Silken Prey

by John Sandford

  Lucas rode up to Kidd’s floor in a freight elevator that smelled of oranges and bananas and paint and maybe oil, walked down the hall and knocked on Kidd’s hand-carved walnut door, which Kidd said he’d copied from some Gauguin carvings. Lucas wouldn’t have known a Gauguin carving if one had bit him on the ass, so when told about it, he’d just said, “Hey, that’s great,” and felt like an idiot.

  • • •

  LAUREN OPENED THE DOOR, a slender woman, not tall, with red hair and high cheekbones and a big smile: “Lucas, damnit, you need to come around more often. Why don’t you jack up Weather and let’s go to dinner? I need to get out. So does she.”

  She pecked him on the cheek and then Kidd came up, chewing on a hot dog bun with no dog. He was wearing jeans and a paint-flecked military-gray T-shirt stretched tight across his shoulders. And gold-rimmed glasses.

  “New glasses,” Lucas said.

  “Yeah. When I’m working, I walk away from the painting, then I walk right up close, and then I walk away again,” Kidd said. “You know, figuring it out. I began to realize I wasn’t seeing the close-up stuff so well.”

  “Getting old,” Lucas said.

  “I’m a year older than you,” Kidd said. “I just turned fifty.”

  “Yeah . . . I’m not looking forward to it.”

  Kidd shrugged. “Forty-five was a little tough. Fifty, I didn’t notice.”

  “Didn’t even remember,” Lauren said, nudging Kidd with her elbow. “Jackson and I popped a surprise party on him, and he didn’t even know what it was for, at first.”

  Jackson was their son, who was five, named after some dead New York painter. They drifted into the living room, and Lucas told them about Letty and Sam and the baby, and they talked about schools and other domestic matters. Then Kidd asked, “So what’s up?”

  Lucas: “You’ve read about Porter Smalls?”

  Kidd: “Yeah. Good riddance.”

  Lucas: “He might be innocent.”

  Lauren: “Oh, please.”

  Kidd: “Huh. Tell me about it.”

  • • •

  LUCAS TOLD HIM ABOUT the computer, and Kidd listened carefully, eyes fixed on Lucas’s face. Kidd was a couple of inches shorter than Lucas, but was wider across the shoulders, and narrower through the hips: a wrestler. He’d lost an athletic scholarship when he’d dragged an abusive coach out of his office and forced his head through the bars of a railing around the field house balcony. They’d had to call the fire department to get the coach free, and around the field house, Kidd had been both a hero and a persona non grata. Not that it mattered much: the Institute of Technology hired him as a teaching assistant, and paid him more than he’d gotten from the scholarship.

  When Lucas finished with what he knew about Porter Smalls, Kidd said, “I need to see the hard drive.”

  Lucas took it out of his jacket pocket and handed it to him.

  Kidd said, “Mmm. How long did she have it before she gave it to you?”

  “Half an hour,” Lucas said. “Maybe a little more.”

  Kidd turned the drive in his hands, then said, “She could have done anything to it.”

  “She didn’t mess with it,” Lucas said. “She’d understand the consequences.”

  “Which would be?”

  “She’d make an enemy out of me,” Lucas said. “She wouldn’t want that. And she knows what’s at stake here.”

  Kidd thought for a couple seconds, then nodded, a quick jerk of the head. “Okay,” and then, “Come on back to the shop.”

  Lucas asked, “So you’re in?”

  “We’re in,” Kidd said.

  • • •

  KIDD, LAUREN, AND JACKSON lived in the original oversized unit, which had a long living room overlooking the river and the Port of St. Paul, and a couple of bedrooms and bathrooms; and Kidd used the other two units as studio and computer work space. He still did some computer-related consulting, he said, as Lucas followed him back to the computer space, though ninety percent of his time was now spent painting.

  Lucas stuck his head into the studio—Kidd had three landscapes under way—and then asked, “Lauren doesn’t work?”

  “Not so much, anymore,” Kidd said. “Pretty much a full-time mom.”

  “What’d she do when she was working?”

