Silken Prey ld-23 Read online

  “No problem. Christmas is coming.”

  Reynolds took them to a gray Dell desktop computer. “Smalls is getting a court order for a copy of the hard drive,” he told them. “It’ll be here first thing tomorrow.”

  “He’s denying any knowledge,” Lucas said. “What do you think?”

  “I’ve usually got an opinion,” Reynolds said. “But this thing is a little funky. I don’t know.”

  “Funky, how?”

  “The circumstances of the discovery,” Reynolds said. “When you get into it, you’ll see.”

  Whidden said, “I’m sixty-five percent that he’s guilty. But, if I was on the jury . . . I don’t think I’d convict him.”

  Reynolds brought up the porn file: the usual stuff, for kiddie porn: young boys and girls having sex with each other, young boys and girls with adults. Nothing new there, as kiddie porn went.

  Lucas asked, “How much is there?”

  “Several hundred individual images and thirty-eight video clips,” Reynolds said. “Some European—we’ve seen them before—and some, we don’t know where it comes from. We haven’t looked at it all, but what we’ve seen, it’s pretty bad stuff.”

  “What about this volunteer, the whole thing about throwing some papers on the keyboard?” Lucas asked.

  “We’ve tested that, and that’s the way it works,” Reynolds said. “You’re looking at the porn, you walk away. In two minutes, the screen blanks. Touch a key, and it comes back up with whatever was on the screen. In this case, the porn file.”

  • • •

  THERE WASN’T MUCH TO talk about, so Lucas thanked Whidden for the file, and Reynolds for the demonstration, and drove home. He arrived twenty minutes before dinner would be ready, and when Weather asked him if there was anything new, he said, “Yeah. I’ve been asked to prove that Porter Smalls is innocent.”

  “Shut up,” she said.

  • • •

  PORTER SMALLS’S LIST OF campaign staff members came in, more than forty of them, both paid and volunteer. After dinner, Lucas spent a while digging around on the Internet, looking for background on them. He found a few things on Facebook, but quickly realized that nobody was going to post “Guess who I framed?”

  He’d just given up when ICE called. “I talked to your wing-nut’s lawyer, and he says we’ll get a copy of the hard drive tomorrow, around ten-thirty, eleven o’clock,” she said.

  “I was told you’d get it first thing,” Lucas said.

  “Well, I was told that the attorney general’s office wants a representative there, and they’re bringing along their own computer guy. They couldn’t get him there any sooner.”

  “I need to talk to you as soon as you’ve got it, but don’t tell anybody you’re bringing it to me. Let them think it’s for Smalls’s attorney and nobody else,” Lucas said. “Could you bring the stuff here, to my place?”

  “I’ll have to see what the attorney says, but I don’t see why not.”

  “Call me, then,” Lucas said. “One other thing: I’m researching a bunch of people, I really need to get background on them. But all I get from Google is a lot of shit.”

  “You know that old thing about ‘Garbage in, garbage out’?” ICE asked.

  “Yeah?”

  “Google is now the biggest pile of garbage ever assembled on earth,” ICE said. “Give it a couple more years, and you won’t be able to find anything in it. But, hate to tell you, I don’t do databases. I do coding and decoding and some hardware. But I don’t do messaging or databases. I don’t even Tweet.”

  “You got anybody who’s good at databases?” Lucas asked. “I really need to get some research done.”

  “Yeah. I do know someone. So do you. He probably knows more about databases than anybody in the world. Literally.”

  “Who’s that?” Lucas asked.

  “Kidd.”

  “What kid?”

  “Kidd the artist,” ICE said.

  “Kidd? The artist?” Lucas knew Kidd fairly well, and knew he did something with computers, in addition to his painting. They’d been jocks at the University of Minnesota around the same time, Lucas in hockey and Kidd as a wrestler. Weather owned one of Kidd’s riverscapes, and had paid dearly for it—a price Lucas would have considered ridiculous, except that Weather had been offered three times what she’d paid, and had been told by an art dealer that the offer wasn’t nearly good enough.

  ICE said, “Yeah. Believe me, he does databases.”

  “He’s really good?”

