Silken Prey (8 page)

“Personal car,” Lucas said. The musky odor of weed hung around her head.

She looked at him for a minute, then said, “So give me some money if you’re so rich.”

Lucas opened his mouth to say something when another small boy, a couple years older than the first, came out crying, rubbing an eye with his fist, and said, “Spud says you’re gonna put me in the garbage can again.”

“Yeah, well, don’t hit him,” Otis told the kid.

The kid said, “Sometimes Spud really pisses me off.”

“But don’t hit him,” Otis said. “You see this guy? He’s a cop and he’s got a big gun. If you hit Spud again, he’s going to shoot you.”

The kid stepped back, his mouth open in fear. Lucas blurted, “No, I won’t.”

But the kid backed away, still scared, and vanished inside. Otis said, “So what do you want? I’m not responsible for Dick’s debts. We’re all over with.”

Lucas looked around for something to sit on: the stoop would never touch the seat of his Salvatore Ferragamo slacks. There was nothing, so he stood, looming over her. “Three years ago, you were picked up and taken to juvie court as part of a prostitution ring that was busted over in Minneapolis.”

“That’s juvenile and it doesn’t count,” Otis said.

“It does count, because it’s probably messed up your head, but that’s not exactly what I want to talk about,” Lucas said. “Sometime in there, when these people were running you, they took pictures of you and Mark Trebuchet and three adults in a sex thing. Did they sell those pictures?”

“I don’t know if they had time, before they were busted,” Otis said. “They were busted, like, two days after the photo shoot. I think the photographer bragged to the wrong guy about it.”

“Now, who was this? Who’s ‘they’?” Lucas asked.

“The Pattersons. Irma and Bjorn.”

“The Pattersons ran the business?”

“Yeah. They’re doing fifteen years. They got twelve to go. And if you’re a cop, how come you didn’t know that?”

“Because I’m operating off a telephone,” Lucas said. “Our guys just found the pictures . . . but the pictures were in court? You, and the two men and the woman and Mark?”

“Yup.”

“Did the cops get them off the Internet? The evidence photos?”

“I don’t think so. The Internet was already getting too dangerous, with cops all over the place. The Pattersons were really scared about that, telling their clients to stay away from the ’net. They mostly printed them out and sent them around that way,” Otis said. “They said they were for my
portfolio
. They said I was going to be a movie star. Like that was going to happen, the big fat liars.”

“So what happened in court?”

“Well, I had to testify about what we did. The sex and all. And about the pictures. They wanted us to identify the adults, but, you know, we didn’t know who they were,” she said. “I’d seen them around, but I didn’t know their names. I think they took off when the Pattersons got busted.”

“Were there a lot of other pictures put in at the same time? In court? Of you?”

She frowned. “No. When the Pattersons took the pictures, they took a lot of them. I can remember that flash going off over and over and really frying my eyeballs. And this guy I was blowing, he had like a soft-on all the time, I had to keep pumping him up. But the cops had, I don’t know, four or five pictures. Or six or seven. Like that. I think all they had were like these paper pictures, and they took them right off the Pattersons’ desk.”

A little girl, maybe Spud’s sister, came out of the house and looked at Lucas and then at Otis and said, “I pooped.”

“Ah, Jesus Christ, you little shit machine,” Otis said. “All right. You go back in, and I’ll come and change you.”

The girl went back in and Otis asked, “You done?”

“Yeah, but don’t go anywhere, okay?” Lucas said.

“Where in the fuck would I go?” Otis asked. “I’m living in an old fuckin’ trailer. My next stop is a park bench.”

Lucas turned away, then back and said, “This place can’t be licensed.”

“Are you kidding me?” she asked. “I’m working for minimum-wage dumbasses who either leave the kids with me or lock them in a car. I’m all they can afford, and I’m better than a car. Maybe.”

Lucas said, “All right, but don’t put Carl in the garbage can anymore, okay?”

“Carl gets what Carl deserves,” she said. “But they all like chocolate ice cream. I could get some for tomorrow, Porsche cop, if I had an extra twenty bucks.”

“How many kids are in there?”

“Seven,” she said. “Unless one of them has killed another one.”

Lucas took a twenty out of his wallet. “Get them the ice cream,” he said. “You spend it on dope, I’ll put you in something worse than a garbage can.”