  “Insurance adjuster,” Kidd said.

  His computer desk was an old oaken library table, ten or twelve feet long, with a half-dozen computers scattered down its length. Three printers sat on an adjacent table, and a heap of cameras sat next to them. He said, “Let’s see what we’ve got here.”

  • • •

  LUCAS CONSIDERED HIMSELF computer literate in the sense that he could hook up computers and printers and Wi-Fi systems, and that he could use Microsoft Word, Excel, and Access, and Google and a few other programs; and he’d once owned a software company, though he had nothing to do with coding the software.

  But he had no idea what Kidd was doing, other than whistling while he worked. Kidd started by plugging ICE’s hard drive into an unbranded desktop computer. He brought the system up, poked at some keys, looked at some numbers, then wandered across the workshop to a bin full of DVDs, flipped through them, chose one, brought it back, and loaded it into the computer.

  “What’s that?” Lucas asked.

  “It’s an inventory program. It searches for certain kinds of apps and . . . whoops. There we are.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. Let’s look at it.”

  Kidd’s fingers rattled on his keyboard, and a program popped up in reader form. Lauren came in, looked at Lucas, and raised an eyebrow, and he shrugged. Lucas knew nothing about the program, except that it wasn’t very long.

  After reading through it, Kidd said, “If this is what it looks like, you’re right—Smalls didn’t do it.”

  It was too fast. Lucas was astonished: “What is it?”

  “Watch.” Kidd pulled the DVD out of the computer, restarted the machine, and when it was up, rattled his fingers across the keyboard again. The screen instantly went blank.

  “Good work,” Lauren said.

  They looked at the blank screen for a moment, then Kidd reached out, picked up a computer manual, and dropped it on the keyboard. A pornographic picture popped up.

  “Aw, that’s rotten,” Lauren said. “Kids.”

  “That’s the file,” Lucas said. “How’d you do that?”

  “Somebody wrote a little script—”

  “A script?”

  “Not even a program,” Kidd said. “Just a few lines of shell commands.” He paused. “How technical do you want this?”

  “Just tell me what it does,” Lucas said.

  “What it does is, it tells the computer, ‘If someone presses these keys all at the same time, show these photos.’ It’s more complicated than that, but it’s not . . . mmm . . . complex.”

  “Show me.”

  “Well, first, you have to get the script and the porn file—it’s actually a bunch of files, but they’re stored in a wrapper format—on the computer. That’s the tricky bit. You have to run the script once—just type the name or double-click it—and it installs itself so it starts on bootup.”

  “Like a virus,” said Lucas.

  “Not really. You have to do it intentionally. A virus would do it by itself. Anyway, if the script is running, it’s just waiting for you to press four keys: QW with one hand, and OP with the other. If you do that, it sends the porn file to the default photo viewer—that’s actually called Photo Viewer in this case. It also activates the screensaver. The next person who touches the keyboard or the mouse cancels the screensaver and, presto. Porn right in your face.”

  Kidd held the four keys and the screen blacked out. “The porn is floating under there. If I hit anything to cancel it, the porn’s right there. But. If I hit the escape key, and only the escape key . . .”

  He did it, and they were back at the Windows home screen. He tapped on the keyboard, and nothing
more happened.

  “What you have is a script that will take you right to the porn, blank the screen, and set it up for instant retrieval,” Kidd said. “But if you need to ditch the program, you hit the escape key—specifically the escape key and nothing else. I can think of no earthly reason to set that up, if you were just looking at the porn. The only reason to do it . . .”

  “Would be to set up a booby trap,” Lucas finished. “But—wouldn’t any computer investigator find that? The script? I mean, as soon as that turned up . . .”

  Kidd looked at him and said, “No.”

  “No?”

  “No, they wouldn’t find it. My tool here chased it down. The script itself is actually fairly well hidden. My tool found it because it’s not part of any standard Windows boot protocol,” he said. “Here’s another thought. Whoever did this, whoever wrote and installed this script, knows his or her way around coding. This is a very tight little piece of work. I don’t think it’s something a politician would write, unless he came out of the computer industry.”

