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 wh
ere 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?”
Lucas Davenport Collection: Books 11-15 Page 46
