Silken Prey (9 page)

“. . . goes without saying . . .”

“. . . I found Tubbs’s hideout cache, which St. Paul hadn’t found,” Lucas said.

“Why didn’t they find it?” Henderson asked.

“Because he hid it in a weird place, and when they opened it up, they found just what they expected to find.” He told Henderson about the pipes, and how he belatedly realized that they’d hardly be draining upward.

“And in the pipes . . .” Henderson prompted.

“I found a gun, a wad of papers, plus some money, cash, and three thumb drives. I opened the thumb drives and found exactly the same porn file—exactly the same—as the one the cops found on Smalls’s computer. There’s a remote possibility—remote in my mind, anyway—that the file went from Smalls to Tubbs. That Tubbs found out that there was a porn file on Smalls’s computer, went in, stole it, and is, or was planning to, blackmail Smalls. So Smalls, or one of his henchmen, killed him. There’s a much better possibility that it went the other way—from Tubbs to Smalls’s computer. We know that Tubbs occasionally dropped by Smalls’s campaign office.”

“Let’s look at the first possibility,” Henderson said; he was a lawyer. “Why don’t you think Tubbs was blackmailing Smalls?”

“Because there’s nothing on the file, or in the other documents on the thumb drives, that mentions the porn or Smalls. He’d have no way to tie it to Smalls—all he had was the file itself. Why would anyone believe it came from Smalls, or anyone else, for that matter? If he tried to go public with it, Smalls would just blow it off as an egregiously vicious smear by a Democratic operative who’d been involved in other dirty tricks.”

“Is there any reason to think it
could
be a blackmail file?”

“Only one that I could think of,” Lucas said. He patted his bound copies: “Because it seems likely that Tubbs may have been involved in other blackmail operations. Maybe not for money, maybe for influence. So he might have been a practiced blackmailer.”

Henderson nodded: “So what’s the other side? Why do you think it went Tubbs to Smalls, that Tubbs planted it on Smalls’s computer?”

“Couple of reasons,” Lucas said. “If it had really been Smalls’s file, he probably would have paid Tubbs off. He’d have done it in a way that Tubbs couldn’t come back on him—filmed it, or done it with trusted witnesses. That way, if the file ever showed up again, Tubbs at least would go down for blackmail.”

He continued: “The other reason is, just look what happened. A guy who does dirty tricks is involved, somehow, with a really dirty trick, which could change an important election. He might have been paid for it. Maybe a lot. So if you take the simplest, straightforward answer to a complicated question . . .”

“Occam’s razor . . .”

Lucas nodded. “. . . the file was going from Tubbs to Smalls. A straightforward political hit.”

“So, what you’re saying is, Tubbs probably took the thumb drive to Smalls’s office, and when Smalls was gone, inserted the file.”

“Yes. Or more likely, an associate of his did. Whatever happened, for either side, Tubbs was probably murdered to shut him up. Neither one of us is going to be able to avoid that . . . fact,” Lucas said.

“I wouldn’t avoid the fact,” Henderson said, “but that doesn’t mean that I don’t think it could use some management.”

“I agree,” Lucas said. He added, “The thumb drives included a lot of other stuff. I printed it out—it’s all documents, with a few photos. I annotated them, best I could, and bound it up.”

•   •   •

H
E HANDED THE BOOK
to Henderson, who weighed it in his hands and then turned to the first page. He thumbed through it for a few minutes, then, in a distracted voice, asked, “You know how to make a G-and-T?”

“Sure.”

“Could you get me another? Lean hard on the G.”

Lucas went and made the drink, and then brought it back, and the governor took it without looking up, and Lucas pulled off his shoes and leaned back on the chaise and drank his beer and stared out into the dark over the river valley. He could see stars through a break in the trees: winter could arrive any second, although there was no sign of it.

A minute or so later, Henderson chuckled and said, “Jean Coutee . . . I wondered where she got that Jaguar. Poor as a church mouse, all workingman’s rights and anti-this-and-that . . . and she took the money and bought a fuckin’ Jag.”

