"Did you see her more than the one time?" Lucas asked.

"Yeah, when she delivered them. The disks with the ads. Our store's down on Lake Street."

"Why'd you meet at Cheese-It? She lived downtown here."

"She worked there. She was up front about it-she was working until she got her feet on the ground-and suggested that I just stop in when I had a minute, and we'd talk. We wound up walking down to a coffee bar so I could sketch out what we wanted. We'd already put a special type font on our signs and business cards, and we wanted to keep going with that in the ad."

They talked for another three minutes, and Lucas was convinced: Not only was he probably the right guy, he probably had nothing to do with the killing. "I've got a guy I want you to talk to, if you have a few minutes. Give a statement," he told Wise.

"You think I'm okay? The whole thing was quite a shock. Seeing the picture in the paper."

"We'll pull the picture," Lucas said. "We'll say that you came forward voluntarily and… Whatever sounds good."

LUCAS CALLED SLOAN, who was the best interrogator on the force, took him aside, and explained what he needed. Sloan took Wise off to Homicide to make the statement. Lucas looked at Marcy and said, "Shoots that idea in the ass."

"Not only that, wait'll you hear what the feds have for us," Marcy said.

"Good news or bad?"

"One of each. Which do you want first?"

"Bad."

"You know that profiling stuff on the drawings? It's shit. You could get it out of a book. When I got finished with the FBI stuff, I knew less than when I started. It's like somebody sawed off the top of my head and poured in sawdust."

"Nothing?"

"He's probably between twenty-five and forty and has some formal education in the arts."

"Ah, man. What's the good news?"

"The Dutch cops grabbed Ware's computer site in Holland. The forensic computer people traced it, and it was early morning in Holland already, and they called over there and the cops busted the place. They're doing something that copies all the files out, I don't know what, but they say there are huge files that gotta be pictures. Hundreds of them."

"Has Ware made bail yet?"

"Hearing's right now. The county's asking for a lien on his house."

"Who's his attorney?" Lucas asked.

"Jeff Baxter."

"All right. We want to talk to him, soon as he gets out of the hearing. In fact, I'll walk on over there and see if I can catch him."

"Too bad about the drawings," Marcy said.

"Yeah…" Lucas pulled at his lip for a moment, then said, "There's an art guy over in St. Paul. Supposed to be a big name. He's a painter. I don't know anything about him except that I called him one time. There was a question about a painting, and he just told me the answer right off the top of his head. A guy over at the U says he's a genius. Maybe if we asked him to take a look…"

"What's his name?" Marcy asked.

Lucas scratched his head. "Uh, Kidd. I can't remember his first name, but he's supposed to be pretty famous."

"I'll run him down," she said. "What're you doing the rest of the day?"

"Talk to Baxter and Ware, if I can. Think about it. Read all the paper. Goddamnit, I wish Wise had run for the border instead of coming in here. We woulda had him in a day."

"Two problems: He wasn't there, and he didn't do it."

"Yeah, yeah. But you know what this does? That guy from Menomonie-this puts his whole theory back in play. A skinny blond guy who looks like some other movie star, not Bruce Willis."

"Edward Fox. The guy in Day of the Jackal."

"Yeah. I'm gonna have to look at it again-get a feel for the guy."

JEFF BAXTER, A thirty-something criminal attorney with reddish-blond hair, a pale Nordic complexion, and a prominent English nose, was leaning against a wall outside a courtroom, reading papers in a green file folder. He saw Lucas coming and raised a hand.

"How's it going?" Lucas asked.

"Slow season. It's all this rain," Baxter said. "Nobody's gonna stick up a 7-Eleven in this weather."

"Right. When's the last time you defended a 7-Eleven guy?"

"I'm talking in theory," Baxter said. He pushed away from the wall. "Is this just a random, friendly encounter, or did you come over looking for me?"

"Look, you're defending Morrie Ware?" Lucas asked.

"Yeah. Your guys just finished throwing the book at him. I'm not sure how good a case it is." Baxter was a good attorney and could smell the smallest molecules of a possible deal.

"However good it is, it got better in the last couple of hours," Lucas said. "The Dutch cops grabbed Ware's website in Holland, and I suspect it is chock-full of little children playing with their wee-wees."

"Ah, fuck. You know for sure there're kids?"

"Not yet. The feds are handling that end of it. But Morrie's a scuzzbag, whatever they find."

"Yeah, well… just between you and me, if I ever caught him standing next to one of my kids, I'd stick a gun in his ear. But he does get a lawyer."

"That's why I'm talking to you," Lucas said. "Ware may be able to help us on another, unrelated case. We'd want somebody to pick his brain… and we can probably deal down the cocaine problem."

"What other case?"

"The Aronson murder."

"The guy in the black coat?" Baxter asked. "I saw his picture."

"Wasn't him," Lucas said, shaking his head. "He came in this morning. Didn't even need an attorney."

Baxter made a farting noise with his mouth.

Lucas grinned. "Yeah, yeah. Anyway, we need to talk to Ware about what he knows about sex freaks in the art community. Since he is one, we thought he might know some more."

"You don't think he's involved…"

Lucas shook his head. "No reason to think so. We're just looking to talk, and we can probably deal on the cocaine."

"We'd want it to go away. Entirely," Baxter said. "It's small-time, anyway."

Lucas shrugged. "I can ask, I can't promise. There's no way anybody's gonna deal on the kid-porn stuff."

"Yeah, I know."

"So long as you know it's not part of the deal. And you tell Ware: If he bullshits us, we'll stick the coke charge right down his throat, along with everything else. If we push the little girl we picked up harder, I think we can get a few more names. I think we can bring in a few more kids who'll say that Ware feeds them cocaine in exchange for sex and pictures."

"So I'll talk to Morrie," Baxter said. He looked at his watch. "He's downstairs, getting his clothes."

"Gotta be quick. Like this morning. Like right now. We've got big problems with the Aronson thing."

"Maybe it's worth more than you're offering?"

Lucas shook his head. "Nah. It's unlikely that he can give us anything. He's just a shot in the dark. You better settle for talking down the coke charge."

They chatted for another minute, then Lucas headed back to his office, and thought about skinny blond men killing skinny blond women.

Marcy said, "I talked to that artist. He sounds sorta… funky." In Marcy's vocabulary, "funky" was usually desirable. "He said he could stop by this afternoon."

"Excellent."

"What're you doing? Just gonna wait for Ware?"

"Yeah, and read the file that the Menomonie guy brought in. Maybe there's something in it."

Going through the file from Menomonie, Lucas began making a list. The three missing women all had several things in common with Aronson. They were all blondes, all in their twenties, all three had some involvement with art-and specifically, he decided, painting. All three in the Menomonie files had taken art classes shortly before their deaths. There were no classes listed in Aronson's file, but since she was young and in the arts, she almost certainly had taken some not long before. All of them, he thought, either lived in, or recently had lived in, small towns. But the small towns were scattered all over the place, and might not mean anything except that small-town women were a little more vulnerable than big-city kids. And it might not even mean that.