by Winter Prey
They talked while Lucas ate the doughnuts, feeling each other out.
Lucas talked about Minneapolis, pension, and bennies.
"I'd like to go somewhere warmer if I could figure out some way to transfer pension and bennies," Domeier said. "You know, someplace out in the Southwest, not too hot, not too cold. Dry. Someplace that needs a sex guy and'd give me three weeks off the first year."
"A move sets you back," Lucas said. "You don't know the town, you don't know the cops or the assholes. A place isn't the same if you haven't been on patrol."
"I'd hate to go back in uniform," Domeier said with an exaggerated shudder. "Hated that shit, giving out speeding tickets, breaking up fights."
"And you got a great job right here," the waitress said.
"What would you do if you didn't have Polaroid Peter?"' "Polaroid who?" asked Lucas.
"Peter," Domeier said, dropping his face into his hands.
"A guy who's trying to kill me."
The waitress cackled and Domeier said, "He's like a flasher. He drops trow in the privacy of his own home, takes a Polaroid picture of his dick. Pretty average dick, I don't know what he's bragging about.
Then he drops the picture around a high school or in a mall or someplace where there are bunches of teenage girls. A girl picks it up and ram-she's flashed. We think he's probably around somewhere, watching. Gettin' off on it."
Lucas had started laughing and nearly choked on a piece of doughnut.
Domeier absently whacked him on the back.
"What happens when a guy picks up the picture?" Lucas asked.
"Guys don't," Domeier said morosely. "Or if they do, they don't tell anybody. We've got two dozen calls about these things, and every time the picture's been picked up by a teenage girl. They see it laying there on the sidewalk, and they just gotta look. And if we got twenty-five calls, this guy must've struck a hundred times."
"Probably five hundred if you got twenty-five calls," Lucas said.
"Driving us nuts," Domeier said, finishing his coffee.
"Big deal," Lucas said. "Actually sounds kind of amusing."
"Yeah?"
Domeier looked at him. "You wanna tell that to the mayor?"
"Uh-oh," Lucas said.
"He went on television and promised we'd get the guy soon," Domeier said.
"The whole sex unit's having an argument about whether we oughta shit or go blind."
Lucas started laughing again and said, "You ready?"
"Let's go," Domeier said.
Bobby McLain lived in a two-story apartment complex built of concrete blocks painted beige and brown, in a neighborhood that alternated shabby old brown-brick apartments with shabby new concrete-block apartments. The streets were bleak, snow piled over the curbs, big rusting sedans from the seventies parked next to the snowpiles. Even the trees looked dark and crabbed. Domeier rode with Lucas, and pointed out the hand-painted Chevy van under a security light on the west side of the complex. "That's Bobby's. It's painted with a roller."
"What color is that?" Lucas asked as they pulled in beside it.
"Off-grape," Domeier said. "You don't see that many off-grape vans around. Not without Dead Head stickers, NNW anyway.
They climbed out, looked up and down the street. Nobody in sight: not a soul other than themselves. At the door, they could hear a television going inside. Lucas knocked, and the television sound died.
'Who is AT' The voice squeaked like a new adolescent's.
i "Domeier. Milwaukee PD." After a moment of silence, Domeier said, "Open the fuckin' door, Bobby."
"What do you want?"
Lucas stepped to the left, noticed Domeier edging to the right, out of the direct line of the door.
"I want you to open the fuckin' door," Domeier said.
He kicked it, and the voice on the other side said, "Okay, okay, okay.
Just one goddamn minute."
A few seconds later the door opened. Bobby McLain was a fat young man with thick glasses and short blond hair. He wore loose khaki trousers and a white crew-neck t-shirt that had been laundered to a dirty yellow. He sat in an aging wheelchair, hand-powered.
"Come in and shut the door," he said, wheeling himself backwards.
They stepped inside, Domeier first. McLain's apartment smelled of old pizza and cat shit. The floor was covered with a stained shag carpet that might once have been apricot-colored. The living room where they were standing , had been converted to a computer office, with two large Macintoshes sitting on library tables, surrounded by paper and other unidentifiable machines.
Domeier was focused on the kitchen. Lucas pushed the door shut with his foot. "Somebody just run out the back?"' Domeier asked.
"No, no," McLain said, and he looked around toward the kitchen.
"Really..."
Domeier relaxed, said, "Okay," and stepped toward the kitchen and looked in. Without looking back at McLain he said, "The guy there is named Davenport, he's a deputy sheriff from Ojibway County, up north, and he's investigating a multiple murder. He thinks you might be involved."
"Me?" McLain's eyes had gone round, and he stared up at Lucas.
"What?"
"Some people were killed because of one of your porno magazines, Bobby," Lucas said. A chair next to one of the Macintoshes was stacked with computer paper. Lucas picked up the paper, tossed it on the table, and turned the chair around to sit on it. His face was only a foot from McLain's. "We only got a piece of one page. We need the rest of the magazine," he said.
