Silken Prey

CHAPTER 13

On the way out the door, Lucas stopped at the BCA men’s room, where he found Jenkins, shirtless and shaving. He went to a urinal and over his shoulder asked, “What? You lost all your money gambling and now you’re homeless?”

“Got a date,” Jenkins said. “She likes it when my cheeks are smooth like a baby’s butt.”

“So she doesn’t get beard burn on her thighs?”

“That’s disgusting, but given a person of your ilk, I’m not surprised,” Jenkins said.

Lucas finished up at the urinal and walked over to wash his hands and said, “Say you’ve got a hot, rich politician running for office, but she’s losing, then her opponent is hit with a scandal involving child porn on his computers, then the guy you think put it there suddenly disappears and the politician turns out to have armed security people, including a couple of guys with thick necks who were in special operations in the army. What we unsophisticates call ‘trained killers.’ What do you think?”

Jenkins paused, half of his face covered with shaving cream, the other half bare and shaven; he asked, “You got that much for sure?”

“I’m being told all that,” Lucas said.

“Have you hooked Tubbs to Grant?”

“Not yet . . . but Tubbs was probably involved in dirty tricks, and she needed one, bad. And he had a whole bunch of money, cash, in a hideout spot.”

“You steal any of it?” Jenkins asked.

“No, no, I didn’t.”

“Huh,” Jenkins said. “Little cold cash is always useful.”

“But that would be illegal,” Lucas said.

“Oh, yeah, I forgot,” Jenkins said. “Listen, we told you, you gotta be careful. Now you gotta be more careful. If Tubbs was found dead with a gunshot wound or his head bashed in, that’s one thing. The killer could have been anybody. But if he disappears with no sign . . . then whoever disappeared him knew what he was doing, and that’s another thing entirely. You don’t find that kind of guy standing around on a street corner—a killer who knows how to organize it, and carries it out clean.”

“My very thought.”

Jenkins took another thoughtful scrape through the shaving cream, rinsed the blade, then asked, “Would winning the election be worth the risk of murdering somebody? Of getting involved in a conspiracy to murder somebody?”

“That’s the problem,” Lucas said. “I don’t think any rational person would, and Grant seems pretty rational. Either that, or she’s crazier than a shithouse mouse. I talked to her today, pushed her a bit, and she pushed back. Never showed a wrinkle of worry, which means she’s either innocent or nuts.”

“Go for innocent: it cuts down the number of problems,” Jenkins said.

“Another thing: I’m told one of these special forces guys is in love with her . . . which creates the question, exactly what would he do to see her win? Would he even tell her what he was planning to do?”

“Remember that guy who went around robbing those ladies’ spa places?” Jenkins asked. “You know, manicure stores? Couple years ago?”

“Yeah, but I can’t remember why he did it.”

“He did it because he figured that there wouldn’t be many guys around to deal with. No macho problems. It’d just be a bunch of women, and the places were almost all cash. He was getting a couple thousand bucks a week, paying no taxes, taking it easy,” Jenkins said. “Anyway, he was ex–special forces. I tried to get his military records, and couldn’t. Never did. We didn’t need them, as it turned out, because one of the places he hit made some great movies of him . . . but the point is, I couldn’t get the records. That’s gonna be a problem, if these guys are really ex-army. Especially if they’re former special ops.”

“Maybe I won’t need them,” Lucas said.

“Oh . . . I think you probably will. There’s nothing harder to break, IMHO”—he actually said the letters, I-M-H-O—“than a murder done by a guy who’s well organized, doesn’t feel much guilt, and you can’t find the body. I’ve had two of those, and I’m batting five hundred. The one guy I got, it was luck. This is probably gonna be tougher. So you will need all the background you can get on them. . . . Grant wouldn’t hire stupid people.”

“I knew that talking to you would cheer me up,” Lucas said.

“Yeah, well . . .”

Jenkins went back to shaving, and though it was late, Lucas headed back to his office. He wasn’t exactly inspired by Jenkins, but he could make a couple of quick checks.

• • •

HE FOUND EMPLOYMENT RECORDS for Carver and Dannon in the quarterly tax reports filed by Grant with the state, which gave him their full names and addresses—they both lived in the same town house complex off I-494 west of the Cities. They didn’t show up in the property tax records, so they were probably renting. He couldn’t get directly at the income tax records, though he had a friend who could; but he hesitated to use her when he didn’t have to, and he didn’t really need to know how much they made. The DMV gave him their birth dates, which was what he really needed.

