Silken Prey

CHAPTER 5

When Lucas woke Monday morning, the first thing he did was check the window: blue sky. Excellent. Another good day. People had been talking about bad weather coming in, but he didn’t know when it was supposed to arrive.

And, thank God, they were through the weekend. Working on a Sunday was a pain in the ass, with everybody gone. Today, there’d be a lot going on: no more matinee movies.

He’d start with the volunteer who found the porn, he thought as he got dressed. He picked out a medium-blue wool suit that he’d thought would look awful at the time the salesman suggested it, but that had become one of his cool-weather favorites. He tried several ties, finally choosing a red-and-blue check with a turquoise thread in it, which went nicely with his eyes. Black lace-up shoes from Cleverley of London, for which he’d been measured during a European trip two years earlier, finished the ensemble.

The volunteer’s family, the Hunts, lived in Edina, an affluent Minneapolis suburb. Lucas took the Porsche, because it would feel at home there. He took ten minutes driving across town, and after a few minutes of confusion caused by the Porsche’s outdated navigation system, found the Hunts’ home: another sprawling brick ranch, at the end of a woody cul-de-sac.

• • •

BRITTANY HUNT MET LUCAS at the door, her mother a step behind. Lucas was amazed: they looked almost exactly alike, and that was like Doris Day in 1960. Lucas hadn’t yet been born in 1960 to get the full Doris Day effect, but he’d seen her often enough on late-night television. . . .

“I’m Brittany,” Brittany said, offering her hand in a firm shake. “I’m the one who outed him.”

“I’m her mother, Tammy,” her mother said. “Friends call me Tam.” She had perfect white teeth and sparkled at Lucas, and she smelled of Chanel on a Monday morning at home.

They led the way inside and a sliding door banged shut in the back. A man in an open-necked white shirt and khakis padded through the living room and thrust out his hand and said, “Jeff Hunt.”

They wound up seated on a semicircular couch in a conversation pit in front of a flagstone fireplace. Lucas said, “So tell me what happened.”

Brittany told him, and it was exactly what she’d told the St. Paul cops. When she finished—she’d stood by the computer until the cops got there—Lucas turned to Jeff and said, “You called the cops right away?”

“Instantly,” he said. “First of all, you can’t let people get away with this kind of stuff. Second of all, I was worried about Brit. What if he’d come back and found her standing there, with that stuff on the screen? I mean, this is the end of everything for him. What if he’d gotten violent?”

“I don’t understand why they haven’t arrested him yet,” Tam said. “He’s such a monster. I mean, children.”

“There are some questions,” Lucas said. “But unless something changes, it looks like the Hennepin County attorney is planning to take it to the grand jury next week, unless the attorney general takes it away.”

“The AG is gonna run for governor, and he’d love to bag Smalls, so I bet he takes it,” Jeff said. Jeff was yet another attorney. “If he does, it’ll go to a grand jury for sure. If he loses the case, he can blame the grand jury for the indictment. If he wins, who cares about the grand jury?”

Lucas said, “Well . . .”

• • •

THEN BRITTANY CHANGED EVERYTHING.

“What a weird summer,” she said. “Child porn on Porter’s computer and then Bob Tubbs vanishes.”

Lucas looked at her for a moment, then said, “Bob Tubbs? What did Bob Tubbs have to do with this?”

“Well, nothing,” she said. “But, you know, he was around. You ever met him? Big tall blond guy? He used to call me chica, like the Mexicans do.”

“He worked for Smalls?” Lucas asked.

She shook her head. “I don’t know the details, exactly, but he was a lobbyist for the Minnesota Apiary Association.”

“You mean, archery?” Jeff asked.

“No, apiary, Daddy. You know, honey bees. There was some kind of licensing thing going on,” Brittany said. “The state was going to put on a fee, and some of the bee guys said they wouldn’t bring their hives into Minnesota if that happened, and Tubbs thought that the bees were interstate commerce and so only the feds were allowed to regulate it. Or something like that. I don’t know. I wasn’t interested enough to follow it. But Bob was around.”

“What about Bob?” Tam asked Lucas.

Lucas said, “He’s one of our local political operators. He disappeared . . . what, it must have been Friday night?”

“Same day the porn file popped up,” Jeff said.

“I’m not sure that’s right, though,” Lucas said. “I just heard about it from a St. Paul cop. Tubbs’s mother claims he’s been kidnapped. A couple people have said he might be on a bender somewhere. He did that once before—vanished, and turned up a week later in Cancún, dead drunk in a hotel room. But, I guess he hasn’t been using his credit cards, doesn’t answer his cell phone, his passport was in his desk, and his car is sitting in his parking garage.”

“Boy, that doesn’t sound good,” Jeff said.

Lucas looked at Brittany. “How’d you even know about him?”

“It was in the paper,” she said. “This morning. People are looking all over for him.”

Tam’s hand went to her throat: “You think . . . dead?”

“Don’t know,” Lucas said. “My agency isn’t involved. It’s just, you know, what I hear.”

• • •

WHEN LUCAS LEFT, ten minutes later, Brit, Tam, and Jeff came out on the porch to wave good-bye. He waved, and sped back to St. Paul.

