most of the photos, the usual pedophile bullshit. Then there’s one says, ‘Left to right, unknown adult male, unknown adult male, Mark James Trebuchet, thirteen, unknown female, Sandra Mae Otis, fifteen.’ That’s the only one with text, but there are about five photos related to that one. I looked them up, those kids—I had to do a little excavating in the juvenile files—and found out that both of them were involved in a prostitution ring busted three years ago by the Minneapolis cops. I assume evidentiary photos wouldn’t just be turned loose on the Internet.”

“Ah, fuck me,” Lucas said.

“I thought you’d be pleased,” Kidd said.

“Fuck me. I gotta think about this,” Lucas said. “If anybody—anybody—got wind of this, the whole goddamn state would blow up.”

“No, it wouldn’t. The whole goddamn media-political complex would get its knickers in a twist, and then, after a lot of screaming and slander, life would go on,” Kidd said. “You gotta keep some perspective.”

“I’ll tell you something, Kidd—that might be true if you’re an artist,” Lucas said. “But if you’re a cop, what you see is endless finger-pointing, investigative commissions, legislative inquiries, accusations of obstruction of justice, perjury . . .”

“. . . misfeasance with a corncob . . .”

“Yeah, go ahead and laugh,” Lucas said. “Listen, keep working this. You think the Smalls file came out of Minneapolis?”

“I have no idea—but those two kids were involved with Minneapolis police. I could dig out the complete juvenile files, if you need them.”

“Do that. Uh, how do you do that? I thought they were sealed.”

Kidd slid past the question: “Oh, you know. Anyway, what I can’t figure out is why the photos of these kids would be inserted in the middle of a child-porn file . . . unless maybe the cops got the file when they busted the prostitution ring. And then annotated it? I don’t know, that sounds weird.”

Lucas thought for a moment, then asked, “This girl in the picture, Sandra, you said she was fifteen? And this was three years ago?”

“Sandra Mae Otis, and yeah, the caption says she was fifteen,” Kidd said.

“Huh. Look, I’m in my car. Are you in a place where you could look up her birth date? Like in the DMV files? See if she’s eighteen yet?”

“Wait one,” Kidd said. Lucas heard his keyboard rattling, and ten seconds later Kidd said, “She’s eighteen . . . as of last March. March tenth.”

“What’s her address?”

Kidd read it off, then said, “I’m checking that address on a satellite photo. . . . Hold on a second . . . it looks like a trailer park.”

“I know the place,” Lucas said. Then, “All right. I don’t know what access you have to Minneapolis police files, and I won’t ask, but if you should stumble over what looks like the Smalls file . . . let me know.”

“I’ll do that,” Kidd said. “Why was Sandra’s age important?”

“Think about it for one second,” Lucas said.

Kidd thought about it for one second, then said, “Ah. She’s an adult now. You can twist her arm until it falls off, and nobody can tell you to quit.”

“Perzactly,” Lucas said. “And that’s what I’m going to do . . . if that’s what it takes.”

•   •   •

T
UBBS LIVED IN A
prosperous-looking, two-story redbrick apartment building, set up above the street. Still thinking about the porn file, Lucas let himself in with the keys he’d gotten from Morris, skipped the elevator for a flight of carpeted stairs, and let himself into Tubbs’s apartment. The living room and bedroom were acceptably neat, for a bachelor who lived alone, and smelled faintly of food that was made in cans and cooked in pots, and also of scented candles. The office was a mess, with stacks of paper everywhere.

Lucas spent only a few minutes in the living room, bedroom, and the two bathrooms, because they’d have been gone through by St. Paul detectives and the crime-scene crew, and they wouldn’t have missed anything significant. The office would be where the action was at, because Lucas knew something the St. Paul cops hadn’t known: a possible connection to the Smalls problem.

St. Paul had taken out Tubbs’s computers, so there wasn’t anything to work with but paper. He skipped everything that looked like a report, and started shuffling through individual pieces of paper.

A half hour in, he found a Republican Senate campaign schedule, a half-dozen sheets stapled at the corner and folded in thirds—the right size to be stuck in the breast pocket of a sport coat. The outside sheet was crumpled and then resmoothed, and the whole pack of paper had been folded and refolded, so Tubbs had carried it for a while. There was no equivalent schedule for the Democrats, although Tubbs had been one.

Lucas carried the schedule to a window for the better light and peered at the sheets: there were penciled tick marks against a half-dozen scheduled appearances by Smalls. Interesting, but not definitive. Tubbs had been following Smalls’s campaign.

He called Smalls:

“What was your relationship with Bob Tubbs?”

“Tubbs?” Smalls asked. “What’re you doing?”

“Trying to figure out why he was tracking your campaign.”

“Tracking . . . Well, I don’t think you could draw any conclusions from that,” Smalls said. “That’s what he did for a living.”

Lucas read off the list of the appearances Tubbs had been tracking. “Any reason why he’d pick those four?”

After a moment of silence, Smalls said, “The only thing I can think of is that I was out of town on all of them.”

“Of course,” Lucas said. He should have seen it.

“My God, Davenport, the papers say Tubbs has disappeared,” Smalls said. “What does this have to do with the porn thing?”

