Silken Prey

by John Sandford

  “Do that. Uh, how do you do that? I thought they were sealed.”

  Kidd slid past the question: “Oh, you know. Anyway, what I can’t figure out is why the photos of these kids would be inserted in the middle of a child-porn file . . . unless maybe the cops got the file when they busted the prostitution ring. And then annotated it? I don’t know, that sounds weird.”

  Lucas thought for a moment, then asked, “This girl in the picture, Sandra, you said she was fifteen? And this was three years ago?”

  “Sandra Mae Otis, and yeah, the caption says she was fifteen,” Kidd said.

  “Huh. Look, I’m in my car. Are you in a place where you could look up her birth date? Like in the DMV files? See if she’s eighteen yet?”

  “Wait one,” Kidd said. Lucas heard his keyboard rattling, and ten seconds later Kidd said, “She’s eighteen . . . as of last March. March tenth.”

  “What’s her address?”

  Kidd read it off, then said, “I’m checking that address on a satellite photo. . . . Hold on a second . . . it looks like a trailer park.”

  “I know the place,” Lucas said. Then, “All right. I don’t know what access you have to Minneapolis police files, and I won’t ask, but if you should stumble over what looks like the Smalls file . . . let me know.”

  “I’ll do that,” Kidd said. “Why was Sandra’s age important?”

  “Think about it for one second,” Lucas said.

  Kidd thought about it for one second, then said, “Ah. She’s an adult now. You can twist her arm until it falls off, and nobody can tell you to quit.”

  “Perzactly,” Lucas said. “And that’s what I’m going to do . . . if that’s what it takes.”

  • • •

  TUBBS LIVED IN A prosperous-looking, two-story redbrick apartment building, set up above the street. Still thinking about the porn file, Lucas let himself in with the keys he’d gotten from Morris, skipped the elevator for a flight of carpeted stairs, and let himself into Tubbs’s apartment. The living room and bedroom were acceptably neat, for a bachelor who lived alone, and smelled faintly of food that was made in cans and cooked in pots, and also of scented candles. The office was a mess, with stacks of paper everywhere.

  Lucas spent only a few minutes in the living room, bedroom, and the two bathrooms, because they’d have been gone through by St. Paul detectives and the crime-scene crew, and they wouldn’t have missed anything significant. The office would be where the action was at, because Lucas knew something the St. Paul cops hadn’t known: a possible connection to the Smalls problem.

  St. Paul had taken out Tubbs’s computers, so there wasn’t anything to work with but paper. He skipped everything that looked like a report, and started shuffling through individual pieces of paper.

  A half hour in, he found a Republican Senate campaign schedule, a half-dozen sheets stapled at the corner and folded in thirds—the right size to be stuck in the breast pocket of a sport coat. The outside sheet was crumpled and then resmoothed, and the whole pack of paper had been folded and refolded, so Tubbs had carried it for a while. There was no equivalent schedule for the Democrats, although Tubbs had been one.

  Lucas carried the schedule to a window for the better light and peered at the sheets: there were penciled tick marks against a half-dozen scheduled appearances by Smalls. Interesting, but not definitive. Tubbs had been following Smalls’s campaign.

  He called Smalls:

  “What was your relationship with Bob Tubbs?”

  “Tubbs?” Smalls asked. “What’re you doing?”

  “Trying to figure out why he was tracking your campaign.”

  “Tracking . . . Well, I don’t think you could draw any conclusions from that,” Smalls said. “That’s what he did for a living.”

  Lucas read off the list of the appearances Tubbs had been tracking. “Any reason why he’d pick those four?”

  After a moment of silence, Smalls said, “The only thing I can think of is that I was out of town on all of them.”

  “Of course,” Lucas said. He should have seen it.

  “My God, Davenport, the papers say Tubbs has disappeared,” Smalls said. “What does this have to do with the porn thing?”

  “I don’t know—but I was told that he went through your campaign office from time to time,” Lucas said.

  “Not while I was there,” Smalls said. “But, you know . . . political people hang out.”

  “What about Tubbs? Did he hate you?”

