Silken Prey

by John Sandford

  So Kidd had had to stay with the computers, watching for trouble, although now, painting six and seven hours a day, he was working so hard that he hadn’t time to do anything creative with the machines; and he was making so much money that he didn’t have to.

  He and the other members of his network understood that even monitoring the feds could be dangerous. Computer systems were totally malleable, changing all the time. Updating access code could lead to serious trouble if it was detected. In addition to that problem, the number of major computer systems was increasing all the time, and security was constantly getting better. So care was needed, and time was on the government’s side.

  The most powerful aspect of any bureaucracy, in Kidd’s eyes, was the same thing that gave cancer its power: it was immortal. If you didn’t seek it out and kill it, cell by cell, it’d just keep growing. Bureaucracies could chase you forever. You could defeat them over and over and over again, and the bureaucracy didn’t much care, though some individual bureaucrats might.

  The bureaucracy, as a whole, just kept coming, as long as the funding lasted.

  • • •

  AS PART OF his monitoring efforts, Kidd had long been resident in the Minneapolis Police Department’s computer systems, which had useful access to several federal systems. The federal systems had safeguards, of course, but since the basic design of the system had been done to encourage access by law enforcement, the safeguards were relatively weak. Once you had unrestricted access to a few big federal systems, you could get to some pretty amazing places.

  None of which concerned him when he went out on the network from a Grand Avenue coffee shop eight hours after he’d testified for the attorney general. In his testimony, he’d represented himself as a former computer consultant who was mostly out of the business, and was now concentrating on art. That was true.

  Which didn’t mean he’d misplaced his brain.

  So he got a grande no-foam latte and sat at a round plastic table at the back of the shop and slipped into the Minneapolis Police Department’s computer system. Instead of going out to the federal networks, he began probing individual computers on the network. He was looking for a group of numbers—the number of bytes represented by the photo collection.

  The collection was a big one, and though there’d be thousands of files in the department’s computers, the actual number of bytes would vary wildly from file to file. If he found a matching number, it’d almost certainly be the porn file.

  He’d thought he had a good chance to find the file; and he was right.

  • • •

  “THE PROBLEM,” he told Lauren later that night, “is that I found four copies of it. I know which computers have accessed the files, but I don’t know who runs those computers.”

  “Sounds like something Lucas should find out for himself,” she said.

  “Yeah. But how’s he going to explain that he knows about the files? Without explaining about me?”

  “Maybe that’s something you should talk to him about,” she said.

  Kidd looked at his watch: “You think it’s too late to call?”

  “He said he stays up late.”

  Lucas answered on the third ring. “Hey, what’s up?”

  “I have a certain amount of access to the Minneapolis police computer system,” Kidd began.

  “I’m shocked,” Lucas said. “So . . . what’d you find?”

  “I found the porn file. I found it in four different places, but I don’t know who controls the files. The files themselves have four different names. The thing is, I don’t want to be connected to this one.”

  “Because then the cops will know you’re inside,” Lucas said.

  “That’s right.”

  “So how’d you do it?” Lucas asked.

  Kidd explained, briefly, Lucas thought about it for a moment, then said, “How about this? I get a warrant, or a subpoena, or just an okay, whichever works. I show the file to ICE, and she finds that number. That byte number. We go over to Minneapolis and jack up their systems manager and ICE finds the files, like you did, using that number, all on the up-and-up.”

  “That would be perfect,” Kidd said. “Let me give you the number you’re looking for.”

  “You’re not in the BCA system, are you?” Lucas asked.

  “Of course not,” Kidd said.

  “Then how’d you get this phone number?” Lucas asked. “You’re calling on my work phone.”

  “You called me on this phone—so your number was on my phone,” Kidd said. “Jesus, don’t you trust anyone?”

  Lucas said, “Oh . . . maybe.”

  Kidd gave Lucas the number he’d be looking for, and hung up. Lauren said, “He suspects you’re in the BCA system, huh?”

