"Light in the window," Lucas said.
"Of course. It's almost two o'clock," Del said. "This fuckin' place."
"Not very cold, though," Lucas said, as they pushed through the front gate and headed for the stairs.
"Not for Moscow," Del said. "For any other place, this is cold."
A machine was whining inside the house. Lucas rang the doorbell, and they both heard a thump. A man's eyes appeared in the small window cut in the front door, and a second later, the door opened.
"Yeah?" The guy in the doorway wore white coveralls and a white paper hat that covered his hair. He was thin, slat-faced, with a two-day stubble.
"Minneapolis police," Lucas said. "We're looking for Morris Ware."
"Uh, Mr. Ware isn't here. We're the housecleaners."
"You're a Miracle Maid?" Lucas asked.
"Yeah. That's what I am." He sounded like he didn't believe it himself.
"Do you know where Ware'd be?" Del asked.
The man's eyes flicked to Del, lingered for a moment, and a rime of skepticism appeared. "Do you guys have any ID?"
Both Lucas and Del nodded automatically and flipped their IDs. "So…"
"I don't have an address or anything, but I do have a contact number. I think it's his office," the man said.
Lucas and Del waited on the porch while he went to get the number, and Del said, "I'm not sure he believes I'm a cop."
"You're too hard on yourself," Lucas said.
The housecleaner returned with the number. Lucas jotted it down and then said, "You don't have to call him and tell him we were here."
"Maybe I should just forget it entirely."
"Good policy," said Del.
LUCAS CALLED THE phone number in, and a minute later got an address back. "It's off 280, off Broadway somewhere, in those warehouses," the dispatcher said. "You know where that Dayton's office furniture place is? Around there somewhere."
They took I-35 north, then 280, falling in behind a highway patrol cruiser. The cruiser cut a yellow light at Broadway, while Lucas eased into the turn lane. As they sat at the stoplight, waiting to make a left, a half-dozen teenagers in nylon jogging suits ran in a pack down a hill on the golf course across the highway.
"That's what you ought to do, get in shape," Lucas said.
"Life's too short to spend it getting in shape," Del said. "Besides, it'd ruin my credibility on the street."
MORRIS WARE'S OFFICE was in a long line of low, yellow-painted concrete-block warehouse spaces that mostly held distributors of one kind or another. The address was obscure: They finally spotted it as a signless window between a pressure-hose distributor and something called "Christmas Ink."
The warehouse was fronted by a service street with diagonal parking. Lucas pulled in fifty feet past Ware's, and they both got out. As they did, a woman pulled in at Christmas Ink, walked around to the back of her minivan, and popped the hatch. She was struggling with a cardboard box when Lucas and Del walked up.
"Let me get that for you," Lucas said.
She stepped back and took them in. "Thanks."
The woman was in her fifties, with elaborate gold-frosted hair and electric-red lipstick. She wore a hip-length nylon parka and rubber snow boots. She waited until Lucas had the box out, locked the van, and led the way to the door of Christmas Ink.
Inside, a counter ran from wall to wall, and another woman and two men sat at metal desks in the back peering at computer screens. A bookcase was stuffed with catalogs and directories; one wall was covered with holiday cards, with header signs that said "Memorial Day," "Mother's Day," "Father's Day," and "New Sympathy Cards from Leonbrook." The woman in the parka lifted a countertop gate, went through, said, "You can just leave it on the counter. Thanks again."
Lucas put the book on the counter and said, "We're Minneapolis police."
The woman said, "Yes?" and the three people in the back all looked up.
"We're looking for a guy named Morris Ware. We'd like to talk to him."
One of the men looked at the woman behind the computer screen and said, "Told you."
" 'Told you' what?" Del asked.
The man said, "We don't want any trouble with our neighbors…"
Lucas shrugged. "There's no need for Mr. Ware to know we stopped in here."
The 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."
THEY 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."
JUST 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."