Lucas turned away, then back and said, "This place can't be licensed."

"Are you kidding me?" she asked. "I'm working for minimum-wage dumbasses who either leave the kids with me or lock them in a car. I'm all they can afford, and I'm better than a car. Maybe."

Lucas said, "All right, but don't put Carl in the garbage can anymore, okay?"

"Carl gets what Carl deserves," she said. "But they all like chocolate ice cream. I could get some for tomorrow, Porsche cop, if I had an extra twenty bucks."

"How many kids are in there?"

"Seven," she said. "Unless one of them has killed another one."

Lucas took a twenty out of his wallet. "Get them the ice cream," he said. "You spend it on dope, I'll put you in something worse than a garbage can."

BACK DOWN I-35 TO Kidd's place.

Lauren came to the door, said, "Hi," and then, as Lucas followed her inside, said, "We've got a couple of friends staying with us for a few days, with their kids. It could be a little noisy."

"I just need Kidd to take a look and give me an estimate on what's inside these things," Lucas said, showing her the thumb drives.

Kidd was sitting in the front room with a black couple, and Kidd said, "Hey, Lucas," and to the couple, "This is Lucas Davenport, he's a cop. Lucas, John and Marvel Smith, from down in Longstreet, Arkansas. John's a sculptor, Marvel's a politician. John does some stuff that you and Weather ought to look at."

"I'll do that," Lucas said. He shook hands with John Smith, an athletic guy with some boxer's scars around his eyes, and smiled at Marvel, a beautiful long-legged woman with a reserved smile; like she might be wary of cops.

Kidd said, "So let's see what you got... . Back in a couple of minutes, guys."

On the way back, Lucas gave Kidd a thirty-second summary of how he'd gotten the drives. "This Tubbs guy-I believe he's dead. Murdered. I mean, we all thought so, but now I'm pretty sure of it."

"That's disturbing," Kidd said.

In the computer lab, Kidd plugged in all three thumb drives at the same time, quickly figured out that one set had been formatted under an Apple OSX operating system, and the other two with different versions of Windows.

He put in a piece of his own software and tapped some keys, and a file popped up. "There it is," he said. He opened it, and they saw the first photos of the Smalls porn files.

"How'd you do that?" Lucas asked.

"I've got the number of bytes from the file off the Smalls machine, and looked for a file of close to the same length. This one was exact, which is a rare thing."

"Goddamnit-Smalls is clear."

"Not necessarily," Kidd said. "Remember-the file could have gone the other way, too. From Smalls to Tubbs. Maybe Tubbs stole it, and was blackmailing Smalls."

"You sound like a defense lawyer," Lucas said.

"Thanks." Kidd did some other computer stuff, popping up files with all kinds of various corporate papers, real estate records, legislative committee meeting transcripts, court records.

"Cover-your-ass files," Lucas said.

"Might be more complicated than that," Kidd said. He went to the door and called, "Hey, Marvel? You got a minute?" And he said to Lucas, "Marvel's okay."

MARVEL CAME DOWN THE HALL, and Kidd showed her into the lab and said, "Look at this file. It's from here in Minnesota. Do you see anything?"

Lucas was a little nervous having the woman looking at the file, but she was from Arkansas, and Kidd probably wouldn't have asked her to look at it if she might become a problem. He kept his mouth shut.

The file Marvel was examining was one of the smaller ones, fifteen or twenty pieces of paper that had been scanned into PDF files, as well as three or four fine-resolution JPEG photos. Using a mouse, Marvel clicked back and forth between the images. John and Lauren came into the lab, leaned against a wall to watch.

Marvel took five minutes; at one point, the kids made a noise that sounded like they'd killed a chicken, and Lauren ran off to see what it was. She'd just come back when Marvel tapped the computer screen and said, "See, what happened was, this guy, Representative Diller, got the licensing fees on semi-trailers reduced by about half, so they'd supposedly be in line with what they were in the surrounding states. He said he wanted to do that so the trucking companies wouldn't move out of Minnesota. But what you see over here is a bunch of 1099 forms that were sent by trucking companies to Sisseton High-Line Consulting, LLC, of Sisseton, South Dakota. Over here is the South Dakota LLC form and we find out that a Cheryl Diller is the president of Sisseton High-Line Consulting. And we see that she got, mmm, fifty-five thousand dollars for consulting work that year, from trucking companies."

"So if these two Dillers are related ..." Lucas began.

"I promise you, they are," Marvel said.

Kidd said, "Marvel's a state senator. In Arkansas."

Marvel added, "This shit goes on all the time. On everything you can think of, and probably a lot you can't think of."

Lucas said to Kidd, "So what these are, are blackmail files."

"Or protection files, if they're all the same kind of thing," Marvel said. "Whoever owned these files might have been involved in these deals, and kept the evidence in case he ever got in trouble and needed help."

Lucas looked at the computer screen for a moment and then said, "All right. Give me the drives back, Kidd. You guys don't want to know anything about this."

Kidd pulled the drives out, handed them to Lucas, and said, "You are so right. Do not mention my name in any of this."

"I won't," Lucas promised. "Can I print these out on my home printer?"

"Probably," Kidd said. "What kind of computer are you running?"

"Macs," Lucas said.

"Most of the files are on government machines, Windows," Kidd said. "I'll loan you a Windows laptop, a cleaned-up Sony. If anyone asks, you paid cash at Best Buy a couple years ago."

BACK IN THE CAR, the laptop on the passenger seat, Lucas called the governor and said, "I need to talk to you alone, tonight. Without Mitford or anybody else around."

"That bad?"

"Worse than you could have imagined," Lucas said. "The problem is, I can't get out of it now."

"I've got a cabin on the Wisconsin side of the St. Croix, north of St. Croix falls. I could be there at six, if it's that bad."

"Tell me where," Lucas said.

He got directions to the cabin, again told the governor to come alone, then went home, said hello to the housekeeper, who said that Letty wouldn't be back until six o'clock, that Weather had been called to do emergency work on a woman whose face had been cut in an auto accident, and she'd be late, and that the kids were fine.