As Lucas was on the way to his office, ICE called and told him that she had the copy of Smalls’s hard drive. “Got everything, gonna take you six months to read it. There’s about a million e-mails. And old albums. He’s got every Bowie album ever made.”

“Let’s try not to judge,” Lucas said. “Anyway, I’m not going home, I’m coming there. Wait for me.”

When Lucas got to the St. Paul police parking lot, he found her waiting in a black six-series BMW convertible. She handed Lucas a hard drive about the size of a paperback and said, “Who do I bill?”

“Send it to me personally,” Lucas said. “I’ll get it back later. Anything happen out of the ordinary?”

“Purely routine,” she said. “Tell Kidd that it was Windows 7 . . . not that he won’t know.”

She didn’t ask if she could come along, to visit with Kidd.

• • •

WHEN SHE WAS GONE, Lucas went inside, badged his way back to the homicide unit, and found Roger Morris peering at a brown paper bag with a small grease stain at one end.

“Is that a clue?” Lucas asked.

“It’s my lunch,” Morris said. “I’m thinking about eating it early.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m starving to death, that’s why,” Morris said. “My wife’s got me on a food-free diet.”

“You are looking pretty trim,” Lucas lied, since he needed a favor.

“Bullshit. I only started yesterday,” Morris said. Then his brow beetled, and he said, “Say, you don’t work here.”

“I need to see the Tubbs file.”

“Ah, man,” Morris said. “Of the twelve million things I didn’t need to hear this morning, that is number one. Davenport wants to see the Tubbs file.”

“You’re working it?”

“Nothing to work.”

“So let me see the file,” Lucas said. “I may have some suggestions.”

“That’s my greatest fear,” Morris said. “After the contents of my lunch bag, of course.”

• • •

LUCAS PAGED THROUGH the thin file, sitting at Morris’s desk, peering at his computer. Tubbs hadn’t been seen after Friday evening. Tubbs’s mother had called St. Paul on Saturday afternoon to report him missing. Not much had been done—a couple cops went around and knocked on his apartment door, and asked a few questions of his neighbors, who hadn’t seen him. His mother had shifted into high hysteria on Sunday, complaining to St. Paul that her son must have been kidnapped.

According to Mrs. Tubbs, Tubbs was supposed to pick her up and go shopping on Saturday, but hadn’t shown, and hadn’t called to say he wouldn’t make it. Mom said he’d never done that in his life. On Sunday, he was supposed to take her to Mass, but hadn’t shown up then, either. She couldn’t get him at home or on either of his two cell phones, and she’d been trying since Saturday morning.

The cops checked with AT&T and found that he hadn’t used either his home or his cell phones, nor had he used his credit cards, which was when they began to take the old woman’s complaints seriously: Tubbs had never, in a credit card record going back ten years, gone two days without using one. He paid for everything with a card, his mother said. He hardly used cash at all, because you couldn’t deduct invisible business expenses, and almost all of Tubbs’s expenses were business.

On Sunday afternoon, Tubbs’s mother let the cops into his apartment for a look around. One of the cops said that it was apparent that he’d recently been sexually involved, as there were stains on the bedsheets. Samples had been taken. There was no sign of forced entry, or violence.

On Monday morning, there were a couple of stories in the local newspapers, based on calls by Tubbs’s mother. The stories hadn’t shaken him loose, nor had he begun to use his credit cards.

“You think he’s dead?” Lucas asked Morris.

“That’s what I think,” Morris said.

“What about his apartment?”

“What about it?”

“Close it out yet?” Lucas asked.

“Not yet,” Morris said. “You want to look around?”

“Yes.”

“You’d have to get an okay from Tubbs’s mother, but you’ll get it. She’s frantic,” Morris said. “Why are you interested?”

“If I told you, you’d have to change your name and move to New Zealand,” Lucas said.

“Seriously . . .”

“I’m a little serious,” Lucas said. “I’m doing a political thing and you really don’t want to know about it. And it probably has nothing to do with Tubbs. If it does, I’ll tell you, first thing.”

“First thing?”

“Absolutely,” Lucas said.

Morris reached out and touched his lunch sack, and said, “She made me a BLT. With motherfuckin’ soy bacon.”

“Jesus, that’s not good,” Lucas said. “Motherfuckin’ soy bacon?”

“That’s the way us black people talk,” Morris said.

“What about Tubbs’s apartment?” Lucas asked.

“I’ve got a key,” Morris said. “Let’s call the old lady. If you find anything . . .”

“First thing,” Lucas said.

Morris called Tubbs’s mother, explained that a high-ranking agent from the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension would like to check out the apartment, and was immediately given an okay. Morris gave him the key, said, “Use it wisely,” and agreed to send an electronic copy of the Tubbs file to the BCA, where Lucas could look at it.

Lucas thanked him, and headed across town to the river, not to Tubbs’s apartment but to Kidd’s.

• • •

KIDD OWNED HALF A FLOOR in a redbrick restoration condo overlooking the Mississippi. Lucas had visited him a few times, and had watched the condo grow. Kidd had started with a single large unit, added a second one a few years later, and finally, during the great real estate crash, picked up a third unit for nearly nothing. He also owned a piece of the underground parking garage, where he kept a couple of cars and a boat.

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.