Silken Prey

by John Sandford

  Lucas was halfway through the Star Tribune’s comics when his cell phone buzzed. He took it out of his pocket, looked at the caller ID, clicked it, and said, “Good morning, Neil. I assume you’re calling from the Cathedral.”

  Neil Mitford, chief weasel for the governor of Minnesota, ignored the comment. “The guy needs to see you this morning. He should be out of church and down at his office by ten-thirty or so. He’s got to talk to a guy at ten-forty-five, more or less, until eleven-thirty or so. He’d like to see you either at ten-thirty or eleven-thirty.”

  “I could make the ten-thirty,” Lucas said. “Is this about Tubbs?”

  “Tubbs? No, Tubbs is just off on a bender somewhere. This is about Smalls.”

  “What about Smalls? That’s being handled by St. Paul.”

  “He’ll tell you. Come in the back,” Mitford said. “We’ll have a guard down at the door for you.”

  • • •

  LUCAS CHECKED HIS WATCH and saw that he would make it to the Capitol right on time, if he left in the next few minutes, and drove slowly enough.

  “Wait,” Weather said. “We were all going shopping.”

  “It’s hard to tell the governor to piss up a rope,” Lucas said. “Even on a Sunday.”

  “But we were going to pick out Halloween costumes . . .”

  “I’d just be bored and in your way, and you wouldn’t let me choose, anyway,” Lucas said. “You and Letty will be fine.”

  Letty shrugged and said to Weather, “That’s all true.”

  • • •

  SO LUCAS IDLED UP Mississippi River Boulevard, top down on the Porsche 911, to Summit Avenue, then along Summit with its grand houses, and over to the Capitol.

  The Minnesota Capitol is sited on a hill overlooking St. Paul, and because of the expanse of the hill, looks taller and wider than the U.S. Capitol. Also, whiter.

  Lucas left the car a block away, and strolled through the cheerful morning, stopping to look at a late-season butterfly that was perched on a zinnia, looking for something to eat. The big change-of-season cold front had come through the week before, but, weirdly, there hadn’t yet been a killing frost, and there were still butterflies and flowers all over the place.

  At the Capitol, an overweight guard was waiting for him at a back door. He and the guard had once worked patrol together on the Minneapolis police force—the guard was double-dipping—and they chatted for a few minutes, and then Lucas climbed some stairs and walked down to the governor’s office.

  The governor, or somebody, had left a newspaper blocking the doorjamb, and Lucas pushed open the door, picked up the paper, and let the door lock behind him. He was standing in a darkened outer office and the governor called, “Lucas? Come on in.”

  • • •

  THE GOVERNOR WAS A tall, slender blond named Elmer Henderson, who might, in four years, be a viable candidate for vice president of the United States on the Democratic ticket. The media said he’d nail down the left-wingers for a presidential candidate who might prefer to run a little closer to the middle.

  Henderson might himself have been a candidate for the top job, if he had not been, in his younger years, quite so fond of women in pairs and trios, known at Harvard as the “Henderson Hoagie,” and cocaine. He certainly had the right pedigree: Ivy League undergraduate and law, flawless if slightly robotic wife and children, perhaps a half billion dollars from his share of the 3M inheritance.

  He was standing behind his desk, wearing a dark going-to-church suit, open at the throat, the tie curled on his desktop. He had a sheaf of papers in his hands, thumbing them, when Lucas walked in. He looked over his glasses and said, “Lucas. Sit. Sorry to bother you on a Sunday morning.”

  “It’s okay.” Lucas took a chair. “You need somebody killed?”

  “Several people, but I’d hesitate to ask, at least here in the office, on the Lord’s Day,” the governor said. He gave the papers a last shuffle, set them aside, pressed a button on a box on his desk, and said, “Get in here,” and asked Lucas, “You’ve been reading about Porter Smalls?”

  “Yeah. You guys must be dancing in the aisles,” Lucas said.

  “Should be,” said a voice from behind Lucas. Lucas turned his head as Mitford came through a side door, which led into his compact, paper-littered office. “This is one of the better political moments of my life. Porter Smalls takes it between the cheeks.”