  “Lucas, the guy’s a legend,” ICE said. “He not only does databases, he does everything. There’s a story—it might not be true—that Steve Jobs was afraid that Microsoft’s new operating system would crush the life out of Apple. This was back in the late nineties, or maybe 2000. So Jobs asked Kidd to help out, and Kidd supposedly said he’d see what he could do. The next Microsoft release . . . well, you’ve heard of Windows ME?”

  “Sort of.”

  “It did more damage to Windows’ reputation among consumers than anything before or since,” ICE said. “It sucked. It worse than sucked. Supposedly, Kidd had a finger deep in its suckedness.” She hesitated, then said, “Of course, that might all be a fairy tale.”

  Lucas said, “Well, I guess I’ll give him a call.”

  “Say hello for me,” ICE said. “Tell him if he ever ditches his wife, I’m around.”

  “That way, huh?”

  “He is so hot . . . don’t even get me started.”

  • • •

  HOT? KIDD?

  Lucas had never thought of Kidd as hot, or even particularly good-looking. He certainly didn’t know anything about fashion—Lucas had never seen him in anything but jeans and tennis shoes and T-shirts or sweatshirts, sometimes with the sleeves cut off. Weather gave money to the Minneapolis Institute of Art, quite a lot of money, and they’d once gone to a function that specified business casual dress, and Kidd was there . . . in jeans, running shoes, and a sweatshirt, but with the sleeves intact. He said it was casual, for his business.

  Still, in regard to his hotness . . . Weather seemed to enjoy Kidd’s company. A lot. Sort of like she enjoyed the company of Virgil Flowers, another predator, in Lucas’s opinion. And Kidd had a wife who was herself so hot, in Lucas’s view, that she was either far too good for the likes of Kidd, or . . .

  Kidd had something that Lucas didn’t recognize. Not that there was anything wrong with that, Lucas thought.

  • • •

  LUCAS DUG KIDD’S PHONE number out of his desk and called him. Kidd picked up: “Hey, Davenport,” he said. “Wasn’t there, didn’t do it.”

  “How’s Lauren?” Lucas asked.

  “Who wants to know? And why?”

  “Just making small talk,” Lucas said. “I need to talk to you . . . about computers. A friend told me that you understand databases.”

  “What friend?”

  “Ingrid Caroline Eccols.” There followed a silence so long that Lucas finally asked, “You still there?”

  “Thinking about ICE,” Kidd said. “So, what’s the situation?”

  “I’d rather explain it in person,” Lucas said. “But time is short. Would you be around tomorrow, early afternoon?”

  “Yeah, but ICE isn’t invited.”

  “She’s a problem?”

  “I couldn’t even begin to explain the many ways in which she could be a problem,” Kidd said.

  “Okay. She’s not invited,” Lucas said.

  “Can Lauren sit in?”

  Lucas hesitated, then said, “It’s a very confidential matter.”

  “She’s a very confidential woman,” Kidd said. “And if it’s that confidential, I’d rather she hear about it. You know, in case I need a witness at some later date.”

  “Then fine, she’s invited, if she wants to be there.”

  “Oh, she’ll be there,” Kidd said. “She thinks you’re totally hot.”

  • • •

  TOTALLY HOT.

 
; Everybody was hot, everybody was rich. Better than chasing chicken thieves in Black Duck, Lucas thought, as he settled at his desk with the file from Whidden.

  The file looked pretty good, until he opened it. Once opened, half of it turned out to be printouts of 911 conversations, repetitive reports on the seizing of the computer from the campaign offices, and reports of conversations and interviews with office personnel, most of whom knew nothing whatever, and an interview with Brittany Hunt, the volunteer who found the pictures.

  Hunt was twenty and had been working as a volunteer since June, and would return to college—Sarah Lawrence—the following winter, having spent half a year working on the campaign.

  She knew only slightly more than the completely ignorant office employees. She’d had a report on the ten-year cost of proposed bridge repairs, for which Smalls had gotten appropriations from the feds. She’d walked into his office a little after ten o’clock in the morning, and since Smalls himself had ordered the report, she’d placed it where he’d be sure to see it, and know that she’d fulfilled his request: she dropped it on his keyboard.