And fifteen minutes after that, Henderson sighed and shut the book, and handed it back to Lucas. “Am I in there . . . anywhere?”

“No.”

“I don’t mean as a crook, because I’m not. But am I mentioned? Am I going to court?”

“You’re not even mentioned,” Lucas said.

“Okay. That’s okay.”

“There’s another thing that worries me,” Lucas said. “That porn file. There’re a lot of photos and most of them have some text. But one of the files seems likely to have come from a police evidence file. From Minneapolis.”

“What? Police?”

“I don’t know the connection, or how it got in the bigger file,” Lucas said. “I suspect it came from the police. The question is, did the Minneapolis cops, or probably one cop, give the file to Tubbs, in an effort to destroy Smalls? If they did, is it possible—”

“That a cop killed Tubbs? So that he wouldn’t rat them out if he got caught?”

“Or maybe they realized he wasn’t reliable,” Lucas said. “The thing is, Smalls and the cops, and Minneapolis in particular, did not get along. Smalls wanted to outlaw public employee unions. The unions saw him as a deadly enemy. When I look into this, that’s going to be one aspect of the case,” Lucas said.

“Which makes it even a bigger stink bomb,” Henderson said.

“It’d be good to keep you out of this . . . in an operative sense,” Lucas said.

“Absolutely.”

“I might have to perjure myself, but only lightly and not really significantly,” Lucas said. “The only two people who’d ever know would be you and me. . . .”
And Kidd and Lauren and Marvel and John, but they should be safe enough,
Lucas thought. He wasn’t telling any real lies, he was just warping time a bit.

The governor didn’t quail at the idea of perjury, he simply asked, “What are we talking about?”

“I put everything back. The St. Paul cops don’t know I’ve already been to the apartment. I put everything back, and call the lead investigator, and tell him that I’ve been there for an hour. When they arrive, I’ll be sitting there, looking at the paper. . . . I’ll insist on taking it to the BCA computer lab. Nobody there knows what I’ve been up to. They’d find all this stuff, and the porn, Smalls would be cleared, a couple of crooks might go down. I noticed that one of them is a pretty close ally of yours.”

“Fuck him,” Henderson said. “He’s a goddamned criminal, sucking on the public tit. I never saw that in him. But where’s the perjury in this?”

“Might not be any. I’d tell them exactly what happened when I entered the apartment, where I looked and what I did, and here’s the evidence. I wouldn’t have to mention that it was my second trip there . . . that I took the stuff out, copied it, and then put it back. After all, the docs are all in the public record.”

Henderson nodded, and closed his eyes. Then he said, “The murder.”

“I’d want to stay on that,” Lucas said.

“I’d insist. This thing will leak five minutes after you call St. Paul, and there’s gonna be a shit storm. I’ll be outraged, and you’ll be my minister plenipotentiary to the investigation. That’ll give us a reason for these . . . conferences.”

“That’ll work, I think,” Lucas said.

They sat there for a minute, then Henderson said, “There’s the elephant in the room . . . that we haven’t talked about.”

Lucas nodded: “Who did it. Who killed Tubbs.”

“If he’s dead.”

“Yeah, if he’s dead. But . . . it feels like it.”

“
Why
it was done . . . should lead you to who did it,” Henderson said. “A lot of people hate Smalls, but the most obvious beneficiary is Taryn Grant.”

“But hiring a killer is a problem, no matter how much money you have,” Lucas said. “The best model for that is the movie
Fargo
—idiots hiring idiots. From what I’ve read about her, she’s not an idiot.”

“She’s not,” Henderson agreed. “But it could be somebody working on her behalf. Or somebody who
thinks
he’s working on her behalf. A psycho.”

“I’ll talk to her,” Lucas said. “As the investigation spreads out, she’d be an obvious person to interview. I’ll take a look and see what we can find out about her.”

