Silken Prey

Dannon said. “Davenport is going through the whole campaign committee office, grilling everybody, looking for his accomplice. I don’t think she knows anything about us.”
    “Do you know who she is? What her name is?”
    “Yeah, but I’m not going to tell you,” Dannon said. “I don’t want her name in your head, if you’re asked about her.”
    She looked at him for a moment, thinking about that, then nodded and said, “Okay. I see that. But how could she know about us? Tubbs didn’t know for sure. Not until he got here.”
    “Tubbs
knew
, he just didn’t have any proof,” Dannon said. “He didn’t know my name or anything about me. We made the assumption, incorrect, in retrospect, that if the payoff was big enough, he’d keep his head down, that he wouldn’t even want to know where the money came from. But once he started looking, it was just a matter of time before he found us.”
    Taryn stood and wandered around the sitting area, working it out. “The real problem is, if he mentioned anything to this woman, even his suspicions, those would sort of harden up if she talked with the police. You know what I mean? If Tubbs was alive, but he hadn’t gone looking for you, and they found him and put him under oath, he’d have to admit that he couldn’t identify the person who paid him. But if this Davenport finds his girl, his accomplice, and she just tells him what Tubbs
thought
, that takes on its own reality. And Tubbs won’t be around to cross-examine, to say he didn’t know where the money came from.”
    “That’s true,” Dannon said. “But: right now, they can’t know Tubbs’s motive. Not for sure. As far as they know, he might have done it on his own hook. If we
do
something about her, that would confirm to Davenport that there’s somebody else operating here. If he finds her and she says she doesn’t have any idea why Tubbs planted the porn, then it stops with Tubbs. But if
she
turns up dead, then there’s gotta be somebody else. See what I mean?”
    “I do,” she said. “It’s a conundrum.”
    “I’ve been thinking about it,” Dannon said. “Davenport’s already raised the question of whether somebody in the Minneapolis Police Department might have been involved with the porn. Well, there is somebody. When Tubbs first got back in touch with me, with the porn idea, I asked him where he’d get it. He said he knew a vice cop in Minneapolis who had a file of it. I don’t know if it’s for the cop’s own viewing pleasure, or just one of those things that cops do. Anyway, I pushed Tubbs on it, saying I had to vet the guy before Tubbs made an offer. Tubbs told me the guy’s name is Ray Quintana. If word ever gets out that he supplied the porn, he’s in a world of hurt. So I’m thinking . . . I could call Quintana, mention that Tubbs’s girl could be a problem for him, and maybe he could figure out a way to do a little investigating for us. As a vice cop, looking into this porn allegation. Talk to her. Let us know if there’s a problem.”
    “This is turning into a rat’s nest,” Taryn said. “One complication after another.”
    “Yes. And maybe the best way out would be to do nothing. Deny, deny. They’ll be looking at you for sure, but there’s no way to connect us to anything. We’ve never had any formal contact with Tubbs—you never met him, you don’t know him, Connie doesn’t know him. . . . We could just sit tight.”
    “Maybe even put out the word that we suspect Smalls of some kind of disinformation campaign.” Taryn stood and walked a few steps down the hall, then back, and a few steps up the hall, and back.
    “I don’t know how you’d work that—”
    She waved a hand at him: “I do. That’s not your concern. The real question mark is Tubbs’s girl. If this Davenport cracks her, and she points at us, we can deny . . . but the word’ll get out and the implications of it all, like Tubbs’s disappearance . . . I’ll lose the election.”
    “But you won’t go to prison.”
    “But I want to win. That’s the whole point of the exercise,” Taryn said.
    They sat in silence for a minute, then Dannon said, “What do you want me to do?”
    “Think about it,” she said. “You’re smart. And I’ll think about it overnight. We’ll talk tomorrow morning. It’s all a balancing of the various risks, and the various goals. It’s like a calculus problem: and there is an answer.”
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    T HE HOUSE HAD W I- F I