Silken Prey

CHAPTER 6

The St. Paul file on the Tubbs disappearance didn’t quite convince Lucas that Tubbs had been murdered, but he thought it probable. The physical evidence was nonexistent, and the circumstantial evidence ambiguous, although the longer Tubbs remained missing, the more likely it was that he was dead.

The circumstantial evidence included the fact that Tubbs called his mother on an almost daily basis, and hadn’t called her since he disappeared; that his credit cards hadn’t been used, and that he used the cards for even the most minor purchases, including daily bagel breakfasts at a Bruegger’s bagel bakery on Grand Avenue; and that he’d missed a number of appointments that would have been important to him.

On the other hand, he’d disappeared once before, so completely that he’d made the newspapers. Ten years earlier, he’d flown to Cancún for a wedding, intending to come back two days later. Instead, he’d apparently gone on an alcoholic bender and had not surfaced for a week. Before he showed up, it had been widely speculated that he’d gone swimming alone and had been eaten by a shark.

He’d never disappeared again, and after that alcoholic episode, he’d signed up with Alcoholics Anonymous. Abstinence only lasted a few weeks before he’d started drinking again, but he’d controlled it, as far as anyone knew.

Still, there was the possibility that he was facedown in a motel room somewhere.

Lucas didn’t believe that, but it was possible.

• • •

WHEN HE’D FINISHED READING the file, Lucas put on his jacket, got his keys, stopped at a candy machine for a pack of Oreos, then drove south to University Avenue, and over to Tubbs’s apartment building.

He’d just found a parking spot when his cell phone rang. He looked at the screen: Kidd.

“Yeah?”

“How bad do you cops hate Smalls?” Kidd asked.

“I don’t hate him at all,” Lucas said. “I didn’t vote for him, but there was nothing personal about it.”

Kidd said, “When I started looking him up, I found out that he doesn’t like public employee unions. Any public employee unions, including police unions. He wants to outlaw them. He debated the head of the Minneapolis union on public television, the Almanac program.”

“He’s a right-winger,” Lucas said. “This is a surprise?”

“No, what’s a surprise is, I think the porn file might have come out of a police department,” Kidd said.

Lucas wasn’t sure he’d heard that right: “What are you talking about?”

“A part of it may have come out of evidentiary files. There’s some text with most of the photos, the usual pedophile bullshit. Then there’s one says, ‘Left to right, unknown adult male, unknown adult male, Mark James Trebuchet, thirteen, unknown female, Sandra Mae Otis, fifteen.’ That’s the only one with text, but there are about five photos related to that one. I looked them up, those kids—I had to do a little excavating in the juvenile files—and found out that both of them were involved in a prostitution ring busted three years ago by the Minneapolis cops. I assume evidentiary photos wouldn’t just be turned loose on the Internet.”

“Ah, fuck me,” Lucas said.

“I thought you’d be pleased,” Kidd said.

“Fuck me. I gotta think about this,” Lucas said. “If anybody—anybody—got wind of this, the whole goddamn state would blow up.”

“No, it wouldn’t. The whole goddamn media-political complex would get its knickers in a twist, and then, after a lot of screaming and slander, life would go on,” Kidd said. “You gotta keep some perspective.”

“I’ll tell you something, Kidd—that might be true if you’re an artist,” Lucas said. “But if you’re a cop, what you see is endless finger-pointing, investigative commissions, legislative inquiries, accusations of obstruction of justice, perjury . . .”

“. . . misfeasance with a corncob . . .”

“Yeah, go ahead and laugh,” Lucas said. “Listen, keep working this. You think the Smalls file came out of Minneapolis?”

“I have no idea—but those two kids were involved with Minneapolis police. I could dig out the complete juvenile files, if you need them.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s her address?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

• • •

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

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

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

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

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

He called Smalls:

“What was your relationship with Bob Tubbs?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What about Tubbs? Did he hate you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• • •

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

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

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

“How big are they?” Kidd asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“See you then: two hours.”

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

• • •

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The Pattersons. Irma and Bjorn.”

“The Pattersons ran the business?”

