Chosen Prey

for a moment, then said, “Fuck this. Fuck this.” She dug in her purse, found a license, and handed it over.
    Lucas read her name off: “Sylvia Berne.” Then: “Tell officer Rie what your birthdate is, Sylvia.”
    Berne muttered something, Rie said, “What?” and Berne muttered the date again. Rie looked at Lucas. “Is that what the license says?”
    “That’s what the license says,” Lucas said. To Berne: “You gotta remember to call me when you turn eighteen. I’ll buy you a malt.”
    Berne looked puzzled. “A what?”
    “A malt. . . . Never mind.” To Rie: “We’ll need a statement from Ms. Berne. And get a juvie officer down here.”
    “Absolutely,” Rie said.
    Lucas asked Berne, “How many times have you done this?”
    She shrugged. “A couple. Nobody gets hurt.”
    “Morrie never gave you a free sample of the pictures, did he?”
    “Maybe,” Berne said.
    “I love you,” Lucas said.
    The man said, “What about me?”
    “You better sit down,” Lucas said. “I got a whole bunch of bad news for you.”
     
    T EN MINUTES LATER, Lucas arrested Ware on charges of abusing a minor and of creating child pornography, and Henrey for creating child pornography—Berne said he was the shooter at the last session—and the man who arrived with Berne for child sexual abuse. Carr was freed, but was told not to leave Minnesota.
    “She’s not a child,” Ware snarled, gesturing at Berne. “Look at her, for Christ’s sake. She’s got tits out to here.”
    “Looks like a kid after you scrape off the abuse,” Del said. To Lucas, he said, “I was fooling around behind the desk, and one of those power outlets looked a little strange. I took the cover off, and guess what? It’s a little teeny little safe. There’s a Baggie full of white powder inside. We gotta get the crime-scene folks down here.”
    Lucas looked at Ware. “Uh-oh,” he said.
     
    T HE UNIFORM COPS took Ware downtown to be booked, and Lucas called Washington from his cell phone. He finally tracked down Louis Mallard at his home and said, “We need another favor.”
    “Jeez, you guys are running up a bill,” Mallard said.
    “Well, you know we’re tracking this guy, the drawing guy.”
    “Yeah, yeah, quite the artworks.”
    “So we went out and busted a porno guy, hoping we can squeeze him on the sex scene around here . . . and we find out that he’s probably got a child-sex photo warehouse over in Europe somewhere. Our source gave us the address for the site, but says the thing can probably be burned in about ten seconds. We need some hot-shit feds to track the site down, and then maybe get onto the cops wherever it is—our source thinks maybe Holland—and grab the servers before our man makes bail tomorrow.”
    “We can try,” Mallard said. “Of course, it depends on what kind of cooperation we get. If it’s Holland, we ought to be able to do something. We’re fairly tight with the Dutch.”
    Lucas gave Mallard the details on Ware and the site address, and said, “Let me know.”
    “I’ll call you tomorrow. And we ought to have something on the drawings first thing tomorrow morning.”
     
    L ATER THAT NIGHT, Lucas and Weather walked down to Eau du Chien, a new French-American restaurant a block from the Ford Bridge in St. Paul. A waitress lit the white tapers on their table, they ordered Chardonnay and looked at the menus, and Weather asked, without taking her eyes off the menu, “Whatever happened to that engagement ring?”
    “Gave it away,” Lucas said absently, peering at his own menu.
    Now she looked up, a wrinkle of vexation on her forehead. “Gave it away?”
    “For charity. They had an auction, I got a tax write-off.”
    She said, “Lucas, this is serious. If you’re pulling my leg . . .”
    “It’s in the chest of drawers, second drawer, in the box under my socks.”
    They looked at the menus for another moment, then Weather said, over the menu, “I’ve been thinking. We may be going at this whole thing a little too informally.”
    “You’re scaring me,” he said.
    “I don’t want to scare you. I just think we should Talk,” she said.
    “Ah, Jesus. Not that.”
    “What?” The wrinkle was back.
    “Talk. I don’t want to talk with a capital T. I want to get married and have a couple of kids and send them to parochial schools or wherever you think is best, but I really don’t want to fuckin’ hack through all the pieces ahead of time.”
    “I don’t want to hack