"What do you think about my list?"

"Interesting. Somebody's probably out there operating."

"Somebody always is," Marshall said.

DEL CAME BACK a few minutes after Marshall left and found Lucas staring at the ceiling of his office. Del said, "I ran those guys from the ad agencies. One of them doesn't pay his parking tickets. The other one has never talked to a cop, far as I can tell."

"Did you run them against the lists?" Lucas asked.

"Not yet. Marcy was entering stuff…" Lucas had turned in his chair, his eyes drifting away as Del was talking. Del said, "Hey. What's up?"

"Huh?"

"Look like you've seen a ghost."

Lucas explained about Marshall. "I've been looking through his file. It's got a bad feel to it, Del."

"You think he's onto something?"

"I'm afraid he might be," Lucas said.

"He got anyplace we can go with it?"

Lucas pushed himself onto his feet. "Not right away. So let's go look up Morris Ware."

Del nodded. "That dickhead. I was hoping he'd moved to one of the fuckin' coasts with the rest of the perverts. Where'd you hear about him?"

Lucas pulled his coat on. "That Lori chick over at Hot Feet Jazz Dance, down on…"

"… Lyndale. Yeah. Strange chick."

"I was over there a couple of days ago. She did one of those dance things where you hold on to a bar and stretch your leg over your head. I spent five minutes talking to her crotch."

"And her crotch said Morris Ware…"

"… is back out on the street with his Brownie, looking for the young stuff again."

"Not surprised," Del said. "That's not something you get over."

Lucas asked, "Didn't Ware run with the art crowd, like from over at the Walker?"

"Yeah, for a while, I think. He did this book, Little Women on the Edge, or something like that. Like on the edge of puberty. It was supposed to be art, naked girls, but it had the smell of puke about it."

7

MORRIS WARE LIVED in a tidy two-story stucco house under the northern approach lanes for Minneapolis… St. Paul International Airport. A Miracle Maids van sat in front of the house, and a pink plastic Miracle Maids bin sat on the porch, next to the front door. The porch might have held a porch swing-there were hooks in the ceiling, and worn spots on the deck-but didn't. Both the back and front yards were surrounded by low dark-green chain-link fences. A clapboard garage sat astride the driveway behind the fence, and on the lawn, next to the driveway, a Macon Security sign warned against burglary: "Armed Response Authorized."

"Light in the window," Lucas said.

"Of course. It's almost two o'clock," Del said. "This fuckin' place."

"Not very cold, though," Lucas said, as they pushed through the front gate and headed for the stairs.

"Not for Moscow," Del said. "For any other place, this is cold."

A machine was whining inside the house. Lucas rang the doorbell, and they both heard a thump. A man's eyes appeared in the small window cut in the front door, and a second later, the door opened.

"Yeah?" The guy in the doorway wore white coveralls and a white paper hat that covered his hair. He was thin, slat-faced, with a two-day stubble.

"Minneapolis police," Lucas said. "We're looking for Morris Ware."

"Uh, Mr. Ware isn't here. We're the housecleaners."

"You're a Miracle Maid?" Lucas asked.

"Yeah. That's what I am." He sounded like he didn't believe it himself.

"Do you know where Ware'd be?" Del asked.

The man's eyes flicked to Del, lingered for a moment, and a rime of skepticism appeared. "Do you guys have any ID?"

Both Lucas and Del nodded automatically and flipped their IDs. "So…"

"I don't have an address or anything, but I do have a contact number. I think it's his office," the man said.

Lucas and Del waited on the porch while he went to get the number, and Del said, "I'm not sure he believes I'm a cop."

"You're too hard on yourself," Lucas said.

The housecleaner returned with the number. Lucas jotted it down and then said, "You don't have to call him and tell him we were here."

"Maybe I should just forget it entirely."

"Good policy," said Del.

LUCAS CALLED THE phone number in, and a minute later got an address back. "It's off 280, off Broadway somewhere, in those warehouses," the dispatcher said. "You know where that Dayton's office furniture place is? Around there somewhere."

They took I-35 north, then 280, falling in behind a highway patrol cruiser. The cruiser cut a yellow light at Broadway, while Lucas eased into the turn lane. As they sat at the stoplight, waiting to make a left, a half-dozen teenagers in nylon jogging suits ran in a pack down a hill on the golf course across the highway.

"That's what you ought to do, get in shape," Lucas said.

"Life's too short to spend it getting in shape," Del said. "Besides, it'd ruin my credibility on the street."

MORRIS WARE'S OFFICE was in a long line of low, yellow-painted concrete-block warehouse spaces that mostly held distributors of one kind or another. The address was obscure: They finally spotted it as a signless window between a pressure-hose distributor and something called "Christmas Ink."

The warehouse was fronted by a service street with diagonal parking. Lucas pulled in fifty feet past Ware's, and they both got out. As they did, a woman pulled in at Christmas Ink, walked around to the back of her minivan, and popped the hatch. She was struggling with a cardboard box when Lucas and Del walked up.

"Let me get that for you," Lucas said.

She stepped back and took them in. "Thanks."

The woman was in her fifties, with elaborate gold-frosted hair and electric-red lipstick. She wore a hip-length nylon parka and rubber snow boots. She waited until Lucas had the box out, locked the van, and led the way to the door of Christmas Ink.

Inside, a counter ran from wall to wall, and another woman and two men sat at metal desks in the back peering at computer screens. A bookcase was stuffed with catalogs and directories; one wall was covered with holiday cards, with header signs that said "Memorial Day," "Mother's Day," "Father's Day," and "New Sympathy Cards from Leonbrook." The woman in the parka lifted a countertop gate, went through, said, "You can just leave it on the counter. Thanks again."

Lucas put the book on the counter and said, "We're Minneapolis police."

The woman said, "Yes?" and the three people in the back all looked up.

"We're looking for a guy named Morris Ware. We'd like to talk to him."

One of the men looked at the woman behind the computer screen and said, "Told you."

" 'Told you' what?" Del asked.

The man said, "We don't want any trouble with our neighbors…"

Lucas shrugged. "There's no need for Mr. Ware to know we stopped in here."

The woman in the parka unzipped the coat and said, "There's some pretty peculiar goings-on over there."

Del asked, "Like what?"

One of the men said, "I was out back, hauling some trash to the dumpster. This kid who works over there was hauling out some bags of trash… When he went back in, I could see this light coming out of there and just caught a shot of this girl. She was naked."

"How old?" Lucas asked.

The guy shrugged. "Not very. I mean, old enough to do that kind of stuff, maybe. I mean, she had breasts and everything."

"But there have been some people going in there that were too young," said the woman, who was taking off the parka. She tossed it at an office chair and said, "We don't know that anything was going on with them, but I've come here a couple of times in the morning and there were a couple of kids hanging around outside, waiting for those people to show up. They looked like orphan kids or something."