Текст книги "Lucas Davenport Novels 1-5"

Автор книги: John Sandford

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Текущая страница: 96 (всего у книги 105 страниц)

“You lose a little high-frequency hearing every time you fire one without ear protection, and that’s a fact,” Lucas said.

She ran out of gas. Suddenly. She stopped talking, came over and slumped next to him on the couch.

“Snuggle up,” he said, and pulled her down. She lay quietly for a moment, her back to him, then started to softly cry. “Goddamn him, he shot my house,” she said.

Her body shook with the anger of it, and Lucas wrapped his arm around her and held on.

CHAPTER

13

The Iceman rode wildly across the frozen lake, off the tracks, a plume of snow thrown high behind the sled when he banked through the long, sinuous turns that would take him to the Circle Lake intersection. He could see police flashers streaming down through the town, but couldn’t hear them: and they certainly couldn’t see him. He was running without lights, his sled as black as his snowmobile suit, invisible in the night.

The gunfight had surprised him, but not frightened him. He had simply seen the truth: not tonight. He couldn’t get at her tonight, because if he stayed, if he fought it out with whoever was inside—and it was almost certainly the cop from Minneapolis—he could be hurt. And hurt was good as dead.

Time time time . . .

He was running out of it. He could feel it trickling through his fingers. Davenport and Crane had taken something out of the LaCourt house, and it was almost certainly the photograph. But they had sent it to the lab in Madison: maybe it had been ruined in the fire after all. He’d talked to the cops who’d been there when they were looking at it, but they had no precise details. Just a piece of paper, they said.

If Weather Karkinnen ever saw the photograph, they’d be on him.

Weather: why was Davenport at her house? Guarding her? Screwing her? Why would they be guarding her? Had she given them something? But the only thing she had to give them was the identification, and if she’d given them that, they’d be knocking on his door.

The intersection came up, marked by two distinctively pink sodium vapor lights. He was in luck: there were no other sleds at the crossing. If they saw him running a blacked-out sled, they’d be curious.

He bucked through the intersection, up the boat landing, down the landing road, onto the trail built in the ditch beside the road. A moment later he turned onto Circle Creek, ran under the road and two minutes later onto the lake. He turned on his lights in the creek bed but kept cranking. There were more snowmobiles on Circle Lake, and he crossed paths with them, moving south and west.

He worked through his options:

He could run. Get in the car, make some excuse for a couple days’ absence, and never come back. By the time they started looking for him, he’d be buried in Alaska or the Northwest Territories. But if he was missing, it wouldn’t take long for the cops to figure out what happened. And if he ran, he’d have to give up almost everything he had. Take only what would fit in the car, and he’d have to dump the car in a few days. And he still might get caught: they had his picture, his fingerprints.

He could go after the other members of the club, take them all out in one night. The problem was, some of them had already taken off. The Schoeneckers: how would he find them? No good.

He had to stay. He had to find out about the photograph. Had to go back for Weather. He’d missed her twice now, and he was uneasy about it. When he’d been a kid, working the schoolyard, there’d always been a few people he’d never been able to get at. They’d always outmaneuvered him, always foiled him, sometimes goading him into trouble. Weather was like that: he needed to get at her, but she turned him away.

He bucked up over another intersection, down a long bumpy lane cleared through the woods by the local snowmobile club, onto the next lake, and across. He came off the lake, took the boat landing road out to the highway, sat for a moment, then turned left.

The yellow-haired girl was waiting. So was her brother, Mark. Mark with the dark hair and the large brown eyes. The yellow-haired girl let him in, helped him take off his snowmobile suit. Mark was smiling nervously: he was like that, he needed to be calmed. The Iceman liked working with Mark because of the resistance. If the yellow-haired girl hadn’t been there . . .

“Let’s go back to my room,” she said.

“Where’s Rosie?”

“She went out drinking,” the yellow-haired girl said.

“I gotta get going,” said Mark.

“Where’re you going?” Smiling, quiet. But the shooting still boiled in his blood. God, if he could get Weather someplace alone, if he could have her for a while . . .

“Out with Bob,” said Mark.

“It’s cold out there,” he said.

