Winter Prey

Lucas asked, pointing at the stack of paper in the closet.
    “That’s references . . . for people who want to know what I do,” McLain said.
    Lucas turned his head to Domeier and said, “If we slapped this asshole around a little bit, maybe threw him in the bathtub, you think people’d get pissed off?”
    Domeier looked at McLain, then at Lucas. “Who’re they gonna believe, two cops or a fartbag like this? You wanna throw him?”
    “Wait just a fuckin’ minute,” McLain complained. “I’m giving you what you asked for.”
    “I want the goddamn original,” Lucas snapped.
    McLain rolled back another foot. “Man, I don’t fuckin’ have it.”
    Lucas tracked him, leaning over him, face close. “And I don’t fuckin’ believe it.”
    McLain moved back another foot and said, “Wait. You come out in the kitchen.”
    They trailed him back down the hall, through the living room into the kitchen. McLain wheeled his chair up to a plastic garbage bag next to the back door, pulled the tie off, and started pulling out paper.
    “See, these are the pasteups for the last one. I output the stuff on a laser printer, scan the picture, paste it up and ship it. I shred the originals. See, here’s an original.” He passed Lucas several strips of shiny plastic paper. Ashredded Polaroid. “Here’s some more.”
    Lucas looked at the strips of plastic, which showed the back half of a nude woman, sitting on an Oriental carpet. Then McLain passed him a few more strips, which showed the front half of her, doing oral sex on a man, who, as in the Jim Harper photos, was cut off at hips and knees. McLain dumped a torn-up pizza carton on the floor, found a few more pieces of originals.
    “What about the laser printer copies?” Lucas asked.
    “I get the pasteups back and I shred those, too,” Bobby said.
    “Why do you shred them?”
    “I don’t want garbagemen finding dirty pictures and calling Domeier,” McLain said.
    “You don’t keep any?” Domeier asked.
    McLain looked up from the garbage bag. “Listen, you see so much of this shit, after a while they’re like 29-cent stamps. And some of the people who contribute this stuff aren’t so nice, so I don’t wanna leave around any envelopes with addresses or that kind of stuff. I wouldn’t want to bring any shit down on them.”
    “All right,” Lucas said. He tossed the strips of Polaroid back at McLain. “You’re saying you never saw the guy who took the picture of the kid.”
    “That’s right. People send me letters and some of them have pictures. I’ll put in the letter and the picture if it can be reproduced. You’d be amazed at how bad most of the pictures are.”

    After a few more questions, they left McLain and walked back out to Lucas’ four-by-four, taking McLain’s four copies of the magazine.
    “Did we do good?” Domeier asked.
    “You did good, but I just shot myself in the foot,” Lucas said. He turned on the dome light, opened a magazine again, and studied the picture. “The way things broke—the kid was murdered, then the LaCourts had gotten hold of the picture of him—I was sure there must be something in the picture. Something. But there’s not a fuckin’ thing here.”
    Just a blurry picture of a man in the foreground and the kid in the background.
    “Maybe you could figure out how long his dick is, go around with a ruler,” Domeier said straightfaced. “You know, hang out in the men’s rooms.”
    “Not a bad idea. Why don’t you come on up?”
    Lucas tore the photo page out of the magazine, threw the rest of the paper out of the truck into the parking lot, folded the page, and stuck it in his jacket pocket. “Goddammit. I thought we’d get more.”

CHAPTER

15
    Just south of Green Bay, moving as fast as he could in the dark, Lucas ran into snow flurries, off-and-on squalls dropping wet, quarter-sized flakes. He paused at a McDonald’s on the edge of Green Bay, got a cheeseburger and coffee, and pushed on. West of Park Falls on County F, he slowed for what he thought was a highway accident, two cars and a pickup on the road in the middle of nowhere.
    A man in an arctic parka waved him through, but he stopped, rolled down his window.
    “Got a problem?”
    The man’s face was a small oval surrounded by fur, only one eye visible at a time. He pointed toward a cluster of people gathered around a snowbank. “Got a deer down. She was walking down the road like she didn’t know where she was, and she kept falling