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

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

“Yup.”

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

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

“So what happened in court?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How many kids are in there?”

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

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

• • •

BACK DOWN I-35 TO Kidd’s place.

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

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

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

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

Kidd said, “So let’s see what you got. . . . Back in a couple of minutes, guys.”

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

“That’s disturbing,” Kidd said.

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

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

“How’d you do that?” Lucas asked.

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

“Goddamnit—Smalls is clear.”

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

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

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

“Cover-your-ass files,” Lucas said.

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

• • •

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

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

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

Marvel took five minutes; at one point, the kids made a noise that sounded like they’d killed a chicken, and Lauren ran off to see what it was. She’d just come back when Marvel tapped the computer screen and said, “See, what happened was, this guy, Representative Diller, got the licensing fees on semi-trailers reduced by about half, so they’d supposedly be in line with what they were in the surrounding states. He said he wanted to do that so the trucking companies wouldn’t move out of Minnesota. But what you see over here is a bunch of 1099 forms that were sent by trucking companies to Sisseton High-Line Consulting, LLC, of Sisseton, South Dakota. Over here is the South Dakota LLC form and we find out that a Cheryl Diller is the president of Sisseton High-Line Consulting. And we see that she got, mmm, fifty-five thousand dollars for consulting work that year, from trucking companies.”

“So if these two Dillers are related . . .” Lucas began.

“I promise you, they are,” Marvel said.

Kidd said, “Marvel’s a state senator. In Arkansas.”

Marvel added, “This shit goes on all the time. On everything you can think of, and probably a lot you can’t think of.”

Lucas said to Kidd, “So what these are, are blackmail files.”

“Or protection files, if they’re all the same kind of thing,” Marvel said. “Whoever owned these files might have been involved in these deals, and kept the evidence in case he ever got in trouble and needed help.”

Lucas looked at the computer screen for a moment and then said, “All right. Give me the drives back, Kidd. You guys don’t want to know anything about this.”

Kidd pulled the drives out, handed them to Lucas, and said, “You are so right. Do not mention my name in any of this.”

“I won’t,” Lucas promised. “Can I print these out on my home printer?”

“Probably,” Kidd said. “What kind of computer are you running?”

“Macs,” Lucas said.

“Most of the files are on government machines, Windows,” Kidd said. “I’ll loan you a Windows laptop, a cleaned-up Sony. If anyone asks, you paid cash at Best Buy a couple years ago.”

• • •

BACK IN THE CAR, the laptop on the passenger seat, Lucas called the governor and said, “I need to talk to you alone, tonight. Without Mitford or anybody else around.”

“That bad?”

“Worse than you could have imagined,” Lucas said. “The problem is, I can’t get out of it now.”

“I’ve got a cabin on the Wisconsin side of the St. Croix, north of St. Croix falls. I could be there at six, if it’s that bad.”

“Tell me where,” Lucas said.

He got directions to the cabin, again told the governor to come alone, then went home, said hello to the housekeeper, who said that Letty wouldn’t be back until six o’clock, that Weather had been called to do emergency work on a woman whose face had been cut in an auto accident, and she’d be late, and that the kids were fine.

Lucas took the thumb drives back to his den, hooked the Sony up to his printer, then had to download some printer software that matched the Sony to his printer. He took a few more minutes to re-familiarize himself with Windows, and started printing. There were thirty-four files on the three drives, not nearly filling them, but it took two hours to get them all printed out.

He didn’t print the porn file.

While the printing was going on, he paged through the porn file, image by image, and found the photos that Kidd thought came from police files. He looked at the captions, which had apparently been printed onto sheets of paper that had been attached to the bottom of paper photos—the kind of photos you would give to a jury. Kidd was right, he thought: they were evidentiary photos.

When the printing was done, he used a three-hole punch to put binder holes in Tubbs’s files, and bound them book-style between cardboard covers. Then he started annotating them, figuring out who was who, and trying to figure out what was going on in each file. Virtually all of them were evidence of payoffs to state legislators and a variety of state bureaucrats.