  Instantly, she said, a picture flashed up, and she’d reflexively looked at it: at first it seemed like a jumble of dead people, and then she realized that it was a group sex photo, and that two of the people in the photo were children.

  She called Dad, and Dad dialed 911. The rest was history. Lucas learned almost nothing from the report that he hadn’t gotten from Smalls, except that Sarah Lawrence women freely used sexual references that Lucas heretofore thought confined to pornographic films.

  He finished the file, and went into the kitchen in search of orange juice. Weather and Letty were leaning on the kitchen breakfast bar, programming something into Weather’s cell phone. Weather looked up and asked, “Well? What was in the file? Did he do it?”

  Lucas got a bottle of orange juice from the refrigerator and twisted its cap off. “File was useless. One good thing: I’m not far behind the St. Paul cops.”

  “I’m shocked that you’re behind at all,” Weather said.

  “Me too,” said Letty. “Shame.”

  “Thank you for your support,” Lucas said. “You’ll find me in the garage, sharpening my lawn mower blade.”

  Letty looked at Weather and asked, “Is that a euphemism?”

  “I hope not.”

  Lucas ignored them, finished the orange juice, put the bottle in the recyclables, and went off to the garage.

  They could taunt him all they wished; but Kidd’s scorchingly good-looking wife, Lauren, thought he was totally hot.

  CHAPTER 4

  Taryn Grant came back from a campaign loop through Rochester, Wabasha, and Red Wing, and found Doug Dannon, her security coordinator, waiting inside the door from the garage. Her two German shepherds, Hansel and Gretel, whimpered with joy when she walked in, and she knelt and gave them a good scratch and got a kiss from each of them, and then Dannon said, “I’ve got some news. Where’s Green?”

  Alice Green was a former Secret Service agent. She was not in the loop on the shadow campaign. Taryn said, “Alice is with the car. . . . What happened?”

  “The word around the Smalls campaign is that there’s a new state investigator looking into the porn scandal,” Dannon said. “I don’t know if they’ve taken it away from St. Paul, but Smalls is pretty happy about it. He thinks something’s gonna get done. There are rumors that Smalls talked to the governor, but nobody knows what was said.”

  “The governor? He’s supposed to be on our side.” Taryn bent sideways and gave Gretel another scratch on the head.

  “Don’t know—don’t know what’s happening. Maybe Connie can get something.”

  Connie Schiffer was Taryn’s campaign manager.

  “What about the investigator, the new guy?” Taryn asked.

  “I’ve been looking him up on the Internet. He’s a killer. His name is Lucas Davenport, he’s been around a long time,” Dannon said. “Works for the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. There’s a ton of newspaper clips. He’s killed a bunch of people in shoot-outs. He seems to be the guy they go to, when they need somebody really smart, or really mean.”

  “But what could he find out?”

  “Worst case, he could find the thread that leads from Tubbs to Smalls,” Dannon said. “Everybody’s looking for Tubbs, but they don’t know about the connection. We can’t do anything about it. They’ll probably come and talk to you, Taryn. If they think there’s something fishy about the porn, this campaign is where they’ll look. If they find out that Tubbs is connected, and Tubbs never shows up . . . then they’ll be asking about murder.”

  “But Tubbs will never show up,” she said.

  “No. No chance of that,” Dannon said.

  • • •

  TARYN GRANT, DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATE for the U.S. Senate, suffered from narcissistic personality disorder, or so she’d been told by a psychologist in her third year at the Wharton School. He’d added, “I wouldn’t worry too much about it, as long as you don’t go into a life of crime. Half the people here are narcissists. The other half are psychopaths. Well, except for Roland Shafer. He’s normal enough.”

  Taryn didn’t know Roland Shafer, but all these years later, she sometimes thought about him, and wondered what happened to him, being . . . “normal.”

  The shrink had explained the disorder to her, in sketchy terms, perhaps trying to be kind. When she left his office, she’d gone straight to the library and looked it up, because she knew in her heart that she was far too perfect to have any kind of disorder.

  • • •

  NARCISSISTIC PERSONALITY DISORDER:

  Has excessive feelings of self-importance.

  Reacts to criticism with rage.

  Takes advantage of other people.

  Disregards the feelings of others.