“Another thing: we need to manage the news release. We know it’ll leak, we need to be out front on that.”

“That’s what Mitford’s for,” Lucas said. “Just make sure he gives me a heads-up before the shit hits the fan.”

“I will. Now about your book . . .” Henderson said. He patted the bound printout that Lucas had given him.

“Into the grinder,” Lucas said.

•   •   •

A
T TEN MINUTES AFTER
nine o’clock that night, Roger Morris, the St. Paul homicide detective, wearing a purple velour tracksuit and Nike Air running shoes, stuck his head into Tubbs’s apartment and called, “Where are you?”

“In the bathroom,” Lucas called back.

Morris found Lucas on his knees, looking at papers he was pulling out of two white plastic sewer pipes. Morris tipped his head back and closed his eyes and said, “Fuck me with a parking meter. We missed it.”

“Yeah, well . . . I looked in there and wondered, why would you drain a sewer
up
, in a two-story building?” Lucas said.

“So what is it?”

“Papers, money, and three computer thumb drives,” Lucas said. “You can have the money and the papers. The thumb drives . . . finders keepers. I’ve got a guy waiting for me at the BCA computer lab.”

“
We
got a computer lab—”

“Ours is better,” Lucas said. “This stuff just might blow the ass off the legislature. . . . These papers, the ones I can read, suggest that some of our beloved politicians are on the take.”

“That’s a motive on the Tubbs killing,” Morris said. “Seriously, man, it’s my murder investigation—”

“I want those thumb drives at the BCA,” Lucas said. “You’ll get the contents—I’ll drive you over there, and we’ll give you a receipt. I’ll tell you what, Roger, I’m only looking at Tubbs for one reason: the kid who found that porn said Tubbs had been hanging around the Smalls campaign, and might have had the opportunity to put it on Smalls’s computer. I looked close at the Smalls porn, the stuff from your computer lab, and there’s some involvement there that you don’t want to deal with. I don’t want to deal with it, either, but you
really
don’t.”

“Like what?”

“Like one of the photos may have come out of the Minneapolis cops,” Lucas said. “Maybe the whole file did. Maybe some cops were trying to get rid of Smalls. Maybe Tubbs was killed to seal off the connection.”

“No, no,” Morris said. A few seconds later, “You don’t have to drive me—I’ll follow you over. I want that receipt. You can keep the papers and the money, too. But I want copies of every single goddamn document on my computer tomorrow morning.”

“Fast as I can get it to you, Roger,” Lucas said. “I promise.”

L
ucas got the contents of Tubbs’s hidey-hole into the BCA lab, and the tech there, called in on overtime, loaded up the files and began printing out the documents. When he found the porn file, he asked, “What about this trash?”

“Aw, man,” Lucas said. They dialed into the file, and he switched to full drama mode: “Aw, Jesus Christ.”

He’d given Morris a receipt for the pile of evidence and Morris had gone home with the promise of complete access in the morning. Now Lucas called him at home and said, “You might want to get over here.”

“What happened?”

“We pretty much confirmed that Tubbs–porn connection,” Lucas said. “He’s got the file on one of these thumb drives.”

“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” Morris said.

•   •   •

W
HEN
M
ORRIS ARRIVED, THE
first thing he asked Lucas was, “If this file was a setup, if Tubbs did it, and if Tubbs was killed the same day the file was found . . . that night . . . then he’d have had to go to Smalls’s office that morning. Right? He couldn’t have put it on the day before.”

“That’s right,” Lucas said.

“I’ll tell you what: you can check us on this, but we backtracked Tubbs, to see who he’d talked to, and where he’d been, the day he disappeared, and that night. He didn’t go to Smalls’s campaign office. We’ve accounted for all his time back a couple of days, and he wasn’t there.”

“Then . . . he had to have an associate.”