Domeier stepped over to the crippled man and handed him a Xerox copy of the original page. At the same time he took one of the handles on the back of McLain's wheelchair and jiggled it. McLain glanced up nervously and then went back to the Xerox copy.
"I don't know," he said.
"C'mon, Bobby, we're talking heavy-duty shit here- like prison," Domeier said. He jiggled the chair handle again.
"We all know where the goddamn thing came from."
McLain turned the page in his hand, glanced at the blank back side, then said, "Maybe." Domeier glanced at Lucas and then Bobby said, "I gotta know what's in it for me."
Domeier leaned close and said, "To start with, I won't dump you out a this chair on your fat physically challenged butt."
"And you get a lot of goodwill from the cops," Lucas said. "This stuff you print, kiddie porn, this shit could be a crime. And we can seize anything that's instrumental to a crime. If we get pissed, you could say good-bye to these computers."
Bobby looked nervously at the Xerox copy, then turned his head to Domeier and said irritably, "Quit fuckin' with my chair."
"Where's this magazine?"
McLain shook his head, then said, "Down the hall, goddammit."
He pivoted his chair and rolled down a short hallway past the bathroom to the door of the only bedroom, wheeled inside. The bedroom was chaotic; pieces of clothing were draped over chairs and the chest of drawers, the floor was littered with computer magazines and books on printing. A high-intensity reading light was screwed to the corner of a bed; the windows were covered with sheets of black paper thumbtacked in place. McLain pushed a jumble of old canvas gym shoes out of the way andjerked open a double-wide closet. The closet was piled chest-high with pulp black-and white magazines. "You'll have to look through it, but this is all I got," he said. "There should be three or four copies of each issue."
Lucas picked up a stack of magazines, shuffled through them. Half were about sex or fetishism. Two were different white supremacist sheets, one was a computer hacker's publication, and another involved underground radio. They all looked about the same, neatly printed in black-and-white on the cheapest grade of newsprint, with amateurish layout and canned graphics. "Which issue was this stuff in?"
"I don't know offhand. What I do is, I go down to the bookstores and get these adult novels. I take stuff out of them, type it up in columns-sometimes I rewrite them a little-and I put in the pictures people send me. I've got a post 0 ce box."
"You've got a subscription list?" Lucas asked.
"No. This goes through adult stores," McLain said. He looked up at Lucas. "Let me see that copy again."
Lucas handed it to him and he glanced at the bottom of the page, then said, "Just a minute."
"What about this Nazi shit?" Domeier asked, looking through it.
"Does that go through the bookstores?"
McLain had wheeled himself to a bookcase next to the bed, and was going through a stack of Playboys, glancing at the party jokes on the backs of the centerfolds. "No, that's all commissioned stuff. The Nazi magazines, the phreak and hacker stuff, the surplus military, that's all commission. I just do the sex and fetish."
He scanned the backside of a blonde with blow-dried pubic hair, then checked the cover. "Here... I crib jokes from Playboy when a column doesn't fill up. This is the August issue, and here's some of the jokes on the bottom of your page. So you're looking for something printed in the last six months, which would be maybe the top fifty or sixty magazines."
Domeier found the picture ten minutes later, halfway through a magazine called Very Good Boys: "Here it is."
Lucas took it, glanced at the caption and the little-head joke. They were right.
The photo at the top of the page had a nude man, turned half-sideways to display an erection. In the background, a boy sprawled across an unmade bed, smirking at the camera.
His hair fell forward across his forehead, and his chest and legs were thin. He looked very young, younger than he must have been. His head was turned enough that an earring was visible at his earlobe. He held a cigarette in his left hand.
His left wrist lay on his hip, the hand drooping slightly. He was missing a finger.
The photo was not good, but the boy was recognizable.
The man in the foreground was not. He was visible from hips to knees and was slightly out of focus: the camera had concentrated on the boy, made a sexual prop out of the man.
"You said the kid's dead?" Domeier asked, looking over Lucas' shoulder.
"Yeah."
"There ain't much there, man," Domeier said.
No." There wasn't: the bed had no head or foot board, nor were there any other furnishings visible except what appeared to be a bland beige or tan carpet and a pair of gym shoes off to the left. Since the picture was black-and-white, none of the colors were apparent.
Lucas looked at McLain. "Where's the original?"
McLain shrugged, wheeled his chair back a few inches.
"I shredded it and threw it. If I kept this shit around, I'd be buried in paper."
"Then how come you keep this?" Lucas asked, pointing at the stack of paper in the closet.
"That's references... for people who want to know what I do," McLain said.
Lucas turned his head to Domeier and said, "If we slapped this asshole around a little bit, maybe threw him in the bathtub , you think people'd get pissed off?" ii Domeier looked at McLain, then at Lucas.