With that, he went out to the National Crime Information Center. Carver had once been arrested, at age eighteen, for fighting, apparently while he was still in high school. The charges had been dismissed without prosecution. Dannon came up clean.

There was almost nothing else, on either of them. Jenkins had been right: he’d need the army records. He picked up the phone and called Kidd.

“I already owe you for the help with the porn and the Minneapolis connection . . . but I’ve spotted a couple of guys who I’m interested in, and I can’t find anything about them in the records that I can get at. Could you get military records?”

After a moment, Kidd said, “I hate to mess with the feds.”

“I can understand that,” Lucas said. “The thing is . . . these two guys are ex–special operations, apparently, and would have the skills to take out somebody like Tubbs. What I’d like to know is, did they have a record of killing in the military? Did they have a criminal history there? Did they get honorable discharges? I’ve got no way of getting that.”

Kidd said, “I’ll tell you what. I’ll take a very conservative, safe approach. If I can get the stuff without a problem, without setting anything off, I’ll do it. I won’t take any risks. But if you use it, how’ll you explain it?”

“You could dump it to my e-mail, anonymously. I’ll figure out a way to explain it that’ll keep you clear.”

“I’m already not clear—people already know that I’m involved in this thing,” Kidd said.

“What if I put in an official request for the records, with the army?” Lucas suggested. “They’ll take it under advisement, but they won’t give them to me. If you could find a way to ship the records out of the army’s database, like there was a slipup . . .”

“Oh, boy . . .”

“I’ll start calling the army the first thing in the morning. If you can help me out, that’d be good. If you can’t, you can’t.”

“Oh, boy . . .”

“And there’s another thing,” Lucas said. “Something I doubt you could do.”

“Lucas, my man, you originally just wanted a little help protecting the American Way . . .”

“I know, I know. But here’s the thing. Taryn Grant’s got this terrific security system. Cameras all over the place, inside and out. At one time, the photography went out to the cloud, saved for a month. In the last couple of days, somebody cut that to forty-eight hours. They did that about forty-eight hours after Tubbs disappeared. I’m wondering, what if Tubbs showed up at Grant’s place, and ran into something with one of these security guys?”

“You want me to find the recordings?” Kidd asked.

“If you can.”

“Do you know which cloud?” Kidd asked. “There are lots of clouds.”

“I don’t know jack shit,” Lucas admitted.

“Do you know her cell phone number?”

“Well . . . yeah, I do know that.”

“Give it to me,” Kidd said. “It’s a start, if she monitors the system from her phone.”

• • •

LUCAS WENT HOME.

Weather and Letty were curious, and Lucas kept them updated on his cases, but he had nothing to tell them. He did describe the meeting with Grant, and Weather said, “She sounds more interesting than I would have expected. Educated.”

“She is. And she may have gotten a guy murdered.”

“And she may not have,” Weather said. “Something for you to think about.”

• • •

LUCAS SPOKE TO the governor later that evening. The attorney general, the governor said, was all over the papers taken from Tubbs’s apartment. “I suggested he investigate them thoroughly, at least until the election was over and done with. That way, he’ll have the full attention of the press. He saw the wisdom of that.”

“So I don’t have to worry about him being in my hair . . .”

“At least not for a week,” Henderson said. “What’d you think of Grant?”

“Smart and tough,” Lucas said.

“She could be president someday, if you don’t drag her down.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Lucas asked.

“I’m just sayin’, my friend. Keep me up to date.”

• • •

LUCAS GOT TO THE OFFICE early the next morning, conscious of the time difference between Minneapolis and Washington, and began calling the Pentagon. He spent two hours talking to a variety of captains, majors, and colonels—somehow missing lieutenant colonels—and got nothing substantial, except the feeling that everybody dreaded making a mistake. He did get pointed to online request forms, which he dutifully filled out and submitted, and backed those with direct e-mails to the captains, majors, and colonels, reiterating his requests for information.

When he was done, he had no information, but had laid down a solid record of information requests. Now if Kidd came through . . .

Lucas thought about spies, and with no particular place to push, eventually drove over to Smalls’s campaign headquarters and talked to Helen Roman, Smalls’s campaign secretary, who sent him down the hall to a guy named John Mack, the deputy campaign manager. He was, Roman told him, in charge of operations.