“I’ll be okay,” Mark said. He wouldn’t meet his eyes. “He’s gonna pick me up.”

“And I’ll be here,” said the yellow-haired girl. She was wearing a sweatsuit, old and pilled, wished it were something more elegant for him. She plucked at the pants leg, afraid of what he might say; of cruelty in his words.

But he said, “That’s great.” He touched her head and the warmth flowed through her.

Later in the evening he was lying in her bed, smoking. He thought of Weather, of Davenport, of Carr, of the picture; of Weather, of Davenport, round and round . . .

The yellow-haired girl was breathing softly next to him, her hand on his stomach.

He needed time to find out about the photo. If he could just put them off for a few days, he could find out. He could get details. Without the photo, there wouldn’t be a link, but he needed time.

CHAPTER

14

The telephone rang in the kitchen.

Lucas let it ring, heard a voice talking into the answering machine. He should get it, he thought. He rolled over and looked at the green luminous numbers on the bedstand clock. Nine-fifteen.

Four hours lying awake, with a few sporadic minutes of sleep. The air in the house was cool, almost cold, and he pulled the blankets up over his ears. The phone rang again, two rings, then stopped as the answering machine came on. There was no talk this time. Whoever it was had hung up.

A minute later the phone rang twice again. Irritated, Lucas thought about getting up. The ringing stopped, and a moment later began again, two more rings. Angry now, he slipped out of bed, wrapped the comforter around his shoulders, stomped down the hall to the kitchen, and glared at the phone.

Ten seconds passed. It rang again, and he snatched it up. “What?” he snarled.

“Ah. I knew you were sleeping in,” the nun said with satisfaction. “You’ve got a message on the answering machine, by the way.”

Lucas looked down at the machine, saw the blinking red light. “I’m freezing my butt off. Couldn’t . . .”

“The message isn’t from me. I know you’ve got one because your phone’s only ringing twice before the machine answers, instead of four or five times,” she said, sounding even more pleased with herself.

“How’d you get the number?”

“Sheriff’s secretary,” Elle said. “She told me what happened last night, and that you’re guarding the body of some lady doctor who’s quite attractive. Are you okay, by the way?”

“Elle . . .” Lucas said impatiently, “You sound too smug for this to be a gossip call.”

“I’ll be gone for the day and I wanted to talk to you,” she said. “I found a couple of Phil Bergen’s friends. I didn’t want to put it on an answering machine.”

“What’d they say?”

“They say he was awkward around women but that he was certainly oriented toward them. He was not interested in men.”

“For sure?” Lucas thought, Shit.

“Yes. One of them laughed when I asked the question. Bergen’s not a complete ’phobe, but he has a distaste for homosexuals and homosexuality. That attitude wasn’t a cover for a secret interest, if you were about to ask me that.”

Lucas chewed on his lower lip, then said, “Okay. I appreciate your help.”

“Lucas, these are people who would know,” Elle said. “One was Bergen’s college confessor. He wouldn’t have talked to me if homosexuality had ever been broached in confession, so it must not have been. And it would have been.”

“All right,” Lucas said. “Dammit. That makes things harder.”

“Sorry,” she said. “Will you be down next week?”

“If I get done up here.”

“We’ll see you then. We’ll get a game. By the way, something serious was happening at the sheriff’s office. Nobody had any time to speak to me, something about a lost kid . . .”

“Oh, my God,” Lucas said. “Elle, I’ll talk to you later.”

He hung up, started to punch in the number for the sheriff’s office, saw the blinking light on the answering machine and poked it.

Carr’s voice rasped out of the speaker: “Davenport, where’n the heck are you? We found the Mueller kid. He’s dead and it wasn’t an accident. I’m going to send somebody over to wake you up.”

Just before the phone hung up, Carr called to someone in the background, “Get Gene over to Weather Karkinnen’s house.”

There was a motor sound outside. Lucas used two fingers to separate the curtain over the kitchen sink and looked out. A sheriff’s truck was pulling into the driveway. Lucas hurried to Weather’s bedroom. The door was unlocked, and he opened it and stuck his head inside. She was curled under a down comforter, and looked small and innocent.

“Weather, wake up,” he said.

