"You mean street kids?" Lucas asked.

"Yeah. They always look old," she said.

"Younger than eighteen?"

"We don't want to get involved in a huge hassle here," said the second man, who'd kept quiet.

"You never want to get in hassles, George," the second woman said. "We should have called somebody."

"I'm just trying to keep our head above water," he said.

"We still should have called."

"Younger than eighteen?" Lucas asked again.

"A couple of them looked like they were maybe fifteen, at the most," said the woman who had worn the parka.

Lucas said, "Please don't mention this to anyone, okay? And thanks. Del, let's go outside."

Outside, they turned away from Ware's window and walked back toward Lucas's car. "We can call Benton, he'd give us a warrant."

"Take an hour," Del said.

"So we go eat some black beans and rice…"

"He won't talk, Ware won't. If we find anything. He'll get lawyers and they'll shut him up."

Lucas thought about it for a minute, then said, "Aronson isn't coming back to life, and if Ware's doing that child shit… We ought to put him in Stillwater regardless of Aronson. We can have the Sex guys find us somebody else who knows the city."

Del nodded. "All right. Let's go for the warrant." After a moment, he added, "I've been on the street for so long that sometimes I forget that there's something more than deals. You know?"

"Absolutely."

THEY SPENT AN hour at a health-food place in Roseville, eating black beans with cheese, and drinking water faintly flavored with lemon, waiting for the phone call. They got it from an assistant county attorney named Larsen.

"I'd like to come along, but I'm stuck in court," she said.

"Next time," said Lucas.

On the way back to Ware's, Lucas mentioned to Del that Larsen would have liked to come. "I wonder why," Del said. "She gonna run for something? Get her picture taken?"

"I think she just likes the rush," Lucas said. "She's been along on a couple of entries."

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."