•   •   •

B
ACK DOWN
I
-35 TO
Kidd’s place.

Lauren came to the door, said, “Hi,” and then, as Lucas followed her inside, said, “We’ve got a couple of friends staying with us for a few days, with their kids. It could be a little noisy.”

“I just need Kidd to take a look and give me an estimate on what’s inside these things,” Lucas said, showing her the thumb drives.

Kidd was sitting in the front room with a black couple, and Kidd said, “Hey, Lucas,” and to the couple, “This is Lucas Davenport, he’s a cop. Lucas, John and Marvel Smith, from down in Longstreet, Arkansas. John’s a sculptor, Marvel’s a politician. John does some stuff that you and Weather ought to look at.”

“I’ll do that,” Lucas said. He shook hands with John Smith, an athletic guy with some boxer’s scars around his eyes, and smiled at Marvel, a beautiful long-legged woman with a reserved smile; like she might be wary of cops.

Kidd said, “So let’s see what you got. . . . Back in a couple of minutes, guys.”

On the way back, Lucas gave Kidd a thirty-second summary of how he’d gotten the drives. “This Tubbs guy—I believe he’s dead. Murdered. I mean, we all thought so, but now I’m pretty sure of it.”

“That’s disturbing,” Kidd said.

In the computer lab, Kidd plugged in all three thumb drives at the same time, quickly figured out that one set had been formatted under an Apple OSX operating system, and the other two with different versions of Windows.

He put in a piece of his own software and tapped some keys, and a file popped up. “There it is,” he said. He opened it, and they saw the first photos of the Smalls porn files.

“How’d you do that?” Lucas asked.

“I’ve got the number of bytes from the file off the Smalls machine, and looked for a file of close to the same length. This one was exact, which is a rare thing.”

“Goddamnit—Smalls is clear.”

“Not necessarily,” Kidd said. “Remember—the file could have gone the other way, too. From Smalls to Tubbs. Maybe Tubbs stole it, and was blackmailing Smalls.”

“You sound like a defense lawyer,” Lucas said.

“Thanks.” Kidd did some other computer stuff, popping up files with all kinds of various corporate papers, real estate records, legislative committee meeting transcripts, court records.

“Cover-your-ass files,” Lucas said.

“Might be more complicated than that,” Kidd said. He went to the door and called, “Hey, Marvel? You got a minute?” And he said to Lucas, “Marvel’s okay.”

•   •   •

M
ARVEL CAME DOWN THE HALL,
and Kidd showed her into the lab and said, “Look at this file. It’s from here in Minnesota. Do you see anything?”

Lucas was a little nervous having the woman looking at the file, but she was from Arkansas, and Kidd probably wouldn’t have asked her to look at it if she might become a problem. He kept his mouth shut.

The file Marvel was examining was one of the smaller ones, fifteen or twenty pieces of paper that had been scanned into PDF files, as well as three or four fine-resolution JPEG photos. Using a mouse, Marvel clicked back and forth between the images. John and Lauren came into the lab, leaned against a wall to watch.

Marvel took five minutes; at one point, the kids made a noise that sounded like they’d killed a chicken, and Lauren ran off to see what it was. She’d just come back when Marvel tapped the computer screen and said, “See, what happened was, this guy, Representative Diller, got the licensing fees on semi-trailers reduced by about half, so they’d supposedly be in line with what they were in the surrounding states. He said he wanted to do that so the trucking companies wouldn’t move out of Minnesota. But what you see over here is a bunch of 1099 forms that were sent by trucking companies to Sisseton High-Line Consulting, LLC, of Sisseton, South Dakota. Over here is the South Dakota LLC form and we find out that a Cheryl Diller is the president of Sisseton High-Line Consulting. And we see that she got, mmm, fifty-five thousand dollars for consulting work that year, from trucking companies.”

“So if these two Dillers are related . . .” Lucas began.

“I promise you, they are,” Marvel said.

Kidd said, “Marvel’s a state senator. In Arkansas.”

Marvel added, “This shit goes on all the time. On everything you can think of, and probably a lot you can’t think of.”

Lucas said to Kidd, “So what these are, are blackmail files.”

“Or protection files, if they’re all the same kind of thing,” Marvel said. “Whoever owned these files might have been involved in these deals, and kept the evidence in case he ever got in trouble and needed help.”

