Chosen Prey

by John Sandford

  Rie took the roll of paper from Swanson and spread it across the dining table. “Oh, my,” Lucas said. It was a drawing, detailed, and nearly full-length, of a nude woman whose body was projecting toward the viewer, legs slightly spread, one hand pressed into her vulva. She was fellating a man who was mostly, but not entirely, out of the picture.

  Weather picked up on the tone and came over to look. “Gross,” she said. She looked closely at Rie. “Where’d you get it?”

  “Back in November, a woman named Emily Patton was walking across the Washington Avenue Bridge, the covered part, going over to the university library on the West Bank. This was about six in the morning, still really dark, not many people around. She sees this drawing on one of the walls—you know what I’m talking about? Those inside walls where the students paint all their signs and put up posters and stuff?”

  “Yeah, go ahead,” Lucas said.

  “Anyway, she sees this poster, and there are a couple more like it. The thing is, Patton recognized this woman.” Rie tapped the face of the woman in the drawing. “She figured the woman would not approve, so she takes them down. There are three of them, and I personally think they must have been put up within a few minutes of Patton coming by, because I think somebody would have stolen them pretty quick. They were only Scotch-taped up.”

  “Any prints on the tape?” Lucas asked.

  “No, but I’ll come back to that,” Rie said. “Anyway, Patton was embarrassed about it, and she didn’t know what to ask the other woman—they were once in a class together, and she didn’t know her all that well.”

  “What’s her name?” Weather asked. “The woman in the picture?”

  “Beverly Wood,” Rie said. “So Patton eventually looks up Wood, this is a couple days later, and says, ‘Hey, did you know that somebody posted some pictures of you?’ Wood didn’t know, so Patton showed her, and Wood freaked. She came to see us, with Patton. The thing is, she says, she never posed for any pictures like that. In fact, she’d only had, like, two sexual relationships in her life, and neither had lasted very long. The sex, she says, was all very conventional. No photographs, no drawings, no messing around naked.”

  “Sounds kinda boring,” Lucas said.

  “That’s the point,” Rie said. “She’s not the kind of person who winds up in this kind of picture.”

  “Did you check the guys? The ex-boyfriends?”

  “Yeah, we did,” Rie said. “Both of them deny anything, both of them seem to be fairly nice guys—even Wood said so. Neither one of them has any background in art . . . and whoever did this, I mean, he seems to be pretty good. I mean, a pretty good artist.”

  They all looked again: He was pretty good, whoever he was. “No question that this is Wood? It could be pretty generic.”

  “Nope. That little bump on the nose . . . She’s got that beauty mark by her eye. I mean, you’ve got to see her and talk to her. This is her.”

  “Okay,” Lucas said. He stepped back from the table and looked at Swanson. “What else? You say this happened back in November?”

  “Okay. We checked it for prints and it came up absolutely clean, except for Patton’s prints and a few that Wood put on them. So the guy who drew this knows that somebody might be looking for his prints. He’s careful.”

  “Did you check Patton? And Wood?” Weather asked. “It could be a form of exhibitionism.”

  Rie batted the question away. “We were doing that . . . but you have to understand, we were not even sure that a crime had been committed. Anyway, we checked them. Or we were in the process of checking on them, but in the meantime, Patton and Wood had both talked about the situation, and the Daily Minnesotan got onto it. They sent this kid reporter over and . . . with Wood’s permission, we gave them a little story. We thought the most likely guy to do something like this would be somebody in the art department, and maybe somebody would recognize the style. We got these.”

  Rie unrolled two more sheets of paper, both smaller than the first, and both creased, as though they’d once fit inside an envelope. One was a drawing of a woman masturbating with a vibrator. Another was a low-angle drawing of a nude woman leaning against a door, her hips thrust toward the viewer.

  “These were mailed to two university students, one back in June, last year, the other one in late August or early September. Neither woman reported the drawings. One of them thought it was just a silly trick by one of her art friends, and actually thought the drawing was kind of neat.”

  “That would be the door drawing,” Weather said, carrying cups of microwave coffee.

  “Yeah. Not many woman would think the vibrator drawing was all that cool,” Rie said. “Anyway, this woman”—she touched the masturbation drawing—“not only claims that she never posed for anybody, but nobody has ever seen her nude, not since she was in high school gym class. Nobody, male or female. She’s still a virgin.”

  “Huh,” Lucas said. He looked at the three drawings. There was no question that they’d been done by the same artist. “So we got a weirdo.” Again he looked at Swanson. “And?”

  “That strangled chick that got dug up last Sunday? Aronson? This was in her file; we’d found it in a desk drawer. To tell you the truth, I think most everybody had forgotten about it, except Del.” Swanson rolled out another drawing. A woman was sitting astride a chair, her legs open to the world, her breasts cupped in her hands. The pose was marginally less pornographic than the first two, but there was no doubt that it’d had been done by the same hand as the other drawings.

