Silken Prey

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.”
    •   •   •
    T UBBS 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