Chosen Prey

7

MORRIS WARE LIVED in a tidy two-story stucco house under the northern approach lanes for Minneapolis… St. Paul International Airport. A Miracle Maids van sat in front of the house, and a pink plastic Miracle Maids bin sat on the porch, next to the front door. The porch might have held a porch swing-there were hooks in the ceiling, and worn spots on the deck-but didn't. Both the back and front yards were surrounded by low dark-green chain-link fences. A clapboard garage sat astride the driveway behind the fence, and on the lawn, next to the driveway, a Macon Security sign warned against burglary: "Armed Response Authorized."

"Light in the window," Lucas said.

"Of course. It's almost two o'clock," Del said. "This fuckin' place."

"Not very cold, though," Lucas said, as they pushed through the front gate and headed for the stairs.

"Not for Moscow," Del said. "For any other place, this is cold."

A machine was whining inside the house. Lucas rang the doorbell, and they both heard a thump. A man's eyes appeared in the small window cut in the front door, and a second later, the door opened.

"Yeah?" The guy in the doorway wore white coveralls and a white paper hat that covered his hair. He was thin, slat-faced, with a two-day stubble.

"Minneapolis police," Lucas said. "We're looking for Morris Ware."

"Uh, Mr. Ware isn't here. We're the housecleaners."

"You're a Miracle Maid?" Lucas asked.

"Yeah. That's what I am." He sounded like he didn't believe it himself.

"Do you know where Ware'd be?" Del asked.

The man's eyes flicked to Del, lingered for a moment, and a rime of skepticism appeared. "Do you guys have any ID?"

Both Lucas and Del nodded automatically and flipped their IDs. "So…"

"I don't have an address or anything, but I do have a contact number. I think it's his office," the man said.

Lucas and Del waited on the porch while he went to get the number, and Del said, "I'm not sure he believes I'm a cop."

"You're too hard on yourself," Lucas said.

The housecleaner returned with the number. Lucas jotted it down and then said, "You don't have to call him and tell him we were here."

"Maybe I should just forget it entirely."

"Good policy," said Del.

LUCAS CALLED THE phone number in, and a minute later got an address back. "It's off 280, off Broadway somewhere, in those warehouses," the dispatcher said. "You know where that Dayton's office furniture place is? Around there somewhere."

They took I-35 north, then 280, falling in behind a highway patrol cruiser. The cruiser cut a yellow light at Broadway, while Lucas eased into the turn lane. As they sat at the stoplight, waiting to make a left, a half-dozen teenagers in nylon jogging suits ran in a pack down a hill on the golf course across the highway.

"That's what you ought to do, get in shape," Lucas said.

"Life's too short to spend it getting in shape," Del said. "Besides, it'd ruin my credibility on the street."

MORRIS WARE'S OFFICE was in a long line of low, yellow-painted concrete-block warehouse spaces that mostly held distributors of one kind or another. The address was obscure: They finally spotted it as a signless window between a pressure-hose distributor and something called "Christmas Ink."

The warehouse was fronted by a service street with diagonal parking. Lucas pulled in fifty feet past Ware's, and they both got out. As they did, a woman pulled in at Christmas Ink, walked around to the back of her minivan, and popped the hatch. She was struggling with a cardboard box when Lucas and Del walked up.

"Let me get that for you," Lucas said.

She stepped back and took them in. "Thanks."

The woman was in her fifties, with elaborate gold-frosted hair and electric-red lipstick. She wore a hip-length nylon parka and rubber snow boots. She waited until Lucas had the box out, locked the van, and led the way to the door of Christmas Ink.

Inside, a counter ran from wall to wall, and another woman and two men sat at metal desks in the back peering at computer screens. A bookcase was stuffed with catalogs and directories; one wall was covered with holiday cards, with header signs that said "Memorial Day," "Mother's Day," "Father's Day," and "New Sympathy Cards from Leonbrook." The woman in the parka lifted a countertop gate, went through, said, "You can just leave it on the counter. Thanks again."

Lucas put the book on the counter and said, "We're Minneapolis police."

