Silken Prey

Minneapolis cops, and that’s got everybody steppin’ and fetchin’.”
    In Jenkins’s personal lexicon, the Geheime Staatspolizei comprised the BCA’s top management. It was also the proper name of the German Gestapo, though he probably wasn’t pronouncing it correctly—not that Lucas knew for sure.
    Lucas explained that a compromise had been worked out with Minneapolis, and that he’d be working in cooperation with the city’s Internal Affairs unit.
    “That doesn’t help much,” Del said. “I’ll tell you what, my friend. You’re not doing yourself a lot of good around here, hanging out with the politicians. The knives are coming out.”
    “Fuck ’em,” Lucas said. “It’s a murder case. I’ll break it and the tunes will change.”
    “No, they won’t,” Shrake said. “Everybody will agree that you did a great job and then they’ll stab you in the back. It’s the tall poppy syndrome.”
    “I’ll take care,” Lucas said.
    “You already haven’t,” Del said.
    •   •   •
    W HEN THEY’D GONE, Lucas got Taryn Grant’s office phone number, called it and spoke to a secretary, who went away for a moment, then came back and said, “Ms. Grant is in her car. I’m forwarding your call directly to her.”
    When Grant came on—she had the kind of voice he’d always liked, low and husky, like Weather’s—he said, “I’m working on the investigation of the child pornography found on Senator Smalls’s computer, and also the disappearance of a political operative named Bob Tubbs. I need to talk to you about the situation.”
    “I’ve already made a public statement to the media.”
    “I know, I saw it. But I have a few questions for you, and I also need to brief you on the status of the investigation,” Lucas said. “Time is so short, before the election, we want to be sure everybody is informed.”
    “I’ll be home between six and six-forty-five tonight, but then I have campaign visits to make.”
    “I’ll see you then,” Lucas said. “If you could give me your address . . .”
    •   •   •
    ICE CALLED: “I talked to the systems manager over in Minneapolis, and we’re on for three o’clock. I’m familiar with their equipment. I didn’t tell him exactly what we are going to do, you know . . . just in case they might try to ditch it.”
    “Good. The chief knows what we’re doing, so they might be able to figure it out, but they don’t have the number, as far as I know.”
    •   •   •
    W HEN L UCAS got to the Minneapolis Police Department’s ugly, obsolete, purple-stone headquarters in downtown Minneapolis, ICE was sitting with her feet up on the systems manager’s desk, talking about old times at what was once called the Institute of Technology at the University of Minnesota.
    A sergeant named Buck Marion sat in a corner, reading a free newspaper; Marion was with the Minneapolis Internal Affairs unit, and nodded at Lucas. One of Marion’s predecessors had gotten Lucas thrown off the Minneapolis police force, for beating up a pimp.
    Lucas listened to ICE and the systems manager ramble along, then shook his head, and ICE asked, “What?”
    “Nothing like a long, rambling C++ story,” Lucas said, not trying to hide a yawn. “Fascinating.”
    “We’re intellectuals,” ICE explained. “Anyway, Larry’s going to help us look for the files. We were waiting for you.” Larry Benson was the systems manager.
    “Then let’s do it,” Lucas said.
    ICE explained that they wouldn’t be using the specific byte size, but would enter a narrow range that the file should fall into, even if an item or two were missing. ICE leaned over Benson’s shoulder and fed him the file size number, and he entered the number range into his system. They all watched as the system thought it over, and then spat out twelve returns. “Twelve returns,” ICE said. “Interesting.”
    Lucas almost blurted out that Kidd had found only four. Before he could, Benson said, “Let’s take a look.”
    He opened them, one by one, on top of each other. Eight of them were irrelevant. Four of them, just as Kidd said, showed an identical opening set of child porn. “Man, I hate to think this shit is floating around in there,” Benson said. “One file . . . it’s pretty open access, if you know what to look for.”
    “Any way to tell
who
has accessed them?” Lucas asked.
    “Not really. Well, I can tell you pretty sure in one case, but not the other three. Tom