Chosen Prey

by John Sandford

“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, a
nd 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.”