  “Uh-oh,” Lucas said.

  “We didn’t know about the other drawings, because Sex was handling them,” Swanson said. “Del saw them when he stopped to talk to Carolyn, and he remembered the drawing in the Aronson file. We pulled them just this afternoon, and put them together.”

  “A psycho,” Rie said.

  “Looks like it,” Lucas said. “So what do you want? More people?”

  “We thought maybe you’d like to come in, take a look.”

  “I’m a little tied up.”

  “Oh, horseshit,” Weather said. She looked at Swanson and Rie. “He’s so bored, he’s talking about renting a sailboat.”

  And to Lucas: “It would certainly give you something to do until the sun comes out.”

  3

  DEPUTY CHIEF/ INVESTIGATIONS Frank Lester supervised all the nonuniformed investigative units except Lucas’s group. He had the spread-ass look of a longtime bureaucrat, but still carried the skeptical thin smile of a street cop. When Lucas walked into his office the next morning, Lester gestured with a cup of coffee and said, “You got a hickey on your neck.”

  “You must be a trained investigator,” Lucas said, but he self-consciously touched the hickey, which he’d noticed while he was shaving. “Did you talk to Swanson?”

  “He called me at home last night, before he talked to you,” Lester said. “I was hoping you’d come in.” He was leaning back in his chair, his feet up on his metal desk. A dirty-gray morning light filtered through the venetian blinds behind him; a senile tomato plant wilted on the windowsill. “Are you gonna tell me about the hickey?”

  Instead of answering the question, Lucas said, “You told me once that when you sit with your feet up on your desk, you pinch a nerve.”

  “Goddamnit.” Lester jerked his feet off the desk, sat up straight, and rubbed the back of his neck. “Every time I get a cup of coffee, I put my feet up. If I do it too long, I’m crippled for a week.”

  “Oughta see a doctor.”

  “I did. He told me to sit up straight. Fuckin’ HMOs.” He’d forgotten about the hickey. “Anyway, you and your crew are welcome to come in. I’ll have Swanson brief you on the crime scene, get you the files and photos, all the stuff they picked up from Aronson’s apartment. Rie’s gonna bring in the woman in the other drawings. Isn’t that weird, the drawings?”

  “It’s weird,” Lucas agreed.

  They both thought about it for a minute, the weirdness, then Lester said
, “I’ll talk to Homicide, and send Swanson and Black to you guys, and you can take the whole thing. We’ve got three current homicide cases and the Brown business. Without Lynette Brown’s body, it’s all circumstantial and the prosecutor’s scared shitless. We still can’t find the goddamn dentist who put that bridge in her mouth.”

  “I heard Brown hired Jim Langhorn.” Langhorn was an attorney.

  “Yeah. The rumor is, he called Langhorn, and Langhorn came on the phone and said, ‘One million,’ and Brown said, ‘You got a client.’ ”

  “If it really is Langhorn . . .”

  “It is,” Lester said.

  “Then you’re at least semi-fucked.”

  “I know it.”

  “Maybe you’ll catch a break. Maybe somebody’ll find a tooth sticking out of an egg carton,” Lucas said. “You could do a DNA or something.”

  “Everybody thinks it’s fuckin’ funny,” Lester said. He poked a finger at Lucas. “It’s not fucking funny.”

  “It’s a little fuckin’ funny,” Lucas suggested. “I mean, Harold Brown?”

  Harold Brown was a rich do-gooder who ran a recyling plant with his dead daddy’s money, turning old newspapers into egg cartons. The last thing he was suspected of recycling was his wife, Lynette. Homicide believed he’d thrown her body into the acid-reduction vat—a gold bridge was found at the bottom of the vat when it was drained—and that Lynette was now holding together several dozen grade-A eggs.

  “No. It’s not fuckin’ funny,” Lester said. “Ever since Channel Eleven found out about the bridgework, the TV’s been on us like a coat of blue paint.” Then he brightened. “And that’s one thing you got going for you. Nobody but Swanson, Rie, Del, and you and me know about the drawings. None of the news pukes got it yet—that we’ve got another weird motherfucker roaming around.”

  “I hate to tell you this, but we might have to put the drawings on TV,” Lucas said. “If we got two people coming in with drawings because they saw a four-inch article in the Daily Minnesotan, you gotta wonder—how many more are there?”

  Lester leaned back and put his feet up on his desk, unconsciously crossing his ankles as he did it. He scratched the side of his chin and said, “Well, if you gotta. Maybe it’ll take some heat off the Lynette Brown thing.”

