Silken Prey

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.”
    •   •   •
    B ACK 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.”
    •   •   •
    M ARVEL 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