  Preoccupied with fantasies of success, power, beauty, and intelligence.

  • • •

  EXCESSIVE FEELINGS OF SELF-IMPORTANCE? Did that idiot shrink know she’d inherit the better part of a billion dollars, that she already had enough money to buy an entire industry? She was important.

  Reacts to criticism with rage? Well, what do you do when you’re mistreated? Shy away from conflict and go snuffle into a Kleenex? Hell no: you get up in their face, straighten them out.

  Takes advantage of other people? You don’t get anywhere in this world by being a cupcake, cupcake.

  Disregards the feelings of others? Look: half the people in the world were below average, and “average” isn’t anything to brag about. We should pay attention to the dumbasses in life?

  How about, “Preoccupied with fantasies of success, power, beauty, and intelligence”? Hey, had he taken a good look at her and her CV? She was in the running for class valedictorian; she looked like Marilyn Monroe, without the black spot on her cheek; and she had, at age twenty-two, thirty million dollars of her own, with twenty or thirty times more than that, yet to come. What fantasies? Welcome to my world, bub.

  • • •

  THAT HAD BEEN more than a decade ago.

  Taryn was now thirty-four. She still had those major assets—she was blond, good-looking, with interesting places in all the interesting places. She’d graduated from Wharton in Entrepreneurial Management, and then from the London School of Economics in finance. Until four years earlier, she’d worked in the finance department at Grant Mills, the family’s much-diversified agricultural products business, the fifth largest closely held company in the U.S.

  She’d spent six years with Grant Mills, six years of snarling combat with a list of parents, uncles, and cousins, about who was going to run what. She might have won that fight, eventually, but she’d opted out. There was a lot of money there, but she couldn’t see spending her life with corn, wheat, beans, and rice.

  She’d quit to start Digital Pen LLC, which wrote apps for smartphones and tablets. She employed two hundred people in Minneapolis, and another hundred out on the Coast, and had stacked up a few
more tens of millions, on top of the three-quarters of a billion in the Grant Mills trust.

  But even with Digital Pen, she’d grown bored. She’d turned the company over to a hired CEO, told him not to screw it up, and turned her eyes to politics.

  Taryn had watched the incumbent U.S. senator, a Republican named Porter Smalls, stepping on his political dick for five consecutive years. She thought, Hmmm. She had an interest in the Senate, as a stepping-stone, and it was clear from early on that the main Democratic candidates would be the usual bunch of stooges, clowns, buffoons, apparatchiks, and small-town wannabees—and a witch—who couldn’t have found Washington, D.C., with a Cadillac’s navigation system and a Seeing Eye dog.

  Taryn had everything she needed to buy a good, solid Senate seat, and start looking to move up. She’d pounded the field in the Democratic primary, taking fifty-one percent of the vote in a four-way race; the witch had finished third. She’d been a weekly visitor on both local and national talk shows, was good at it, and people started referring to her as a “rising star.”

  She liked that. A lot. As anyone with narcissistic personality disorder would.

  There was one large, juicy fly in the ointment. Three weeks before the election, she was losing. The thing about Smalls was, he was likable. Okay, he’d screw anything that moved, and in one case, allegedly, a woman who said she’d been too drunk to move. But then, what did that mean, anymore?

  • • •

  SO TARYN, WORKING ANONYMOUSLY through the shadow campaign, had hired Bob Tubbs to do his thing, to win the election for her. Tubbs didn’t know the man who passed him the 100K in twenties and fifties.

  But Tubbs was a political, and had been around a long time, and knew how to follow a trail. It took a while, but he eventually followed it back to Dannon and thus to Taryn.

  He showed up at her house at midnight.

  He wanted more money.

  Like this:

  • • •

  DOUG DANNON WAS A sandy-haired man of medium height with a trim, sandy mustache and a wedge-shaped body, marked with a few shrapnel scars from nearby explosions. On the particular night that Tubbs showed up at the door, he was sitting on a twenty-thousand-dollar German woven-leather couch that was soft as merino wool, his feet on a seventy-five-thousand-dollar Persian carpet as delicately brilliant as a French cathedral’s stained-glass window. He looked out through the faintly green, curved-glass porch windows at the billion-dollar woman, who looked like a million bucks.