  “Oh, not really. We didn’t particularly care for each other,” Smalls said. “He was pretty much a standard Democrat operator. He also lobbied some, so he had to suck up to Republicans as well. He was just one of those guys doing a little here, a little there. He was supposedly a bagman for one of our less revered St. Paul state senators. Don’t know if that’s true or not, but I suspect it was.”

  “Did he do dirty tricks? Could he have come up with this porn idea?”

  “Well, you know, yeah, probably,” Smalls said. “He’d do opposition research, try to find a picture of you picking your nose, or waving your arm so that if it was cropped right, you looked like you were doing a Hitler salute.”

  They talked for a few more minutes, and when Lucas got off the phone, he started taking the apartment apart. It hadn’t occurred to him until Smalls mentioned the possibility that Tubbs had been a bagman, and that he might have been involved in dirty tricks, but the fact was, nothing the least bit discreditable had been found in the apartment by either the St. Paul cops or the crime-scene people. No porn, no cash . . . and looking around, Lucas hadn’t found any employment contracts, no car titles, no leases, no legal papers of any kind.

  Tubbs might well have a safe-deposit box somewhere, but Lucas thought there was a good chance that he’d have a hidey-hole somewhere in the apartment, somewhere he could get at important papers quickly. After a quick survey, in which he didn’t spot anything in particular, he unplugged a lamp and carried it around the apartment, testing all the outlets. Fake electric outlets, though opening to small caches, were both innocuous-looking and easy to get at. In this case, all the outlets worked.

  He rapped on the wooden floor and got a hard return: the building was a steel-reinforced concrete structure, so there were no holes in either the floor or the ceiling, which looked like genuine plaster. An access panel on the back wall of the bathroom looked promising, because it appeared to have been removed a few times—probably at least once by the crime-scene crew. He found a screwdriver in a tool kit that he’d seen in the kitchen, and removed the panel, and found sewer pipes and the usual inter-wall dust and grime. He put the panel back on and moved to the closets, checking for fake side panels.

  Lucas had designed his own home, and worked daily with the contractor who built it, almost inch by inch. He was standing in a closet when he thought, Sewer pipes? He went back to the bathroom and took the panel off again. Two white six-inch PVC sewer pipes were coming down from above—but Tubbs’s apartment was on the second floor of a two-story building. Where were the pipes coming from? Couldn’t be Tubbs’s own bathroom because, unless there are big pumps involved, sewage flows down, not up.

  He sat on the toilet seat, looking at the two large pipes, and it occurred to him that the access panel didn’t give access to anything. You couldn’t do anything except look at the pipes. He reached out and shook one of them: solid. Shook the other: also solid.

  But when he tried twisting one of them, it turned, and quite easily.

  • • •

  THE PIPES WERE ABOUT fourteen inches long, with screw-in caps. He unscrewed the cap on the first pipe, and there it all was: the personal papers that had been missing, along with a gun—an old revolver with fake pearl stocks—and three thumb drives. The second pipe contained more paper, all curled to fit in the pipe, the kind of thing that Lucas might have been looking at in a corruption investigation. There were tax records, testimony clipped from lawsuits, bills of sale, corporate records, and $23,000 in stacks of fifty-
dollar bills, held together by rubber bands.

  He put back the gun and all the personal papers, and the money. He took everything else, and called Kidd.

  “I’ve got three thumb drives and I need a quick survey, just to find out what’s on them.”

  “How big are they?” Kidd asked.

  Lucas looked at the drives and said, “Two two-gig, one four-gig.”

  “You could put the equivalent of several thousand books on those things, so the survey might not be quick,” Kidd said.

  “I just need an idea—and I need to know if that porn file is on one of them,” Lucas said. “I doubt that there are several thousand books on them.”

  “Well, shoot, look . . . I guess. We could check for the porn fairly quickly. Come over in an hour. I’ll put a little search program together.”

  “Would two or three hours be better? I’ve got something else I could do.”

  “Two hours would be better,” Kidd said. “We’re expecting some guests and I’m in the kitchen, being a scullery maid.”

  “See you then: two hours.”

  Lucas put the pipes back together and screwed the panel back on, walked back to the car, and headed north up I-35.