Mack said that he knew Bob Tubbs by sight, and may have said hello at the candy machine, but had never had a real conversation with him. “He’s a bit older than I am—we’re not contemporaries. I don’t know what we’d have in common. We’re not even with the same political party.”

“Even without knowing him, but just knowing what he did . . . knowing what you do . . .”

“Maybe I should take the Fifth,” Mack said.

“C’mon, man, gimme a little help . . . Give Smalls a little help.”

Mack repeated that he didn’t know anything about spying, but just as an intellectual exercise . . .

Tubbs’s accomplice would have had one of three motives for trying to dump Smalls, Mack said: (1) financial—he might have been paid; (2) ideological—he wanted Smalls dumped because he hated his politics; or (3) personal—he (or she) was a close friend or lover of Tubbs; or he (or she) was a personal enemy of Smalls.

If it were (3), it seemed likely that the accomplice would also be older. Perhaps not exactly Tubbs’s or Smalls’s contemporary, but most of the volunteers were college kids, and unlikely to be close enough to either man to do something as ugly as dropping the child pornography on Smalls, simply at Tubbs’s say-so.

Could be (2) ideological, Mack said, although the volunteers were vetted before they were given any real responsibility. “But the thing is, if they planted this thing in Porter’s computer, they don’t have to have any responsibility. All they need is access,” Mack said. “I have no idea how many office keys are floating around, but it’s quite a few, and the place is empty late at night.”

Or he said, it could be (1) financial . . . though if it were financial, how would Tubbs have made the approach to the accomplice, or spy? He could probably have done it only through personal knowledge of the accomplice, and that would loop right back to (3): a personal relationship.

So Lucas was probably looking for somebody a bit older, Mack said, or a reckless, ideologically driven youngster, whom Tubbs would have to have known. Was it possible that Tubbs had recruited a spy for Taryn Grant’s campaign, then enlisted him to do the pornography dump?

“Grant says she didn’t know Tubbs, and she seems smart enough that she probably wouldn’t lie about it . . . especially if we could find out about it,” Lucas told Mack. “Anyway, I believed her. She probably didn’t know him.”

“I’ll tell you what—if an operator like Tubbs knew about a spy in our campaign, other Democrats would know about it, too,” Mack said. “I think you might be going around threatening the wrong people.”

“I wasn’t threatening you,” Lucas said.

“Then why am I sweating?”

• • •

LUCAS WAS MULLING IT all over as he walked out to his car, and as he popped the door lock, took a call from Marion, the Minneapolis internal affairs cop.

“Just an update: I’ve been tearing up Domestics this morning. I don’t have any proof, but I’ve got a half-dozen names, and whoever copied that porn for Tubbs is probably on the list.”

“How’d you get the names?” Lucas asked.

Marion explained that he’d started with the people he’d considered least likely to be involved, and with the threat of felonies hanging over their heads, they’d been cooperative. He’d been looking for people who’d been seen using the Domestics computer at unlikely times, alone or in small groups, or had been unhappy to be seen using it and had quickly signed off when a new face turned up at the office.

“There are five guys and one woman who may—and I say ‘may’—have been looking at the porn repeatedly. I think all six probably were . . . kind of like a little club down there that knew about it. Two of the shrinks had heard rumors about child porn on city computers. That’s where I got the names.”

“What’re you doing next?” Lucas asked.

“I’ve got to talk to the chief about that, but I’m inclined to try to figure out who was the least likely to have dumped the porn to Tubbs, and offer him immunity for information.”

“When are you going to do it?”

“After I talk to the chief, I’ll have to get with the lawyers . . . I’m thinking it couldn’t be any earlier than this evening, and most likely tomorrow.”

“Keep talking to me,” Lucas said.

• • •

ON THE WAY BACK to his office, he called Smalls:

“How’s the campaign going?”

“Not well: that bitch has got everybody she knows whispering that the porn was really mine.”

“I thought she told the TV people that her campaign wasn’t doing that, and she’d fire anybody who did,” Lucas said.

“Well, of course she said that,” Smalls said. “She’s lying through her teeth.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because that’s what I’d do.”

