Silken Prey

be involved, and with the threat of felonies hanging over their heads, they’d been cooperative. He’d been looking for people who’d been seen using the Domestics computer at unlikely times, alone or in small groups, or had been unhappy to be seen using it and had quickly signed off when a new face turned up at the office.
    “There are five guys and one woman who may—and I say ‘may’—have been looking at the porn repeatedly. I think all six probably were . . . kind of like a little club down there that knew about it. Two of the shrinks had heard rumors about child porn on city computers. That’s where I got the names.”
    “What’re you doing next?” Lucas asked.
    “I’ve got to talk to the chief about that, but I’m inclined to try to figure out who was the least likely to have dumped the porn to Tubbs, and offer him immunity for information.”
    “When are you going to do it?”
    “After I talk to the chief, I’ll have to get with the lawyers . . . I’m thinking it couldn’t be any earlier than this evening, and most likely tomorrow.”
    “Keep talking to me,” Lucas said.
    •   •   •
    O N THE WAY BACK to his office, he called Smalls:
    “How’s the campaign going?”
    “Not well: that bitch has got everybody she knows whispering that the porn was really mine.”
    “I thought she told the TV people that her campaign wasn’t doing that, and she’d fire anybody who did,” Lucas said.
    “Well, of course she said that,” Smalls said. “She’s lying through her teeth.”
    “How do you know that?”
    “Because that’s what
I’d
do.”
    Lucas said, “Okay. Listen, we’re making more progress, but we need to find Tubbs’s accomplice in your office. That’ll break the thing wide open. If this was done for ideological reasons, if it was done by a spy, then somebody in your campaign has got to have doubts about that person. It’s not that easy to hide your basic beliefs . . . especially if you’re a college kid. So, I need somebody, not you but maybe your campaign manager, to talk to everybody about who that might be. We’re trying to catch a spy. I’m going to work it from the other end, the Democratic side, see if I can get them to cough somebody up.”
    Smalls was silent for a moment, then said, “I can do that. In fact, if we leak to the TV people that we’re looking for a spy . . . that might help convince them that there really was a dirty trick.”
    “Whatever,” Lucas said. “I’m not really trying to get you reelected.”
    Smalls laughed and said, “Gotta be killing a good liberal like you.”
    “Ah, I’m not that political. Anyway, if you could do that, I’ll start on the other side.”
    “Four days to the election,” Smalls said. “If it ain’t done by Sunday, I’m screwed.”
    •   •   •
    L UCAS CALLED K IDD: “Anything happening?”
    “Not yet. It’s delicate.”
    •   •   •
    F ROM HIS OFFICE, he called Rose Marie Roux and asked, “What Democratic Party operator would be most likely to know who is spying on who?”
    “Well, that’d be Don Schariff, but don’t tell him I said so. Why?”
    “I’m going to jack him up,” Lucas said. “Where can I find him?”
    Schariff had an office at the DFL headquarters—Minnesota’s Democratic Party was technically called the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party—and Lucas found him there, by phone, and said he wanted to come over.
    “Should I be worried?” Schariff asked.
    Lucas said, “I don’t know. Should you?”
    “I’m wondering if I should have a lawyer sit in?”
    Lucas said, “I don’t know. Should you?”
    The DFL headquarters was a low white-brick building in a St. Paul business park across the Mississippi from downtown that possibly looked hip for fifteen minutes after it was built but no longer did. Lucas talked to a receptionist, who made a call. Schariff came out and got him, and said, “We’re down in the conference room.”
    “Who’s we?” Lucas asked.
    “Me and Daryl Larson, our attorney,” Schariff said. He was a stocky, dark-haired man with a neatly trimmed beard and dark-rimmed glasses. He was wearing a white shirt with a couple of pens in a plastic pocket protector. In any other circumstance, Lucas would have been willing to arrest him on the basis of the pocket protector alone. “I asked, and everybody said when you’re talking to a cop . . . especially one investigating the Grant-Smalls fight . . .”
    “Okay,” Lucas