“Huh?” She rolled, half-asleep, and looked up at him.

“They found the Mueller kid and he’s dead,” Lucas said. “I’m going.”

She sat up, instantly awake, and threw off the bedcovers. She was wearing a long-sleeved white flannel nightgown. “I’m coming with you.”

“You’ve got an operation.”

“I’ll be okay, a few hours is fine.”

“You really don’t . . .”

“I’m the county coroner, Lucas,” she said, “I’ve got to go anyway.” Her hair stuck out from her head in a corona and her face was still morning-slack. She had a red pillow-wrinkle on one cheek. Her cotton nightgown hid all of her figure except her hips, which shaped and moved the soft fabric. She started toward the bath that opened off her bedroom, felt him watching her, said, “What?”

“You look terrific.”

“Jesus, I’m a wreck,” she said. She stepped back to him, stood on her tiptoes for a kiss, and Climpt began banging on the door.

“That’s Gene,” Lucas said, stepping back toward the hall. “Five minutes.”

“Ten,” she said. “I mean, it won’t make any difference to John Mueller.”

She said it offhandedly, a surgeon and a coroner who dealt in death. But Lucas was stricken. She saw it in his face, a quick tightening, and said, “Oh, God, Lucas, I didn’t mean it.”

“You’re right, though,” he said, his voice gone hard. “Ten minutes. It won’t make any difference to the kid.”

Lucas let Climpt in, and while the deputy looked at the damage from the night’s shooting, went back to the bathroom for a quick cleanup.

When he came back out, Weather was coming down the hall, dressed in insulated jeans and a wool shirt, carrying the bag she’d had at the LaCourts’. “Ready?”

“Yeah.”

“You were lucky last night,” Climpt said. He was standing in the living room, smoking a cigarette, looking at the damage from the firefight.

“I don’t think there was anything lucky about it,” Weather said. “Look what he did.”

“If’d been me out there, you’d a been dead. He should of waited until you were right at the door.”

“I’ll tell him when I see him,” Lucas said.

John Mueller’s body had been dumped in an abandoned sandpit off a blacktopped government road in the Chequamegon National Forest, fifteen miles from his home. A half-dozen sheriff’s vehicles were jammed into the turnoff, and the snow had been beaten down by people walking into the pit.

“Shelly’s freaked out,” Climpt said, talking past a new cigarette. “Something happened at Mass today.”

“They found Bergen?”

“Yeah, I guess. He was there.”

They could see the sheriff standing alone, like a fat dark scarecrow, just inside the sandpit. “This is his worst nightmare,” Weather said.

Climpt nodded. “All he wanted was a nice easy cruise up to retirement, taking care of people. Which he’s pretty good at.”

They parked and started up toward a cluster of cops at the edge of the sandpit. A civilian in an orange parka stood off to the side, next to a snowmobile, talking to another deputy. Carr saw them coming and walked down the freshly trampled path to meet them.

“How are you?” Carr asked Weather. “Get any sleep?”

“Very little,” Weather said. “Is the kid . . .”

“Right there. We haven’t called his folks yet.” Carr looked at Lucas. “How long will it take to catch this guy?”

“That’s not a reasonable question,” Weather snapped.

But Lucas looked up the rise to the cluster of cops around the body. “Three or four days,” he said after a few seconds. “He’s out of control. Unless we’re missing some big connection on this kid, there wasn’t any reason to kill him. He took a hell of a risk for no gain.”

“Will he kill more people?” Carr asked. His voice was a compound of anger, tension, and sorrow, as though he’d worked out the answer.

“He could.” Lucas nodded, looking straight into Carr’s dry, exhausted eyes. “Yeah, I’d say he could. You better find the Schoeneckers. If they’re involved, and they’re someplace where he could get at them . . .”

“We got bulletins out all over the south, from Florida to Arizona. We’re interviewing their friends.”

Weather was moving on toward the body, and Lucas trailed after her. Carr hooked his elbow. “You gotta figure a way to make something happen, Lucas.”

“I know,” Lucas said.

