Silken Prey

SAID, “ W AIT 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.
    •   •   •
    “ T HERE’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.”
    •   •   •
    W HEN L UCAS LEFT K IDD’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.
    •   •   •
    L UCAS 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