“Who might’ve gotten scared when he saw how crazy this whole thing got,” Morris said. “It might’ve started out as a dirty trick, and all of a sudden, people are talking about multiple felonies and Smalls is going nuts on TV. He figures if it comes out, who put the file on Smalls’s computer, he’s heading for prison. So he talks to Tubbs, one thing leads to another . . . and
bang
.”

“That seems reasonable,” Lucas said, because it was.

They talked about the possibilities as Lucas walked Morris up to the lab, where Lucas said to the lab tech, “You need to call the St. Paul computer lab guy. There’s got to be some trigger for the porn file booby trap. Between the two of you, I want you to find it tonight, so Roger and I know what it is when we come in tomorrow.”

“That’s a tall order,” the tech said.

“That’s your problem,” Lucas said. “It’s gotta be there: find it.”

To Morris: “I want to show you this one group of photos.” He ran through the file, found the pictures of Otis and the others in the group sex, and tapped the caption. “These were the pictures that were presented in court. Unless you believe that the Minneapolis cops are posting this stuff on the Internet, then they had to come out of the Minneapolis computer system. In fact, I was told by this girl”—he tapped Otis’s face—“that the photos presented in court were on paper, and were seized when the cops raided the porn operation. I’m thinking . . . this had to come out of Minneapolis’s evidence file. I mean, look at the caption: that’s cop stuff.”

Morris rubbed his forehead: “You’re saying somebody in Minneapolis helped Tubbs set up Smalls?”

“It’s a possibility,” Lucas said.

“Then . . .
that
guy could be the killer,” Morris said.

Lucas shrugged.

Morris watched Lucas for a moment, then switched directions: “Have you looked at the document files?”

“I’m getting them printed now,” Lucas said. “It looks like it’s the same as the other papers—blackmail stuff, cover-your-ass files, whatever. A lot of corrupt bullshit.”

Morris considered for a moment, then said, “We need a conference. We need the heavies on this. I’ll call you tomorrow at eight o’clock—”

“Nine would be better,” Lucas said.

“Nine o’clock, and we’ll both have lists of who should be in the conference.”

“It’s a plan,” Lucas said.

He and Morris spent a half hour flicking through the document files, and then through the porn files, looking for any other clue to its origin, but found nothing new. When they were done, Morris said, “Nine o’clock tomorrow.”

•   •   •

L
UCAS WENT HOME:
he’d successfully covered his ass, he thought. Now it should be a straightforward murder investigation, and they already had several pieces of the puzzle.

Morris was a competent investigator, and more than competent: but he didn’t have everything that Lucas had, and Lucas couldn’t give him some of it. He really had to stay on the case, Lucas thought. He
wanted
to stay on it. It was getting intense, and he liked intense.

Liked it enough that he got up early to think about it. And at nine o’clock the next morning, in jeans and T-shirt, he’d already finished a Diet Coke and a plate of scrambled eggs, and his list of who should be at the conference. His list: Henry Sands, director of the BCA; Rose Marie Roux, commissioner of public safety; Rick Card, St. Paul chief of police; Morris; and himself. He was trying to remember who would call whom, when his phone rang. He picked it up, looked at the screen.

The governor: “Everything cool?” Henderson asked.

“Yes. We’re going bureaucratic, to blur everything over. The St. Paul homicide detective on the Tubbs case, and I, are going to convene a conference with Sands and Rose Marie and the St. Paul chief, lay it all out, and then just start a straight criminal investigation. Maybe parcel some of it out to the attorney general . . . but we’ll see what Rose Marie has to say about that. You should stay clear.”

“Keep me informed.”

•   •   •

M
ORRIS CALLED A MINUTE LATER,
with his list. He had the same list as Lucas, less Rose Marie, and with the addition of the Ramsey County attorney.

He agreed with Lucas on Rose Marie, but Lucas argued against the county attorney: “That guy is owned by Channel Three. If he’s in the conference, we might as well put it on television.”

“Man, my computer guy printed out those document files and left them for me, and I gotta tell you, it’s gonna be political, and it’s gonna be ugly. The names in these things . . . they scare the shit out of me. I think we need lawyers. Lots of lawyers. The more the better. These docs aren’t for cops.”

