Silken Prey

tell him that I’ve been there for an hour. When they arrive, I’ll be sitting there, looking at the paper. . . . I’ll insist on taking it to the BCA computer lab. Nobody there knows what I’ve been up to. They’d find all this stuff, and the porn, Smalls would be cleared, a couple of crooks might go down. I noticed that one of them is a pretty close ally of yours.”
    “Fuck him,” Henderson said. “He’s a goddamned criminal, sucking on the public tit. I never saw that in him. But where’s the perjury in this?”
    “Might not be any. I’d tell them exactly what happened when I entered the apartment, where I looked and what I did, and here’s the evidence. I wouldn’t have to mention that it was my second trip there . . . that I took the stuff out, copied it, and then put it back. After all, the docs are all in the public record.”
    Henderson nodded, and closed his eyes. Then he said, “The murder.”
    “I’d want to stay on that,” Lucas said.
    “I’d insist. This thing will leak five minutes after you call St. Paul, and there’s gonna be a shit storm. I’ll be outraged, and you’ll be my minister plenipotentiary to the investigation. That’ll give us a reason for these . . . conferences.”
    “That’ll work, I think,” Lucas said.
    They sat there for a minute, then Henderson said, “There’s the elephant in the room . . . that we haven’t talked about.”
    Lucas nodded: “Who did it. Who killed Tubbs.”
    “If he’s dead.”
    “Yeah, if he’s dead. But . . . it feels like it.”
    “
Why
it was done . . . should lead you to who did it,” Henderson said. “A lot of people hate Smalls, but the most obvious beneficiary is Taryn Grant.”
    “But hiring a killer is a problem, no matter how much money you have,” Lucas said. “The best model for that is the movie
Fargo
—idiots hiring idiots. From what I’ve read about her, she’s not an idiot.”
    “She’s not,” Henderson agreed. “But it could be somebody working on her behalf. Or somebody who
thinks
he’s working on her behalf. A psycho.”
    “I’ll talk to her,” Lucas said. “As the investigation spreads out, she’d be an obvious person to interview. I’ll take a look and see what we can find out about her.”
    “Another thing: we need to manage the news release. We know it’ll leak, we need to be out front on that.”
    “That’s what Mitford’s for,” Lucas said. “Just make sure he gives me a heads-up before the shit hits the fan.”
    “I will. Now about your book . . .” Henderson said. He patted the bound printout that Lucas had given him.
    “Into the grinder,” Lucas said.
    •   •   •
    A T TEN MINUTES AFTER nine o’clock that night, Roger Morris, the St. Paul homicide detective, wearing a purple velour tracksuit and Nike Air running shoes, stuck his head into Tubbs’s apartment and called, “Where are you?”
    “In the bathroom,” Lucas called back.
    Morris found Lucas on his knees, looking at papers he was pulling out of two white plastic sewer pipes. Morris tipped his head back and closed his eyes and said, “Fuck me with a parking meter. We missed it.”
    “Yeah, well . . . I looked in there and wondered, why would you drain a sewer
up
, in a two-story building?” Lucas said.
    “So what is it?”
    “Papers, money, and three computer thumb drives,” Lucas said. “You can have the money and the papers. The thumb drives . . . finders keepers. I’ve got a guy waiting for me at the BCA computer lab.”
    “
We
got a computer lab—”
    “Ours is better,” Lucas said. “This stuff just might blow the ass off the legislature. . . . These papers, the ones I can read, suggest that some of our beloved politicians are on the take.”
    “That’s a motive on the Tubbs killing,” Morris said. “Seriously, man, it’s my murder investigation—”
    “I want those thumb drives at the BCA,” Lucas said. “You’ll get the contents—I’ll drive you over there, and we’ll give you a receipt. I’ll tell you what, Roger, I’m only looking at Tubbs for one reason: the kid who found that porn said Tubbs had been hanging around the Smalls campaign, and might have had the opportunity to put it on Smalls’s computer. I looked close at the Smalls porn, the stuff from your computer lab, and there’s some involvement there that you don’t want to deal with. I don’t want to deal with it, either, but you
really
don’t.”
    “Like