Chosen Prey

a better place,” she offered.
    Lucas thought Kidd’s eyelids may have dropped a tenth of an inch as he said, “That’d be good.”
    “The guy comes over to catch a killer and winds up hustling my staff,” Lucas said, bending his head back to talk to the ceiling.
    “With a staff like this . . .” Kidd said.
    “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
     
    K IDD AND M ARCY left together—Kidd was asking, “Can I touch your gun?”—and Lucas, shaking his head at the ways of singles sex, called Sloan and asked him to come over. “We got that porno guy I was telling you about. He’s gonna converse.”
    “I’ll bring the tape deck,” Sloan said.
    Sloan was a narrow-faced man who tended to dress in shades of gray and brown, and always had, from his first day in plainclothes. He was one of Lucas’s best friends, and for years had never seemed to change. But Lucas had noticed in the past few months that Sloan’s hair was swiftly going white. Like most cops, Sloan had always been a little salt-and-pepper, but over the winter he’d gotten perceptibly older. The white seemed to emphasize the lines of his face and the narrowness of his stature. And the last time they’d talked, Sloan had remarked that he’d be eligible to retire in a couple of years.
    Getting old.
    Lucas stood in his office door, chatting with Baxter, while Ware slumped on a chair and picked at his cuticles. He’d also aged after the long night in the lockup. Yesterday, his gray-on-black shirt and jacket had looked arty; today they looked drab. Then Sloan banged into the office and asked, cheerfully, “Everybody ready?”
    Lucas nodded, and Sloan dragged an extra chair into the office, plugged in the tape deck, checked the cassette, and then recited everybody’s names and the date, looked at Ware, and said, “Looks like you had a pretty bad night.”
    “Ahhhh,” Ware said in disgust.
    “It’s a problem when somebody comes in late,” Sloan said. “The courts just won’t move themselves around to have round-the-clock bail hearings.”
    “I think it’s absurd. You’re supposed to be treated as if you’re innocent until proven guilty.”
    “No,” Sloan said. “You are innocent until proven guilty.”
    “That’s right, that’s right.”
    Baxter looked at Lucas and rolled his eyes. They both knew what Sloan was doing—he was getting on Ware’s side. “Why don’t you ask a question,” Baxter said to Sloan. “We can have the blood-brother ceremony later.”
    Morris Ware listened to the story of the drawings, then looked at the drawings. “Very nice,” he said, but he said it with a bored tone that sounded genuine.
    “What?” Lucas asked. “They’re not to your taste?”
    “No, they are not,” Ware said.
    “You like the young stuff,” Lucas suggested.
    “I am not interested in bodies,” Ware said. “I am interested in qualities— innocence, freshness, dawning awareness . . .”
    “Let’s cut the horseshit, Morrie,” Lucas said. “Look at this guy.”
    Ware took the printed-out photo of the actor from Day of the Jackal. “Yes?”
    “Who do you know in the sex-freak community who looks like this—a guy with connection to the arts, who knows about computers and photography, is interested in blond women, who might like to strangle them?”
    Ware looked over the photo at Lucas. “If I knew, it’d be worth a lot more than dropping this stupid cocaine charge.”
    “On the other hand, if you know and don’t tell us, and we find out—that’s accessory to first-degree murder. When a known child pornographer is charged with murder, sometimes the juries aren’t too fussy about how strong the evidence is,” Lucas said.
    “I’m not—Fuck you.”
    Sloan eased in: the good guy. “Take it easy, Lucas, we want the guy to cooperate.”
    “Dickweed says he’s not a pornographer,” Lucas snapped.
    Sloan held up a hand, then looked at Ware. “Let’s forget the pornography stuff. Who do you know? That’s the question.”
    Ware looked down at the photo again, then back at Sloan. “You know, this is a fashionable look among the art crowd—that languid, ascot-wearing, private-school look.”
    “So you know some people?”
    “I could give you five or six names of people, um, in the art community who, um, also have an interest in nonconventional sexuality.”
    “Great,” Sloan said.
    “But I don’t think any of them will be your man,” he said.
    “Why not?” Sloan had the ability to project eagerness for an