Silken Prey

on the phone bank. Is she the one who did this?”
    “Don’t know—but we got a tip that made us want to talk with her,” Lucas said. “Don’t do anything that would let her know we’re looking at her.”
    “In other words, keep my mouth shut.”
    “I’m far too polite to say that to a U.S. senator.”
    •   •   •
    J ENKINS SHOWED UP and said, “I was next in line.”
    “That piece of shit you drive won’t know the difference,” Lucas said. “You could fill it up with a water hose. Let’s go.”
    Lucas briefed Jenkins on the way over. They got to Smalls’s headquarters a little after four o’clock, and the secretary, Helen, pointed out Bunny Knoedler, a tall, dark-haired, blue-eyed girl with bow-lips, who looked like she might have been Lucas’s daughter.
    The phone room was just another office, divided up into a half-dozen booths with acoustic tiling on the walls, to hush up the multiple voices. Knoedler was sitting in a booth with two hardwired phones and a list, and was dialing a number when Lucas leaned over her shoulder and pushed down the hang-up bar on the base set.
    She turned and looked up at him and said, “What . . . ?” and he could see in her eyes that she knew who he was.
    “We need you to come back into Senator Smalls’s office,” Lucas said. Jenkins loomed behind him, as though to keep her from running.
    “What . . . what?” she asked.
    “I think you know what, but we have to talk about it,” Lucas said. “Come along.”
    She put the phone down, and with the other phone-bank people suddenly gone silent, followed them out of the room, sandwiched between Jenkins and Lucas, like a perp walk.
    Smalls’s office was empty—not even a computer anymore—and Lucas pointed Knoedler at a chair. He and Jenkins remained on their feet, looking down at her. “You’re a Democratic spy,” Lucas said. “A friend of Bob Tubbs, and you worked with him on out-state campaigns. He planted you here to watch Senator Smalls’s campaign.”
    She was scared, and started to reply. She said, “I—”
    Lucas put up a hand to stop her. “We’re going to read you your rights. But I want to tell you, in addition to your rights, if you lie to me, that’s a crime. You have the right to remain silent, to say nothing at all, but you can’t lie to me. At this point, we’re looking for information.”
    Lucas looked at Jenkins and nodded, and Jenkins started the routine. “You have the right to remain silent . . .”
    When he was finished, Lucas asked, “Did you understand all of that? That you have a right to an attorney?”
    “I haven’t done anything illegal,” she said, looking at the two of them, looming.
    She hadn’t asked for a lawyer. This was delicate: Lucas didn’t want to talk about illegalities. Instead, he said, “Bob’s mother is worried sick about him, but we don’t know whether he’s just lying low, or if he’s been . . . killed. We’re afraid that he has been. If he’s still around, we desperately need to know that.”
    “I . . . I . . . I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, I’m worried, too. He was the guy I was supposed to talk to, if I found anything out. Then he just stopped answering his phone. I was calling him every night, and then . . . he was gone.”
    She’d just admitted being a spy. “Do you know where he got the pornography?” Jenkins asked. “Did he get it from a police officer?”
    “The pornography . . . He didn’t have anything to do with that,” she said. “That’s crazy. He didn’t do dirty tricks.”
    “We know you’re a little new with this political campaign stuff,” Lucas said. “But I’m here to tell you, Bob was involved in a few tricks in the past. And you’re sort of a dirty trick, spying on the Smalls campaign.”
    “Everybody does it,” she said. “Everybody. Smalls has a spy in the Grant camp, too. Just ask him. Ask him under oath.”
    “Okay,” Lucas said. Smalls had already as much as admitted that.
    He looked at Jenkins, who was the asshole. Jenkins said, “I dunno. I doubt that everybody does it. Gotta be some kind of a crime. And she’s not all that new with this stuff—she’s worked those out-state campaigns.”
    “It is
not
a crime,” she said, showing a little streak of anger. “It’s not illegal. I wouldn’t do anything illegal.”
    “We know that you were close to Bob,” Lucas said. “We know that Bob needed somebody to help set the computer so the