"Who're they gonna believe, two cops or a fartbag like this? You wanna throw him?"
"Wait just a fuckin' minute," McLain complained. "I'm 11 giving you what you asked for."
"I want the goddamn original," Lucas snapped.
McLain rolled back another foot. "Man, I don't fuckin' have it."
Lucas tracked him, leaning over him, face close. "And I don't fuckin' believe it."
McLain moved back another foot and said, "Wait. You z out in the kitchen." i come -MMER They trailed him back down the hall, through the living nto the kitchen. McLain wheeled his chair up to a room i plastic garbage bag next to the back door, pulled the tie off, and started pulling out paper.
"See, these are the pasteups for the last one. I output the stuff on a laser printer, scan the picture, paste it up and ship it. I shred the originals. See, here's an original."
He passed Lucas several strips of shiny plastic paper. A shredded Polaroid. "Here's some more."
Lucas looked at the strips of plastic, which showed the back half of a nude woman, sitting on an Oriental carpet.
Then McLain passed him a few more strips, which showed the front half of her, doing oral sex on a man, who, as in the Jim Harper photos, was cut off at hips and knees. McLain dumped a torn-up pizza carton on the floor, found a few more pieces of originals.
"What about the laser printer copies?" Lucas asked.
"I get the pasteups back and I shred those, too," Bobby said.
"Why do you shred them?"
"I don't want garbagemen finding dirty pictures and calling Domeier," McLain said.
"You don't keep any?" Domeier asked.
McLain looked up from the garbage bag. "Listen, you see so much of this shit, after a while they're like 29-cent stamps. And some of the people who contribute this stuff aren't so nice, so I don't wanna leave around any envelopes with addresses or that kind of stuff. I wouldn't want to bring any shit down on them."
"All right," Lucas said. He tossed the strips of Polaroid back at McLain. "You're saying you never saw the guy who took the picture of the kid."
"That's right. People send me letters and some of them have pictures.
I'll put in the letter and the picture if it can be reproduced. You'd be amazed at how bad most of the pictures are."
After a few more questions, they left McLain and walked back out to Lucas' four-by-four, taking McLain's four copies of the magazine.
"Did we do good?" Domeier asked.
"You did good, but I just shot myself in the foot," Lucas said. He turned on the dome light, opened a magazine again, and studied the picture. "The way things broke-the kid was murdered, then the LaCourts had gotten hold of the picture of him-I was sure there must be something in the picture.
Something. But there's not a fuckin' thing here."
Just a blurry picture of a man in the foreground and the kid in the background.
"Maybe you could figure out how long his dick is, go around with a ruler," Domeier said straight faced. "You know, hang out in the men's rooms."
"Not a bad idea. Why don't you come on up?"
Lucas tore the photo page out of the magazine, threw the rest of the paper out of the truck into the parking lot, folded IBM= the page, and stuck it in his jacket pocket. "God damnit. I thought we'd get more."
CHAPTER 15
Just south of Green Bay, moving as fast as he could in the dark, Lucas ran into snow flurries, off-and-on squalls dropping wet, quarter-sized flakes. He paused at a McDonald's on the edge of Green Bay, got a cheeseburger and coffee, and pushed on. West of Park Falls on County F, he slowed for what he thought was a highway accident, two cars and a pickup on the road in the middle of nowhere.
A man in an arctic parka waved him through, but he stopped, rolled down his window.
"Got a problem?"
The man's face was a small oval surrounded by fur, only one eye visible at a time. He pointed toward a cluster of people gathered around a snowbank. "Got a deer down. She was walking down the road like she didn't know where she was, and she kept falling down.
Starvin', I think."
"I'm a cop, I've got a pistol."
"Well, we're gonna try to tie her down, get her into town and feed her.
She's just a young one."
"Good luck."
The snow grew heavier as he left Price County for Lincoln.
Back in town, under the streetlights, the fat flakes turned the place into a corny advertisement for Christmas.
He found Weather and Climpt at her house, playing gin rummy in the living room.
"How'd it go?" Climpt asked. He dumped a hand without looking at it.
"We found the picture; not much in it," Lucas said. He took out the copy he'd ripped from the magazine, passed it to Climpt. Climpt opened it, looked at it, said, "That narrows it down to white guys."
I Lucas shook his head and Weather reached for the photo , but Climpt held it away from her. "Not for ladies," t:7 MA he said.
r "Kiss my ass, Gene," Weather said.<
br />
"Yes, ma'am, whatever you say," Climpt said with a dry chuckle. But he handed the photo back to Lucas. "Are you gonna bag out here again?"
"Yeah," Lucas said. "But I'd like to stick her somewhere that nobody knows about."
Weather put her hands on her hips. "That's right, talk around me-I'm a lamp," she said.
Climpt looked at her, sighed, said, "Goddamn feminists."
