Silken Prey

grooming a cop for a move upward, or a dead end for a guy who wasn’t going anywhere; in Morgan’s case, Lucas didn’t know which it was.
    Morgan was poking at a computer keyboard when Lucas knocked on his doorjamb. He turned in his chair and his face fell, and he said, “Lucas. Goddamnit, I was afraid you’d show up here.”
    Lucas said, “Really.”
    “Yeah, everybody in the building is hiding out, afraid you’re gonna want to talk to them. The word’s all over the place.”
    “I only talked to the chief . . . and Marion. And Larry Benson . . .”
    “Might as well have driven down the hall in a sound truck,” Morgan said. He reached back, caught a wheeled guest chair, and shoved it toward Lucas. “Sit down and tell me about it.”
    Lucas explained the situation, and when he was finished, Morgan said, “Well, that’s about what I heard. I’ll tell you what, though. When we busted that place, the Pattersons’, they weren’t putting the files on the Internet. They were too smart to do that. If you wanted pictures from them, you’d get them by FedEx, and they’d be on paper. The Internet was only used for contacts. When we got them, we scanned the paper photos into the system, because that was the only way we had to coordinate them with everything else, for the court case. But they were a separate file. Nobody had access but the people who were working the case. And they should never have been aggregated with other files.”
    “What are the chances that somebody saw an opportunity for a little private enterprise? Put the files together and then sell them?” Lucas asked.
    “I’d say . . . slim to none,” Morgan said. “The thing is, the files were down in Vice, and nobody had access to them but us vice guys. And one thing we all knew, and most cops know now, is that cops and snitches are all over the place on kiddie porn. They’re everywhere. Guys spend their spare time browsing the ’net, looking for it, looking for a bust. You buy kiddie porn off the ’net, you’re gonna lose your job, probably get divorced, and probably go to prison. The vice guys . . . they wouldn’t mess with it. It’s more dangerous than dealing drugs. Way more. And there’s less money in it.”
    “So you’re saying whoever took it wasn’t trying to make a buck, and it didn’t get loose somehow.”
    Morgan shook his head: “Nope. Sad as I am to say it, I’d bet those pictures came straight out of here. Straight out of our system.”
    Lucas asked, “You hear any rumors of guys looking at porn?”
    “Lucas, you know how it is. You worked here, for how long? You hear some guys might be looking at porn, some guys might be getting their knobs polished by the street girls, that some guys have a little too much cash, that some cocaine’s gone astray . . . you hear all that crap. And most of it’s crap. Backbiting bullshit.”
    That was true enough. The brotherhood of cops was fairly tight from the outside, but from the inside, it was more like a bureaucratic knife fight.
    They talked for a while longer, about various possibilities, then Lucas looked at the wall clock and said, “I gotta roll. Thanks for the conversation.”
    Morgan asked, “Is the stuff gonna hit the fan?”
    “Not if Robin handles it right,” Lucas said. “What you need is a lot of promises and a big cloud of smoke . . . and then hope something blows up somewhere, and makes the media stampede that way.”

CHAPTER 12
    D annon and Taryn were both on their feet, in the library, feeling the stress, and Dannon said, “We don’t know anything. We’re amazed that people are talking to us. Who
is
Tubbs?”
    She nodded. “I worked on it last night before I went to bed. I can do it. But I have to have my head in the right place.”
    “I’ll be outside with Carver. Green will be in the monitor room. We want him to see Green, but not us.”
    “Yes,” she said. She frowned. “What are we talking about, anyway?”
    “Exactly.” He nodded, and left.
    A minute later, her walkie-talkie function buzzed, and Alice Green said, “We’ve got a Porsche at the gate.”
    •   •   •
    L UCAS WATCHED THE GATE roll back and caught the two clear lenses, and two black glassy spots, one of each on the stone gate pillars, on either side of the driveway. Camera lenses and infrared alarm sensors. The security would be excellent. And the hard drives on the security cameras could be gotten with a search warrant: something to