“I’ll take a look as soon as I go in this morning,” Lucas said. “But we’re cops, so it’s okay to have a conference about a possible crime. Nobody can criticize us for that. Then we let Rose Marie and Rick figure out who to bring in, for the political stuff. We can just focus on the murder.”

They went back and forth, and eventually Morris said, “I knew you had a sneaky streak, but I didn’t know it was this sneaky. But okay, let’s do it your way. I’ll declare a big-ass emergency and try to get a conference at noon or one o’clock, here in St. Paul.”

“Do it,” Lucas said.

•   •   •

T
HE MEETING WAS SET
for eleven o’clock, the only mutual time they could all find, in the chief’s office in St. Paul. Lucas had a couple of hours, so he called Brittany Hunt, the volunteer who’d discovered the porn file. She was driving to the Mall of America. She was no longer employed, she said, but not too worried about it.

“I talked to my adviser and she said that exposing a criminal like Smalls was a lot more important than my campaign work.” She was worried about meeting Lucas without her father present, but he told her that he just had a couple of quick questions that weren’t about her at all. “I need to gossip,” he said.

She agreed to make a quick detour and meet him at a sandwich shop off Ford Parkway, five minutes from his house. He changed into a suit and tie, then drove over to the sandwich shop, where he found her eating a fried egg sandwich on a buttermilk biscuit. Lucas got a glass of water and sat down across the table from her.

“I was famished,” she said.

“So eat.” Lucas leaned toward her and pitched his voice down. “Tubbs . . . did he have any special friends in Smalls’s campaign?”

She cocked her head and licked a crumb of biscuit off her lower lip, then asked, “You mean, was he sleeping with anybody?”

Lucas said, “Well, any kind of close friend.”

She said, “You know . . . I don’t know. But I can tell you how to find out. There’s a guy there, Cory, mmm, I don’t really know his last name, he works in the copy room. He’s the biggest gossip in the world. He knows
everything.
”

“Cory.”

“Yes. He’s not really part of the campaign staff, he was hired to do the printing and copying. They do a lot of that. He knows
everything.
Ask Helen Roman. She’s the campaign manager, she’ll know where to find him.”

“Sounds like a good guy to know,” Lucas said.

“Yeah. If you like gossip, and we all do.” She burped, then looked toward the counter. “I could use another one of those sandwiches. I haven’t eaten since the day before yesterday.”

•   •   •

S
MALLS’S CAMPAIGN OFFICE
was off I-94 on the St. Paul side of the Mississippi, ten minutes away. Lucas went there, found Helen Roman, the office manager, who said that Cory Makovsky worked in the distribution center, at the end of the hall. Lucas went there, where he found Makovsky talking excitedly on his cell phone. When Lucas tried to get his attention, Makovsky held up a finger, meaning “Wait one,” and gushed a revelation “He’d just seen it online from
People
, there really isn’t any doubt that she’s pregnant,” into the phone.

Lucas looked pointedly at his watch, and Makovsky frowned and said to the phone, “Hang on a sec,” and to Lucas,
“What?”

Lucas said, “I’m an agent with the BCA. Did you murder Bob Tubbs?”

Makovsky took that in for a few seconds, then said hastily into the phone, “I gotta get back to you, Betty.”

When Lucas had Makovsky’s attention, he asked, “Did you kill him?”

Makovsky, who’d gone a little pale, said, “Of course not. Who told you I did?”

“Nobody. I just wondered,” Lucas said. Then: “I was told you might have some information I need. Do you know if Bob Tubbs had a special friend of some kind . . . a lover, maybe . . . in Senator Smalls’s campaign office?”

Makovsky’s eyes widened, and his voice dropped to a whisper: “Is that the story Smalls is putting out?”

“No—that’s the question I’m asking. Did Tubbs have a special friend?”

