Silken Prey

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.”

“That seems reasonable,” Lucas said, because it was.

They talked about the possibilities as Lucas walked Morris up to the lab, where Lucas said to the lab tech, “You need to call the St. Paul computer lab guy. There’s got to be some trigger for the porn file booby trap. Between the two of you, I want you to find it tonight, so Roger and I know what it is when we come in tomorrow.”

“That’s a tall order,” the tech said.

“That’s your problem,” Lucas said. “It’s gotta be there: find it.”

To Morris: “I want to show you this one group of photos.” He ran through the file, found the pictures of Otis and the others in the group sex, and tapped the caption. “These were the pictures that were presented in court. Unless you believe that the Minneapolis cops are posting this stuff on the Internet, then they had to come out of the Minneapolis computer system. In fact, I was told by this girl”—he tapped Otis’s face—“that the photos presented in court were on paper, and were seized when the cops raided the porn operation. I’m thinking . . . this had to come out of Minneapolis’s evidence file. I mean, look at the caption: that’s cop stuff.”

Morris rubbed his forehead: “You’re saying somebody in Minneapolis helped Tubbs set up Smalls?”

“It’s a possibility,” Lucas said.

“Then . . . that guy could be the killer,” Morris said.

Lucas shrugged.

Morris watched Lucas for a moment, then switched directions: “Have you looked at the document files?”

“I’m getting them printed now,” Lucas said. “It looks like it’s the same as the other papers—blackmail stuff, cover-your-ass files, whatever. A lot of corrupt bullshit.”

Morris considered for a moment, then said, “We need a conference. We need the heavies on this. I’ll call you tomorrow at eight o’clock—”

“Nine would be better,” Lucas said.

“Nine o’clock, and we’ll both have lists of who should be in the conference.”

“It’s a plan,” Lucas said.

He and Morris spent a half hour flicking through the document files, and then through the porn files, looking for any other clue to its origin, but found nothing new. When they were done, Morris said, “Nine o’clock tomorrow.”

• • •

LUCAS WENT HOME: he’d successfully covered his ass, he thought. Now it should be a straightforward murder investigation, and they already had several pieces of the puzzle.

Morris was a competent investigator, and more than competent: but he didn’t have everything that Lucas had, and Lucas couldn’t give him some of it. He really had to stay on the case, Lucas thought. He wanted to stay on it. It was getting intense, and he liked intense.

Liked it enough that he got up early to think about it. And at nine o’clock the next morning, in jeans and T-shirt, he’d already finished a Diet Coke and a plate of scrambled eggs, and his list of who should be at the conference. His list: Henry Sands, director of the BCA; Rose Marie Roux, commissioner of public safety; Rick Card, St. Paul chief of police; Morris; and himself. He was trying to remember who would call whom, when his phone rang. He picked it up, looked at the screen.

The governor: “Everything cool?” Henderson asked.

“Yes. We’re going bureaucratic, to blur everything over. The St. Paul homicide detective on the Tubbs case, and I, are going to convene a conference with Sands and Rose Marie and the St. Paul chief, lay it all out, and then just start a straight criminal investigation. Maybe parcel some of it out to the attorney general . . . but we’ll see what Rose Marie has to say about that. You should stay clear.”

“Keep me informed.”

• • •

MORRIS CALLED A MINUTE LATER, with his list. He had the same list as Lucas, less Rose Marie, and with the addition of the Ramsey County attorney.

He agreed with Lucas on Rose Marie, but Lucas argued against the county attorney: “That guy is owned by Channel Three. If he’s in the conference, we might as well put it on television.”

“Man, my computer guy printed out those document files and left them for me, and I gotta tell you, it’s gonna be political, and it’s gonna be ugly. The names in these things . . . they scare the shit out of me. I think we need lawyers. Lots of lawyers. The more the better. These docs aren’t for cops.”

“I’ll take a look as soon as I go in this morning,” Lucas said. “But we’re cops, so it’s okay to have a conference about a possible crime. Nobody can criticize us for that. Then we let Rose Marie and Rick figure out who to bring in, for the political stuff. We can just focus on the murder.”

They went back and forth, and eventually Morris said, “I knew you had a sneaky streak, but I didn’t know it was this sneaky. But okay, let’s do it your way. I’ll declare a big-ass emergency and try to get a conference at noon or one o’clock, here in St. Paul.”