Some of the evidence was explicit, some of it was simply suggestive. Some of it would have led to criminal charges, or to claw-back civil suits. Almost all of it would have ended careers.

• • •

A LITTLE AFTER FIVE, he went out to the Lexus SUV that he drove outside the Cities, and took off for Wisconsin. He was not in a mood for the scenic tour, so he went straight up I-35 to Highway 8, then east through Chisago City and Lindstrom and past Center City to Taylors Falls, then across the St. Croix into Wisconsin, north on Highway 82, off on River Road and finally, down a dirt lane lined with beech and oak trees to a redwood house perched on a bluff over the river. The front door was propped open with a river rock.

The governor was sitting on a four-season porch, already closed in for the winter, that looked over the river valley. When Lucas banged on the screen door, he called, “Straight through to the porch. Get a beer out of the kitchen, or make yourself a drink.”

The kitchen was compact: Lucas snagged a Leinie’s from the refrigerator, popped the top with a church key hung on the refrigerator with a magnet, and walked through the house to the porch. The house was larger than it looked from the outside, and elegant, and smelled lightly of cigar smoke. A side hallway led toward what must’ve been two or three bedrooms. A library featured pop fiction and a big octagonal poker table with a green baize surface; the living room was cluttered with couches and chairs and small tables. An oversized television hung from one wall.

Henderson was wearing soft tan slacks and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, and boat shoes. He said, “Give me one sentence to crank up my enthusiasm for being here.”

Lucas sat on a wooden chaise with waterproof cushions, took a sip of the beer, thought for a few seconds, then said, “Bob Tubbs had the porn before it was unloaded on Smalls, and was probably murdered to shut him up.”

The governor stared at him for a few seconds, then said, “Oh, shit.”

Lucas pushed on: “I went into Tubbs’s apartment, legally, with the approval of Tubbs’s mother and the investigator from the St. Paul Police Department. I searched the place, and pretty much because of my superior intelligence . . .”

“. . . goes without saying . . .”

“. . . I found Tubbs’s hideout cache, which St. Paul hadn’t found,” Lucas said.

“Why didn’t they find it?” Henderson asked.

“Because he hid it in a weird place, and when they opened it up, they found just what they expected to find.” He told Henderson about the pipes, and how he belatedly realized that they’d hardly be draining upward.

“And in the pipes . . .” Henderson prompted.

“I found a gun, a wad of papers, plus some money, cash, and three thumb drives. I opened the thumb drives and found exactly the same porn file—exactly the same—as the one the cops found on Smalls’s computer. There’s a remote possibility—remote in my mind, anyway—that the file went from Smalls to Tubbs. That Tubbs found out that there was a porn file on Smalls’s computer, went in, stole it, and is, or was planning to, blackmail Smalls. So Smalls, or one of his henchmen, killed him. There’s a much better possibility that it went the other way—from Tubbs to Smalls’s computer. We know that Tubbs occasionally dropped by Smalls’s campaign office.”

“Let’s look at the first possibility,” Henderson said; he was a lawyer. “Why don’t you think Tubbs was blackmailing Smalls?”

“Because there’s nothing on the file, or in the other documents on the thumb drives, that mentions the porn or Smalls. He’d have no way to tie it to Smalls—all he had was the file itself. Why would anyone believe it came from Smalls, or anyone else, for that matter? If he tried to go public with it, Smalls would just blow it off as an egregiously vicious smear by a Democratic operative who’d been involved in other dirty tricks.”

“Is there any reason to think it could be a blackmail file?”

“Only one that I could think of,” Lucas said. He patted his bound copies: “Because it seems likely that Tubbs may have been involved in other blackmail operations. Maybe not for money, maybe for influence. So he might have been a practiced blackmailer.”

Henderson nodded: “So what’s the other side? Why do you think it went Tubbs to Smalls, that Tubbs planted it on Smalls’s computer?”

“Couple of reasons,” Lucas said. “If it had really been Smalls’s file, he probably would have paid Tubbs off. He’d have done it in a way that Tubbs couldn’t come back on him—filmed it, or done it with trusted witnesses. That way, if the file ever showed up again, Tubbs at least would go down for blackmail.”

