Silken Prey

room. He’s the biggest gossip in the world. He knows
everything.
”
    “Cory.”
    “Yes. He’s not really part of the campaign staff, he was hired to do the printing and copying. They do a lot of that. He knows
everything.
Ask Helen Roman. She’s the campaign manager, she’ll know where to find him.”
    “Sounds like a good guy to know,” Lucas said.
    “Yeah. If you like gossip, and we all do.” She burped, then looked toward the counter. “I could use another one of those sandwiches. I haven’t eaten since the day before yesterday.”
    •   •   •
    S MALLS’S CAMPAIGN OFFICE was off I-94 on the St. Paul side of the Mississippi, ten minutes away. Lucas went there, found Helen Roman, the office manager, who said that Cory Makovsky worked in the distribution center, at the end of the hall. Lucas went there, where he found Makovsky talking excitedly on his cell phone. When Lucas tried to get his attention, Makovsky held up a finger, meaning “Wait one,” and gushed a revelation “He’d just seen it online from
People
, there really isn’t any doubt that she’s pregnant,” into the phone.
    Lucas looked pointedly at his watch, and Makovsky frowned and said to the phone, “Hang on a sec,” and to Lucas,
“What?”
    Lucas said, “I’m an agent with the BCA. Did you murder Bob Tubbs?”
    Makovsky took that in for a few seconds, then said hastily into the phone, “I gotta get back to you, Betty.”
    When Lucas had Makovsky’s attention, he asked, “Did you kill him?”
    Makovsky, who’d gone a little pale, said, “Of course not. Who told you I did?”
    “Nobody. I just wondered,” Lucas said. Then: “I was told you might have some information I need. Do you know if Bob Tubbs had a special friend of some kind . . . a lover, maybe . . . in Senator Smalls’s campaign office?”
    Makovsky’s eyes widened, and his voice dropped to a whisper: “Is that the story Smalls is putting out?”
    “No—that’s the question I’m asking. Did Tubbs have a special friend?”
    “I don’t know,” Makovsky said, with real regret in his voice. “I realize I should know, but I don’t. I could ask around.”
    “Could you do that?” Lucas asked. He dug a card out of his pocket, wrote a number on the back, and said, “If you hear anything, call me.”
    “I’ll do that,” Makovsky said, his eyes bright. Lucas believed him; and two minutes after he called Lucas, the word would probably be tweeted, or Twittered, or whatever that was. Probably to
People
.
    •   •   •
    W HEN HE LEFT the campaign office, Lucas had ten minutes to get down to the St. Paul Police Department, just enough time to retrieve his car and be marginally late. When he got there, he found he was the first person from outside the department to arrive.
    The chief, Morris, and a lab tech were sitting around, drinking coffee, talking about a recent controversial tasing. A Bloomington cop’s wife had woken angry in the middle of the night, and had used his duty Taser to tase her sleeping husband in the area sometimes called the
gooch
. He was now claiming a major disability—sexual dysfunction caused by a city-owned instrument—and was seeking to be retired at full pay. He was twenty-seven.
    “I’ll tell you what,” Morris said, holding his coffee cup with his pinkie finger properly out in the air, “That boy won’t be sleeping easy with a woman again, no matter who she is.”
    Commissioner of Public Safety Rose Marie Roux walked in and caught the last of that, and she asked, “Who was that?”
    “Talking about the Bloomington tasing,” Lucas said.
    “Oh, yeah,” she said. She took a chair, and plopped her purse on the chief’s desk. “The guy who got it in the gooch.”
    Henry Sands, the BCA director, showed up a minute later, took the last chair, and Rose Marie asked, “So what’s up? Or, I sorta know what’s up, but what’s new, and why is it an emergency?”
    Morris said, “Lucas and I found a bunch of stuff in Bob Tubbs’s apartment—you all know Tubbs, and know we’re investigating his disappearance as a possible murder. Well, the stuff we found suggests that Tubbs planted the kiddie porn on Senator Smalls’s computer. There’s the theoretical possibility that he found it on Smalls’s computer, and was using it to blackmail him, but Lucas and I don’t believe that. . . . We think he was killed to eliminate him as a witness to whoever supplied the porn to get Smalls. It’s