  “You said his or her. You italicized the her.”

  “ICE could do it—she could write this in four minutes,” Kidd said.

  Lucas thought about it for a second, then said, “Nah.”

  “Okay.”

  • • •

  LAUREN SAID, “WAIT A MINUTE. You’re moving too fast. If this guy is like a . . . thrill freak . . . then he might get off looking at porn while there are other people across the desk. Then if he needed to dump it really fast, he could do it. One touch . . .”

  Kidd shook his head. “I see what you’re saying, but it doesn’t feel like that to me. That feels backwards. He’s got this complicated four-key press to get the file up . . . but he doesn’t need to do that. If you know the file is there, you can bring it up fast enough. Just like any work file. But the script is designed to bring it up and simultaneously hide it. Why is that?”

  Lucas and Lauren both shrugged, and Kidd said, “Because it was designed so that somebody could go into his office for a few seconds and bring it up as a booby trap.”

  Kidd continued: “If he was only out for thrills, he’d probably just bring it up the regular way. No reason not to. Then he’d write the script so that any key would kill it. If he was getting his thrills by looking at it in his office, with other people present, and then somebody unexpectedly stepped behind his desk, he’d want to kill it with any key. Now, you kill it with the escape key. But if you needed to kill it in a big hurry, you wouldn’t want to have to reach out and hit the escape key—specifically the escape key—and nothing else, to kill it. You could fumble that.”

  They all thought about that for a while, then Lauren said, “Maybe.”

  “Find something else,” Lucas said, flicking his fingers at the computer.

  “That’ll take a little longer,” Kidd said. “I suspected something like this script was there. Anything else . . . I’ll have to dig into the file.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “Dunno,” Kidd said.

  “Gotta be fast,” Lucas said.

  “I’ll make it a priority,” Kidd said.

  • • •

  “THERE’S ONE OTHER THING,” Kidd said. “Do you have any idea how this was put in there?”

  “Not yet.”

  “That’s gonna be a problem. If the machine is on the Internet, it’s theoretically vulnerable. Even if it’s on a local network. It’s not likely, but it’s possible. But if it’s not that, and it doesn’t look like it, you’ve got a different problem. To install this quickly, you’d have to know the machine’s password. Just to run something the first time, nowadays, you need to do that.”

  “That’s not a problem. Apparently everybody in the office knew it. It’s ‘Smallscampaign.’”

  Kidd shook his head: “People never learn.”

  Lucas had another thought: “Can you tell me if the script was written at the same time the porn file was created?”

  “Good thought,” Kidd said. He rattled the keys for a while, peered at the screen, and said, “Yeah. They were. And . . . uh-oh.”

  “What?”

  “Interesting.” He said it like computer freaks do when they’re preoccupied.

  “What?” Lucas asked.

  He got a minute of silence, then:

  “This is an unusual collection,” Kidd said. “When people create a porn collection, they almost always collect the pieces separately, because everybody’s tastes are different. But here, every file was downloaded all at once. That’s unusual.”

  “But what does that mean?”

  “Don’t know. It’s possible that he made the collection on a different computer, put it on a thumb drive, and carried it over to his office, but it’s also possible . . .”

  “That somebody brought it to his office and loaded them all at once,” Lucas said.

  “Man, it feels like something dirty happened here,” Kidd said. “This is just not right.”

  “Keep pushing,” Lucas said.

  “I’ll call you,” Kidd said.

  Lucas took Smalls’s employee list out of his pocket. “When you get tired of checking out the porn thing, could you look up some people for me? I don’t know how to do this, and ICE said you’re really good at databases.”

  • • •

  WHEN LUCAS LEFT KIDD’S apartment, he called the governor: “We have some early indications that Smalls was set up.”

  “Could you prove it in court?”

  “No. Couldn’t prove he was set up, but we might get him acquitted . . . but that’s purely a negative thing. Doesn’t say he’s innocent.”

  “Keep working,” Henderson said, and he was gone.

