Chapter 11

After a bit Cecelia calmed down and dried her eyes, and we walked back to the Blazer – with her arm around my waist, instead of hand in hand. It wasn't usual for her, but I didn't say anything. She'd been stepping slightly out of her normal boundaries in the past few years, and in any event she'd just cried on my shirt and probably wanted to be closer than we usually walked.

Once we were belted in she reached into a pocket – I never know how many pockets she'll put on a skirt, and mostly she conceals them in ways that probably any decent seamstress could emulate but which completely baffle me – and pulled out the sheets of paper on which she'd printed out the places we were going to look. "Darvin," she said, "I would like to visit a couple of the stores first. For one thing I am not really up, at this juncture, to venturing into a place where they make this filth, and for another I suspect that someone who sells it might be more aware of the variety of ... actors ... than those who produce it."

"Not necessarily," I told her as I started the engine. "The creeps who make this stuff are always on the lookout for new faces. Believe me, C, this kind of thing gets old fast. Nothing pales as fast, I don't think, as sexual dissipation. That's why people are always reinventing the old ways to debase women – because for people who are into this kind of thing, what they did yesterday just isn't enough today."

"On that I must take your word – I do not know by experience, and have no wish to. However, I would prefer to at least begin with establishments which sell this stuff, rather than those which create it."

"That I can understand. You wade in filth long enough, and a lower percentage of sludge in the flow begins to look attractive." I pulled out of the school's driveway onto Paseo del Norte going east, and then almost immediately turned south onto San Pedro. I could remember when about the only thing up here was the school, but Albuquerque's growing everywhere it can, mostly on the West Mesa where there's the most room, but inside the city too, wherever there's open land to put stuff on. There are nearly a million people in Albuquerque these days, and they need room to live, to work, to shop ... and unfortunately room to just walk around and see the brush and the mountains and the sky suffers.

From the northern reaches of the city, with their affluent growth, to the inside of an "adult bookstore," is a big belly drop. Cecelia got looks – there aren't many women who buy stuff in places like that – and more than one customer decided to slink his way out when I began asking questions. Few people, no matter what our culture tries to say, are perfectly free of guilt at buying that kind of thing – there's this little problem called a conscience which tells them that it's just wrong to pay for the exploitation of women. At that, I've often wondered at the fact that the people who get exercised about the alleged patriarchal society allegedly oppressing women are often the same people who oppose any effort to stamp out porn, which oppresses and objectifies women like nothing else.

We made no visible progress. If anyone had ever seen the girl we were looking for, he wasn't willing to admit it. And I actually thought that we were getting reasonably honest responses. There are moral hierarchies among criminals – even most porn producers won't touch children, and the last thing you want to be in prison is a child molester. If you go in on that sort of rap, they'll either have to put you in segregation, or you'll wind up suffering at the hands of "honest" murderers and thieves and rapists.

After we'd come empty-handed from three or four such places, I said, "Maybe I'll have to start looking at the pictures on the packaging."

"I would rather you didn't," Cecelia told me.

"Yeah, me too."

We walked to the Blazer, which we'd parked in another business' parking lot – neither of us cared to park in the lot of a porn store – without saying anything else. But as we got to the vehicle Cecelia asked, "Is investigation always this tedious?"

"Usually, yeah." I unlocked her door and walked around the hood to mine, which I also unlocked. We climbed in, and as we were fastening our seat belts I said, "Working an investigation is accumulating information. Most of it proves to have absolutely no useful bearing on the case. Most of the time you spend turns out to be a waste of time. But you don't know that when you're doing it. You never know which little fact is going to be crucial. You never know which interview is going to give you the key to the whole thing. You never know which five minutes is going to be the most important five minutes out of the whole deal. So you just keep on goin', an' hope that you can clear it up before you die of terminal boredom."

"This too shall be a factor in my decision." She sat for a moment, while I glanced at the list to see where we could go next. "I suppose," she finally said, "that surveillance is equally monotonous."

"Yeah, with the added joys of sitting in a vehicle for long periods, usually without a bathroom handy."

She looked over at me. "And what, pray, does an investigator do when he requires relief?"

"Men have it easy – we can carry around a jar. You'd have to ask Kim what women do."

"You never have?"

"No, and I ain't a-gonna, neither. That would be TMI."

"TMI? Darvin, I know a great deal, but that acronym has never entered my ears before."

I grinned. "It just means Too Much Information. I got it from reading Tamar Meyers' books – both Abbie Timberlake and whatsername, the Mennonite lady, use it."

"Are you referring to Magdalena Yoder?"

"Yeah – for some reason her name slipped me just now. How did you know it?"

"Not from reading the books, certainly – you have spoken of the character in my hearing." She looked out the windshield. "I wish this slime we're wallowing in could slip me."

"It can, you know."

She nodded. "Yes – I could step out of the investigation. I have thought of doing so, too." Her voice turned bitter. "It seems my peace of mind is reparable, at the cost of ignoring a child who is terrified and alone."