John Mueller’s body had been found by the snowmobiler in the orange parka. He’d seen two coyotes working over the spot and assumed they’d killed a deer. He’d stopped to see if it was a buck and still had antlers. He chased off the dogs, saw the boy’s coat, and called the sheriff’s department. The first deputy at the scene had shot a coyote and covered the boy with a plastic tarp.

“Bad,” Weather said when she lifted the tarp. Around them, the talking stopped as everybody looked at them crouched over the body. “Is that him?”

Lucas studied the child’s half-eaten face, then nodded. “Yeah, that’s him. I’m almost sure. Jesus Christ.”

He walked away, unable to handle it. He hadn’t had that problem since his third week on patrol: cops looked at dead people, end of story.

“You all right?” Climpt asked.

“Got on top of me,” Lucas said.

He was halfway back to the cars when he saw Crane, the crime-scene tech from Madison, walking up the path.

“Anything for me?” Crane asked.

“I doubt it. The scene’s pretty cut up and coyotes have been at the body. It’ll take an ME to figure out how he was killed.”

“I’ve got a metal detector, I’ll check the site for shells. Listen, I got some news for you this morning. I tried to call and was told you were on the way out here. Remember that burnt-up page from the porno magazine that we sent down to Madison? The one with the picture you want?”

“Yeah?”

“We shipped it to all the major departments in Wisconsin, Illinois, and Minnesota, and we actually got a callback. A guy named . . .” Crane patted his pockets, pulled off a glove, dipped into one, and came up with a slender reporter’s notebook. “ . . . a guy named Curt Domeier with the Milwaukee PD. He says he might know the publisher. He says give him a call.”

Lucas took the notebook page: something to do. He walked down to the truck, called the dispatcher, and was patched through to Milwaukee. Domeier worked with the sex unit. He wasn’t in his office, but picked up a phone on a page. Lucas introduced himself and said, “The Madison guys say you might know who put out the paper.”

“Yeah. I haven’t seen this particular one, but he uses those little dingbats—that’s what they call them, dingbats—at the ends of the stories. They look like playing-card suits. Hearts, diamonds, spades, and clubs. I’ve never seen that anywhere else, but I’ve seen it with this guy.” Domeier’s voice was rusty but casual, the kind of cop who chewed gum while he drank coffee.

“Can we get our hands on him?” Lucas asked.

“No problem. He works out of his apartment, up on the north side off I-43. He’s a crippled guy, does Macintosh services.”

“Macintosh? Like the computer?”

“Exactly. He does magazine stuff, cheap,” Domeier said. “Makeup, layout, that stuff.”

“We got four dead up here,” Lucas said.

“I been reading about it. I thought it was three.”

“There’ll be another in the paper tomorrow morning, a little kid.”

“No shit?” Polite interest.

“We think the killer might have hit the family because of the picture on that page,” Lucas said.

“I can talk to this guy right now or you could come down and we could both go see him,” Domeier said. “Whatever you want.”

“Why don’t I come down?”

“Tomorrow?”

“How about this afternoon or tonight?” Lucas said.

“I’d have to talk to somebody here about overtime, but if your chief called down . . . I could use the bucks.”

“I’ll get him to call. Where’ll we meet?” Lucas asked.

“There’s a doughnut place, right off the interstate.”

Carr was unhappy about the trip: “We need pressure up here. I could send somebody else.”

“I want to talk to this guy,” Lucas said. “Think about it: he may have seen our man. He may know him.”

“All right. But hurry, okay?” Carr said anxiously. “Have you heard about Phil?”

“Bergen? What?”

“He showed up for Mass. We’d been looking for him, couldn’t find him, then he drove up a half hour before Mass, wouldn’t talk to us. After his regular sermon at Mass this morning, he said he needed to talk to us as friends and neighbors. And he just let it out: he said he knew about the talk in town. He said he had nothing to do with the LaCourts or John Mueller, but that the suspicion was killing him. He said that he’d gotten drunk the night we found him, and said last night he’d gone to Hayward and started drinking again. Said he got right to the edge, right to the place where he couldn’t get back, and he stopped. Said he talked to Jesus and stopped drinking. He asked us to pray for him.”

“And you believe him?” Lucas asked.