Lucas said, “Okay. Listen, we’re making more progress, but we need to find Tubbs’s accomplice in your office. That’ll break the thing wide open. If this was done for ideological reasons, if it was done by a spy, then somebody in your campaign has got to have doubts about that person. It’s not that easy to hide your basic beliefs . . . especially if you’re a college kid. So, I need somebody, not you but maybe your campaign manager, to talk to everybody about who that might be. We’re trying to catch a spy. I’m going to work it from the other end, the Democratic side, see if I can get them to cough somebody up.”

Smalls was silent for a moment, then said, “I can do that. In fact, if we leak to the TV people that we’re looking for a spy . . . that might help convince them that there really was a dirty trick.”

“Whatever,” Lucas said. “I’m not really trying to get you reelected.”

Smalls laughed and said, “Gotta be killing a good liberal like you.”

“Ah, I’m not that political. Anyway, if you could do that, I’ll start on the other side.”

“Four days to the election,” Smalls said. “If it ain’t done by Sunday, I’m screwed.”

• • •

LUCAS CALLED KIDD: “Anything happening?”

“Not yet. It’s delicate.”

• • •

FROM HIS OFFICE, he called Rose Marie Roux and asked, “What Democratic Party operator would be most likely to know who is spying on who?”

“Well, that’d be Don Schariff, but don’t tell him I said so. Why?”

“I’m going to jack him up,” Lucas said. “Where can I find him?”

Schariff had an office at the DFL headquarters—Minnesota’s Democratic Party was technically called the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party—and Lucas found him there, by phone, and said he wanted to come over.

“Should I be worried?” Schariff asked.

Lucas said, “I don’t know. Should you?”

“I’m wondering if I should have a lawyer sit in?”

Lucas said, “I don’t know. Should you?”

The DFL headquarters was a low white-brick building in a St. Paul business park across the Mississippi from downtown that possibly looked hip for fifteen minutes after it was built but no longer did. Lucas talked to a receptionist, who made a call. Schariff came out and got him, and said, “We’re down in the conference room.”

“Who’s we?” Lucas asked.

“Me and Daryl Larson, our attorney,” Schariff said. He was a stocky, dark-haired man with a neatly trimmed beard and dark-rimmed glasses. He was wearing a white shirt with a couple of pens in a plastic pocket protector. In any other circumstance, Lucas would have been willing to arrest him on the basis of the pocket protector alone. “I asked, and everybody said when you’re talking to a cop . . . especially one investigating the Grant-Smalls fight . . .”

“Okay,” Lucas said.

Larson was a tall, thin man whom Lucas knew through Weather’s association with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. Larson raised money for the orchestra, usually by wheedling rich wives; it’d worked with Weather. When Lucas stepped into the room, Larson put down the paper he’d been reading and stood to shake hands. “Lucas, nice to see you. How’s Weather?”

“Broke. She’s broke. She’s got no money left. She’s wondering how we’re going to feed the kids.”

“Hate to hear that,” Larson said, with a toothy smile. “I’ll call her with my condolences.”

The pleasantries out of the way, they settled into the conference chairs and Lucas outlined some of what he knew and believed about Tubbs’s disappearance. He finished by saying, “You guys are probably not going to want to talk about this, because when the media puts Tubbs’s disappearance together with the porn trick . . . it’s gonna look bad.”

“I think we can agree on that,” Larson said for Schariff, who’d kept his mouth shut. “But how does this involve Don?”

“I’ve been told, by somebody who knows these things, that Don knows a lot about the, mmm, tactical maneuverings of the party, and everybody involved in these things.”

“I don’t do dirty tricks,” Schariff said.

Larson put up a finger to shut him up, and said to Lucas, “Go on.”

“So the technical fact of the matter is, the booby trap on Smalls’s computer had to be set the same morning it went off. Tubbs wasn’t there that morning. Hadn’t been there for a few days,” Lucas said. “So, he had an accomplice. That accomplice might have been acting out of pure greed . . . Tubbs might have paid him. But it’s equally likely that it’s an ideological thing, that Tubbs knew that there was a spy among the volunteers and got the guy to set the trap. Since Don knows most of the party’s operators . . . well, we thought he might also know who the spy is. If there is one.”

“Getting information like that isn’t a crime,” Larson said.

“I didn’t say it was—but framing Smalls is. Anybody who helped the spy put that stuff on the computer, or knows about it and doesn’t say so, is also in trouble. Conspiracy and all that. Prison time,” Lucas said. “I’m not trying to be impolite here, but you see where I’m going.”