  “What an unhappy expression,” the governor said. He dropped into his chair, sighed, and put his stocking feet on the desktop. “But appropriate, I suppose. He’s certainly being screwed by all and sundry.”

  “And it kills the Medicaid nonsense,” Mitford said, as he took another chair. “He was carrying that on his back, and anything he was carrying is tainted. You want to pass a bill sponsored by a kiddie-porn addict? What kind of human being are you?”

  “Grossly unfair,” the governor said. He didn’t seem particularly worried about the unfairness of it. He’d been looking at Mitford, but now turned to Lucas. “You know what the problem is?”

  “What?”

  “He didn’t do it. Wasn’t his child porn,” the governor said. “I talked to him yesterday afternoon, over at his house, for a long time. He didn’t do it.”

  “I thought you guys were blood enemies,” Lucas said.

  “Political enemies. I went to kindergarten with him, and knew him before that. Went to the same prep school, he went to Yale and I went to Harvard. His sister was a good friend of mine, for a while.” He paused, looked up at the ceiling, and smiled a private smile, then recovered. “I tell you, from the bottom of my little liberal heart, Porter didn’t do it.”

  “He could’ve gone off the rails somewhere,” Lucas suggested.

  The governor shook his head. “No. He doesn’t have it in him, to look at kiddie porn. I know the kind of women he looks at. I can describe them in minute detail, and nobody would call them kiddies: he likes them big-titted, big-assed, and blond. He liked them that way in kindergarten and he still likes them that way. Go look at his staff, you’ll see what I mean.”

  “Can’t always tell . . .” Lucas began, but the governor held up a finger.

  “Another thing,” he said. “This volunteer said she walked into his office and put some papers on his keyboard and up popped the porn. If it really happened like that, it means that he had a screen of kiddie porn up on his computer, and walked away from it to a campaign finance meeting, leaving the door unlocked and the kiddie porn on the screen. The screen blanked for a while, but was still there, waiting to be found. Vile stuff, I’m told. Vile. Anyway, that’s the only way her story works: the screen was blanked when she walked in, and popped back up when she put the papers on the keyboard. Porter was near the top of his class at Yale Law. He’s not stupid, he’s not a huge risk-taker. Do you really believe he would do that?”

  “Even smart people—”

  “Oh, horseshit,” the governor said, waving him off.

  “Suicidal . . .”

  “Porter goes to the emergency room if the barber cuts his hair too short,” the governor said. “He wants and expects to live forever, preferably with a big-titted, big-assed blonde sitting on his face.”

  Lucas thought for a moment, then conceded the point: “That thing about the volunteer—it worries me.”

  “It should,” the governor said. He kicked his feet off the desktop and said, “I want you to look into this, Lucas. But quietly. I don’t want to disturb anybody without . . . without there being something worthwhile to disturb them with.”

  “One more question,” Lucas said. “This guy is a major pain in your party’s ass. Why . . . ?”

  “Because it’s the right thing to do, mostly,” the governor said. “There’s something else, too. This sort of shit is going too far. Way too far. Most Republicans aren’t nuts. They’re perfectly good people. So are most of us Democrats. But this kind of thing, if it’s deliberate—it’s a threat to everybody. All you have to do is say ‘kiddie porn’ and
a guy’s career is over. Doesn’t make any difference what he’s done, what his character is like, how hard he’s worked, it doesn’t even matter if there’s proof—once it gets out in the media, they’ll repeat it endlessly, and there’s no calling it back. You could have the Archbishop of Canterbury go on TV tomorrow and say he has absolute proof that Porter Smalls is innocent, and fifty other bloggers would be sneering at him in two minutes and CNN would be calling the bishop a liar. So we’re talking about dangerous, immoral, antidemocratic stuff.”

  “You’re saying the media is dangerous, immoral, and antidemocratic?”

  “Well . . . yes,” Henderson said. “They don’t recognize it in themselves, but they’re basically criminals. In the classic sense of that word.”

  “All right,” Lucas said.

  “And, of course, there’s the other thing,” the governor said. “The less righteous thing.”

  Lucas said, “Uh-oh.”

