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 answer.
Ware closed his eyes and tilted his head back. "Because I think I met your man. At a photography show at the Institute."
"The Institute of Art," Sloan said.
Ware nodded without opening his eyes. "But it was a long time ago-ten years, maybe. The fellow was maybe twenty-five, and he was looking at a series of nudes by Edward Weston. I can sometimes tell by the way people look at… pictures… that they are enthusiasts. He had the look-and by the way, he doesn't so much look like the man in your photograph as much as he shares an air with him."
"What'd he say?"
"He talked about how Weston did photographs that were as clean as fine drawings. He took a pencil from his pocket and used the eraser end to show how you could follow the line of the nude to make a whole new creation. There was a certain frenzy to it."
Sloan glanced at Lucas, then at Ware. "That's interesting. Do you remember his name, have you seen him since, know where he works, or what he does?"
Ware opened his eyes and looked at Lucas. "I never knew his name. I can't remember seeing him since that day. I don't know where he works. It was all too long ago… But one thing struck me, given his enthusiasm. I don't know what it was, but something he said made me think that he was a priest. Or studying to be a priest, or something."
"Really?" Sloan's eyebrows went up.
"Something he said made me think he might be a priest," Ware said.
"A priest?"
"That's the only reason that it all stuck with me: He was a priest, and his enthusiasm was so clear."
"He was wearing a collar?"
"No, nothing like that. But if you were a priest and you were going to an exhibit of nudes… maybe you wouldn't wear the collar."
Sloan ticked it off on his fingers. "So he was an enthusiast, he had a frenzy about him, he compared the nudes to drawings…"
"One other thing. He was so obviously an enthusiast-and perhaps he saw it in me-that we walked along for a bit, looking at the photographs and talking, and I said something about women being endlessly fascinating. He shook his head and he said, 'Not endlessly. Not endlessly.' He looked at me, and I was a little frightened. Really-frightened."
Lucas said, interested, "Huh. In the middle of the day, in the museum, you were frightened."
"Yeah." Ware nodded. "Years ago, back in the eighties, there were rumors of Mexican snuff flicks. You know, some woman gets hauled into a warehouse, is raped and beaten, and then she's killed on camera. There were even a few flicks offered around, for collectors of that kind of thing. Pretty bad fakes, for the most part. But occasionally, you'd get somebody looking for one. Sometimes they were cops, sometimes they were reporters, sometimes they were curiosity seekers. Sometimes they were people who scared you. People who really wanted a snuff flick. I got a whiff of that from the priest."
"But you don't really know that he was a priest," Sloan said.
"Something he said…"
On another topic: "Have you ever seen anything like these drawings on the Internet?"
"Not really. Porn guys like photographs. They like specifics: You show them a clitoris the size of a chili pepper, they want you to blow it up as big as a zucchini. And they always want better color and better resolution… They're crazy."
"Have you seen photographs that look like the bodies in these drawings?"
"Well, sure, the drawings… those are all pretty standard poses," he said.
"I mean specifically: photos that could have been used for these drawings."
Ware shook his head. "I couldn't tell you that. I'm not out on the Internet that much. You oughta ask Tony Carr."
Carr was the computer tech who'd been at Ware's when the door was kicked. "What about him?" Sloan asked.
"He knows all the sites. What he does is, he loots them, then he burns the images onto CDs and peddles the CDs. He's basically interested in money, not the porn, but he knows about every site out there."
"How about Henrey?" Lucas asked.
"He's just a hired gun. He's not particularly creative, and he's no good with lights-not good enough for product photography or anything hard, anyway. He can do boudoir stuff okay."
"So he's not much."
Ware shook his head. "He's a dummy."
MARCY HAD RETURNED during the interrogation, and was at her desk when Lucas and Sloan finished with Ware. Lucas told Baxter that they might need to talk again; Baxter agreed, and escorted Ware out of the office. Sloan said he'd get back with a transcript for the file; he scrubbed Marcy's head with his knuckles, and left.
"Get anything?" Marcy asked.
"We need to talk to Anthony Carr again. You'll find him in the Ware file. Call him up and tell him to come in."
"All right… Tomorrow?"
"Yeah, it's gonna have to be tomorrow. We're running out of time today. How was your lunch with Kidd?"