  • • •

  SANDRA MAE OTIS LIVED in a manufactured home in a manufactured home park off I-494 north of St. Paul. She also ran an illegal daycare center.

  Otis was sitting on the stoop smoking when Lucas pulled into the driveway: she had bleached-blond hair, black eyebrows, and small metallic eyes like the buttons on 501 jeans. She regarded him with a certain resignation as he got out of the car, flicked the butt-end of the smoke off into the weeds, turned and shouted, “Carl, knock it the fuck off,” and looked back at Lucas.

  As Lucas walked up, a little boy, maybe three, dressed in a Kool-Aid-spotted T-shirt and shorts, and crying, came out and said, “Carl hit me, really hard.”

  Otis said, “I know, Spud, we’ll get him later. You go on back in there and tell him that if he hits you again, I’ll put him in the garbage can and let you beat on it.” Back to Lucas: “How long have cops been driving Porsches?”

  “Personal car,” Lucas said. The musky odor of weed hung around her head.

  She looked at him for a minute, then said, “So give me some money if you’re so rich.”

  Lucas opened his mouth to say something when another small boy, a couple years older than the first, came out crying, rubbing an eye with his fist, and said, “Spud says you’re gonna put me in the garbage can again.”

  “Yeah, well, don’t hit him,” Otis told the kid.

  The kid said, “Sometimes Spud really pisses me off.”

  “But don’t hit him,” Otis said. “You see this guy? He’s a cop and he’s got a big gun. If you hit Spud again, he’s going to shoot you.”

  The kid stepped back, his mouth open in fear. Lucas blurted, “No, I won’t.”

  But the kid backed away, still scared, and vanished inside. Otis said, “So what do you want? I’m not responsible for Dick’s debts. We’re all over with.”

  Lucas looked around for something to sit on: the stoop would never touch the seat of his Salvatore Ferragamo slacks. There was nothing, so he stood, looming over her. “Three years ago, you were picked up and taken to juvie court as part of a prostitution ring that was busted over in Minneapolis.”

  “That’s juvenile and it doesn’t count,” Otis said.

  “It does count, because it’s probably messed up your head, but that’s not exactly what I want to talk about,” Lucas said. “Sometime in there, when these people were running you, they took pictures of you and Mark Trebuchet and three adults in a sex thing. Did they sell those pictures?”

  “I don’t know if they had time, before they were busted,” Otis said. “They were busted, like, two days after the photo shoot. I think the photographer bragged to the wrong guy about it.”

  “Now, who was this? Who’s ‘they’?” Lucas asked.

  “The Pattersons. Irma and Bjorn.”

  “The Pattersons ran the business?”

  “Yeah. They’re doing fifteen years. They got twelve to go. And if you’re a cop, how come you didn’t know that?”

  “Because I’m operating off a telephone,” Lucas said. “Our guys just found the pictures . . . but the pictures were in court? You, and the two men and the woman and Mark?”

  “Yup.”

  “Did the cops get them off the Internet? The evidence photos?”

  “I don’t think so. The Internet was already getting too dangerous, with cops all over the place. The Pattersons were really scared about that, telling their clients to stay away from the ’net. They mostly printed them out and sent them around that way,” Otis said. “They said they were for my portfolio. They said I was going to be a movie star. Like that was going to happen, the big fat liars.”

  “So what happened in court?”

  “Well, I had to testify about what we did. The sex and all. And about the pictures. They wanted us to identify the adults, but, you know, we didn’t know who they were,” she said. “I’d seen them around, but I didn’t know their names. I think they took off when the Pattersons got busted.”

  “Were there a lot of other pictures put in at the same time? In court? Of you?”

  She frowned. “No. When the Pattersons took the pictures, they took a lot of them. I can remember that flash going off over and over and really frying my eyeballs. And this guy I was blowing, he had like a soft-on all the time, I had to keep pumping him up. But the cops had, I don’t know, four or five pictures. Or six or seven. Like that. I think all they had were like these paper pictures, and they took them right off the Pattersons’ desk.”

  A little girl, maybe Spud’s sister, came out of the house and looked at Lucas and then at Otis and said, “I pooped.”