“Absolutely. But you’d have to have been there to understand it. The man spoke to Jesus Christ, and while he was talking to us, the Holy Spirit was there in the church. You could feel it—it was like a . . . warmth. When Phil was walking away from the altar after the Mass, he broke down and began to cry, and you could feel the Spirit descending.” Carr’s eyes were glazing as he relived it. Lucas stepped away, spooked.

“I got a call from my nun friend,” Lucas said. Carr wrenched himself back to the present. “She checked out some Church sources. They say Bergen’s straight. Never had any sexual interest in men. That’s not a hundred percent, of course.”

Carr said, “Which leaves us the question of Bob Dell.”

“We’ve got to talk to Bergen again. You can do it today or wait until I get back.”

“We’ll have to wait,” Carr said. “After this morning, Phil’s way beyond me.”

“I’ll try to get back tonight,” Lucas said. “But I might not. If I don’t, could you put somebody with Weather?”

“Yeah. I’ll have Gene go on over,” Carr said.

Weather declared John Mueller dead under suspicious circumstances and ordered the body shipped to a forensic pathologist in Milwaukee. Lucas told her he was leaving, explained, and said he would try to get back.

“That’s a twelve-hour round trip,” she said. “Take it easy.”

“Gene’ll take me into town. Could you catch a ride with Shelly?”

“Sure.” They were standing next to Climpt’s truck, a few feet from Climpt and Carr. When he turned to get in, she caught him and kissed him. “But hurry back.”

On the way back, Climpt said, “You ever thought about having kids?”

“I’ve got one. A daughter,” Lucas said. And then remembered Weather’s story about Climpt’s daughter.

Climpt nodded, said, “Lucky man. I had a daughter, but she was killed in an accident.”

“Weather told me about it,” Lucas said.

Climpt glanced at him and grinned. He could have made a Marlboro commercial, Lucas thought. “Everybody feels sorry for me. Sort of wears on you after a while, thirty years,” Climpt said.

“Yeah.”

“Anyway, what I was gonna say . . . I’m thinking I might kill this asshole for what he did to that LaCourt girl and now the Mueller kid. If we get him, and we get him in a place where we can do it, just sort of turn your head.” His voice was mild, careful.

“I don’t know,” Lucas said, looking out the window.

“You don’t have to do it—just don’t stop me,” Climpt said.

“Won’t bring your daughter back, Gene.”

“I know that,” Climpt rasped. “Jesus Christ, Davenport.”

“Sorry.”

After a long silence, listening to the snow tires rumble over the rough roadway, Climpt said, “I just can’t deal with people that kill kids. Can’t even read about it in the newspaper or listen to it on TV. Killing a kid is the worst thing you can do. The absolute fuckin’ worst.”

The drive to Milwaukee was long and complicated, a web of country roads and two-lane highways into Green Bay, and then the quick trip south along the lake on I-43. Domeier had given him a sequence of exits, and he got the right off-ramp the first time. The doughnut place was halfway down a flat-roofed shopping center that appeared to be in permanent recession. Lucas parked and walked inside.

The Milwaukee cop was a squat, red-faced man wearing a long wool coat and a longshoreman’s watch cap. He sat at the counter, dunking a doughnut in a cup of coffee, charming an equally squat waitress who talked with a grin past a lipstick-smeared cigarette. When Lucas walked in she snatched the cigarette from her mouth and dropped her hand below counter level. Domeier looked over his shoulder, squinted, and said, “You gotta be Davenport.”

“Yeah. You’re telepathic?”

“You look like you been colder’n a well-digger’s ass,” Domeier said. “And I hear it’s been colder’n a well-digger’s ass up there.”

“Got that right,” Lucas said. They shook hands and Lucas scanned the menu above the counter. “Gimme two vanilla, one with coconut and one with peanuts, and a large coffee black,” he said, dropping onto a stool next to Domeier. The coffee shop made him feel like a metropolitan cop again.

The waitress went off to get the coffee, the cigarette back in her mouth. “It’s not so cold down here?” Lucas asked Domeier, picking up the conversation.

“Oh, it’s cold, six or eight below, but nothing like what you got,” Domeier said.

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 zam—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, 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 it?” The voice squeaked like a new adolescent’s.

“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 outa 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 and jerked 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 office 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.”