“Do it,” Lucas said.

• • •

THE MEETING WAS SET for eleven o’clock, the only mutual time they could all find, in the chief’s office in St. Paul. Lucas had a couple of hours, so he called Brittany Hunt, the volunteer who’d discovered the porn file. She was driving to the Mall of America. She was no longer employed, she said, but not too worried about it.

“I talked to my adviser and she said that exposing a criminal like Smalls was a lot more important than my campaign work.” She was worried about meeting Lucas without her father present, but he told her that he just had a couple of quick questions that weren’t about her at all. “I need to gossip,” he said.

She agreed to make a quick detour and meet him at a sandwich shop off Ford Parkway, five minutes from his house. He changed into a suit and tie, then drove over to the sandwich shop, where he found her eating a fried egg sandwich on a buttermilk biscuit. Lucas got a glass of water and sat down across the table from her.

“I was famished,” she said.

“So eat.” Lucas leaned toward her and pitched his voice down. “Tubbs . . . did he have any special friends in Smalls’s campaign?”

She cocked her head and licked a crumb of biscuit off her lower lip, then asked, “You mean, was he sleeping with anybody?”

Lucas said, “Well, any kind of close friend.”

She said, “You know . . . I don’t know. But I can tell you how to find out. There’s a guy there, Cory, mmm, I don’t really know his last name, he works in the copy room. He’s the biggest gossip in the world. He knows everything.”

“Cory.”

“Yes. He’s not really part of the campaign staff, he was hired to do the printing and copying. They do a lot of that. He knows everything. Ask Helen Roman. She’s the campaign manager, she’ll know where to find him.”

“Sounds like a good guy to know,” Lucas said.

“Yeah. If you like gossip, and we all do.” She burped, then looked toward the counter. “I could use another one of those sandwiches. I haven’t eaten since the day before yesterday.”

• • •

SMALLS’S CAMPAIGN OFFICE was off I-94 on the St. Paul side of the Mississippi, ten minutes away. Lucas went there, found Helen Roman, the office manager, who said that Cory Makovsky worked in the distribution center, at the end of the hall. Lucas went there, where he found Makovsky talking excitedly on his cell phone. When Lucas tried to get his attention, Makovsky held up a finger, meaning “Wait one,” and gushed a revelation “He’d just seen it online from People, there really isn’t any doubt that she’s pregnant,” into the phone.

Lucas looked pointedly at his watch, and Makovsky frowned and said to the phone, “Hang on a sec,” and to Lucas, “What?”

Lucas said, “I’m an agent with the BCA. Did you murder Bob Tubbs?”

Makovsky took that in for a few seconds, then said hastily into the phone, “I gotta get back to you, Betty.”

When Lucas had Makovsky’s attention, he asked, “Did you kill him?”

Makovsky, who’d gone a little pale, said, “Of course not. Who told you I did?”

“Nobody. I just wondered,” Lucas said. Then: “I was told you might have some information I need. Do you know if Bob Tubbs had a special friend of some kind . . . a lover, maybe . . . in Senator Smalls’s campaign office?”

Makovsky’s eyes widened, and his voice dropped to a whisper: “Is that the story Smalls is putting out?”

“No—that’s the question I’m asking. Did Tubbs have a special friend?”

“I don’t know,” Makovsky said, with real regret in his voice. “I realize I should know, but I don’t. I could ask around.”

“Could you do that?” Lucas asked. He dug a card out of his pocket, wrote a number on the back, and said, “If you hear anything, call me.”

“I’ll do that,” Makovsky said, his eyes bright. Lucas believed him; and two minutes after he called Lucas, the word would probably be tweeted, or Twittered, or whatever that was. Probably to People.

• • •

WHEN HE LEFT the campaign office, Lucas had ten minutes to get down to the St. Paul Police Department, just enough time to retrieve his car and be marginally late. When he got there, he found he was the first person from outside the department to arrive.

The chief, Morris, and a lab tech were sitting around, drinking coffee, talking about a recent controversial tasing. A Bloomington cop’s wife had woken angry in the middle of the night, and had used his duty Taser to tase her sleeping husband in the area sometimes called the gooch. He was now claiming a major disability—sexual dysfunction caused by a city-owned instrument—and was seeking to be retired at full pay. He was twenty-seven.