  “Naw, he was just kicking the anthill, to see if anything ran out,” Kidd said. “He’s got no clue.”

  “I’d stay out of there for a while, anyway,” Lauren said. “Just in case.”

  • • •

  “KIDD IS INTO EVERYTHING,” Lucas told Weather, as they got in bed. “He’s all over Minneapolis and I know damn well he’s in the BCA computers, too. He says he’s not, but he’s lying.”

  “Don’t you trust anyone?” she asked.

  “You and Letty,” Lucas said. “Most of the time. Of course, I always check back and verify.”

  • • •

  THE NEXT MORNING, he called ICE, described the file to her, and asked, “How do I find out how many bytes are in it?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “Because when I was working at the company, the guys there could find specific files by the number of bytes they had in them. I’d like to know how many are in this one, then I can take it over to the Minneapolis cops’ system and look for it there.”

  “That’ll work,” she said. “Okay, you got the file up? I’ll walk you through it.”

  She did, and eventually had Lucas write down the same number that Kidd had come up with, although he didn’t tell her that. When he had the number, she said, “Do you trust the Minneapolis cops?”

  “If somebody puts a gun in my ear,” he said. “Why?”

  “Because what if their systems guy plugs the number into his machine, says, ‘Nope, not here.’ You’re far too ignorant to argue. Then what?”

  “I’ve got that figured out—that was easy,” he said.

  “Yeah? What’re you going to do?”

  “I’m gonna take you with me.”

  • • •

  THERE WAS BUREAUCRACY to be worked through. When Lucas talked to Rose Marie, she was unhappy about the necessity of jacking up the Minneapolis cops, even though she’d known it was coming. “We’re doing everything right out in front of the media now, and I’m not going to have you serve a search warrant on Minneapolis,” she said. “Talk to Robin and get him straight, we’ll bring in their own Internal Affairs unit, and we’ll talk about all the cooperation we’re getting.”

  Robin Connolly was the Minneapolis chief of police.

  “What if Connolly says no?” Lucas asked.

  “He won’t. He’ll want to be out front on this, he’ll want to be informed. If he does say no, I’ll call him. I’ll tell him that I’ll personally stick the search warrant up his ass and then cut him out of the loop on the return.”

  “You’re so grandmotherly sometimes,” Lucas said.

  Which didn’t mean that Connolly didn’t throw a fit when Lucas called him and told him what he wanted to do.

  “What the hell are you talking about? You think we planted the porn file on Smalls? You’re nuts, Davenport. I’m not going to . . .” blah blah blah.

  Lucas said, “Rose Marie will be calling you in a minute or so. Maybe she can explain things more clearly than I have.”

  “Fuck a bunch of Rose Marie,” Connolly shouted. “I’ll put wheels on that bitch and roll her right into the Mississippi.”

  Lucas called Rose Marie, who said she’d call Connolly. Connolly called back five minutes later and
said, “It might be possible that we can work something out.”

  “Is Rose Marie in the Mississippi?” Lucas asked.

  “Fuck you.”

  • • •

  LUCAS CALLED ICE and asked her to gently and with great diplomacy set up an appointment with the Minneapolis systems manager. While he was waiting for ICE to get back to him, he called the duty officer and asked him to get him a good phone number for Taryn Grant. He was sitting in his office, with his feet up on his desk, waiting for callbacks and thinking about how he’d sequence his various visits, when Del stopped in, took a chair, and said, “I bought a Harley.”

  “Oh, Jesus . . .”

  “What? I had one before.”

  “You were in your twenties,” Lucas said. “If you had to lay one down now, they’d be picking you up with a sponge.”

  “I’m not going on any big rides. . . . It’s gonna be a warm-weather bike, just rolling around town on the local streets,” Del said. “Besides, most Harley guys are my age. Or older.”

  “And you know what? They’re getting picked up with sponges.”

  Jenkins came in and when Del told him about the Harley, they slapped hands and Jenkins said, “I’d have one myself, if they weren’t such pieces of shit.”