The woman said, "Yes?" and the three people in the back all looked up.

"We're looking for a guy named Morris Ware. We'd like to talk to him."

One of the men looked at the woman behind the computer screen and said, "Told you."

" 'Told you' what?" Del asked.

The man said, "We don't want any trouble with our neighbors…"

Lucas shrugged. "There's no need for Mr. Ware to know we stopped in here."

The woman in the parka unzipped the coat and said, "There's some pretty peculiar goings-on over there."

Del asked, "Like what?"

One of the men said, "I was out back, hauling some trash to the dumpster. This kid who works over there was hauling out some bags of trash… When he went back in, I could see this light coming out of there and just caught a shot of this girl. She was naked."

"How old?" Lucas asked.

The guy shrugged. "Not very. I mean, old enough to do that kind of stuff, maybe. I mean, she had breasts and everything."

"But there have been some people going in there that were too young," said the woman, who was taking off the parka. She tossed it at an office chair and said, "We don't know that anything was going on with them, but I've come here a couple of times in the morning and there were a couple of kids hanging around outside, waiting for those people to show up. They looked like orphan kids or something."

"You mean street kids?" Lucas asked.

"Yeah. They always look old," she said.

"Younger than eighteen?"

"We don't want to get involved in a huge hassle here," said the second man, who'd kept quiet.

"You never want to get in hassles, George," the second woman said. "We should have called somebody."

"I'm just trying to keep our head above water," he said.

"We still should have called."

"Younger than eighteen?" Lucas asked again.

"A couple of them looked like they were maybe fifteen, at the most," said the woman who had worn the parka.

Lucas said, "Please don't mention this to anyone, okay? And thanks. Del, let's go outside."

Outside, they turned away from Ware's window and walked back toward Lucas's car. "We can call Benton, he'd give us a warrant."

"Take an hour," Del said.

"So we go eat some black beans and rice…"

"He won't talk, Ware won't. If we find anything. He'll get lawyers and they'll shut him up."

Lucas thought about it for a minute, then said, "Aronson isn't coming back to life, and if Ware's doing that child shit… We ought to put him in Stillwater regardless of Aronson. We can have the Sex guys find us somebody else who knows the city."

Del nodded. "All right. Let's go for the warrant." After a moment, he added, "I've been on the street for so long that sometimes I forget that there's something more than deals. You know?"

"Absolutely."

THEY SPENT AN hour at a health-food place in Roseville, eating black beans with cheese, and drinking water faintly flavored with lemon, waiting for the phone call. They got it from an assistant county attorney named Larsen.

"I'd like to come along, but I'm stuck in court," she said.

"Next time," said Lucas.

On the way back to Ware's, Lucas mentioned to Del that Larsen would have liked to come. "I wonder why," Del said. "She gonna run for something? Get her picture taken?"

"I think she just likes the rush," Lucas said. "She's been along on a couple of entries."

JUST BEFORE FOUR o'clock, a Chevy van with the entry team backed into a parking space between Christmas Ink and Ware's office while two squads moved into position to block the back door. Lucas and Del parked down the block again, walked down to Christmas Ink, and went inside. The woman who'd been wearing the parka was on the phone. One of the men had left, but the other man and woman were still at their desks.

"You're back," the man said. He didn't look happy.

"Is there any way to tell if your neighbors are home?" Lucas asked. "I mean, without calling them on the phone?"

The parka lady said, "I gotta go," into the phone, hung up, and turned to Lucas. "UPS delivered something ten minutes ago, and somebody was there. I've been watching."

"All right," Lucas said. He took his phone out of his pocket, called the van, and said, "Go when you're ready."

LUCAS AND DEL stood in the window with the Christmas Ink people and watched the van unload. Carolyn Rie, the Sex Unit cop, led the way in her letter jacket. A uniformed cop followed just behind, carrying a sledge. Another uniformed cop and a computer specialist climbed out behind them.

Rie tried the door handle, shook her head no, stepped aside, and the uniformed cop lifted the sledge. As he started his backswing, Lucas and Del opened the door at Christmas Ink, and as the unmarked door at Ware's exploded inward from the impact of the hammer, they joined the surge into the office.

