SO LUCAS HAD RUN out of stuff to do. He tried to think about it for a while, but didn't have enough material to think about. He called home, and nobody answered-they were still out shopping for superhero costumes for Sam. He left a message that he'd probably be home at seven o'clock. That done, he went out to a divorced guys' matinee, to catch the Three Stooges movie he'd missed when it came by in the spring. The divorced guys were scattered around the theater as always, single guys with popcorn, carefully spaced apart from each other, emitting clouds of depression like smoke from eighties' Volkswagen diesel.

Despite that, Lucas laughed at the movie from the moment a nun got poked in the eyes and fell on her ass; took him back to his childhood, with the ancient movies on the obscure TV channels. And Jesus, nuns getting poked in the eye? You'd have to have a heart of pure ice not to laugh at that.

HE WAS OUT OF the movie at five-thirty, called ahead to St. Paul, and at five-forty-five, he parked at the St. Paul Police Department, in the guest lot. He walked inside, had a friendly chat with the policewoman in the glass cage, and was buzzed through to the back, where he found Whidden leaning against the wall, sucking on a Tootsie Pop.

Whidden said, "This way," and led him down to Vice, where he took a fat file off an unoccupied desk and said, "Copy of what we got. Want to look at the porn?"

"Maybe take a peek," Lucas said.

He followed Whidden down to the lab, where Jim Reynolds, a very thin man in a cowboy shirt, was looking at a spreadsheet. He saw Lucas and Whidden, stood up and said, "Over here," and to Lucas, "Thanks for the overtime."

"No problem. Christmas is coming."

Reynolds took them to a gray Dell desktop computer. "Smalls is getting a court order for a copy of the hard drive," he told them. "It'll be here first thing tomorrow."

"He's denying any knowledge," Lucas said. "What do you think?"

"I've usually got an opinion," Reynolds said. "But this thing is a little funky. I don't know."

"Funky, how?"

"The circumstances of the discovery," Reynolds said. "When you get into it, you'll see."

Whidden said, "I'm sixty-five percent that he's guilty. But, if I was on the jury ... I don't think I'd convict him."

Reynolds brought up the porn file: the usual stuff, for kiddie porn: young boys and girls having sex with each other, young boys and girls with adults. Nothing new there, as kiddie porn went.

Lucas asked, "How much is there?"

"Several hundred individual images and thirty-eight video clips," Reynolds said. "Some European-we've seen them before-and some, we don't know where it comes from. We haven't looked at it all, but what we've seen, it's pretty bad stuff."

"What about this volunteer, the whole thing about throwing some papers on the keyboard?" Lucas asked.

"We've tested that, and that's the way it works," Reynolds said. "You're looking at the porn, you walk away. In two minutes, the screen blanks. Touch a key, and it comes back up with whatever was on the screen. In this case, the porn file."

THERE WASN'T MUCH TO talk about, so Lucas thanked Whidden for the file, and Reynolds for the demonstration, and drove home. He arrived twenty minutes before dinner would be ready, and when Weather asked him if there was anything new, he said, "Yeah. I've been asked to prove that Porter Smalls is innocent."

"Shut up," she said.

PORTER SMALLS'S LIST OF campaign staff members came in, more than forty of them, both paid and volunteer. After dinner, Lucas spent a while digging around on the Internet, looking for background on them. He found a few things on Facebook, but quickly realized that nobody was going to post "Guess who I framed?"

He'd just given up when ICE called. "I talked to your wing-nut's lawyer, and he says we'll get a copy of the hard drive tomorrow, around ten-thirty, eleven o'clock," she said.

"I was told you'd get it first thing," Lucas said.

"Well, I was told that the attorney general's office wants a representative there, and they're bringing along their own computer guy. They couldn't get him there any sooner."

"I need to talk to you as soon as you've got it, but don't tell anybody you're bringing it to me. Let them think it's for Smalls's attorney and nobody else," Lucas said. "Could you bring the stuff here, to my place?"

"I'll have to see what the attorney says, but I don't see why not."

"Call me, then," Lucas said. "One other thing: I'm researching a bunch of people, I really need to get background on them. But all I get from Google is a lot of shit."

"You know that old thing about 'Garbage in, garbage out'?" ICE asked.

"Yeah?"

"Google is now the biggest pile of garbage ever assembled on earth," ICE said. "Give it a couple more years, and you won't be able to find anything in it. But, hate to tell you, I don't do databases. I do coding and decoding and some hardware. But I don't do messaging or databases. I don't even Tweet."

"You got anybody who's good at databases?" Lucas asked. "I really need to get some research done."

"Yeah. I do know someone. So do you. He probably knows more about databases than anybody in the world. Literally."

"Who's that?" Lucas asked.

"Kidd."

"What kid?"

"Kidd the artist," ICE said.

"Kidd? The artist?" Lucas knew Kidd fairly well, and knew he did something with computers, in addition to his painting. They'd been jocks at the University of Minnesota around the same time, Lucas in hockey and Kidd as a wrestler. Weather owned one of Kidd's riverscapes, and had paid dearly for it-a price Lucas would have considered ridiculous, except that Weather had been offered three times what she'd paid, and had been told by an art dealer that the offer wasn't nearly good enough.

ICE said, "Yeah. Believe me, he does databases."

"He's really good?"

"Lucas, the guy's a legend," ICE said. "He not only does databases, he does everything. There's a story-it might not be true-that Steve Jobs was afraid that Microsoft's new operating system would crush the life out of Apple. This was back in the late nineties, or maybe 2000. So Jobs asked Kidd to help out, and Kidd supposedly said he'd see what he could do. The next Microsoft release ... well, you've heard of Windows ME?"

"Sort of."

"It did more damage to Windows' reputation among consumers than anything before or since," ICE said. "It sucked. It worse than sucked. Supposedly, Kidd had a finger deep in its suckedness." She hesitated, then said, "Of course, that might all be a fairy tale."

Lucas said, "Well, I guess I'll give him a call."

"Say hello for me," ICE said. "Tell him if he ever ditches his wife, I'm around."

"That way, huh?"

"He is so hot ... don't even get me started."