Silken Prey

know who’d been calling him about Helen Roman, but he suspected that whoever it was had gone over to Roman’s house the night before and killed her.
    Quintana wasn’t a bad cop; okay, not a terrible one. He might have picked up a roll of fifties off a floor in a crack house that didn’t make it back to the evidence room; he might have found a few nice guns that the jerkwads didn’t need anymore, that made their way to gun shows in Wisconsin; he might have done a little toot from time to time, the random scatterings of the local dope dealers.
    But he’d put a lot of bad people in jail, and overall, given the opportunities, and the stresses, not a bad guy.
    When Tubbs had come to him, he’d put it out there as a straight business deal: Tubbs had heard from somewhere unknown that the Minneapolis Police Department had an outrageous file of kiddie porn. Quintana had known Tubbs since high school; Tubbs had been one of the slightly nerdy intellectuals on the edge of the popular clique, while Quintana had been metal shop and a football lineman.
    Tubbs had said, “I’ll give you five thousand dollars for that file. Nobody’ll ever know, because hell, if I admit it went through my hands, I’d be in a lot more trouble than you.”
    Quintana had asked him what he was going to do with it, and Tubbs had told him: “I’m gonna use it to screw Porter Smalls. I’m gonna get Taryn Grant elected to the U.S. Senate. When that happens, I’ll be fixed for life. I’ll remember you, too.”
    Had Grant hired him?
    “I don’t know—I’m being funded anonymously,” Tubbs said. “But that’s obviously where it comes from. I got the cash, and enough to split off five thousand for you.”
    How much had Tubbs gotten?
    “That’s between me and Jesus,” Tubbs said. “I’m taking all the risk. You get more than it’s worth, and if you don’t want the money—well, I’ll get another file. I know they’re floating around out there.”
    Quintana wanted the five grand. Hadn’t really needed it, but he
wanted
it.
    Quintana’s problem now was that Marion from Internal Affairs was on the trail, as was Davenport. Quintana knew Davenport, had worked with him, both on patrol and as detectives; Davenport scared him. Eventually, he thought, they’d get to him. Tubbs hadn’t exactly snuck into city hall. They might even have been seen talking together.
    Quintana was thinking all of this at his desk, on a Sunday morning, staring at the wall behind it, over all the usual detective litter. He was so focused that his next-door desk neighbor asked, “You in there, Ray?”
    “What?”
    “I thought you were having a stroke or something.”
    Quintana shook his head. “Just tired.”
    “Then what are you doing in here? It’s Sunday.”
    “I was thinking I shoulda gone to Hollywood and become an actor. I could have made the big time.”
    “Man, you
have
had a stroke.”
    He went back to staring.
    His delivery of the porn file could get him jail time. Worse, he suspected that whoever was calling him had killed Roman. Even worse than that, he’d talked casually with Turk Cochran when he’d come in from Roman’s place, and Cochran said that Davenport thought it might be a pro job.
    Even worse than that . . . Quintana suspected the same pro might be coming to shut
him
up.
    If Quintana kept his mouth shut, he might be killed as a clean-up measure. If he kept his mouth shut, Davenport could plausibly come after him as an accessory to murder, especially if word got out that he’d interviewed Roman, or had been seen with Tubbs.
    That all looked really bad.
    There was a bright side: Tubbs was presumably dead, and Roman certainly was. That meant that any story that he made up couldn’t really be challenged. If he could just come up with something good enough, he would probably stay out of jail, and might even hang on to his pension. At least, the half that his ex-wife wasn’t going to get.
    But what was the story? How could he possibly justify handing the file over to Tubbs? He thought and thought, and finally concluded that he couldn’t.
    So he thought some more, and at one o’clock in the afternoon, picked up the phone and called the union rep at home, and said he needed to talk to the lawyer, right then, Sunday or not.
    The union guy wanted to know what for, and Quintana said he really didn’t want to know what for. At two o’clock, he was talking to the lawyer, and at two-thirty, they called Marion. The lawyer, whose