The front was exactly that: a front. Only seven or eight feet deep, it contained four chairs lined up against one wall, and a metal desk with a red telephone. A door, closed, led into the back. The uniformed cop didn't bother to try the knob, but simply kicked it, and the door flew open.

The back room was huge: a warehouse space draped with rolls of backdrop paper. A plush red couch was sitting on one of the rolls; a brass bedstead with a king-size mattress was pushed into a corner. A table held lamps, and two floor lamps stood behind them. There were five strobes on their light stands, two of them covered with soft-boxes, and more lighting equipment sat on another side table.

A short, balding man sat on the couch, holding a camera the size of a shoe box; he was frozen in place. Another man, older, taller, wearing a crisp white shirt and gray slacks, was walking briskly toward a desk full of computer equipment. The computer cop yelled, "Hey, hey hey…" and the man walked faster, reaching, and the computer cop ran straight into him and pushed him away from the computer desk.

The man in the white shirt started screaming at the computer cop: "Get away, get away, get away, this is all illegal this is all illegal get away…"

Another man, who had been out of sight behind a lighting rack, walked to the back door and punched it open: Two cops stood there, and he turned back. "Hey, what's happening…"

Then the guy on the couch with the big camera stood up and said, "I'm leaving. I'm not even supposed to be here."

"Everybody shut up," Rie shouted. "We're Minneapolis police. You two guys…" She pointed at the man who'd tried the back door, and the man by the couch. "Sit. Just sit."

"I want to call my lawyer," the man in the white shirt shouted.

Lucas walked over to him. "How are you, Morris?" he asked. "You remember me?"

Ware looked at Lucas for a moment, then said, "No. I don't. I want my attorney, and I want him now."

"Somebody give Mr. Ware a copy of the warrant," Lucas said. And to one of the squad cops from the blocking car: "Then take him out front and let him use the phone."

Rie got IDs on the other two men, Donald Henrey and Anthony Carr, as Ware was taken into the front room. As he went, he said to Rie, "You're all going down for this. This is the end of your jobs. This is the end…"

The computer specialist pulled a phone line out of the back of Ware's sleek Macintosh, and checked the power cords that went out to peripherals. "Looks okay," he said. "We're isolated, but I'd rather not work on it until I can get it back to the shop."

Lucas nodded. "Whatever's best. The way he was going for it when we came in… gotta be something there."

One uniformed cop from the blocking squad watched the two men on the couch, while Rie, Larsen, Del, Lucas, and the two entry-team uniforms began taking the back room apart-pulling out drawers, looking under pillows, shaking out boxes. They found not a single photograph. They did find two dozen Jaz disks for the Macintosh.

Nothing to look at.

Finally, Lucas asked Henrey, the man with the big camera, "What're we going to find on the disks?"

"I don't know," he said. He sounded depressed. "I'm just hired to shoot. Nothing illegal. I won't shoot anything illegal."

"Does anything illegal get shot in here?"

"I don't know," he said. He turned the big camera in his hands. "I was just hired for one shoot."

"When? Now? Earlier? Later?"

Henrey looked at his watch. "Half hour. We were just setting up lights."

Lucas turned to Rie. "Maybe we ought to get Ware back in here. You could sit out front and be a receptionist."

She ticked a finger at him. "Not bad."

WARE CAME BACK with his escort, looked at Lucas, and snapped, "What?"

"Sit on the couch," Lucas said.

"My attorney is on the way," Ware said.

"Good. I suggest that you not say anything until he gets here."

"I won't. Nobody else better say anything, either," he said, looking at the two other men. "I'll sue for slander and get every nickel you've got. You better believe it."

Lucas crooked a finger at the man with the camera, who followed him into the front room. Rie was moving a chair behind the metal desk, ready to receive visitors.

To Henrey, Lucas said, "If we find child porn on those disks-child stuff is Ware's big thing-then you could wind up in Stillwater for a few years. You know how it goes."

