Lucas shook his head. "Unless your office is a lot more public than I think it is-"

Smalls held up a hand: "Stop right there. Wrong thinking. The thing is, it is public," he said. "It's a temporary campaign office, full of rented chairs and desks and office equipment. I hardly ever go there, but technically, it's mine. I have another office, the Senate office. In that office, my secretary would monitor people coming and going. Nobody would get in the private office without her knowing, and watching them every minute. There's classified stuff in there. In the campaign office, there are staff people going in and out all the time."

"You think a staff person might have been involved?" Lucas asked.

"Had to be. There are undoubtedly a couple of devoted Democrats around-just as ... and this is off the record ... just as there are a couple of pretty devoted Republicans over in Taryn Grant's campaign 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."

ALTHOUGH IT WAS SUNDAY, 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."

LUCAS 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 said. "I'll call Whidden."

Whidden called Lucas five minutes later and said, "I can go in later and Xerox the book for you, but you're gonna have to wait awhile. I got my in-laws coming over. Why don't you come by at six? You want to look at the porn, I can have Jim Reynolds come in."