  Mitford said, “We’re already hearing rumors that he was framed. That there were hints before anyone found the porn that something was coming on Smalls. If it turns out that some overzealous young Democratic hacker did it, if this is a campaign dirty trick . . . then there could be a lot more trouble. If that’s what happened, we need to know it first. The election’s too close to be screwing around.”

  The governor added, “But the preliminary investigation has to be quiet. Invisible might be a better word.”

  Mitford said, “Totally quiet. That fuckin’ tool over in the attorney general’s office wants to move into this office. He thinks prosecuting Smalls is one way to do it. If he finds out that you’re digging around, he’ll paper your ass so fast you’d think you were a new country kitchen. You’ll be working for him.”

  “You don’t sound as offended as the governor,” Lucas said to Mitford. “About Smalls being framed.”

  “I’m paid to keep my eye on the ball, so that’s what I do,” Mitford said. “Short term, there’s no benefit to us, saving an asshole like Smalls. If we get a reward, it’s gonna have to be in heaven, because we sure as shit won’t get it now. If the party found out we were trying to help Smalls, then . . . well, you know, we’re thinking about the vice presidency. On the other hand, if we did this, meaning we in the all-inclusive sense, and if that comes out, say, the Friday before the election . . .”

  “I can’t afford to lose the state House,” Henderson said. He wasn’t running. He still had two years to go on his second term.

  “But Smalls is in the U.S. Senate,” Lucas said. “How could that affect the state House?”

  “Because our majority is too narrow. If it turns out that we tried to sabotage a U.S. Senate race, with child porn, Smalls will eat us alive in the last few days before the election. He could pump up the Republican turnout just enough that we could lose those extra three or four close-run seats. If we lose the House, and the Senate stays Republican, which it will, they’ll spend the next two years dreaming up ways to embarrass me.”

  “We can’t have that,” Mitford said. “I mean, really.”

  “But. If Smalls owes us, even under the rose, he’ll pay up,” the governor said. “He’s that kind of guy. He won’t go after us . . . if he owes us.”

  • • •

  “ALL RIGHT,” LUCAS SAID. He stood up. “I’ll do it.”

  “Excellent,” the governor said. “Call me every day.”

  “But what if he did it?” Lucas asked.

  “He didn’t,” the governor said.

  Lucas said, “I’m going to tell Rose Marie about it. I can’t . . . not do that.” Rose Marie was the public safety commissioner and an old friend.

  The governor was exasperated: “Jesus Christ, Lucas . . .”

  “I can’t not do that,” Lucas insisted.

  The governor threw up his hands. “All right. When you tell her, you tell her to call me. I’ll need . . . Wait. Hell no. I’ll call her right now. You get going on this. I’d like to get something pretty definitive in, say, mmm, three days. Two would be better.”

  “Man . . .”

  “Go.” Henderson waved him away.

  • • •

  ROSE MARIE ROUX HAD been a cop, then a lawyer and prosecutor, then a state senator, then the Minneapolis chief of police, and finally, the commissioner of public safety under Henderson. She had jurisdiction over a number of law enforcement agencies, including the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. She viewed Lucas as both a friend and an effective tool for achieving her policy goals, not all of them involving crime-fighting. She’d gotten him his job at the BCA.

  Rose Marie’s husband was ten years older than she was, and when he’d retired, he talked her into dumping the suburban Minneapolis house in favor of a sprawling co-op apartment in downtown St. Paul. Lucas gave the governor a few minutes to talk to her, and then, as he walked back to his car, called her himself.

  “You at home?”

  “Yeah, come on down. I’ll buzz you into the garage.”

  • • •

  LUCAS HAD BEEN TO the apartment often enough that he knew the routine; buzzed into the garage, he parked in one of the visitors’ slots and took the elevator to the top floor. Rose Marie’s husband opened the door; he was holding the Times in one hand and a piece of jelly toast in the other. “She’s out on the deck,” he said.

  “You raked the leaves off the deck yet?”

  “Thank God for the penthouse—not a leaf to be seen,” he said.

  Rose Marie, wrapped in a wool shawl, was sitting on a lounge chair, smoking a cigarette; nicotine gum, she said, was for pussies. She was a short woman, going to weight, with an ever-changing hair color. Lucas liked her a lot.

