Winter Prey

cops,” Lucas said. “This stuff you print, kiddie porn, this shit could be a crime. And we can seize anything that’s instrumental to a crime. If we get pissed, you could say good-bye to these computers.”
    Bobby looked nervously at the Xerox copy, then turned his head to Domeier and said irritably, “Quit fuckin’ with my chair.”
    “Where’s this magazine?”
    McLain shook his head, then said, “Down the hall, goddammit.”
    He pivoted his chair and rolled down a short hallway past the bathroom to the door of the only bedroom, wheeled inside. The bedroom was chaotic; pieces of clothing were draped over chairs and the chest of drawers, the floor was littered with computer magazines and books on printing. A high-intensity reading light was screwed to the corner of a bed; the windows were covered with sheets of black paper thumbtacked in place. McLain pushed a jumble of old canvas gym shoes out of the way and jerked open a double-wide closet. The closet was piled chest-high with pulp black-and-white magazines. “You’ll have to look through it, but this is all I got,” he said. “There should be three or four copies of each issue.”
    Lucas picked up a stack of magazines, shuffled through them. Half were about sex or fetishism. Two were different white supremacist sheets, one was a computer hacker’s publication, and another involved underground radio. They all looked about the same, neatly printed in black-and-white on the cheapest grade of newsprint, with amateurish layout and canned graphics. “Which issue was this stuff in?”
    “I don’t know offhand. What I do is, I go down to the bookstores and get these adult novels. I take stuff out of them, type it up in columns—sometimes I rewrite them a little—and I put in the pictures people send me. I’ve got a post office box.”
    “You’ve got a subscription list?” Lucas asked.
    “No. This goes through adult stores,” McLain said. He looked up at Lucas. “Let me see that copy again.”
    Lucas handed it to him and he glanced at the bottom of the page, then said, “Just a minute.”
    “What about this Nazi shit?” Domeier asked, looking through it. “Does that go through the bookstores?”
    McLain had wheeled himself to a bookcase next to the bed, and was going through a stack of Playboys, glancing at the party jokes on the backs of the centerfolds. “No, that’s all commissioned stuff. The Nazi magazines, the phreak and hacker stuff, the surplus military, that’s all commission. I just do the sex and fetish.”
    He scanned the backside of a blonde with blow-dried pubic hair, then checked the cover. “Here . . . I crib jokes from Playboy when a column doesn’t fill up. This is the August issue, and here’s some of the jokes on the bottom of your page. So you’re looking for something printed in the last six months, which would be maybe the top fifty or sixty magazines.”
    Domeier found the picture ten minutes later, halfway through a magazine called Very Good Boys: “Here it is.”
    Lucas took it, glanced at the caption and the little-head joke. They were right.
    The photo at the top of the page had a nude man, turned half-sideways to display an erection. In the background, a boy sprawled across an unmade bed, smirking at the camera. His hair fell forward across his forehead, and his chest and legs were thin. He looked very young, younger than he must have been. His head was turned enough that an earring was visible at his earlobe. He held a cigarette in his left hand. His left wrist lay on his hip, the hand drooping slightly. He was missing a finger.
    The photo was not good, but the boy was recognizable. The man in the foreground was not. He was visible from hips to knees and was slightly out of focus: the camera had concentrated on the boy, made a sexual prop out of the man.
    “You said the kid’s dead?” Domeier asked, looking over Lucas’ shoulder.
    “Yeah.”
    “There ain’t much there, man,” Domeier said.
    “No.”
    There wasn’t: the bed had no head or footboard, nor were there any other furnishings visible except what appeared to be a bland beige or tan carpet and a pair of gym shoes off to the left. Since the picture was black-and-white, none of the colors were apparent.
    Lucas looked at McLain. “Where’s the original?”
    McLain shrugged, wheeled his chair back a few inches. “I shredded it and threw it. If I kept this shit around, I’d be buried in paper.”
    “Then how come you keep this?”