“I don’t know,” Makovsky said, with real regret in his voice. “I realize I should know, but I don’t. I could ask around.”

“Could you do that?” Lucas asked. He dug a card out of his pocket, wrote a number on the back, and said, “If you hear anything, call me.”

“I’ll do that,” Makovsky said, his eyes bright. Lucas believed him; and two minutes after he called Lucas, the word would probably be tweeted, or Twittered, or whatever that was. Probably to
People
.

•   •   •

W
HEN HE LEFT
the campaign office, Lucas had ten minutes to get down to the St. Paul Police Department, just enough time to retrieve his car and be marginally late. When he got there, he found he was the first person from outside the department to arrive.

The chief, Morris, and a lab tech were sitting around, drinking coffee, talking about a recent controversial tasing. A Bloomington cop’s wife had woken angry in the middle of the night, and had used his duty Taser to tase her sleeping husband in the area sometimes called the
gooch
. He was now claiming a major disability—sexual dysfunction caused by a city-owned instrument—and was seeking to be retired at full pay. He was twenty-seven.

“I’ll tell you what,” Morris said, holding his coffee cup with his pinkie finger properly out in the air, “That boy won’t be sleeping easy with a woman again, no matter who she is.”

Commissioner of Public Safety Rose Marie Roux walked in and caught the last of that, and she asked, “Who was that?”

“Talking about the Bloomington tasing,” Lucas said.

“Oh, yeah,” she said. She took a chair, and plopped her purse on the chief’s desk. “The guy who got it in the gooch.”

Henry Sands, the BCA director, showed up a minute later, took the last chair, and Rose Marie asked, “So what’s up? Or, I sorta know what’s up, but what’s new, and why is it an emergency?”

Morris said, “Lucas and I found a bunch of stuff in Bob Tubbs’s apartment—you all know Tubbs, and know we’re investigating his disappearance as a possible murder. Well, the stuff we found suggests that Tubbs planted the kiddie porn on Senator Smalls’s computer. There’s the theoretical possibility that he found it on Smalls’s computer, and was using it to blackmail him, but Lucas and I don’t believe that. . . . We think he was killed to eliminate him as a witness to whoever supplied the porn to get Smalls. It’s possible that the kiddie porn came through the Minneapolis Police Department, so the killer could be a cop.”

“Holy shit,” the chief said.

“Plus,” Morris continued, “in the same hideout where we found the kiddie porn—the porn was on a thumb drive—we found a bunch of other papers and copies of public documents which pretty much prove that seven serving state senators and representatives have committed a wide range of felonies, along with six former senators and representatives who are no longer in office, and a half-dozen bureaucrats who were paid off for arranging contracts.”

There was a long silence while the VIPs looked at the ceiling, sideways, and at the carpet, then, “That’s just the fuckin’ cherry on the cake, isn’t it?” Rose Marie said to everybody, the disgust showing on her face. “That’s just the fuckin’ cherry.”

“What we need from you all,” Morris concluded, “is for you to tell us what to do. I mean, we have to continue the Tubbs investigation. We can be pretty sure now that he was murdered—we’ve got a hell of a pile of motives. But there’s a lot of political stuff.”

“I need to see copies of everything,” Rose Marie said.

“Got it at the BCA,” Lucas said. “I can send it over.”

Card said, “I need to see it, too.”

“I’ve got a copy for you,” Morris said.

Rose Marie held her index finger in the air, asking for silence as she thought for a moment, then: “Here’s what I’d suggest. The corruption stuff goes to the attorney general, and he can have some of his under-employed young lawyers look at it. And we need to talk to Senator Smalls’s attorneys right away. Smalls may be a suspect in the murder, if the porn was taken
from
him and he was being blackmailed. But if I understand you correctly, you think there’s a much greater possibility that Tubbs put the porn on Smalls’s computer, in which case, Smalls is being unfairly demonized as a pervert a week before a critical election. We have to tell him what we know, and then let Smalls do what he can with it.”