He continued: “The other reason is, just look what happened. A guy who does dirty tricks is involved, somehow, with a really dirty trick, which could change an important election. He might have been paid for it. Maybe a lot. So if you take the simplest, straightforward answer to a complicated question . . .”

“Occam’s razor . . .”

Lucas nodded. “. . . the file was going from Tubbs to Smalls. A straightforward political hit.”

“So, what you’re saying is, Tubbs probably took the thumb drive to Smalls’s office, and when Smalls was gone, inserted the file.”

“Yes. Or more likely, an associate of his did. Whatever happened, for either side, Tubbs was probably murdered to shut him up. Neither one of us is going to be able to avoid that . . . fact,” Lucas said.

“I wouldn’t avoid the fact,” Henderson said, “but that doesn’t mean that I don’t think it could use some management.”

“I agree,” Lucas said. He added, “The thumb drives included a lot of other stuff. I printed it out—it’s all documents, with a few photos. I annotated them, best I could, and bound it up.”

• • •

HE HANDED THE BOOK to Henderson, who weighed it in his hands and then turned to the first page. He thumbed through it for a few minutes, then, in a distracted voice, asked, “You know how to make a G-and-T?”

“Sure.”

“Could you get me another? Lean hard on the G.”

Lucas went and made the drink, and then brought it back, and the governor took it without looking up, and Lucas pulled off his shoes and leaned back on the chaise and drank his beer and stared out into the dark over the river valley. He could see stars through a break in the trees: winter could arrive any second, although there was no sign of it.

A minute or so later, Henderson chuckled and said, “Jean Coutee . . . I wondered where she got that Jaguar. Poor as a church mouse, all workingman’s rights and anti-this-and-that . . . and she took the money and bought a fuckin’ Jag.”

And fifteen minutes after that, Henderson sighed and shut the book, and handed it back to Lucas. “Am I in there . . . anywhere?”

“No.”

“I don’t mean as a crook, because I’m not. But am I mentioned? Am I going to court?”

“You’re not even mentioned,” Lucas said.

“Okay. That’s okay.”

“There’s another thing that worries me,” Lucas said. “That porn file. There’re a lot of photos and most of them have some text. But one of the files seems likely to have come from a police evidence file. From Minneapolis.”

“What? Police?”

“I don’t know the connection, or how it got in the bigger file,” Lucas said. “I suspect it came from the police. The question is, did the Minneapolis cops, or probably one cop, give the file to Tubbs, in an effort to destroy Smalls? If they did, is it possible—”

“That a cop killed Tubbs? So that he wouldn’t rat them out if he got caught?”

“Or maybe they realized he wasn’t reliable,” Lucas said. “The thing is, Smalls and the cops, and Minneapolis in particular, did not get along. Smalls wanted to outlaw public employee unions. The unions saw him as a deadly enemy. When I look into this, that’s going to be one aspect of the case,” Lucas said.

“Which makes it even a bigger stink bomb,” Henderson said.

“It’d be good to keep you out of this . . . in an operative sense,” Lucas said.

“Absolutely.”

“I might have to perjure myself, but only lightly and not really significantly,” Lucas said. “The only two people who’d ever know would be you and me. . . .” And Kidd and Lauren and Marvel and John, but they should be safe enough, Lucas thought. He wasn’t telling any real lies, he was just warping time a bit.

The governor didn’t quail at the idea of perjury, he simply asked, “What are we talking about?”

“I put everything back. The St. Paul cops don’t know I’ve already been to the apartment. I put everything back, and call the lead investigator, and tell him that I’ve been there for an hour. When they arrive, I’ll be sitting there, looking at the paper. . . . I’ll insist on taking it to the BCA computer lab. Nobody there knows what I’ve been up to. They’d find all this stuff, and the porn, Smalls would be cleared, a couple of crooks might go down. I noticed that one of them is a pretty close ally of yours.”

“Fuck him,” Henderson said. “He’s a goddamned criminal, sucking on the public tit. I never saw that in him. But where’s the perjury in this?”

