Silken Prey

said, “Over here,” and to Lucas, “Thanks for the overtime.”
    “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.”
    •   •   •
    T HERE 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.
    •   •   •
    P ORTER S MALLS’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