Schariff said, “Well, I—”

Larson put the finger up again and said, “No.” Then to Lucas, “Don and I have to talk. I’ll call you later today.”

“How about in ten minutes?” Lucas asked. “Things are getting really tight with the election.”

“Later today,” Larson said. And he wouldn’t budge.

• • •

OUT ON THE SIDEWALK, Lucas took a phone call from Ruffe Ignace, a crime reporter for the Star Tribune: “We’re getting all kinds of different signals on Smalls. Smalls says he’s been cleared by Rose Marie Roux, and she says she’s made her statement, which, when you look at it, doesn’t quite clear him. In the meantime, people are whispering to our political people that the porn was his. Which way should I lean?”

“I’d have to go off the record on that,” Lucas said. “Better yet, why don’t you call Rose Marie directly?”

“She tends to blow me off,” Ignace said. “Anyway, could we stay a little bit on the record? A highly placed source in the investigation?”

“I’m the only one investigating, so that won’t work,” Lucas said. “I need to go completely off.”

“Shit. All right, we’re off the record,” Ignace said. “Which way should I lean?”

“Smalls was framed. . . . He’s innocent.”

“Thanks. We’re almost even now. You only owe me a little bit.”

“Call me back in one minute,” Lucas said. “I might have something else for you.”

“You in the can?”

“No, I’m in a parking lot, leaning on my car,” Lucas said. “I need to think. One minute.”

Lucas leaned against the car and thought about it. One minute later, Ignace called back and Lucas said, “Still off the record, okay?”

“Okay. Against my better judgment. The public’s trust in both government and the media would be so much higher if we identified—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. We’re off the record. Call Don Schariff—S-C-H-A-R-I-F-F—at DFL headquarters. He’s got some kind of title there, but I’m not sure what. Anyway, he’s involved with DFL intelligence gathering—”

“Spies.”

“Yeah. Ask him if Bob Tubbs—”

“The guy who disappeared . . . Holy shit, Tubbs? Tubbs dumped the porn on Smalls?”

“I didn’t say that,” Lucas said. “Schariff might possibly have some information for you. But he’ll probably deny any involvement with Tubbs.”

“You’re saying the Republicans killed Tubbs?”

“Somebody did, but I don’t think it was the Republicans,” Lucas said. “I think there’s a cover-up going on. But it’s possible that Tubbs is just lying low, until the election is over.”

“Not from what I hear,” Ignace said. “I hear the St. Paul cops think he’s dead. I hear you do, too.”

“Yeah, I guess I do,” Lucas said.

“All right, we’re more than even. You need anything from me?”

“Not right now. But wait at least an hour before you call Schariff. I just talked to him two minutes ago, and if you call him right now, he’ll figure I talked to you. So wait.”

“You talking to Channel Three?”

“No. You’ve got it exclusively. So wait.”

“I can do that,” Ignace said. “I can probably get one of our political guys to tie Schariff to Tubbs. They must’ve worked together a hundred times. Hot dog. But say it out loud: Tubbs used the porn to frame Smalls.”

“I can’t say that,” Lucas said. “But I can say that you sometimes, against all odds, seem like a very, very smart guy.”

“You can kiss my odds,” Ignace said. “But no, wait. Thanks, Lucas. I owe you big. If you’re ever indicted for anything, I’ll take your side.”

• • •

LUCAS WENT BACK TO his office, called his agents, got updates—still nothing on the Ape Man Rapist of Rochester—and waited for something from the DFL.

Larson, the lawyer, called back two hours later. He was angry: “Lucas, I’d call you a miserable motherfucker if I didn’t need Weather’s money. You talked to Ignace, over at the Strib. You got him on Don’s case. He’s going to publicly connect Don to Bob Tubbs and Tubbs to the Smalls scandal.”

“I’m not talking to anybody,” Lucas lied. “I’m just trying to get a little cooperation from people who might know why a guy got murdered.”

“You lying motherfucker . . . pardon the language. Don’t talk to Ignace again: don’t, or I’ll find some way to screw you. I promise.”

“Do your best, Daryl. But if I find out Don knew something that he’s not giving me, he’s going to prison,” Lucas said. “He’ll be part of the conspiracy if he tries to cover it up.”

“There’s no cover-up,” Larson said. “If there’s a spy in the Smalls campaign, she was placed by Grant’s campaign, not by us.”

“You said, ‘she,’” Lucas said. “So you know something.”

