"You mind telling me what's going on?" I asked as soon as he was behind the wheel again.

"Sure I mind, but you're going to find out anyway." He opened the box and lifted out the camera again. "Know what this is?"

"You asked that. A camera."

"Right, but what kind of camera is what's important."

As he turned it in his hands I saw the manufacturer's symbol imprinted on the front. A large lowercase d in pale blue. I knew it was the symbol of the computer manufacturer called digiTime. Printed beneath the corporate symbol was DIGISHOT 200.

"This is a digital camera, Jack. That hillbilly Sweetzer didn't know what the fuck he had. We just have to hope we're not too late."

"You're losing me. I guess I'm just a hillbilly, too, but can you-"

"You know what a digital camera is?"

"Yeah, it doesn't use film. They've been experimenting with them at the paper."

"Right, no film. The image the camera shoots is captured on a microchip instead. The image can then be put into a computer, edited, blown up, whatever, then printed. Depending on your equipment-and this is top-of-the-line equipment, comes with a Nikon lens-you can come up with high-resolution photographs. As good as the real thing."

I had seen prints taken on digital at the Rocky. Thorson was correct in his assessment.

"So what's it mean?"

"Two things. Remember what I told you about pedophiles? The networking they do?"

"Right."

"Okay, we pretty much know Gladden has a computer because of the fax, right?"

"Right."

"And now we know he had a digital camera. With the digital camera, his computer and the same modem he used to send the fax, he could send a photo anywhere he wanted to in the world, to anybody who had a phone and a computer and the software to receive it."

It hit me then in a split second.

"He's sending people pictures of kids?"

"No, he's selling them pictures of kids. That's my guess. The questions we had about how he lives and gets money? About this account in Jacksonville he wired money from? This is the answer. The Poet makes his money selling pictures of kids, maybe even the kids he killed. Who knows, maybe even the cops he killed."

"There are people who would…"

I didn't finish. I knew the question was stupid.

"If there is one thing I know from this job it's that there is an appetite and therefore a market for anything and everything," Thorson said. "Your darkest thought is not unique. The worst thing you can possibly imagine, whatever it is, no matter how bad, there is a market for it… I gotta make another call, get this list of dealers split up."

"What was the second thing?"

"What?"

"You said there were two things significant about-"

"It's a break. It's a big fucking break. That is, if we're not too late because Santa Monica's been sitting on the goddamn camera. If Gladden's income, his traveling money, comes from selling photos to other pedophiles, shipping them through the Internet or some private bulletin board, then he lost his main tool last week when the cops took this away."

He tapped the top of the cardboard box on the seat between us.

"He's got to replace it," I said.

"You got it."

"You're going to go to the digiTime dealers."

"You're a smart guy, sport. How come you became a reporter?"

This time I didn't protest the use of his name for me. There wasn't the same malice as when he had called me by it before.

"I called the digiTime 800 number and I got eight dealers who sell the digiShot 200 in L.A. I figure he's got to go for the same model. He'd already have all the other equipment. I've got to make that call to split these up. You got a quarter, Jack? I'm out."

I gave him the quarter and he jumped out of the car and went back to the phone. I imagined he was calling Backus, gleefully telling him about the break and splitting up the list. I sat there thinking that Rachel should have been the one standing there on the phone. In a few minutes, Thorson was back.

"We're checking out three of them. All over here on the west side. Bob's giving the other five to Carter and some guys from the FO."

"Do you have to order these cameras or do they keep them in stock?"

Thorson pulled back into the traffic and headed east on Pico. He referred to one of the addresses he had written down in his notebook as he talked and drove.

"Some places keep them in stock," he said. "If they don't they can get 'em pretty quick. That's what the digiTime operator said."

"Then what are we doing? It's been a week. He would've got one by now."

"Maybe, maybe not. We're playing a hunch. This is not a cheap piece of equipment. You buy it in a kit with the downloading and editing software and the serial cable to connect it to your computer, the leather case and flash and all the extras, you're getting up well over a grand. Probably fifteen hundred. But…"

He raised his finger to make the point.

"What if you already have all the extras and all you want is the camera? No cable. No software. None of that stuff. What if you just shelled out six grand for bail and a lawyer and you're hurting for cash and not only don't need all those extras but can't afford them?"

"You special order just a camera and save a lot of money."

"That's right. That's my hunch. I think that if making bail came close to busting our friend Gladden just like that shyster lawyer said it did, then he'd be looking to save a dollar here and there. If he replaced the camera, I'm betting he made the special order."

He was juiced and it was contagious. I had caught his excitement and was beginning to look at Thorson in perhaps a truer light. I knew these were the moments he lived for. Moments of understanding and clarity. Of knowing he was close.

"McEvoy, we are on a roll," he suddenly said. "I think you might be good luck after all. Just make it good enough that we're not too late."

I nodded my agreement.

We drove for a few minutes in silence before I questioned him again.

"How do you know so much about digital cameras?"

"It's come up before and it's becoming more prevalent. At Quantico we have a unit now that does nothing but computer crime. Internet crime. A lot of what they do bleeds over into pornography, child crimes. They put out bureau-wide briefings to keep people current. I try to keep current."

I nodded.

"There was this old lady-a schoolteacher, no less-up near Cornell in New York checks the download file in her home computer one day and sees a new entry she doesn't recognize. She prints it out and what she gets is a murky black-and-white but clearly identifiable picture of a boy of about ten copping some old guy's joint. She calls the locals and they figure out it got into her computer by mistake. Her Internet address is just a number and they figure the sender transposed a couple digits or something. Anyway, the routing history of the file is right there and they trace it back to some gimp, a pedophile with a nice long record. Out here in fact, he was from L.A. Anyway, they do the search-and-bust and take him down pretty neat. The first digital bust. The guy had something like five hundred different photos in his computer. Christ, he needed a double hard drive. I'm talking about kids of every age, persuasion, doing things normal grownups don't even do… Anyway, good case. He got life, no parole. He had a digiShot, though that might've been a 100 model. They put the story out last year in the FBI Bulletin."

"How come the picture the teacher got was so murky?"

"She didn't have the printer for it. You know, you need a nice color-graphics printer and high-gloss paper. She had neither."

The first two stops were dead ends. One store hadn't sold a digiShot in two weeks and the other had sold two in the last week. However, those two cameras had gone to a well-known Los Angeles artist whose collage portraits made of Polaroid photos were celebrated and displayed in museums around the world. He now wanted to dabble in a newer photographic medium and was going digital. Thorson didn't even bother writing down notes for further follow-up.