John Sandford - The Fool's Run

"Fucking computer is right," LuEllen said, walking from one picture frame to the next. "You could hurt yourself doing some of this stuff."

"Think it's up or down?"

"What?"

"The computer, for Christ's sake."

"Up," she said. She peered closely at me. "You okay? You looked cranked."

"It's okay. It was that dog."

The computer was in the first room at the top of the stairs, an efficient little office with an IBM, two big lockable disk boxes, both unlocked, and a desk made of a Formica countertop set on a half dozen two-drawer filing cabinets. The only odd element was the clock on the wall. The face of the clock portrayed a nude woman seen end-on, her legs representing the clock's hands. The view was unblushingly gynecological.

I brought the IBM up and was shuffling through the disks when LuEllen called.

"Hey Kidd, take a look at this."

"Just a second." I popped my cracker disk into the machine and started it loading. When I stepped out of the office, I found LuEllen in the hall, holding a wad of Kleenex against her bleeding shoulder, and gazing into a bedroom.

"Look." She pointed into the bedroom. There was a waterbed with black candles on the headboard, and a mirrored wall. The main attraction was a photo mural of a woman's face as she performed oral sex on a man who was mostly, but not entirely, out of the picture.

"Look at the size of that thing," LuEllen said.

"Shoot, I've seen donkeys bigger than that," I said.

"I meant the picture, not the guy," she said, coloring a bit. "But I'll tell you what, Kidd. These people aren't a little weird. They're a lot weird. There's a picture like this in every bedroom. This might be some kind of whorehouse. Maybe that's how they could afford to buy the place. Maybe that's why they don't have any alarms. They don't want the cops coming in, no matter what."

"I got to get back," I said. I returned to the office, and LuEllen started trashing the bedrooms. I loaded and reloaded the disks, looking for the communications program. The boxes were full of disks identified only by number. I was on the fourth or fifth one, all files, when LuEllen went past the door, stuck her head in, said, "Found two grand in cash, three guns, and six dildos," and kept going. A second later, she went down the stairs to the living-room level.

The communications program was on the seventh disk. I had pulled off the phone plate and was ready to wire in the bug, but took a minute to run through the program. There was a list of code words, but they looked too similar to the words used by Ebberly and Durenbarger. They might get me into all the system files, but I wasn't sure they would give me access to the programming level.

As the disk was being copied, I finished wiring the bug into the phone box, and put the plate back on. When the communications disk was copied, I dropped the copy into the tennis bag, and looked quickly at the rest of the disks. They were all files, mostly long lists of names and addresses. The files were protected by a commercial security program that wasn't quite worthless: it slowed me down by about five seconds per disk.

When I finished, I pulled out the file drawers under the counter and went through the paper files. Nothing of immediate interest. I was closing the bottom drawer when a flash of white on the inside front panel caught my eye. I pulled it all the way out, and found a piece of masking tape. Seven ten-digit numbers were written on the tape. That looked promising. I copied them out in the order they were written in.

"Kidd!" LuEllen was shouting up the stairs. "C'mere, quick."

I pushed the drawer shut, shoved the copied disks and the list of numbers into the tennis bag, and headed down the stairs. There was no one in the living or dining rooms.

"Where are you?" I called.

"Down in the basement."

The windowless basement was divided lengthwise down the middle. In one half was the utility room, with a washing machine and drier, a tool bench, storage, and what looked like a small bathroom. With the exception of one room, the other half was nothing like the upstairs. It was a warehouse, a paradigm of efficiency, with fluorescent overhead lights and flat white tile floors.

The exception was the neat little photo studio. It had a velvet couch, a pile of red and black velvet drapes, and a cardboard box full of sexual implements: dildos, handcuffs, a whip, masks. And dolls. The Army dolls that boys play with, and two old-fashioned fat, plastic baby dolls that cry when they sit up. There were three lights with umbrella reflectors, pulldown seamless paper, and a pair of Hasselblad cameras, each with its own tripod. Next to it was a professional color darkroom.

The rest of the basement was stacked with cartons and envelopes. LuEllen had opened the cartons and held a sheaf of slender, full-color magazines.

"Take a look at these," she said.

The magazines ran the gamut of the sexual activities usually portrayed by porno magazines, with one significant difference. In each picture, one of the participants was a child. And the shots had been taken in the neat little photo studio.

"These are those child-porn assholes you hear about," LuEllen said. She was wearing a pink blouse, not her own, holding her shoulder, and shouting. "I'm going to burn this fucking place down."

"No, you're not," I said, grabbing her around the waist and pulling her tight. "We can use this. You get everything you'd normally take-guns, money, jewelry, and grab those Hasselblads and all the lenses you see; those are worth a bundle. Let's hurry. Take one copy of each magazine, but don't mess them up. And for Christ's sake, don't get prints on them."

I ran back up the stairs and started making copies of all the file disks. If they were what I thought, I'd have a complete mailing list for the child-porn ring. It took fifteen minutes to copy the files. While I did it, LuEllen went through the place with a vengeance. She came into the office once, to get my tennis bag, and when I finished, I found her with two fat garbage bags in the kitchen.

"We'll take twenty grand out of here," she said with satisfaction.

"Jesus, if a cop sees us carrying those bags, he'll stop us for sure," I said. "There's way too much stuff."

"I know. So we leave them here in the kitchen, except for your disks, and go get the car, come back, load them up, and take off," she said.

"Oh, man, I don't know."

"It's what a doper would do with a load this size," she said defiantly. "He'd take the risk."

So did we. We brought the car back, and I jumped out, while LuEllen waited with the car running in the driveway. I walked up to the front door, knocked, pushed through, got the bags, brought them out, tossed them in the backseat. On an impulse I walked back to the house, took the Schiele off the wall, carried it out to the car, and handed it across the seat to her.

"That was stupid," she said fiercely as we drove away. She was hurting.

"Yeah."

A few minutes later she said, "I feel bad about the dog. He was doing his job." A minute later, she punched me on the arm. "Saved my ass, Kidd."

LuEllen went up to the apartment ahead of me, and when I came in, carrying the bags, Dace had her wrapped up in his arms.

"We've got to get a doctor," he said.

"Can you handle that?" I asked. "Somebody who'll keep his mouth shut?"

"Yeah. I know a guy."

"Tell him the dog was a neighbor's, and we'll make sure it's quarantined, and not to sweat it, we don't want any trouble, no reports," I said.

"I knew something was going to happen," he said. "Sooner or later."

"What are you going to do about those freaks?" LuEllen asked.

"If the number codes get me into the system, I can make some changes that will give me the same status as the systems programmer," I said. "I'll be able to go anywhere in the system. After the operation is running, we'll write to the cops. Tell them the truth. That we broke in, what we found. I got a copy of their whole subscription list, we'll print it out and include that, say we found it with the magazines. Child pornography is not appreciated in the state of Virginia. They'll be looking at ten years in the joint."