Silken Prey ld-23

by John Sandford

  CHAPTER 3

  Lucas 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.”

  • • •

  SMALLS 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.”

  • • •

  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.”