“I don’t know—but I was told that he went through your campaign office from time to time,” Lucas said.

“Not while I was there,” Smalls said. “But, you know . . . political people hang out.”

“What about Tubbs? Did he hate you?”

“Oh, not really. We didn’t particularly care for each other,” Smalls said. “He was pretty much a standard Democrat operator. He also lobbied some, so he had to suck up to Republicans as well. He was just one of those guys doing a little here, a little there. He was supposedly a bagman for one of our less revered St. Paul state senators. Don’t know if that’s true or not, but I suspect it was.”

“Did he do dirty tricks? Could he have come up with this porn idea?”

“Well, you know, yeah, probably,” Smalls said. “He’d do opposition research, try to find a picture of you picking your nose, or waving your arm so that if it was cropped right, you looked like you were doing a Hitler salute.”

They talked for a few more minutes, and when Lucas got off the phone, he started taking the apartment apart. It hadn’t occurred to him until Smalls mentioned the possibility that Tubbs had been a bagman, and that he might have been involved in dirty tricks, but the fact was, nothing the least bit discreditable had been found in the apartment by either the St. Paul cops or the crime-scene people. No porn, no cash . . . and looking around, Lucas hadn’t found any employment contracts, no car titles, no leases, no legal papers of any kind.

Tubbs might well have a safe-deposit box somewhere, but Lucas thought there was a good chance that he’d have a hidey-hole somewhere in the apartment, somewhere he could get at important papers quickly. After a quick survey, in which he didn’t spot anything in particular, he unplugged a lamp and carried it around the apartment, testing all the outlets. Fake electric outlets, though opening to small caches, were both innocuous-looking and easy to get at. In this case, all the outlets worked.

He rapped on the wooden floor and got a hard return: the building was a steel-reinforced concrete structure, so there were no holes in either the floor or the ceiling, which looked like genuine plaster. An access panel on the back wall of the bathroom looked promising, because it appeared to have been removed a few times—probably at least once by the crime-scene crew. He found a screwdriver in a tool kit that he’d seen in the kitchen, and removed the panel, and found sewer pipes and the usual inter-wall dust and grime. He put the panel back on and moved to the closets, checking for fake side panels.

Lucas had designed his own home, and worked daily with the contractor who built it, almost inch by inch. He was standing in a closet when he thought,
Sewer pipes?
He went back to the bathroom and took the panel off again. Two white six-inch PVC sewer pipes were coming down from above—but Tubbs’s apartment was on the second floor of a two-story building. Where were the pipes coming from? Couldn’t be Tubbs’s own bathroom because, unless there are big pumps involved, sewage flows
down
,
not up.

He sat on the toilet seat, looking at the two large pipes, and it occurred to him that the access panel didn’t give access to anything. You couldn’t do anything except look at the pipes. He reached out and shook one of them: solid. Shook the other: also solid.

But when he tried twisting one of them, it turned, and quite easily.

•   •   •

T
HE PIPES WERE ABOUT
fourteen inches long, with screw-in caps. He unscrewed the cap on the first pipe, and there it all was: the personal papers that had been missing, along with a gun—an old revolver with fake pearl stocks—and three thumb drives. The second pipe contained more paper, all curled to fit in the pipe, the kind of thing that Lucas might have been looking at in a corruption investigation. There were tax records, testimony clipped from lawsuits, bills of sale, corporate records, and $23,000 in stacks of fifty-dollar bills, held together by rubber bands.

He put back the gun and all the personal papers, and the money. He took everything else, and called Kidd.

“I’ve got three thumb drives and I need a quick survey, just to find out what’s on them.”

“How big are they?” Kidd asked.

Lucas looked at the drives and said, “Two two-gig, one four-gig.”

“You could put the equivalent of several thousand books on those things, so the survey might not be quick,” Kidd said.

“I just need an idea—and I need to know if that porn file is on one of them,” Lucas said. “I doubt that there are several thousand books on them.”

“Well, shoot, look . . . I guess. We could check for the porn fairly quickly. Come over in an hour. I’ll put a little search program together.”

“Would two or three hours be better? I’ve got something else I could do.”

“Two hours would be better,” Kidd said. “We’re expecting some guests and I’m in the kitchen, being a scullery maid.”

“See you then: two hours.”

Lucas put the pipes back together and screwed the panel back on, walked back to the car, and headed north up I-35.

•   •   •

S
ANDRA
M
AE
O
TIS LIVED
in a manufactured home in a manufactured home park off I-494 north of St. Paul. She also ran an illegal daycare center.

Otis was sitting on the stoop smoking when Lucas pulled into the driveway: she had bleached-blond hair, black eyebrows, and small metallic eyes like the buttons on 501 jeans. She regarded him with a certain resignation as he got out of the car, flicked the butt-end of the smoke off into the weeds, turned and shouted, “Carl, knock it the fuck off,” and looked back at Lucas.

As Lucas walked up, a little boy, maybe three, dressed in a Kool-Aid-spotted T-shirt and shorts, and crying, came out and said, “Carl hit me, really hard.”

Otis said, “I know, Spud, we’ll get him later. You go on back in there and tell him that if he hits you again, I’ll put him in the garbage can and let you beat on it.” Back to Lucas: “How long have cops been driving Porsches?”