Free Silken Prey by John Sandford Page B

carvings. Lucas wouldn’t have known a Gauguin carving if one had bit him on the ass, so when told about it, he’d just said, “Hey, that’s great,” and felt like an idiot.
    •   •   •
    L AUREN OPENED THE DOOR, a slender woman, not tall, with red hair and high cheekbones and a big smile: “Lucas, damnit, you need to come around more often. Why don’t you jack up Weather and let’s go to dinner? I need to get out. So does she.”
    She pecked him on the cheek and then Kidd came up, chewing on a hot dog bun with no dog. He was wearing jeans and a paint-flecked military-gray T-shirt stretched tight across his shoulders. And gold-rimmed glasses.
    “New glasses,” Lucas said.
    “Yeah. When I’m working, I walk away from the painting, then I walk right up close, and then I walk away again,” Kidd said. “You know, figuring it out. I began to realize I wasn’t seeing the close-up stuff so well.”
    “Getting old,” Lucas said.
    “I’m a year older than you,” Kidd said. “I just turned fifty.”
    “Yeah . . . I’m not looking forward to it.”
    Kidd shrugged. “Forty-five was a little tough. Fifty, I didn’t notice.”
    “Didn’t even remember,” Lauren said, nudging Kidd with her elbow. “Jackson and I popped a surprise party on him, and he didn’t even know what it was for, at first.”
    Jackson was their son, who was five, named after some dead New York painter. They drifted into the living room, and Lucas told them about Letty and Sam and the baby, and they talked about schools and other domestic matters. Then Kidd asked, “So what’s up?”
    Lucas: “You’ve read about Porter Smalls?”
    Kidd: “Yeah. Good riddance.”
    Lucas: “He might be innocent.”
    Lauren: “Oh, please.”
    Kidd: “Huh. Tell me about it.”
    •   •   •
    L UCAS TOLD HIM ABOUT the computer, and Kidd listened carefully, eyes fixed on Lucas’s face. Kidd was a couple of inches shorter than Lucas, but was wider across the shoulders, and narrower through the hips: a wrestler. He’d lost an athletic scholarship when he’d dragged an abusive coach out of his office and forced his head through the bars of a railing around the field house balcony. They’d had to call the fire department to get the coach free, and around the field house, Kidd had been both a hero and a persona non grata. Not that it mattered much: the Institute of Technology hired him as a teaching assistant, and paid him more than he’d gotten from the scholarship.
    When Lucas finished with what he knew about Porter Smalls, Kidd said, “I need to see the hard drive.”
    Lucas took it out of his jacket pocket and handed it to him.
    Kidd said, “Mmm. How long did she have it before she gave it to you?”
    “Half an hour,” Lucas said. “Maybe a little more.”
    Kidd turned the drive in his hands, then said, “She could have done anything to it.”
    “She didn’t mess with it,” Lucas said. “She’d understand the consequences.”
    “Which would be?”
    “She’d make an enemy out of me,” Lucas said. “She wouldn’t want that. And she knows what’s at stake here.”
    Kidd thought for a couple seconds, then nodded, a quick jerk of the head. “Okay,” and then, “Come on back to the shop.”
    Lucas asked, “So you’re in?”
    “We’re in,” Kidd said.
    •   •   •
    K IDD, L AUREN, AND J ACKSON lived in the original oversized unit, which had a long living room overlooking the river and the Port of St. Paul, and a couple of bedrooms and bathrooms; and Kidd used the other two units as studio and computer work space. He still did some computer-related consulting, he said, as Lucas followed him back to the computer space, though ninety percent of his time was now spent painting.
    Lucas stuck his head into the studio—Kidd had three landscapes under way—and then asked, “Lauren doesn’t work?”
    “Not so much, anymore,” Kidd said. “Pretty much a full-time mom.”
    “What’d she do when she was