  “Says the owner of a personal Crown Vic.”

  Shrake showed up a few minutes later, and they talked about the Harley, and Shrake said, “That fuckin’ Flowers used to ride, right after he got out of the army. He had some sorta crotch rocket, though, not a Harley. I remember him showing up at crime scenes on it, when he was working for St. Paul. He had hair down his back, he looked like Wild Bill Hickok.”

  After another couple of minutes, Jenkins said to Lucas, “I’m hearing rumors that the Geheime Staatspolizei doesn’t like the fact that you’re working directly for the governor, and bailing out Smalls. I hear you’re about to slap a search warrant on the Minneapolis cops, and that’s got everybody steppin’ and fetchin’.”

  In Jenkins’s personal lexicon, the Geheime Staatspolizei comprised the BCA’s top management. It was also the proper name of the German Gestapo, though he probably wasn’t pronouncing it correctly—not that Lucas knew for sure.

  Lucas explained that a compromise had been worked out with Minneapolis, and that he’d be working in cooperation with the city’s Internal Affairs unit.

  “That doesn’t help much,” Del said. “I’ll tell you what, my friend. You’re not doing yourself a lot of good around here, hanging out with the politicians. The knives are coming out.”

  “Fuck ’em,” Lucas said. “It’s a murder case. I’ll break it and the tunes will change.”

  “No, they won’t,” Shrake said. “Everybody will agree that you did a great job and then they’ll stab you in the back. It’s the tall poppy syndrome.”

  “I’ll take care,” Lucas said.

  “You already haven’t,” Del said.

  • • •

  WHEN THEY’D GONE, Lucas got Taryn Grant’s office phone number, called it and spoke to a secretary, who went away for a moment, then came back and said, “Ms. Grant is in her car. I’m forwarding your call directly to her.”

  When Grant came on—she had the kind of voice he’d always liked, low and husky, like Weather’s—he said, “I’m working on the investigation of the child pornography found on Senator Smalls’s computer, and also the disappearance of a political operative named Bob Tubbs. I need to talk to you about the situation.”

  “I’ve already made a public statement to the media.”

  “I know, I saw it. But I have a few questions for you, and I also need to brief you on the status of the investigation,” Lucas said. “Time is so short, before the election, we want to be sure everybody is informed.”

  “I’ll be home between six and six-forty-five tonight, but then I have campaign visits to make.”

  “I’ll see you then,” Lucas said. “If you could give me your address . . .”

  • • •

  ICE CALLED: “I talked to the systems manager over in Minneapolis, and we’re on for three o’clock. I’m familiar with their equipment. I didn’t tell him exactly what we are going to do, you know . . . just in case they might try to ditch it.”

  “Good. The chief knows what we’re doing, so they might be able to figure it out, but they don’t have the number, as far as I know.”

  • • •

  WHEN LUCAS got to the Minneapolis Police Department’s ugly, obsolete, purple-stone headquarters in downtown Minneapolis, ICE was sitting with her feet up on the systems manager’s desk, talking about old times at what was once called the Institute of Technology at the University of Minnesota.

  A sergeant named Buck Marion sat in a corner, reading a free newspaper; Marion was with the Minneapolis Internal Affairs unit, and nodded at Lucas. One of Marion’s predecessors had gotten Lucas thrown off the Minneapolis police force, for beating up a pimp.

  Lucas listened to ICE and the systems manager ramble along, then shook his head, and ICE asked, “What?”

  “Nothing like a long, rambling C++ story,” Lucas said, not trying to hide a yawn. “Fascinating.”

  “We’re intellectuals,” ICE explained. “Anyway, Larry’s going to help us look for the files. We were waiting for you.” Larry Benson was the systems manager.

  “Then let’s do it,” Lucas said.