“I’ll tell you exactly what we did,” Larson said. “We got everybody together, and we tried to figure out who was working for Smalls, all the volunteers, and then we showed the list to Don. He looked it over and said there was one volunteer, a young woman, Bunny Knoedler, who he was surprised to see working for the opposition.”

“Bunny?”

“Yes. Knoedler. K-N-O-E-D-L-E-R.”

“How surprised was he?” Lucas asked.

“He said she worked on a couple of our campaigns out-state that Tubbs was involved with,” Larson said. “Don said she seemed like a pretty dedicated DFLer.”

Lucas said, “If this works out, Daryl, I’ll send you a hundred dollars myself.”

“Fuck you, Lucas . . . but do say hello to Weather for me.”

• • •

LUCAS LOOKED AT HIS WATCH: getting late. He walked down the hall, saw Shrake on the phone at his desk, went that way. Shrake saw him coming, held up a finger, said, “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Well, send me the paper. Okay. I gotta go.” He hung up and said, “You’re quivering.”

“You got some time?”

“Ah . . . no. Not if you want me to keep pushing the Jackson thing,” Shrake said.

“All right. Where’s Jenkins?” Lucas asked.

“He’s getting his oil changed,” Shrake said.

“He’s . . .”

“No, no, not that,” Shrake said. “He was going down to a Rapid Oil Change, getting the oil changed in his car.”

“Call him, tell him to get back here,” Lucas said. “I need to terrorize a young woman, and I want one of you guys to come along.”

“Well, hell, that’s right up his alley,” Shrake said. He picked up his phone and dialed.

With Jenkins on the way back, Lucas called Smalls and asked the question. Smalls made a call and came back immediately: “The girl is working until nine o’clock on the phone bank. Is she the one who did this?”

“Don’t know—but we got a tip that made us want to talk with her,” Lucas said. “Don’t do anything that would let her know we’re looking at her.”

“In other words, keep my mouth shut.”

“I’m far too polite to say that to a U.S. senator.”

• • •

JENKINS SHOWED UP and said, “I was next in line.”

“That piece of shit you drive won’t know the difference,” Lucas said. “You could fill it up with a water hose. Let’s go.”

Lucas briefed Jenkins on the way over. They got to Smalls’s headquarters a little after four o’clock, and the secretary, Helen, pointed out Bunny Knoedler, a tall, dark-haired, blue-eyed girl with bow-lips, who looked like she might have been Lucas’s daughter.

The phone room was just another office, divided up into a half-dozen booths with acoustic tiling on the walls, to hush up the multiple voices. Knoedler was sitting in a booth with two hardwired phones and a list, and was dialing a number when Lucas leaned over her shoulder and pushed down the hang-up bar on the base set.

She turned and looked up at him and said, “What . . . ?” and he could see in her eyes that she knew who he was.

“We need you to come back into Senator Smalls’s office,” Lucas said. Jenkins loomed behind him, as though to keep her from running.

“What . . . what?” she asked.

“I think you know what, but we have to talk about it,” Lucas said. “Come along.”

She put the phone down, and with the other phone-bank people suddenly gone silent, followed them out of the room, sandwiched between Jenkins and Lucas, like a perp walk.

Smalls’s office was empty—not even a computer anymore—and Lucas pointed Knoedler at a chair. He and Jenkins remained on their feet, looking down at her. “You’re a Democratic spy,” Lucas said. “A friend of Bob Tubbs, and you worked with him on out-state campaigns. He planted you here to watch Senator Smalls’s campaign.”

She was scared, and started to reply. She said, “I—”

Lucas put up a hand to stop her. “We’re going to read you your rights. But I want to tell you, in addition to your rights, if you lie to me, that’s a crime. You have the right to remain silent, to say nothing at all, but you can’t lie to me. At this point, we’re looking for information.”

Lucas looked at Jenkins and nodded, and Jenkins started the routine. “You have the right to remain silent . . .”

When he was finished, Lucas asked, “Did you understand all of that? That you have a right to an attorney?”

“I haven’t done anything illegal,” she said, looking at the two of them, looming.

She hadn’t asked for a lawyer. This was delicate: Lucas didn’t want to talk about illegalities. Instead, he said, “Bob’s mother is worried sick about him, but we don’t know whether he’s just lying low, or if he’s been . . . killed. We’re afraid that he has been. If he’s still around, we desperately need to know that.”