“I’ll tell you what,” Morris said, holding his coffee cup with his pinkie finger properly out in the air, “That boy won’t be sleeping easy with a woman again, no matter who she is.”

Commissioner of Public Safety Rose Marie Roux walked in and caught the last of that, and she asked, “Who was that?”

“Talking about the Bloomington tasing,” Lucas said.

“Oh, yeah,” she said. She took a chair, and plopped her purse on the chief’s desk. “The guy who got it in the gooch.”

Henry Sands, the BCA director, showed up a minute later, took the last chair, and Rose Marie asked, “So what’s up? Or, I sorta know what’s up, but what’s new, and why is it an emergency?”

Morris said, “Lucas and I found a bunch of stuff in Bob Tubbs’s apartment—you all know Tubbs, and know we’re investigating his disappearance as a possible murder. Well, the stuff we found suggests that Tubbs planted the kiddie porn on Senator Smalls’s computer. There’s the theoretical possibility that he found it on Smalls’s computer, and was using it to blackmail him, but Lucas and I don’t believe that. . . . We think he was killed to eliminate him as a witness to whoever supplied the porn to get Smalls. It’s possible that the kiddie porn came through the Minneapolis Police Department, so the killer could be a cop.”

“Holy shit,” the chief said.

“Plus,” Morris continued, “in the same hideout where we found the kiddie porn—the porn was on a thumb drive—we found a bunch of other papers and copies of public documents which pretty much prove that seven serving state senators and representatives have committed a wide range of felonies, along with six former senators and representatives who are no longer in office, and a half-dozen bureaucrats who were paid off for arranging contracts.”

There was a long silence while the VIPs looked at the ceiling, sideways, and at the carpet, then, “That’s just the fuckin’ cherry on the cake, isn’t it?” Rose Marie said to everybody, the disgust showing on her face. “That’s just the fuckin’ cherry.”

“What we need from you all,” Morris concluded, “is for you to tell us what to do. I mean, we have to continue the Tubbs investigation. We can be pretty sure now that he was murdered—we’ve got a hell of a pile of motives. But there’s a lot of political stuff.”

“I need to see copies of everything,” Rose Marie said.

“Got it at the BCA,” Lucas said. “I can send it over.”

Card said, “I need to see it, too.”

“I’ve got a copy for you,” Morris said.

Rose Marie held her index finger in the air, asking for silence as she thought for a moment, then: “Here’s what I’d suggest. The corruption stuff goes to the attorney general, and he can have some of his under-employed young lawyers look at it. And we need to talk to Senator Smalls’s attorneys right away. Smalls may be a suspect in the murder, if the porn was taken from him and he was being blackmailed. But if I understand you correctly, you think there’s a much greater possibility that Tubbs put the porn on Smalls’s computer, in which case, Smalls is being unfairly demonized as a pervert a week before a critical election. We have to tell him what we know, and then let Smalls do what he can with it.”

Lucas chipped in: “I don’t think the porn was taken from Smalls. It’s a logical possibility, which is why we mention it, but . . . it’s like one percent. I think he was framed.”

“Okay. More reason to talk to him soon,” Rose Marie said.

Sands said to Rose Marie, “You can handle the politics. I think that’s proper. But the Tubbs murder . . . and what comes out of it, a definite finding on how the porn got on Smalls’s computer . . . is that St. Paul? Or is that us? St. Paul has been handling the case, and Detective Morris seems to have done an excellent job so far.”

The chief never tried to catch that hot potato—he just let it fly by.

“It’s you,” he said. “I’ll be goddamned if this department is going to investigate the Minneapolis department. That seems to be one of the critical questions, where the porn came from, and you guys have jurisdiction in Minneapolis. We don’t.”

“That’s true,” Sands began. “However—”

Rose Marie jumped in: “Henry, give it to Lucas.”

Sands took a deep breath and said, “We’ve got federal funding being talked about right now. No matter what happens here, whether Smalls or Grant wins the election, we’re gonna piss somebody off. The funding comes right through the Senate Office Building.”

The chief said, “We got the same problem, big guy.”

“Yeah, but it’s a few pennies, relatively,” Sands said. “I’m talking about another building and putting a major lab out in Worthington.”

