Silken Prey

throughout, and when Dannon was gone, Taryn fired up her laptop, went online, and looked up Lucas Davenport. Google turned up thousands of entries, most from newspapers and television stations statewide, covering criminal cases on which he’d worked over the past twenty-five years.
    There were also what appeared to be several hundred business-oriented entries from his involvement with Davenport Simulations.
    Those caught her attention, and she dug deeper. Davenport, it seemed, had been a role-playing game designer as a young man, and then, with the rise of the machines, had created a number of simulations for 911 systems. The simulations were in use nationwide, and after the World Trade Center attack, Davenport Simulations had moved more extensively into training software for security professionals. By that time, she found, Davenport was out of the business, having sold it to his management group.
    The local business magazines estimated that he’d gotten out with around forty million dollars.
    So he was smart and rich.
    And the first batch of clips demonstrated that he was, without a doubt, a killer.
    Somebody, she thought, that she might like.
    •   •   •
    S HE HAD A RESTLESS NIGHT, working through it all, and in the morning beeped Dannon on the walkie-talkie function and said, “I’m going to get an orange juice. Meet me by the pool in three minutes.”
    Three minutes later, she was asking, “This Quintana guy, the Minneapolis cop. If we asked him to check around, he wouldn’t have any idea where the question was coming from, right?”
    “Well, he’d have an idea,” Dannon said. “It’s possible that he and Tubbs speculated on it, but there’s no way he could know for sure.”
    “Then I think we ask him to look up this woman, Tubbs’s girl, and ask the question. He should be able to come up with some kind of legal reason for doing it—that he heard about the attorney general’s review and thought he ought to look into the Minneapolis department’s exposure, something like that. Some reason that wouldn’t implicate him. Just doing his job.”
    “I thought about that last night—I couldn’t decide. I’m about fifty-fifty on it,” Dannon said.
    “So I’ve decided,” Taryn said. “Do it, but be clever about it. Don’t give yourself away. Call from a cold phone.”
    “I can be careful,” Dannon said, “but it’s still a little more chum in the water. We could be stirring up the sharks.”
    “It’s a small risk, and we need to take it,” she said. “Make the call. Let’s see what happens.”

CHAPTER 11
    A few years earlier, Kidd had become entrapped in his computer sideline when the National Security Agency, working with the FBI, tried to tear up a hacking network to which he supposedly belonged. Kidd’s team had managed to fend off the attention, and after several years of quiet, he’d begun to feel safe again.
    Part of it, he thought, might be that he and Lauren had finally had to deal with the fact that they loved each other. Then the baby showed up, though not unexpectedly . . .
    He
wanted
to be safe. He wanted all that old hacker stuff to be over. If you want something badly enough, he thought, sometimes you began to assume that you had it. He and his network had some serious assets, and hadn’t been able to detect any sign that the feds were still looking for them.
    Still, he was sure that if the government people thought they could set up an invisible spiderweb, so they’d get the vibration if Kidd touched the web . . . then they’d do that. They’d give it a shot.
    So Kidd had had to stay with the computers, watching for trouble, although now, painting six and seven hours a day, he was working so hard that he hadn’t time to do anything creative with the machines; and he was making so much money that he didn’t have to.
    He and the other members of his network understood that even monitoring the feds could be dangerous. Computer systems were totally malleable, changing all the time. Updating access code could lead to serious trouble if it was detected. In addition to that problem, the number of major computer systems was increasing all the time, and security was constantly getting better. So care was needed, and time was on the government’s side.
    The most powerful aspect of any bureaucracy, in Kidd’s eyes, was the same thing that gave cancer its power: it was immortal. If you didn’t seek it out and kill it, cell by cell, it’d just keep