Chosen Prey

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.”
    “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.”
     
    T HEY 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.”
     
    J UST 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.”
     
    L UCAS AND D EL 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