“Might not be any. I’d tell them exactly what happened when I entered the apartment, where I looked and what I did, and here’s the evidence. I wouldn’t have to mention that it was my second trip there . . . that I took the stuff out, copied it, and then put it back. After all, the docs are all in the public record.”

Henderson nodded, and closed his eyes. Then he said, “The murder.”

“I’d want to stay on that,” Lucas said.

“I’d insist. This thing will leak five minutes after you call St. Paul, and there’s gonna be a shit storm. I’ll be outraged, and you’ll be my minister plenipotentiary to the investigation. That’ll give us a reason for these . . . conferences.”

“That’ll work, I think,” Lucas said.

They sat there for a minute, then Henderson said, “There’s the elephant in the room . . . that we haven’t talked about.”

Lucas nodded: “Who did it. Who killed Tubbs.”

“If he’s dead.”

“Yeah, if he’s dead. But . . . it feels like it.”

“Why it was done . . . should lead you to who did it,” Henderson said. “A lot of people hate Smalls, but the most obvious beneficiary is Taryn Grant.”

“But hiring a killer is a problem, no matter how much money you have,” Lucas said. “The best model for that is the movie Fargo—idiots hiring idiots. From what I’ve read about her, she’s not an idiot.”

“She’s not,” Henderson agreed. “But it could be somebody working on her behalf. Or somebody who thinks he’s working on her behalf. A psycho.”

“I’ll talk to her,” Lucas said. “As the investigation spreads out, she’d be an obvious person to interview. I’ll take a look and see what we can find out about her.”

“Another thing: we need to manage the news release. We know it’ll leak, we need to be out front on that.”

“That’s what Mitford’s for,” Lucas said. “Just make sure he gives me a heads-up before the shit hits the fan.”

“I will. Now about your book . . .” Henderson said. He patted the bound printout that Lucas had given him.

“Into the grinder,” Lucas said.

• • •

AT TEN MINUTES AFTER nine o’clock that night, Roger Morris, the St. Paul homicide detective, wearing a purple velour tracksuit and Nike Air running shoes, stuck his head into Tubbs’s apartment and called, “Where are you?”

“In the bathroom,” Lucas called back.

Morris found Lucas on his knees, looking at papers he was pulling out of two white plastic sewer pipes. Morris tipped his head back and closed his eyes and said, “Fuck me with a parking meter. We missed it.”

“Yeah, well . . . I looked in there and wondered, why would you drain a sewer up, in a two-story building?” Lucas said.

“So what is it?”

“Papers, money, and three computer thumb drives,” Lucas said. “You can have the money and the papers. The thumb drives . . . finders keepers. I’ve got a guy waiting for me at the BCA computer lab.”

“We got a computer lab—”

“Ours is better,” Lucas said. “This stuff just might blow the ass off the legislature. . . . These papers, the ones I can read, suggest that some of our beloved politicians are on the take.”

“That’s a motive on the Tubbs killing,” Morris said. “Seriously, man, it’s my murder investigation—”

“I want those thumb drives at the BCA,” Lucas said. “You’ll get the contents—I’ll drive you over there, and we’ll give you a receipt. I’ll tell you what, Roger, I’m only looking at Tubbs for one reason: the kid who found that porn said Tubbs had been hanging around the Smalls campaign, and might have had the opportunity to put it on Smalls’s computer. I looked close at the Smalls porn, the stuff from your computer lab, and there’s some involvement there that you don’t want to deal with. I don’t want to deal with it, either, but you really don’t.”

“Like what?”

“Like one of the photos may have come out of the Minneapolis cops,” Lucas said. “Maybe the whole file did. Maybe some cops were trying to get rid of Smalls. Maybe Tubbs was killed to seal off the connection.”

“No, no,” Morris said. A few seconds later, “You don’t have to drive me—I’ll follow you over. I want that receipt. You can keep the papers and the money, too. But I want copies of every single goddamn document on my computer tomorrow morning.”

“Fast as I can get it to you, Roger,” Lucas said. “I promise.”