"Listen, man, honest to God, I was hired," Henrey said earnestly.

"We understand that, and we'll take into account any help you give us. Give me just one thing that'll help."

"I gotta talk to a lawyer."

"One thing, buddy," Lucas said. "Just give me one thing. We might not need you an hour from now."

The guy looked around and said, "You better not be lying. Give me a note or something."

"We don't really have a lot of time to fool around."

"I'm not a bad guy, I'm just trying to make a living taking a few pictures. I usually do wildlife and nature."

"Yeah, well, that's cool."

Henrey sat head-down for a moment, and Rie looked at Lucas and winked. Then Henrey said, "I don't know about the child-porn thing. I heard that he does it, but it'd be stupid. It's death. There're plenty of places outside the States where you can do it all you want, and nobody cares."

"Ware is sort of a hands-on kinda guy," Lucas said.

The photographer winced and said, "Just one thing?"

"Just one."

He nodded. "But you gotta help me… The thing is, sometimes when I've been here shooting, the actors-"

From Rie: "Actors?"

"Models, whatever. They sort of like to get their noses into it, and Morrie usually has a little coke around. I've seen him get it a couple times… go for it. It's not like I could go over and see what he's doing, but I think one of the power outlets behind his desk is a fake. I think he keeps a little stash in there."

Lucas slapped him on the back. "See? That was no problem. And if you're like an up-and-up nature guy, like you say… maybe we can deal. Okay? Now, I'm gonna put you back on the couch with Ware. Don't say anything to him."

Lucas brought Del out to the front, told him about the power outlets, then sent Henrey back to the couch and brought Carr into the outer room. Lucas sat him down where Henrey had been, and made the same pitch.

"Look, all I do is maintain his website," Carr said. "He's never bothered to learn how to do that. He puts his pictures on disks, gives me the index number, and I move them over to the Web and set up thumbnails. ErosFineArtPhotos. com."

"Any children on the site?" Lucas asked.

"No. Of course not," Carr said.

"Does he do kids?"

Carr looked uncomfortable. "I don't know. I don't see everything. I just move megabytes. I'm a moving guy."

Lucas nodded and said, "Listen, pal-you better get an attorney. If we find pictures of kids around here, you're gonna go down as an accomplice, and that means a couple of years in prison. You better think of ways to help us, and get your lawyer to cut a deal… I mean, I don't want to sound like I'm threatening you, but this is serious shit."

Carr puffed up his cheeks and audibly exhaled. "If I don't have the money for a lawyer…"

"We'll get one appointed," Lucas said.

"Listen, I can probably tell you a couple of things. I never got involved in the photography at all, but Morrie once told me that sometimes he had 'special stuff.' "

"Special stuff."

"That's what he called it. He was, like, being important. He said he'd transfer it directly to a guy in Europe who puts it up on a website there." He twisted his hands around, as though he were playing cat's cradle. "I think… Morrie's a content provider. We got eight zillion websites without content, and Morrie provides it."

"There's not enough porno out there?" Rie asked.

"Yeah, there's a lot of stuff, but people are always looking for fresh stuff."

"Young stuff," Rie said.

"Yeah. Teenagers, anyway."

"I'll make you a deal right now," Lucas said. "Give me something, give me anything, and I'll help you out. I won't help you if I find out you've been dealing kid stuff, but if you're just getting paid by Ware to run his website… we can help."

Carr puffed his cheeks again, rubbed his hair, said, "Maybe I ought to see a lawyer."

Lucas shrugged. "That's absolutely up to you. But I'll tell you what, this offer may expire. If we find a bunch of stuff…"

"Aw, man…" He looked at Rie, then said, "I'm not a freak."

"Nobody said you were," she said.

To Lucas, mumbling, Carr said, "There's a possibility… that he ships stuff to an underground website in Europe-Holland, I think-called donnerblitzen451." He spelled it, then said, "You need some kind of code to get in. Putting in the wrong code too many times may wipe the site. Maybe your guys can do something with it."

"Donnerblitzen like the reindeer," Lucas said.

