Silken Prey

spent a half hour flicking through the document files, and then through the porn files, looking for any other clue to its origin, but found nothing new. When they were done, Morris said, “Nine o’clock tomorrow.”
    •   •   •
    L UCAS WENT HOME: he’d successfully covered his ass, he thought. Now it should be a straightforward murder investigation, and they already had several pieces of the puzzle.
    Morris was a competent investigator, and more than competent: but he didn’t have everything that Lucas had, and Lucas couldn’t give him some of it. He really had to stay on the case, Lucas thought. He
wanted
to stay on it. It was getting intense, and he liked intense.
    Liked it enough that he got up early to think about it. And at nine o’clock the next morning, in jeans and T-shirt, he’d already finished a Diet Coke and a plate of scrambled eggs, and his list of who should be at the conference. His list: Henry Sands, director of the BCA; Rose Marie Roux, commissioner of public safety; Rick Card, St. Paul chief of police; Morris; and himself. He was trying to remember who would call whom, when his phone rang. He picked it up, looked at the screen.
    The governor: “Everything cool?” Henderson asked.
    “Yes. We’re going bureaucratic, to blur everything over. The St. Paul homicide detective on the Tubbs case, and I, are going to convene a conference with Sands and Rose Marie and the St. Paul chief, lay it all out, and then just start a straight criminal investigation. Maybe parcel some of it out to the attorney general . . . but we’ll see what Rose Marie has to say about that. You should stay clear.”
    “Keep me informed.”
    •   •   •
    M ORRIS CALLED A MINUTE LATER, with his list. He had the same list as Lucas, less Rose Marie, and with the addition of the Ramsey County attorney.
    He agreed with Lucas on Rose Marie, but Lucas argued against the county attorney: “That guy is owned by Channel Three. If he’s in the conference, we might as well put it on television.”
    “Man, my computer guy printed out those document files and left them for me, and I gotta tell you, it’s gonna be political, and it’s gonna be ugly. The names in these things . . . they scare the shit out of me. I think we need lawyers. Lots of lawyers. The more the better. These docs aren’t for cops.”
    “I’ll take a look as soon as I go in this morning,” Lucas said. “But we’re cops, so it’s okay to have a conference about a possible crime. Nobody can criticize us for that. Then we let Rose Marie and Rick figure out who to bring in, for the political stuff. We can just focus on the murder.”
    They went back and forth, and eventually Morris said, “I knew you had a sneaky streak, but I didn’t know it was this sneaky. But okay, let’s do it your way. I’ll declare a big-ass emergency and try to get a conference at noon or one o’clock, here in St. Paul.”
    “Do it,” Lucas said.
    •   •   •
    T HE MEETING WAS SET for eleven o’clock, the only mutual time they could all find, in the chief’s office in St. Paul. Lucas had a couple of hours, so he called Brittany Hunt, the volunteer who’d discovered the porn file. She was driving to the Mall of America. She was no longer employed, she said, but not too worried about it.
    “I talked to my adviser and she said that exposing a criminal like Smalls was a lot more important than my campaign work.” She was worried about meeting Lucas without her father present, but he told her that he just had a couple of quick questions that weren’t about her at all. “I need to gossip,” he said.
    She agreed to make a quick detour and meet him at a sandwich shop off Ford Parkway, five minutes from his house. He changed into a suit and tie, then drove over to the sandwich shop, where he found her eating a fried egg sandwich on a buttermilk biscuit. Lucas got a glass of water and sat down across the table from her.
    “I was famished,” she said.
    “So eat.” Lucas leaned toward her and pitched his voice down. “Tubbs . . . did he have any special friends in Smalls’s campaign?”
    She cocked her head and licked a crumb of biscuit off her lower lip, then asked, “You mean, was he sleeping with anybody?”
    Lucas said, “Well, any kind of close friend.”
    She said, “You know . . . I don’t know. But I can tell you how to find out. There’s a guy there, Cory, mmm, I don’t really know his last name, he works in the copy