  When Lucas stepped out on the deck, she said, “I appreciate what you did, bringing me into it. This will be interesting, all the way around. Although it has a downside, of course.”

  She crushed the cigarette out on a ceramic saucer by the side of the chair. As Lucas sat down facing her, she asked, “How much do you like your job?”

  “It’s okay. Been doing it for a while,” Lucas said.

  “If this kind of thing happens too often, you’ll get pushed out,” Rose Marie said. “It’s inevitable.”

  Lucas shrugged. “I do it because it’s interesting. This assignment’s interesting. If I wasn’t doing this, I’d be chasing chicken thieves in Black Duck.”

  Rose Marie said, “I keep thinking about what I’m going to do when this job is over. If Elmer makes vice president, he’ll take care of both of us. If he doesn’t, then I’m unemployed, and you probably will be, too.”

  “That’s a cheerful thought,” Lucas said.

  “Gotta face facts,” Rose Marie said. “We’ve both had a good run. But I don’t feel like retiring, and you’re way too young to retire. We’re both financially fine, but what the fuck do we do? Become consultants? I don’t feel like running for anything.”

  “I haven’t spent a lot of time worrying about it,” Lucas said.

  “You should,” Rose Marie said. “Even if Elmer makes vice president, I’m not sure you’d want what he could get you. I’d be fine, because I’m basically a politician, I could work in D.C., or for his office here. But you . . . I don’t know what you’d do. I don’t think you’d want to wind up as some FBI functionary. Or Elmer’s valet.”

  “No.”

  “Well. Sooner or later, your name will be connected to this job,” Rose Marie said. “Whether or not it pans out. If the attorney general doesn’t jump you for the prosecution, Porter Smalls will come after you for the defense. A lot of people in the Department of Public Safety and over at the BCA don’t like this kind of thing, the political stuff. And you’ve been doing a lot of it. When I’m not here to protect you, when Elmer’s not here . . .”

  “Ah, it’s all right, Rose Marie,” Lucas said. “I’ve been fired before. Stop worrying about it.”

  “Yeah.” She peered at him for a moment, then asked, “What are you going to do? About Smalls?”

  “Try to k
eep it quiet, as long as I can,” Lucas said.

  “How are you going to do that?” she asked.

  “Haven’t worked it out yet. I’ve got a few ideas, but you wouldn’t want to hear them.”

  “No. Actually, I wouldn’t.”

  “So. Moving right along . . .” Lucas stood up.

  Rose Marie said, “I’ll talk to Henry. Make sure he has a feel for the situation.” Henry Sands was director of the BCA and had been appointed by Henderson. If he knew Henderson was behind Lucas’s investigation, he’d keep his mouth shut. Unless, of course, he could see some profit in slipping a word to a reporter. He didn’t much like Lucas, which was okay, because Lucas didn’t much like him back.

  “Good,” Lucas said. “And hey—relax. Gonna be all right.”

  “No, it won’t,” she said. “I can almost guarantee that whatever it is, it won’t be all right.”

  • • •

  LUCAS STARTED BACK DOWN to the car, still thinking it over. Rose Marie was probably right about the political stuff. Even if you were on the side of the Lord, the politics could taint you. Which created a specific problem: there was at least one man at the BCA who’d be invaluable to Lucas’s investigation—Del Capslock. Del had contacts everywhere, on both sides of the law, and knew the local porn industry inside out.

  The problem was, Del depended on his BCA salary, and all the benefits, for his livelihood. He had a wife and kid, and was probably fifteen years from retirement. Everybody in the BCA knew that he and Lucas had a special relationship, but that was okay . . . as long as Lucas didn’t drag him down.

  Lucas didn’t particularly worry about himself. Back in the nineties, he’d been kicked out of the Minneapolis Police Department and had gone looking for something to do. He’d long had a mildly profitable sideline as a designer of pen-and-paper role-playing games, which had gone back to his days at the university. After he left the MPD, he’d gotten together with a computer guy from the university’s Institute of Technology. Together they created a piece of software that could be plugged into 911 computer systems, to run simulations of high-stress law-enforcement problems.