  • • •

  LUCAS HEADED BACK to the BCA building to look at the St. Paul homicide file on Tubbs. That done, he’d go over to Tubbs’s apartment. Then he’d harass the hell out of Kidd until he’d unwrapped the hard drive from top to bottom.

  The case was getting interesting.

  Eight days to the election, and counting.

  CHAPTER 6

  The St. Paul file on the Tubbs disappearance didn’t quite convince Lucas that Tubbs had been murdered, but he thought it probable. The physical evidence was nonexistent, and the circumstantial evidence ambiguous, although the longer Tubbs remained missing, the more likely it was that he was dead.

  The circumstantial evidence included the fact that Tubbs called his mother on an almost daily basis, and hadn’t called her since he disappeared; that his credit cards hadn’t been used, and that he used the cards for even the most minor purchases, including daily bagel breakfasts at a Bruegger’s bagel bakery on Grand Avenue; and that he’d missed a number of appointments that would have been important to him.

  On the other hand, he’d disappeared once before, so completely that he’d made the newspapers. Ten years earlier, he’d flown to Cancún for a wedding, intending to come back two days later. Instead, he’d apparently gone on an alcoholic bender and had not surfaced for a week. Before he showed up, it had been widely speculated that he’d gone swimming alone and had been eaten by a shark.

  He’d never disappeared again, and after that alcoholic episode, he’d signed up with Alcoholics Anonymous. Abstinence only lasted a few weeks before he’d started drinking again, but he’d controlled it, as far as anyone knew.

  Still, there was the possibility that he was facedown in a motel room somewhere.

  Lucas didn’t believe that, but it was possible.

  • • •

  WHEN HE’D FINISHED READING the file, Lucas put on his jacket, got his keys, stopped at a candy machine for a pack of Oreos, then drove south to University Avenue, and over to Tubbs’s apartment building.

  He’d just found a parking spot when his cell phone rang. He looked at the screen: Kidd.

  “Yeah?”

  “How bad do you cops hate Smalls?” Kidd asked.

  “I don’t hate him at all,” Lucas said. “I didn’t vote for him,
but there was nothing personal about it.”

  Kidd said, “When I started looking him up, I found out that he doesn’t like public employee unions. Any public employee unions, including police unions. He wants to outlaw them. He debated the head of the Minneapolis union on public television, the Almanac program.”

  “He’s a right-winger,” Lucas said. “This is a surprise?”

  “No, what’s a surprise is, I think the porn file might have come out of a police department,” Kidd said.

  Lucas wasn’t sure he’d heard that right: “What are you talking about?”

  “A part of it may have come out of evidentiary files. There’s some text with most of the photos, the usual pedophile bullshit. Then there’s one says, ‘Left to right, unknown adult male, unknown adult male, Mark James Trebuchet, thirteen, unknown female, Sandra Mae Otis, fifteen.’ That’s the only one with text, but there are about five photos related to that one. I looked them up, those kids—I had to do a little excavating in the juvenile files—and found out that both of them were involved in a prostitution ring busted three years ago by the Minneapolis cops. I assume evidentiary photos wouldn’t just be turned loose on the Internet.”

  “Ah, fuck me,” Lucas said.

  “I thought you’d be pleased,” Kidd said.

  “Fuck me. I gotta think about this,” Lucas said. “If anybody—anybody—got wind of this, the whole goddamn state would blow up.”

  “No, it wouldn’t. The whole goddamn media-political complex would get its knickers in a twist, and then, after a lot of screaming and slander, life would go on,” Kidd said. “You gotta keep some perspective.”

  “I’ll tell you something, Kidd—that might be true if you’re an artist,” Lucas said. “But if you’re a cop, what you see is endless finger-pointing, investigative commissions, legislative inquiries, accusations of obstruction of justice, perjury . . .”

  “. . . misfeasance with a corncob . . .”

  “Yeah, go ahead and laugh,” Lucas said. “Listen, keep working this. You think the Smalls file came out of Minneapolis?”

  “I have no idea—but those two kids were involved with Minneapolis police. I could dig out the complete juvenile files, if you need them.”