Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 49, No. 1 & 2, January/February 2004

They came a little after seven. Didn’t bother to knock. I was half dozing when I heard a key in the lock. The door eased open and they slipped inside. Shadow figures in the dark. Flashlight beams flicked around the room. One flicked across my face. Then whipped back, locking onto me.

“Come on in. Why don’t you switch on the lights?”

The fluorescent lights flickered on overhead, bathing the shop in an icy glare.

There were two of them. Chief Tom Liske in civvies, blue windbreaker, faded jeans, carrying a weighted flashlight. And my father-in-law, Phil Barrett.

“Put your hands on the desk, Kenyon,” Chief Liske ordered, pulling a snub-nosed automatic from under his windbreaker. “Don’t even blink.” Crossing the room, he patted me down for weapons. Didn’t find any. Then backed away, the gun leveled at my midsection.

“My God, Tom, what are you doing?” Phil objected. “There’s no need for that.”

“You’ve stood up for this guy from the first and I’ve gone along,” Liske growled. “Not anymore. There’s too much at stake. We’re gonna have a conversation, Kenyon. And if I don’t like the way it goes, you’ll be in more trouble than you ever dreamed of. Clear?”

I nodded.

“Where’s the stuff you got from the Potter house?”

“Why do you want it?”

“Don’t play dumb, Kenyon. You know Trane was cooking meth in the garage. He may have concealed it in something you bought—”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “No chance.”

“What do you mean, no!”

“You aren’t looking for methedrine, Chief. If you were, you’d have a dog with you. Any half-trained pooch can sniff that crap from across the street and we both know it. You’re after something else.”

“Like what?”

“Pictures. Pornography. Secret shots of little kids undressing. Pretty tame by today’s standards, but there’s a monster market for kiddie porn on the Internet. Especially if it’s three dimensional, like stereopticons or View-Masters. How did you spot it? On the Web?”

Liske was a pro, his face showed nothing. But the pain in Phil’s eyes told me more than I wanted to know.

“God,” he said softly. “I’m almost glad—”

“Shut your mouth, Phil,” Liske snapped. “He isn’t one of us.”

“No, I’m not,” I conceded. “I’m an outsider who blundered into this. And now two people are dead. I need to understand what’s happening.”

“Give you enough to bury us?” Liske snorted. “Not likely.”

“I don’t want to bury anybody, Chief. I’m having trouble enough just making it day to day. But I’m involved in this now. And so are you. I think I know part of it. Suppose I tell you what I think? You can fill in the blanks. Or not. Your choice.”

“I’m listening,” Liske said.

“All right. Jerome Potter was a pornographer and a pedophile. He was old money and social position meant a lot in those days so business was good. Parents were proud to have their kids’ pictures taken by a society photographer. But he was also sneaking pictures of the kids changing clothes. I’m guessing he got caught at some point. What happened?”

Warning Phil to silence with a look, Liske eyed me a moment, then shrugged. “Apparently taking pictures wasn’t enough for Jerome. He started groping boys. When their parents found out, they had a real problem. They couldn’t try Potter without putting a lot of children through hell, maybe marking them for life.”

“So they ran him off instead?”

“Exactly,” Phil said bitterly. “Jerome closed his studio and moved to Florida. Some years later he came back home to that old house and committed suicide. And good riddance!”

“The house stood empty for years,” Liske continued. “Then a few months ago, some photos showed up in my department’s Internet porn watch. I recognized some of the kids from years ago. Trane was squatting in the old Potter place. We figured he found a cache of Jerome’s old photographs and peddled them.”

“When he wasn’t cooking meth,” I added.

“Yeah, I knew about that,” Liske admitted. “Trane wasn’t too bright. You could smell his lab a block away. But I couldn’t bust him. If he had more pictures they’d be found and entered as evidence. It would dredge up the whole dirty business again, cause a lot of pain and embarrassment to innocent people.”

“So we decided to squeeze him out,” Phil said, the story coming out in a rush now. “The Downtown Development Authority bought the house, served him with eviction papers, and ordered an execution sale. We didn’t want trouble, we just wanted him to move on.”

“I thought we had things under control,” Liske continued. “We planned to buy up everything at the sale, force Trane out, then demolish the place once and for all.”

“But you found out Trane tried to beat the execution sale by unloading everything first. Then what? You torched the house?”

Phil and Liske exchanged a glance.

“We didn’t,” Liske conceded, “but there are others involved. Good men, family men, who have a lot to lose if those pictures become public. It’s possible someone panicked and started that fire. There’s no way to prove it now. Meth labs are high risk operations, you said so yourself. They blow up every damn day.”

“And the dead girl?”