Silken Prey Read Online Free PDF Page B

that. Now, she’s going to take me down, probably 52 or 53 to 48 or 47. My core constituency will sit on its hands if they think I’m guilty of this child porn thing. I’m already hearing that.”
    “I knew some of that,” Lucas said.
    “But here’s the thing,” Smalls said, leaning toward Lucas: “The Democrats don’t need to get me indicted, or to be guilty. They just need the accusation out there, with the attorney general running around, looking under rocks. If I’m innocent, they’ll be perfectly happy to apologize for all of this, about an hour after I lose the election. ‘That really wasn’t right about old Porter Smalls. . . .’ So to do me any good, you pretty much have to find out what happened. Not just that I’m probably innocent. ‘Probably’ won’t cut it. We need to hang somebody, and in the next five days or so.”
    Lucas didn’t say that his mission wasn’t to save Smalls’s career; he just said, “Okay.”
    “Damn. I’ll tell you what, Davenport, you may have done the worst possible thing here,” Smalls said.
    “Hmm?”
    “Elmer says you’re really, really good. You’ve given me a little hope. Now I’ve got further to fall.”
    •   •   •
    A LTHOUGH IT WAS S UNDAY, Lucas decided to stop back at the BCA headquarters, on his way home. He walked through the mostly empty building up to his office, where he found an e-mail from Smalls, saying that he’d talked to his attorney, who would go after the hard drive that afternoon. He asked Lucas to put ICE in touch with the attorney. Lucas called ICE, who said she’d take the job, “though I don’t like working for a wing-nut.”
    “You’re not working for a wing-nut,” Lucas said. “You’re working for democracy in America.”
    “For two hundred dollars an hour. Let’s not forget that.”
    •   •   •
    L UCAS SPENT AN HOUR at BCA headquarters, looking at e-mailed reports on investigations that his people were running, but nothing was pressing. Del, Shrake, and Jenkins were trying to find a designer drug lab believed to be in the Anoka area, and Virgil Flowers was seeking the Ape-Man Rapist of Rochester. Lucas wrote notes to them all that he’d be working an individual op for a couple of weeks, but he’d be in touch daily.
    While he was doing that, an e-mail came in from Smalls, saying that he wouldn’t have the list of campaign employees and volunteers until late in the day. Lucas then tried to call the young woman who’d discovered the porn, and was told by her mother that she was at a friend’s house at Cross Lake, and wouldn’t be back before midnight. Lucas arranged to meet her the next morning at her home in Edina.
    That done, he made a call to the St. Paul cops, got shifted around to the home phone of a cop named Larry Whidden, of the narcotics and vice unit. Whidden was out in his backyard, scraping down the barbecue as an end-of-season chore. Lucas asked to see his investigative reports, and Whidden said, “As far as I’m concerned, you can look at everything we got, if the chief says okay. It’s pretty political, so I want to keep all the authorizations very clear.”
    Lucas called the chief, who wanted to know why Lucas was interested. “Rose Marie asked me to take a look,” Lucas said. “To monitor it, more or less. No big deal, but she wants to stay informed.”
    “Politics,” the chief said.
    “Tell you what, Rick,” Lucas said, “how did you get appointed?”
    “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    “Politics,” Lucas said. “It is what it is.”
    “Funny. Okay. But I’ll tell you what, this whole thing ranks really high on my badshitometer. If Smalls is guilty, he could still do a lot of damage thrashing around. If he’s innocent, he’s gonna be looking for revenge, and he’s in exactly the right spot to get it.”
    “All the more reason for somebody like yourself to spread the responsibility around,” Lucas said.
    “I’d already thought of that,” the chief