Silken Prey ld-23

by John Sandford

  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.”

  • • •

  BACK 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 . . .”

  “. . . 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.”

  • • •

  HE 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.

  • • •

  AT 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 follo
w 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.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Lucas 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.

  • • •

  WHEN MORRIS 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.”