“I . . . I . . . I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, I’m worried, too. He was the guy I was supposed to talk to, if I found anything out. Then he just stopped answering his phone. I was calling him every night, and then . . . he was gone.”

She’d just admitted being a spy. “Do you know where he got the pornography?” Jenkins asked. “Did he get it from a police officer?”

“The pornography . . . He didn’t have anything to do with that,” she said. “That’s crazy. He didn’t do dirty tricks.”

“We know you’re a little new with this political campaign stuff,” Lucas said. “But I’m here to tell you, Bob was involved in a few tricks in the past. And you’re sort of a dirty trick, spying on the Smalls campaign.”

“Everybody does it,” she said. “Everybody. Smalls has a spy in the Grant camp, too. Just ask him. Ask him under oath.”

“Okay,” Lucas said. Smalls had already as much as admitted that.

He looked at Jenkins, who was the asshole. Jenkins said, “I dunno. I doubt that everybody does it. Gotta be some kind of a crime. And she’s not all that new with this stuff—she’s worked those out-state campaigns.”

“It is not a crime,” she said, showing a little streak of anger. “It’s not illegal. I wouldn’t do anything illegal.”

“We know that you were close to Bob,” Lucas said. “We know that Bob needed somebody to help set the computer so the pornography would pop up—”

“I had nothing to do with that!” she said, her voice rising. “I would never do something that dirty. That’s rotten. That porn . . . that belongs to Smalls. Everybody knows about his attitude toward women, and sex . . .”

“Come on,” Jenkins said, the scorn rough in his voice.

“I didn’t . . .”

They pushed her for another five minutes, and she claimed that she worked afternoons and nights, and hadn’t been around when the trap must’ve been set. They pushed on that, and she eventually admitted that she thought that Tubbs had been in the office at night, two days before the trap popped. They pushed on that, and finally she said the magic words.

“Look,” she said. “I want a lawyer. Right fuckin’ now.”

Jenkins looked at Lucas and lifted his eyebrows. Arrest her? Lucas shook his head; he wasn’t ready for that. He said, “We’ll want to talk to you again. Do not go away. Do not try to avoid us. I’m tempted to arrest you, and put you in jail overnight, but I’m hoping that you understand that we need to know what happened, more than we need to haul in the small fish. You’re a small fish. Do you understand that?”

She nodded, and said, “Lawyer.”

Lucas offered to provide one, a public defender, but she said she’d get her own. “Are we done?”

“Yes. But don’t run—”

“I’m not going to run, but I want you to take me out of the office,” she said. She looked out through the glass window on Smalls’s office door. “They’re gonna be a little pissed at me.”

“That’s the least of your problems,” Lucas said. “Come on. We’ll take you out.”

• • •

SHE WAS RIGHT: when they walked out of the room, the other volunteers started hissing, and somebody called, “Put her ass in jail.” At the door, Knoedler flashed a finger over her shoulder, and Jenkins laughed and said, “That’s really classy, sweetheart.”

They saw her into her car, and as she backed out of the parking space, Lucas asked Jenkins, “What do you think?”

Jenkins shrugged and said, “Don’t think she knew about the porn. But I wouldn’t be surprised if she let Tubbs into the office, late one night, after everybody else had gone home.”

Lucas nodded. “Maybe. Which would make her a part of it. The thing is, the DFLers swear that they didn’t put her on Smalls, and I believe them because if they did, too many people would have to know about it. I’d find out, and they know that. So, they’re telling the truth. It had to be Tubbs, working alone, or Tubbs working for Grant. We need to keep going back to her, if nothing else breaks.”

“Maybe give Knoedler limited immunity,” Jenkins said.

“Don’t want to give her immunity, if she set the trap,” Lucas said.

Jenkins shook his head: “I gotta tell you: I kinda believed her about that. She got pretty hot about it and that looked real. Besides, she knows we can check.”

Lucas rubbed his nose and looked after her taillights, two blocks down the street. “Yeah. It did look kinda real,” he said. “Goddamnit.”

• • •

HE CHECKED ANYWAY, and Roman, the secretary, said that Knoedler hadn’t been scheduled to work, because even the volunteers were limited to eight hours a day. “But people, you know, are enthusiastic, and they come and go all the time. She could have been here, and I doubt that anyone would have thought it unusual, or even noticed.”