Silken Prey

described the file to her, and asked, “How do I find out how many bytes are in it?”
    “Why do you want to know?”
    “Because when I was working at the company, the guys there could find specific files by the number of bytes they had in them. I’d like to know how many are in this one, then I can take it over to the Minneapolis cops’ system and look for it there.”
    “That’ll work,” she said. “Okay, you got the file up? I’ll walk you through it.”
    She did, and eventually had Lucas write down the same number that Kidd had come up with, although he didn’t tell her that. When he had the number, she said, “Do you trust the Minneapolis cops?”
    “If somebody puts a gun in my ear,” he said. “Why?”
    “Because what if their systems guy plugs the number into his machine, says, ‘Nope, not here.’ You’re far too ignorant to argue. Then what?”
    “I’ve got that figured out—that was easy,” he said.
    “Yeah? What’re you going to do?”
    “I’m gonna take you with me.”
    •   •   •
    T HERE WAS BUREAUCRACY to be worked through. When Lucas talked to Rose Marie, she was unhappy about the necessity of jacking up the Minneapolis cops, even though she’d known it was coming. “We’re doing everything right out in front of the media now, and I’m not going to have you serve a search warrant on Minneapolis,” she said. “Talk to Robin and get him straight, we’ll bring in their own Internal Affairs unit, and we’ll talk about all the cooperation we’re getting.”
    Robin Connolly was the Minneapolis chief of police.
    “What if Connolly says no?” Lucas asked.
    “He won’t. He’ll want to be out front on this, he’ll want to be informed. If he does say no, I’ll call him. I’ll tell him that I’ll personally stick the search warrant up his ass and then cut him out of the loop on the return.”
    “You’re so grandmotherly sometimes,” Lucas said.
    Which didn’t mean that Connolly didn’t throw a fit when Lucas called him and told him what he wanted to do.
    “What the hell are you talking about? You think we planted the porn file on Smalls? You’re nuts, Davenport. I’m not going to . . .” blah blah blah.
    Lucas said, “Rose Marie will be calling you in a minute or so. Maybe she can explain things more clearly than I have.”
    “Fuck a bunch of Rose Marie,” Connolly shouted. “I’ll put wheels on that bitch and roll her right into the Mississippi.”
    Lucas called Rose Marie, who said she’d call Connolly. Connolly called back five minutes later and said, “It might be possible that we can work something out.”
    “Is Rose Marie in the Mississippi?” Lucas asked.
    “Fuck you.”
    •   •   •
    L UCAS CALLED ICEand asked her to gently and with great diplomacy set up an appointment with the Minneapolis systems manager. While he was waiting for ICE to get back to him, he called the duty officer and asked him to get him a good phone number for Taryn Grant. He was sitting in his office, with his feet up on his desk, waiting for callbacks and thinking about how he’d sequence his various visits, when Del stopped in, took a chair, and said, “I bought a Harley.”
    “Oh, Jesus . . .”
    “What? I had one before.”
    “You were in your twenties,” Lucas said. “If you had to lay one down now, they’d be picking you up with a sponge.”
    “I’m not going on any big rides. . . . It’s gonna be a warm-weather bike, just rolling around town on the local streets,” Del said. “Besides, most Harley guys are my age. Or older.”
    “And you know what? They’re getting picked up with sponges.”
    Jenkins came in and when Del told him about the Harley, they slapped hands and Jenkins said, “I’d have one myself, if they weren’t such pieces of shit.”
    “Says the owner of a personal Crown Vic.”
    Shrake showed up a few minutes later, and they talked about the Harley, and Shrake said, “That fuckin’ Flowers used to ride, right after he got out of the army. He had some sorta crotch rocket, though, not a Harley. I remember him showing up at crime scenes on it, when he was working for St. Paul. He had hair down his back, he looked like Wild Bill Hickok.”
    After another couple of minutes, Jenkins said to Lucas, “I’m hearing rumors that the Geheime Staatspolizei doesn’t like the fact that you’re working directly for the governor, and bailing out Smalls. I hear you’re about to slap a search warrant on the