Silken Prey

pornography would pop up—”
    “I had nothing to do with that!” she said, her voice rising. “I would never do something that dirty. That’s rotten. That porn . . . that belongs to Smalls. Everybody knows about his attitude toward women, and sex . . .”
    “Come on,” Jenkins said, the scorn rough in his voice.
    “I didn’t . . .”
    They pushed her for another five minutes, and she claimed that she worked afternoons and nights, and hadn’t been around when the trap must’ve been set. They pushed on that, and she eventually admitted that she thought that Tubbs had been in the office at night, two days before the trap popped. They pushed on that, and finally she said the magic words.
    “Look,” she said. “I want a lawyer. Right fuckin’ now.”
    Jenkins looked at Lucas and lifted his eyebrows. Arrest her? Lucas shook his head; he wasn’t ready for that. He said, “We’ll want to talk to you again. Do not go away. Do not try to avoid us. I’m tempted to arrest you, and put you in jail overnight, but I’m hoping that you understand that we need to know what happened, more than we need to haul in the small fish. You’re a small fish. Do you understand that?”
    She nodded, and said, “Lawyer.”
    Lucas offered to provide one, a public defender, but she said she’d get her own. “Are we done?”
    “Yes. But don’t run—”
    “I’m not going to run, but I want you to take me out of the office,” she said. She looked out through the glass window on Smalls’s office door. “They’re gonna be a little pissed at me.”
    “That’s the least of your problems,” Lucas said. “Come on. We’ll take you out.”
    •   •   •
    S HE WAS RIGHT: when they walked out of the room, the other volunteers started hissing, and somebody called, “Put her ass in jail.” At the door, Knoedler flashed a finger over her shoulder, and Jenkins laughed and said, “That’s really classy, sweetheart.”
    They saw her into her car, and as she backed out of the parking space, Lucas asked Jenkins, “What do you think?”
    Jenkins shrugged and said, “Don’t think she knew about the porn. But I wouldn’t be surprised if she let Tubbs into the office, late one night, after everybody else had gone home.”
    Lucas nodded. “Maybe. Which would make her a part of it. The thing is, the DFLers swear that they didn’t put her on Smalls, and I believe them because if they did, too many people would have to know about it. I’d find out, and they know that. So, they’re telling the truth. It had to be Tubbs, working alone, or Tubbs working for Grant. We need to keep going back to her, if nothing else breaks.”
    “Maybe give Knoedler limited immunity,” Jenkins said.
    “Don’t want to give her immunity, if she set the trap,” Lucas said.
    Jenkins shook his head: “I gotta tell you: I kinda believed her about that. She got pretty hot about it and that looked real. Besides, she knows we can check.”
    Lucas rubbed his nose and looked after her taillights, two blocks down the street. “Yeah. It did look kinda real,” he said. “Goddamnit.”
    •   •   •
    H E CHECKED ANYWAY, and Roman, the secretary, said that Knoedler hadn’t been scheduled to work, because even the volunteers were limited to eight hours a day. “But people, you know, are enthusiastic, and they come and go all the time. She could have been here, and I doubt that anyone would have thought it unusual, or even noticed.”

CHAPTER 14
    L auren had put together a munchie plate and Kidd was munching on the last of the celery with pimento cheese as he bypassed the privacy option on Taryn Grant’s bedroom security camera.
    The camera was inactive, which meant nobody had walked through the bedroom in the past thirty seconds.
    He was working off a laptop that was, technically, operating out of a Wi-Fi system in the federal courthouse, which was just up the street. He’d taken the precaution of building a repeater into the building several years earlier.
    With nothing moving on the screen, he wandered away from the laptop to look at a landscape he was working on, a view of the Mississippi a few miles above the Coon Rapids Dam. The color of the autumn leaves and the dark river was all accurate enough, he thought, but didn’t work for the painting: and accurate color was not a driving aspect of his work.
    He pulled on a paint-spattered apron, selected a handful of tubes of oil paint, squeezed some paint onto a glass