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said. “I’ll call Whidden.”
    Whidden called Lucas five minutes later and said, “I can go in later and Xerox the book for you, but you’re gonna have to wait awhile. I got my in-laws coming over. Why don’t you come by at six? You want to look at the porn, I can have Jim Reynolds come in.”
    •   •   •
    S O L UCAS HAD RUN out of stuff to do. He tried to think about it for a while, but didn’t have enough material to think about. He called home, and nobody answered—they were still out shopping for superhero costumes for Sam. He left a message that he’d probably be home at seven o’clock. That done, he went out to a divorced guys’ matinee, to catch the Three Stooges movie he’d missed when it came by in the spring. The divorced guys were scattered around the theater as always, single guys with popcorn, carefully spaced apart from each other, emitting clouds of depression like smoke from eighties’ Volkswagen diesel.
    Despite that, Lucas laughed at the movie from the moment a nun got poked in the eyes and fell on her ass; took him back to his childhood, with the ancient movies on the obscure TV channels. And Jesus, nuns getting poked in the eye? You’d have to have a heart of pure ice not to laugh at that.
    •   •   •
    H E WAS OUT OF the movie at five-thirty, called ahead to St. Paul, and at five-forty-five, he parked at the St. Paul Police Department, in the guest lot. He walked inside, had a friendly chat with the policewoman in the glass cage, and was buzzed through to the back, where he found Whidden leaning against the wall, sucking on a Tootsie Pop.
    Whidden said, “This way,” and led him down to Vice, where he took a fat file off an unoccupied desk and said, “Copy of what we got. Want to look at the porn?”
    “Maybe take a peek,” Lucas said.
    He followed Whidden down to the lab, where Jim Reynolds, a very thin man in a cowboy shirt, was looking at a spreadsheet. He saw Lucas and Whidden, stood up and said, “Over here,” and to Lucas, “Thanks for the overtime.”
    “No problem. Christmas is coming.”
    Reynolds took them to a gray Dell desktop computer. “Smalls is getting a court order for a copy of the hard drive,” he told them. “It’ll be here first thing tomorrow.”
    “He’s denying any knowledge,” Lucas said. “What do you think?”
    “I’ve usually got an opinion,” Reynolds said. “But this thing is a little funky. I don’t know.”
    “Funky, how?”
    “The circumstances of the discovery,” Reynolds said. “When you get into it, you’ll see.”
    Whidden said, “I’m sixty-five percent that he’s guilty. But, if I was on the jury . . . I don’t think I’d convict him.”
    Reynolds brought up the porn file: the usual stuff, for kiddie porn: young boys and girls having sex with each other, young boys and girls with adults. Nothing new there, as kiddie porn went.
    Lucas asked, “How much is there?”
    “Several hundred individual images and thirty-eight video clips,” Reynolds said. “Some European—we’ve seen them before—and some, we don’t know where it comes from. We haven’t looked at it all, but what we’ve seen, it’s pretty bad stuff.”
    “What about this volunteer, the whole thing about throwing some papers on the keyboard?” Lucas asked.
    “We’ve tested that, and that’s the way it works,” Reynolds said. “You’re looking at the porn, you walk away. In two minutes, the screen blanks. Touch a key, and it comes back up with whatever was on the screen. In this case, the porn file.”
    •   •   •
    T HERE WASN’T MUCH TO talk about, so Lucas thanked Whidden for the file, and Reynolds for the demonstration, and drove home. He arrived twenty minutes before dinner would be ready, and when Weather asked him if there was anything new, he said, “Yeah. I’ve been asked to prove that Porter Smalls is innocent.”
    “Shut up,” she said.
    •   •   •
    P ORTER S MALLS’S LIST OF campaign