Silken Prey

staff.”
    “Spies.”
    “If you want to be rude about it,” Smalls said. “So you get a couple of young people as spies, and some of them are a little fanatical about their status, and about helping one party or the other win. So, yeah, somebody on the staff. That’s a good possibility. A probability.”
    “The computer didn’t have any password protection?”
    “Yes, of course it did. Want to know what it was? It was ‘Smallscampaign.’”
    “Great.”
    “Yeah.”
    Lucas asked, “Do you know what happened to it? Your computer?”
    “The St. Paul police have it,” Smalls said.
    “You think you could get access to it?” Lucas asked.
    “Maybe. Probably. I don’t know if I could get to the computer itself, but we should be able to get a duplicate of the hard drive, which would give you everything relevant,” Smalls said.
    Lucas nodded. “Okay. You’re innocent, right?”
    “Yes.”
    “So: call your attorney,” Lucas said. “Today. Right now, on Sunday. Tell him that you want to duplicate the hard drive to start preparing a defense. Take it to court if you have to, but get the hard drive for me. If you have to go to court, you argue that you will be irreparably harmed, with only a week to the election, if you’re not allowed to see what you’re accused of. You’ll get it. When they give you access, call me, and I’ll send somebody down to monitor the copy process.”
    “Somebody from your company?”
    “No. It’ll be a computer expert named Ingrid Caroline Eccols—everybody calls her ICE, for her initials,” Lucas said. “She’s an independent contractor, and she knows this kind of thing, inside and out.”
    “A hacker?”
    “Not exactly,” Lucas said. “She does a little bit of everything. She’s worked for law enforcement agencies, from time to time, and the St. Paul crime lab folks know her. I think she may have worked on the other side, too. I do trust her, when she says she’ll take a job. The key thing is, when it comes to copying the drive, she won’t miss anything. There won’t be any games. She’ll get everything there is to get.”
    “John Shelton is my attorney,” Smalls said. “I’ll get him going. You get this ICE.”
    “Another thing: I need a list of everybody who works for and around the committee. Send it to my personal e-mail.” Lucas took out a business card and a pen, wrote his e-mail address on the back of it, and handed it to Smalls.
    “I’ll do it this afternoon,” Smalls said.
    “Do it right away,” Lucas said. “I need all the help I can get from you, or I’ll spend a lot of time sitting on my ass.”
    “Let me tell you another little political thing,” Smalls said. “The Democrats have me right where they want me. My opponent is young, good-looking, about a hundred times richer than I am, and is running a good campaign. Her problem was, I was going to beat her by six points, 53 to 47 or thereabouts, before the child porn thing happened. She might have cut a point off 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