"Yeah. Four fifty-one like the Ray Bradbury book, Fahrenheit 451," Carr said. "Four fifty-one is supposed to be the burning point of paper, so I think that's Morrie's little joke. If you put the wrong number into the website-more than a couple of times, anyway-it burns."

"Why would he do that?" Lucas asked. "If somebody found it by mistake…"

"How are you gonna find donnerblitzen451 by mistake? It's not a public facility-it's his. It's his warehouse, I think. You put a high-res photo file in there, somebody wants something special, you go to your warehouse, you order it sent, the site sends out the file, the recipient prints it… There's no way to get back to Morrie. He has a photo negative for ten minutes. After he develops it, he scans it, he burns the neg, and the picture is nothing but a bunch of numbers somewhere in Europe."

"That's interesting," Lucas said. "But you don't know the code to get in."

"No, but I've seen the setup before, and I think it's booby-trapped. If you try to get in, you better know what you're doing, or the place is gonna burn." He nodded, as if turning over the problem in his mind. "I've given the whole thing some thought. Tried to figure out what the code was-tried to catch him going out to the site. I even thought about installing a keystroke recorder in his computer, but… I never did."

"All right, this helps," Lucas said. "If you let on to Ware for one minute what you told us, our deal is off. And you still better get a lawyer."

WHEN LUCAS WAS done with Carr, he sent him back to the couch and said to Rie, "We need to get the code for that website before we turn Ware loose. If he gets five minutes with a computer, he can kill the site."

"How're we gonna do that?" she asked.

"Call the feds, I guess. They're supposed to have some big-deal computer forensics operation going on. Maybe they can help."

"You want to do that?"

"Yeah, I'll take care of it," he said. "And…" He turned his head at movement outside. "Hey-I think we've got customers."

A man and a woman had gotten out of an old Chevy and were walking toward the door.

"They'll see the broken door," Rie said.

"I'll get it." Lucas hurried over to the door and pulled it open, as though he were leaving.

The man was just stepping up onto the sidewalk, and stopped when he saw Lucas. "Hey. Is Morrie around?"

"Yeah. He's in the back," Lucas said. "Who're you?"

"We're the talent," the woman said. She was young, but her face was tough, touched with worry lines-a street kid. She looked straight at Lucas, challenging him. Maybe eighteen, Lucas thought. Maybe not.

"Come on in, talk to Carolyn," Lucas said.

The two stepped past Lucas, crowding into the small reception room. Rie, behind the desk, stood up as Lucas stepped back inside and pulled the door shut. The woman said to Rie, "We're the talent. Morrie said we're supposed to meet him here. We're a couple of minutes early."

"That's all right," Rie said. She held up her badge. "We're the police. Morrie's being raided."

The woman said, "Oh, shit," and pivoted, looking at the door.

"I'd just run you down if you got past me," Lucas said, leaning back against it.

"Fuckin'…" The word came out as a harsh grate, then swung up to a whine. "We haven't done anything."

"No, but we're asking people to cooperate. I'd like to see a little ID, a driver's license."

"I think we need a lawyer," the man said. He was in his late twenties, Lucas thought.

"You might," Lucas agreed. "And you'll get one. But first I want to see some ID."

Lucas took the man's license, read the name, and Rie noted it down. The woman said, "I don't drive."

"Oh, horseshit. You drove that car over here," Lucas said. "Give me your goddamn license."

The woman stared at him for a moment, then said, "Fuck this. Fuck this." She dug in her purse, found a license, and handed it over.

Lucas read her name off: "Sylvia Berne." Then: "Tell officer Rie what your birthdate is, Sylvia."

Berne muttered something, Rie said, "What?" and Berne muttered the date again. Rie looked at Lucas. "Is that what the license says?"

"That's what the license says," Lucas said. To Berne: "You gotta remember to call me when you turn eighteen. I'll buy you a malt."

Berne looked puzzled. "A what?"

"A malt… Never mind." To Rie: "We'll need a statement from Ms. Berne. And get a juvie officer down here."

"Absolutely," Rie said.

