Chosen Prey

by John Sandford

  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.

  8

  LUCAS ARRIVED AT the office at nine o’clock, ragged after a long, intense evening. Marcy was shouting at somebody on the telephone. A bullet-headed man sat in a chair next to her desk, watching her talk. When she saw Lucas walk in, she shouted, “Gotta go,” hung up, and said, “Where’ve you been?”

  “Had to run Weather over to her place early, then bagged out there for a couple of hours. What happened?”

  “You know the guy with the butch haircut and the long black coat who was seen with Aronson outside of Cheese-It?”

  “Yeah?” Lucas’s eyes drifted toward the bullet-headed man, who’d turned to look up at him.

  “This is the guy,” Marcy said. “Jim Wise. Walked in a half hour ago.”

  Wise stood up, and Lucas noticed that he had a black coat folded over his arm. “I saw the picture in the paper and I thought it had to be me,” he said. “I was in there with her, and I had the coat, and my hair used to be cut shorter.”

  “Put the coat on,” Marcy said.

  Wise pulled the coat on, buttoned it, shrugged his shoulders, and looked at Lucas.

  “Damnit,” Lucas said. Behind Wise, Marcy rolled her eyes in exasperation. “How well did you know her?”

  “Not very well. I’ve got a furniture business, Wise-Hammersmith American Loft. Maybe you’ve heard of it?” When Lucas shook his head, Wise continued. “We sell period furniture and accessories—lamps, art pottery, and so on. Anyway, Ms. Aronson did freelance ad work and we needed some good-looking ads cheap, to run in the trade magazines . . . and that’s what I was seeing her about.”

  “Did she do the ads?”

  “Yeah. Three of them. They’re still running.” He stooped, picked up a brown leather briefcase, and took out a magazine with a chair on the front cover. He opened it to a folded-over page and showed Lucas the ad—a photograph of an English-flavored arrangement of fruitwood furniture topped with a glass lamp, and overlain with an arty typeface. “The thing is, getting an ad done is a lot more complicated that it should be. You’ve got to get certain kinds of output and all that computer stuff—I don’t understand it. We just paid her two thousand dollars, and she arranged for the photographer and did the digital stuff, and gave us disks with the ads on them, all to the magazine’s specs. That was what it was.”

  “Did you see her more than the one time?” Lucas asked.

  “Yeah, when she delivered them. The disks with the ads. Our store’s down on Lake Street.”

  “Why’d you meet at Cheese-It? She lived downtown here.”

  “She worked there. She was up front about it—she was working until she got her feet on the ground—and suggested that I just stop in when I had a minute, and we’d talk. We wound up walking down to a coffee bar so I could sketch out what we wanted. We’d already put a special type font on our signs and business cards, and we wanted to keep going with that in the ad.”

  They talked for another three minutes, and Lucas was convinced: Not only was he probably the right guy, he probably had nothing to do with the killing. “I’ve got a guy I want you to talk to, if you have a few minutes. Give a statement,” he told Wise.

  “You think I’m okay? The whole thing was quite a shock. Seeing the picture in the paper.”

  “We’ll pull the picture,” Lucas said. “We’ll say that you came forward voluntarily and . . . Whatever sounds good.”

  LUCAS CALLED SLOAN, who was the best interrogator on the force, took him aside, and explained what he needed. Sloan took Wise off to Homicide to make the statement. Lucas looked at Marcy and said, “Shoots that idea in the ass.”

  “Not only that, wait’ll you hear what the feds have for us,” Marcy said.

  “Good news or bad?”

  “One of each. Which do you want first?”

  “Bad.”

  “You know that profiling stuff on the drawings? It’s shit. You could get it out of a book. When I got finished with the FBI stuff, I knew less than when I started. It’s like somebody sawed off the top of my head and poured in sawdust.”

  “Nothing?”

  “He’s probably between twenty-five and forty and has some formal education in the arts.”

  “Ah, man. What’s the good news?”

  “The Dutch cops grabbed Ware’s computer site in Holland. The forensic computer people traced it, and it was early morning in Holland already, and they called over there and the cops busted the place. They’re doing something that copies all the files out, I don’t know what, but they say there are huge files that gotta be pictures. Hundreds of them.”

  “Has Ware made bail yet?”

  “Hearing’s right now. The county’s asking for a lien on his house.”

  “Who’s his attorney?” Lucas asked.

  “Jeff Baxter.”

  “All right. We want to talk to him, soon as he gets out of the hearing. In fact, I’ll walk on over there and see if I can catch him.”

  “Too bad about the drawings,” Marcy said.

  “Yeah. . . .” Lucas pulled at his lip for a moment, then said, “There’s an art guy over in St. Paul. Supposed to be a big name. He’s a painter. I don’t know anything about him except that I called him one time. There was a question about a painting, and he just told me the answer right off the top of his head. A guy over at the U says he’s a genius. Maybe if we asked him to take a look . . .”

  “What’s his name?” Marcy asked.

  Lucas scratched his head. “Uh, Kidd. I can’t remember his first name, but he’s supposed to be pretty famous.”

  “I’ll run him down,” she said. “What’re you doing the rest of the day?”

  “Talk to Baxt
er and Ware, if I can. Think about it. Read all the paper. Goddamnit, I wish Wise had run for the border instead of coming in here. We woulda had him in a day.”

  “Two problems: He wasn’t there, and he didn’t do it.”

  “Yeah, yeah. But you know what this does? That guy from Menomonie—this puts his whole theory back in play. A skinny blond guy who looks like some other movie star, not Bruce Willis.”