Rose Marie said again, to both of them, “Lucas has it. Everybody agree? Lucas has it.”

The chief sat back and smiled, and Lucas said, “Okay.”

• • •

ROSE MARIE, SANDS, AND LUCAS walked out to the parking lot together, and after Sands took off, Rose Marie said to Lucas, “You should call Elmer and see if he’s the one who wants to break the news on Smalls. If he doesn’t, I will—but we need to move now. We need to catch the five-o’clocks.”

The five-o’clocks—the early-afternoon news.

“I’ll call right now,” Lucas said. He clicked up the governor’s number on his cell phone, and Henderson answered on the third ring. Lucas told him what the group had decided, and Henderson said, “Tell Rose Marie to take the press conference. I’ll call Porter now, and tell him what’s coming.”

He clicked off and Lucas relayed the word to Rose Marie. She said, “I’ll set up a press conference for three o’clock. I’ll be calling you from my hairdresser’s for the background: just e-mail me a few tight paragraphs on the whole thing. Goddamnit, I was hoping Smalls would go down.”

“Maybe he still will,” Lucas said.

“Maybe,” she said. “Taryn is cute, smart, and she’s got more money than Elmer.”

“Okay . . .”

“So how are you going to handle the investigation? Now that it’s public?”

“Don’t know yet,” Lucas said. “I’m thinking about it.”

• • •

LUCAS WALKED OVER to his car and climbed in, and his phone went off: Porter Smalls. Lucas answered and Smalls said, “Thank you. I just talked with Elmer. I owe you big-time and I don’t forget.”

“That makes me a little nervous,” Lucas said. “I don’t want to be owed: this is my job.”

“I don’t care. I owe you,” Smalls said.

When Smalls got off the phone, Lucas called Kidd: “Did you ever get a chance to look at that list of campaign members?”

“Should be in your e-mail,” Kidd said. “There are only a dozen who might be serious contenders. There are two people of particular interest. Daniel MacGuire and Rudy Holly. MacGuire is gay and has run a gay Republicans group, but Smalls has been against gay marriage, so . . . And MacGuire is also a depressive and has anger-management issues, and is taking medication for both. Holly is a conspiracy theory guy, going back to the Clinton years and that whole blow-job business. I’ve seen some stuff he’s put on some conspiracy sites, and the thing is, he’s nuts.”

“Any lonely middle-aged women in there?” Lucas asked.

“Yes. You’re thinking, what?”

“Tubbs wasn’t crazy, he was calculating. Somebody had to set the booby trap the morning that the volunteer tripped it—and that wasn’t Tubbs, because Tubbs has been backtracked by a pretty good cop: he wasn’t at the campaign office that morning. The question is, did he have a lover? Or a very close friend? Somebody he could trust with this?”

After a moment of silence, Kidd said, “Ramona Johnson. She would be your best bet. Divorced four years ago . . . let me see here . . . until about five months ago, she was complaining on Facebook about the lack of eligible men and the problems of middle-aged women. Then she shut up.”

“Ramona Johnson.”

“Yes. There’s one more possibility. A Sally Fey. She’s younger, she’s thirty-one, and she has a new beau, but she’s not talking about it. From what I’ve seen of her and her e-mails . . .”

“You’ve got her e-mails?”

“Forget I said that. From what I’ve seen of her, she’s a very shy, quiet type, and she’s a little mousy. Doesn’t do much with her hair,” Kidd said. “But you can see the hope in her eyes.”

“You can see her eyes?”

“Try to stay on track,” Kidd said. “If the right guy said the right things to her . . .”

“Tubbs could do that. He had a reputation as a ladies’ man,” Lucas said.

“So put Fey on the list.” He spelled her name, and Lucas wrote it down.

• • •

WHEN HE GOT OFF the phone with Kidd, Lucas used his cell phone to check his e-mail, looked at the list that Kidd had shipped him. Twelve names, half men, half women. Would it be an ideologue or a lover?

He’d track down as many of the people on the list as he could, and ask them the hard question. Did you set the booby trap? If the answer was no, Lucas would say, “You realize that Tubbs was killed for what he knew. If you’re lying, you could be next.”

If the answer was still no, the next question would be, “If you didn’t set it, who did?”

It could work.