Silken Prey

done,” Lucas said.
    “And keep me out of it.”
    “You’re gonna have to tell me someday how you come to have access to all this information. Government secrets. It can’t be legal,” Lucas said.
    “Probably not entirely legal,” Kidd said, scuffing along the street. “I’ve been doing this forever, from before there was an Internet. My access just grew. From the early hacking days, fooling around, back in the eighties. Now . . . I do databases. When I do computers at all, which isn’t that often anymore.”
    “With a specialty in revealing secrets.”
    “Not really,” Kidd said. “Sometimes I go looking for information, and I stumble over stuff that should be out there, in public. Secrets that shouldn’t be secrets. Some stuff
should
be secret—I’m not going to give away any biowarfare docs—but a lot of other stuff is criminal and gets covered up.”
    “I’m seeing some of that right now, on the local level,” Lucas said.
    “Yeah. Embezzlement gets covered up, nepotism, favors for special groups or corporations that can run into billions of dollars . . . special access. At the federal level, a lot of it gets classified one way or the other. I see no reason to honor that. It’s crime, plain and simple.”

CHAPTER 16
    D annon was waiting by the door when Taryn got back, late, from a campaign rally. She was getting beat up: she’d been to East Grand Forks, on the North Dakota border, early that morning, had flown to International Falls, on the Canadian border, in the afternoon, and in the evening, had been in Duluth, on the Wisconsin border, where the cars met her and brought her back home.
    The campaign had been shifting: it was all TV, and appearances that were sure to make TV, especially in those cities where they could still move votes. No more one-on-one talks, no more gatherings of the influential money men. It was too late for that. Now, it was all the downhill rush to Election Day, three days out.
    When Taryn came in the house, trailed by Carver, Alice Green, and Connie Schiffer, the campaign manager, Carver peered at Taryn, hard, and she gave a terse nod and said to Green, “We’re all done, Alice. You can take off. Six o’clock tomorrow morning.”
    Green said, “Thank you, ma’am. Six a.m. You try to get some sleep.” Green turned and left.
    “Good advice,” said Schiffer to Taryn. “My butt is worn-out. And that goddamn Henderson.”
    “At least he gave us a little break,” Taryn said. The governor had emphasized, at his press conference, that Tubbs had probably been working alone. Smalls, at a later press conference, hadn’t challenged that assessment, and had said that it was time to get the election back on track. “Henderson seemed like he was trying to get everything back to neutral.”
    “I’d prefer a neutral in our favor,” Schiffer said. “But you’ve got to be ready for the questions, tomorrow, about this Knoedler girl.”
    “Yeah, yeah . . .” Taryn waved her off: they’d talked about it in the car. “If you think of anything else, call me on the way home: I’ll be up for another half hour.”
    “No Ambien,” Schiffer said. “We don’t need you stoned or sleepwalking if we wind up on one of the earlier shows.”
    Taryn nodded and said, “Take off.” And to Carver and Dannon, “Set up the security. I’m going to look at the schedule and think in bed for a while.”
    Schiffer left, pausing to say, “We’re still good. We’ve got four points, but we can’t take any more erosion. Two points and we’re tied and we lose control.”
    “Gotcha.”
    •   •   •
    A S S CHIFFER WAS LEAVING, Dannon asked Carver to do a serious look around the yard. One of the radar buzzers had been going off, Dannon said, and he hadn’t been able to isolate why.
    “Probably another goddamn skunk,” Carver said. He pulled his jacket back on and went to look.
    When he was gone, Taryn turned to Dannon and asked, “What?”
    “I talked to Quintana,” Dannon said. “He says that Davenport somehow figured out where the porn came from. He and the internal affairs officer at the Minneapolis Police Department are digging around, and Quintana says his name is going to come up. He thinks he can stay clear—but before he knew that Davenport was digging around, he went over to the Smalls campaign headquarters and talked to . . . the woman who set up the trap.”
    “Not this Knoedler girl?”
    “No.”
    “That’s a relief,” Taryn said.