Silken Prey

the political stuff. And you’ve been doing a lot of it. When I’m not here to protect you, when Elmer’s not here . . .”
    “Ah, it’s all right, Rose Marie,” Lucas said. “I’ve been fired before. Stop worrying about it.”
    “Yeah.” She peered at him for a moment, then asked, “What are you going to do? About Smalls?”
    “Try to keep it quiet, as long as I can,” Lucas said.
    “How are you going to do that?” she asked.
    “Haven’t worked it out yet. I’ve got a few ideas, but you wouldn’t want to hear them.”
    “No. Actually, I wouldn’t.”
    “So. Moving right along . . .” Lucas stood up.
    Rose Marie said, “I’ll talk to Henry. Make sure he has a feel for the situation.” Henry Sands was director of the BCA and had been appointed by Henderson. If he knew Henderson was behind Lucas’s investigation, he’d keep his mouth shut. Unless, of course, he could see some profit in slipping a word to a reporter. He didn’t much like Lucas, which was okay, because Lucas didn’t much like him back.
    “Good,” Lucas said. “And hey—relax. Gonna be all right.”
    “No, it won’t,” she said. “I can almost guarantee that whatever it is, it won’t be all right.”
    •   •   •
    L UCAS STARTED BACK DOWN to the car, still thinking it over. Rose Marie was probably right about the political stuff. Even if you were on the side of the Lord, the politics could taint you. Which created a specific problem: there was at least one man at the BCA who’d be invaluable to Lucas’s investigation—Del Capslock. Del had contacts everywhere, on both sides of the law, and knew the local porn industry inside out.
    The problem was, Del depended on his BCA salary, and all the benefits, for his livelihood. He had a wife and kid, and was probably fifteen years from retirement. Everybody in the BCA knew that he and Lucas had a special relationship, but that was okay . . . as long as Lucas didn’t drag him down.
    Lucas didn’t particularly worry about himself. Back in the nineties, he’d been kicked out of the Minneapolis Police Department and had gone looking for something to do. He’d long had a mildly profitable sideline as a designer of pen-and-paper role-playing games, which had gone back to his days at the university. After he left the MPD, he’d gotten together with a computer guy from the university’s Institute of Technology. Together they created a piece of software that could be plugged into 911 computer systems, to run simulations of high-stress law-enforcement problems.
    Davenport Simulations—the company still existed, though he no longer had a part of it—had done very well through the nineties, and even better after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Instead of one simulation aimed at police departments, they now produced dozens of simulations for everything from bodyguard training to aircraft gunfight situations. When the management bought Lucas out, he walked away with enough money to last several lifetimes.
    He was rich. Porter Smalls was rich. The governor was
really
rich, and for that matter, so was Porter Smalls’s opponent; even the volunteer who’d started the trouble was rich, or would be. Rich people all over the place; gunfight at the one-percent corral.
    Anyway, he was good, whatever happened. If the Porter Smalls assignment turned into a political quagmire, he could always . . . putter in the garden.
    Del couldn’t.
    Lucas popped the doors on the 911 and stood beside the open door for a minute, working through it.
    Del was out of it. So were his other friends with the BCA.
    Which left the question, who was in, and where would he get the intelligence he would need? He had to smile at the governor’s presumption: get it done, he’d said, in a day or two, and keep it absolutely private. He didn’t care how, or who, or what. He just expected it to be done, and probably wouldn’t even think about it again until Lucas called him.

CHAPTER 3
    L ucas decided to go right to the heart of the problem and start with Porter Smalls. He called the number given him by Mitford, and was invited over. Smalls lived forty-five minutes from downtown St. Paul, on the east side of Lake Minnetonka.
    His house was a glass-and-stone mid-century, built atop what might have been an Indian burial mound, though the land was far too expensive for anyone to look into that possibility. In any case, the house was raised slightly above the lake, with a