  ICE explained that they wouldn’t be using the specific byte size, but would enter a narrow range that the file should fall into, even if an item or two were missing. ICE leaned over Benson’s shoulder and fed him the file size number, and he entered the number range into his system. They all watched as the system thought it over, and then spat out twelve returns. “Twelve returns,” ICE said. “Interesting.”

  Lucas almost blurted out that Kidd had found only four. Before he could, Benson said, “Let’s take a look.”

  He opened them, one by one, on top of each other. Eight of them were irrelevant. Four of them, just as Kidd said, showed an identical opening set of child porn. “Man, I hate to think this shit is floating around in there,” Benson said. “One file . . . it’s pretty open access, if you know what to look for.”

  “Any way to tell who has accessed them?” Lucas asked.

  “Not really. Well, I can tell you pretty sure in one case, but not the other three. Tom Morgan, Lieutenant Morgan, opened them, let me see, about eight times, all in about a four-day period a little more than three years ago, in August.”

  Lucas said, “There was a trial right then. Probably for trial purposes. He was one of the people who testified.”

  Benson said, “The other three sets of files were accessed by three different machines. Each machine accessed only one file, but multiple times.”

  Marion: “Who’s assigned to the machines?”

  Benson shook his head. “They’re office machines. Maybe somebody uses them most of the time, but the rest of the time, anybody could do it.”

  ICE reached out and tapped the computer screen. “Look at this: this machine accessed the file four hundred and eighteen times over three years. They never quit looking at it . . . they’re still looking at it.”

  • • •

  ICE AND BENSON STARTED working through it, and Marion said to Lucas, “This is gonna be a disaster. I don’t know what’s gonna happen if it turns out that a hundred guys were looking at this stuff.”

  “Maybe it won’t be necessary to bring it up,” Lucas suggested.

  “It’ll be necessary,” Marion said. “The chief will be inside my shirt, wanting to know what we found. You’ve probably got to tell your boss. Once that’s done, it’ll get away from us. If it was only us four . . . but it’s not.”

  Lucas said, “You’re probably right. I’m sorry.”

  ICE said, “All right. Machine One is in Vice, and that machine apparently dealt with the original files, and that’s where a variety of files was grouped into one, and that’s where the first duplicate was made. The duplicate had the same name as the
original, but with a version number, Version Two. That was probably a legit backup. Machine Two is also in Vice, and somebody made a second duplicate on that machine, and saved it under a completely new name. That’s the one that has been accessed by Machine Three, the four hundred and eighteen accesses. Machine Three never made a dupe. Machine Four accessed the original file, but only twice. Machine Four is in Vice.”

  “What’s the latest date?” Lucas asked.

  “Machine Three has had sixteen accesses in the last month,” ICE said. “Both of the Machine Four accesses were last year.”

  “We’ve got to nail them all down,” Marion said.

  Lucas said, “This whole Smalls-porn thing feels improvised to me. It doesn’t feel like something that was planned out a year ago. So . . . it probably came off Machine Three. Where’s that one?”

  Benson said, “It’s here, in the building. Down in Domestics.”

  “How many people in Domestics?”

  Benson shrugged, but Marion said, “About twelve or fifteen, counting the shrinks. Seven sworn officers, two or three support people, and the shrinks. Some of the shrinks are part-time, but they’d have access.”

  “Is there any way to see who signed on the machine and what they did? What they looked at?” Lucas asked.

  Benson shook his head. “The only way you could figure that out, would be if Machine Three was in somebody’s locked office. But Domestics is an open bay, with people coming and going. The only way to tell would be to observe . . . figure out who was on that machine at what time.”

  “But all this is in the past,” Lucas said. “How would we do that?”

  “We can’t,” Benson said.

  “What we can do,” Marion said, “is bust some balls.”

  “Gotta be soon,” Lucas said. “Smalls is about halfway off the hook, but the media doesn’t like him, so he’s only halfway off. They’re already saying that Rose Marie never said he was innocent.”

  “I need to talk to the chief,” Marion said to Lucas. “What’re you doing this evening?”