Read Silken Prey for Free Online Page A

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.”
    •   •   •
    H OT? K IDD?
    Lucas had never thought of Kidd as hot, or even particularly good-looking. He certainly didn’t know anything about fashion—Lucas had never seen him in anything but jeans and tennis shoes and T-shirts or sweatshirts, sometimes with the sleeves cut off. Weather gave money to the Minneapolis Institute of Art, quite a lot of money, and they’d once gone to a function that specified business casual dress, and Kidd was there . . . in jeans,