Lucas looked at the computer screen for a moment and then said, “All right. Give me the drives back, Kidd. You guys don’t want to know anything about this.”

Kidd pulled the drives out, handed them to Lucas, and said, “You are
so
right. Do not mention my name in any of this.”

“I won’t,” Lucas promised. “Can I print these out on my home printer?”

“Probably,” Kidd said. “What kind of computer are you running?”

“Macs,” Lucas said.

“Most of the files are on government machines, Windows,” Kidd said. “I’ll loan you a Windows laptop, a cleaned-up Sony. If anyone asks, you paid cash at Best Buy a couple years ago.”

•   •   •

B
ACK IN THE CAR,
the laptop on the passenger seat, Lucas called the governor and said, “I need to talk to you alone, tonight. Without Mitford or anybody else around.”

“That bad?”

“Worse than you could have imagined,” Lucas said. “The problem is, I can’t get out of it now.”

“I’ve got a cabin on the Wisconsin side of the St. Croix, north of St. Croix falls. I could be there at six, if it’s that bad.”

“Tell me where,” Lucas said.

He got directions to the cabin, again told the governor to come alone, then went home, said hello to the housekeeper, who said that Letty wouldn’t be back until six o’clock, that Weather had been called to do emergency work on a woman whose face had been cut in an auto accident, and she’d be late, and that the kids were fine.

Lucas took the thumb drives back to his den, hooked the Sony up to his printer, then had to download some printer software that matched the Sony to his printer. He took a few more minutes to re-familiarize himself with Windows, and started printing. There were thirty-four files on the three drives, not nearly filling them, but it took two hours to get them all printed out.

He didn’t print the porn file.

While the printing was going on, he paged through the porn file, image by image, and found the photos that Kidd thought came from police files. He looked at the captions, which had apparently been printed onto sheets of paper that had been attached to the bottom of paper photos—the kind of photos you would give to a jury. Kidd was right, he thought: they were evidentiary photos.

When the printing was done, he used a three-hole punch to put binder holes in Tubbs’s files, and bound them book-style between cardboard covers. Then he started annotating them, figuring out who was who, and trying to figure out what was going on in each file. Virtually all of them were evidence of payoffs to state legislators and a variety of state bureaucrats.

Some of the evidence was explicit, some of it was simply suggestive. Some of it would have led to criminal charges, or to claw-back civil suits. Almost all of it would have ended careers.

•   •   •

A
LITTLE AFTER FIVE,
he went out to the Lexus SUV that he drove outside the Cities, and took off for Wisconsin. He was not in a mood for the scenic tour, so he went straight up I-35 to Highway 8, then east through Chisago City and Lindstrom and past Center City to Taylors Falls, then across the St. Croix into Wisconsin, north on Highway 82, off on River Road and finally, down a dirt lane lined with beech and oak trees to a redwood house perched on a bluff over the river. The front door was propped open with a river rock.

The governor was sitting on a four-season porch, already closed in for the winter, that looked over the river valley. When Lucas banged on the screen door, he called, “Straight through to the porch. Get a beer out of the kitchen, or make yourself a drink.”

The kitchen was compact: Lucas snagged a Leinie’s from the refrigerator, popped the top with a church key hung on the refrigerator with a magnet, and walked through the house to the porch. The house was larger than it looked from the outside, and elegant, and smelled lightly of cigar smoke. A side hallway led toward what must’ve been two or three bedrooms. A library featured pop fiction and a big octagonal poker table with a green baize surface; the living room was cluttered with couches and chairs and small tables. An oversized television hung from one wall.

Henderson was wearing soft tan slacks and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, and boat shoes. He said, “Give me one sentence to crank up my enthusiasm for being here.”

Lucas sat on a wooden chaise with waterproof cushions, took a sip of the beer, thought for a few seconds, then said, “Bob Tubbs had the porn before it was unloaded on Smalls, and was probably murdered to shut him up.”

The governor stared at him for a few seconds, then said, “Oh, shit.”

Lucas pushed on: “I went into Tubbs’s apartment, legally, with the approval of Tubbs’s mother and the investigator from the St. Paul Police Department. I searched the place, and pretty much because of my superior intelligence . . .”