Lucas asked Berne, "How many times have you done this?"

She shrugged. "A couple. Nobody gets hurt."

"Morrie never gave you a free sample of the pictures, did he?"

"Maybe," Berne said.

"I love you," Lucas said.

The man said, "What about me?"

"You better sit down," Lucas said. "I got a whole bunch of bad news for you."

TEN MINUTES LATER, Lucas arrested Ware on charges of abusing a minor and of creating child pornography, and Henrey for creating child pornography-Berne said he was the shooter at the last session-and the man who arrived with Berne for child sexual abuse. Carr was freed, but was told not to leave Minnesota.

"She's not a child," Ware snarled, gesturing at Berne. "Look at her, for Christ's sake. She's got tits out to here."

"Looks like a kid after you scrape off the abuse," Del said. To Lucas, he said, "I was fooling around behind the desk, and one of those power outlets looked a little strange. I took the cover off, and guess what? It's a little teeny little safe. There's a Baggie full of white powder inside. We gotta get the crime-scene folks down here."

Lucas looked at Ware. "Uh-oh," he said.

THE UNIFORM COPS took Ware downtown to be booked, and Lucas called Washington from his cell phone. He finally tracked down Louis Mallard at his home and said, "We need another favor."

"Jeez, you guys are running up a bill," Mallard said.

"Well, you know we're tracking this guy, the drawing guy."

"Yeah, yeah, quite the artworks."

"So we went out and busted a porno guy, hoping we can squeeze him on the sex scene around here… and we find out that he's probably got a child-sex photo warehouse over in Europe somewhere. Our source gave us the address for the site, but says the thing can probably be burned in about ten seconds. We need some hot-shit feds to track the site down, and then maybe get onto the cops wherever it is-our source thinks maybe Holland-and grab the servers before our man makes bail tomorrow."

"We can try," Mallard said. "Of course, it depends on what kind of cooperation we get. If it's Holland, we ought to be able to do something. We're fairly tight with the Dutch."

Lucas gave Mallard the details on Ware and the site address, and said, "Let me know."

"I'll call you tomorrow. And we ought to have something on the drawings first thing tomorrow morning."

LATER THAT NIGHT, Lucas and Weather walked down to Eau du Chien, a new French-American restaurant a block from the Ford Bridge in St. Paul. A waitress lit the white tapers on their table, they ordered Chardonnay and looked at the menus, and Weather asked, without taking her eyes off the menu, "Whatever happened to that engagement ring?"

"Gave it away," Lucas said absently, peering at his own menu.

Now she looked up, a wrinkle of vexation on her forehead. "Gave it away?"

"For charity. They had an auction, I got a tax write-off."

She said, "Lucas, this is serious. If you're pulling my leg…"

"It's in the chest of drawers, second drawer, in the box under my socks."

They looked at the menus for another moment, then Weather said, over the menu, "I've been thinking. We may be going at this whole thing a little too informally."

"You're scaring me," he said.

"I don't want to scare you. I just think we should Talk," she said.

"Ah, Jesus. Not that."

"What?" The wrinkle was back.

"Talk. I don't want to talk with a capital T. I want to get married and have a couple of kids and send them to parochial schools or wherever you think is best, but I really don't want to fuckin' hack through all the pieces ahead of time."

"I don't want to hack through all the pieces," she said. "I just want to have some kind of rational, up-front discussion. I mean, we haven't even formally decided to get married yet."

"Weather, will you marry me?"

"That's not what I was looking for, exactly," she said.

"Well, will you?"

"Well, yes," she said, the menu still open in front of her, like a book.

"Good. That's taken care of. Put the ring on. And tell me what the fuck Number Five is. That's not something with snails or clams, is it? Or from diseased geese?"

"Lucas…"

"Weather, I'm begging you," Lucas said. "Not right now. Not in Eau du Chien. We can go home, have a beer, get comfortable."

"You'll wave your arms around and rave," she said.

"I will not."

"You won't if we Talk here," she said.

"Goddamnit, Weather."

The waiter thought they were having a fight.