Silken Prey

day, I used to sell do-it-yourself political polling kits. This was back before everything was run on polls, and everybody hired a pro. They were customers, young guys on their way up. They sorta became friends.”
    “I had no idea,” Lucas said. “I don’t think you need to call them—I was just worried you’d think I sold you out or something. Lockes won’t be interested in you. He’ll figure you for a technician. He’s more interested in the . . . political interplay. You might not even be called. In fact, the governor might be able to head the whole thing off.”
    •   •   •
    L UCAS WENT HOME. Ate dinner, messed around with the kids, told Weather what had happened that day, including the possibility of a subpoena. “Why does everybody seem to think that Lockes is a horse’s ass?” she asked.
    “Because he’s a horse’s ass,” Lucas said.
    A little after nine o’clock, as Lucas was browsing his financial websites, Horse’s Ass’s minions arrived with a subpoena. There were two of them, one of each gender, and he knew the woman. Sarah Sorensen was a mid-level assistant attorney general, a bland, brown-haired woman who was wearing an animal-rights baseball cap. She gave Lucas the paper and introduced the male half of the delegation, Mark Dunn, who looked around and said, “This is a nice property.”
    There was a
tone
about the comment that suggested that a cop shouldn’t be living quite so well, and Sorensen picked it up and said curtly, “Lucas founded Davenport Simulations. You may have heard of it.”
    Dunn said, “Of course,” and shut up.
    Sorensen said to Lucas, “The subpoena is for tomorrow, but we’d like to have a little pre-interview here, if you have the time. We’d like to get this over with as quickly as possible—tomorrow, if possible. We need to know if we’ve contacted everybody necessary to get a complete picture.”
    Sorensen already had the names of all the people in the meeting at the St. Paul Police Department, plus the governor, and Neil Mitford, the governor’s weasel, and ICE. Lucas added Kidd’s name to the list, feeling guilty about it, even though Kidd hadn’t seemed bothered by the prospect.
    Sorensen said, “This Ingrid Eccols—ICE, you call her—and Mr. Kidd are essentially computer technicians?”
    “That’s correct,” Lucas said. “We contacted them because we had rather pressing time limitations, with the pornography allegations pushed up against the approaching elections. We got a copy of the hard drive the way we did, through Senator Smalls’s attorney, because it was convenient and fast. You understand that we didn’t change anything, that we were operating only from a copy of the computer hard drive, that the original was preserved.”
    “We understand that,” Sorensen said.
    “We were trying to cover as much ground as quickly as we could, so I called in a couple of personal favors from people I knew to be knowledgeable about computers. And, what popped out, popped out.”
    Dunn said, “Excuse me, but I don’t understand exactly what popped out.”
    “A kind of booby trap which would reveal the porn to anyone who touched Senator Smalls’s keyboard . . . and would allow it to be hidden quickly, should Senator Smalls return before the trap was triggered,” Lucas said. “During that investigation, Robert Tubbs’s name came up, and further investigation—”
    “We have that file,” Sorensen said.
    “Then you know what I know,” Lucas said. “The only thing not in the file is what I was doing today, which was interviewing staff members with Senator Smalls’s campaign committee to try to determine whether Tubbs had an accomplice. I interviewed ten members of the campaign, and all of them denied any connection to Tubbs.”
    Sorensen asked, “And you believe all of them?”
    “I don’t really believe
any
of them,” Lucas said. “I can’t afford to—but I think all but one are telling the truth. I just don’t know who that one is.”
    Sorensen said, “Okay. If you can give me the phone number for Mr. Kidd, I think that’s all we’ll need before tomorrow. Ten a.m., if that’s good with you.”
    •   •   •
    A T TEN O’CLOCK the next morning, Lucas showed up at the attorney general’s office, wound up waiting until after noon, as Rose Marie Roux, Henry Sands, Neil Mitford, Rick Card, and Roger Morris were called in, one by one, and questioned. The interviews were being done in a conference