  “Ah, Jesus Christ, you little shit machine,” Otis said. “All right. You go back in, and I’ll come and change you.”

  The girl went back in and Otis asked, “You done?”

  “Yeah, but don’t go anywhere, okay?” Lucas said.

  “Where in the fuck would I go?” Otis asked. “I’m living in an old fuckin’ trailer. My next stop is a park bench.”

  Lucas turned away, then back and said, “This place can’t be licensed.”

  “Are you kidding me?” she asked. “I’m working for minimum-wage dumbasses who either leave the kids with me or lock them in a car. I’m all they can afford, and I’m better than a car. Maybe.”

  Lucas said, “All right, but don’t put Carl in the garbage can anymore, okay?”

  “Carl gets what Carl deserves,” she said. “But they all like chocolate ice cream. I could get some for tomorrow, Porsche cop, if I had an extra twenty bucks.”

  “How many kids are in there?”

  “Seven,” she said. “Unless one of them has killed another one.”

  Lucas took a twenty out of his wallet. “Get them the ice cream,” he said. “You spend it on dope, I’ll put you in something worse than a garbage can.”

  • • •

  BACK DOWN I-35 TO Kidd’s place.

  Lauren came to the door, said, “Hi,” and then, as Lucas followed her inside, said, “We’ve got a couple of friends staying with us for a few days, with their kids. It could be a little noisy.”

  “I just need Kidd to take a look and give me an estimate on what’s inside these things,” Lucas said, showing her the thumb drives.

  Kidd was sitting in the front room with a black couple, and Kidd said, “Hey, Lucas,” and to the couple, “This is Lucas Davenport, he’s a cop. Lucas, John and Marvel Smith, from down in Longstreet, Arkansas. John’s a sculptor, Marvel’s a politician. John does some stuff that you and Weather ought to look at.”

  “I’ll do that,” Lucas said. He shook hands with John Smith, an athletic guy with some boxer’s scars around his eyes, and smiled at Marvel, a beautiful long-legged woman with a reserved smile; like she might be wary of cops.

  Kidd said, “So let’s see wha
t you got. . . . Back in a couple of minutes, guys.”

  On the way back, Lucas gave Kidd a thirty-second summary of how he’d gotten the drives. “This Tubbs guy—I believe he’s dead. Murdered. I mean, we all thought so, but now I’m pretty sure of it.”

  “That’s disturbing,” Kidd said.

  In the computer lab, Kidd plugged in all three thumb drives at the same time, quickly figured out that one set had been formatted under an Apple OSX operating system, and the other two with different versions of Windows.

  He put in a piece of his own software and tapped some keys, and a file popped up. “There it is,” he said. He opened it, and they saw the first photos of the Smalls porn files.

  “How’d you do that?” Lucas asked.

  “I’ve got the number of bytes from the file off the Smalls machine, and looked for a file of close to the same length. This one was exact, which is a rare thing.”

  “Goddamnit—Smalls is clear.”

  “Not necessarily,” Kidd said. “Remember—the file could have gone the other way, too. From Smalls to Tubbs. Maybe Tubbs stole it, and was blackmailing Smalls.”

  “You sound like a defense lawyer,” Lucas said.

  “Thanks.” Kidd did some other computer stuff, popping up files with all kinds of various corporate papers, real estate records, legislative committee meeting transcripts, court records.

  “Cover-your-ass files,” Lucas said.

  “Might be more complicated than that,” Kidd said. He went to the door and called, “Hey, Marvel? You got a minute?” And he said to Lucas, “Marvel’s okay.”

  • • •

  MARVEL CAME DOWN THE HALL, and Kidd showed her into the lab and said, “Look at this file. It’s from here in Minnesota. Do you see anything?”

  Lucas was a little nervous having the woman looking at the file, but she was from Arkansas, and Kidd probably wouldn’t have asked her to look at it if she might become a problem. He kept his mouth shut.

  The file Marvel was examining was one of the smaller ones, fifteen or twenty pieces of paper that had been scanned into PDF files, as well as three or four fine-resolution JPEG photos. Using a mouse, Marvel clicked back and forth between the images. John and Lauren came into the lab, leaned against a wall to watch.