  “Maybe,” Lucas said. “You want me to talk to Rose Marie?”

  “That’d be good.”

  On the way out, Lucas paused in the door and said, “You got your feet up.”

  “Ah, fuck me.”

  ROSE MARIE ROUX, the chief of police, was meeting with the mayor. Lucas left a message, asking for a minute of her time, and walked down the stairs to his new office. His old office had been a closet with chairs. The new one still smelled of paint and wet concrete, but had two small offices with doors, desks, and filing cabinets, along with an open bay for the investigators’ desks.

  When the space opened up, there’d been a dogfight over it. Lucas had pointed out that Roux could make two groups happy by giving him a larger office, then passing his old office to somebody who didn’t have an office at all. Besides, he needed it: His intelligence people were interviewing contacts in the hallway. She’d gone along, and mollified the losers with new office chairs and a Macintosh computer for their image files.

  When he walked through the door—even the door was new, and he was modestly proud of it—Marcy Sherrill was sitting in his office with her feet up on his desk. She was on medical leave, and he hadn’t seen her in a week. “You’re gonna pinch a nerve,” he said, as the outer door banged shut behind him.

  “I got nerves of steel,” she said. “They don’t pinch.”

  “Tell me that when you can’t stand up straight,” Lucas grunted, as he moved behind the desk. She was attractive, and single, but she didn’t worry Weather: Marcy and Lucas had already been down the romance road, and had called it off by mutual consent. Marcy was a tough girl and liked to fight. Or had. “How’re you feeling?”

  “Not too bad. Still get the headaches at night.” She’d been shot in the chest with a deer rifle.

  “How much longer?” Lucas asked.

  She shook her head. “They’re gonna take me off the analgesics next week. That’ll stop the headaches, they say, but I’ll get a little more chest pain. They say I should be able to handle it by then. They think.”

  “Keeping up with physical therapy?”

  “Yeah. That hurts worse than the chest and the headaches put together.” She saw him looking her over, and sat up. “Why? You got something for me?”

  “We’re gonna take the Aronson murder. Swanson will brief us this afternoon. Black’s gonna join up temporarily. We need to get Del and Lane to come in. The short version of it is this: We got a freak.”

  “You gonna bring me back on line?” She tried for cool, and got eager instead.

  “Limited duty, if you want,” Lucas said. “We could use somebody to coordinate.”

  “I can do that,” she said. She got up, wobbled carefully once around the office, pain shadowing her eyes. “Goddamnit, I can do that.”

  ROSE MARIE’S SECRETARY called while Lucas and Sherrill were planning an approach to the Aronson case. “Rose Marie would like to see you right now.”

  “Two minutes,” Lucas said, and hung up. To Sherrill: “So maybe the feds can give us a psychological profile of the artist. Get the drawings over to one of those architectural drafting places, with the super Xerox machines, and have them make full-sized copies. Mail them overnight them to Washington. Call what’s-his-name, Mallard. His name’s in my Rolodex. See if he can run interference with the FBI bureaucracy.”

  “Okay. I’ll have Del and Lane here at two o’clock, and get Swanson and Rie to move the files over and do a briefing.”

  “Good. I’m gonna talk to Rose Marie, then go run around town for a while, see what’s happening.”

  “You know you got a hickey?” she asked, tapping the side of her own neck.

  “Yeah, yeah. It must be about the size of a rose, the way people are talking about it,” Lucas said.

  Marcy nodded. “Just about. . . . So you gonna knock her up? Weather?”

  “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not.”

  “Jesus. You’re toast.” Marcy smiled, but managed to look a little sad.

  “You’re sure you’re okay?” he asked.

  “I just wish I could get done with all this shit,” she said restlessly. She meant the pain; she’d been talking about it as though it were a person, and Lucas understood exactly how she felt. “I’m only one inch from being back, but I wanna be back. Fight somebody. Go on a date. Something.”

  “Hey. You’re coming back. You look two hundred percent better than you did a month ago. Even your hair looks good. A month from now . . . a month from now, you’ll be full speed.”

  ROSE MARIE ROUX was a heavyset woman, late fifties, a longtime smoker who was aging badly. Her office was decorated with black-and-white photographs of local politicians, a few cops, her husband and parents; and the usual collection of twenty-dollar wooden plaques. Her desk was neat, but a side table was piled with paper. She was sitting at the side table, playing with a string of amber worry beads, when he walked in, and she looked at him with tired hounddog eyes. “You stopped by,” she said. “What’s up?”

  Lucas settled into her leather visitor’s chair and told her about the drawings and the Aronson murder. “We’re gonna take it,” he said. “Lester is worried about the media and what they’ll do. I’m thinking we might have to use them, and wanted to let you know.”

  “Feed it to Channel Three, make damn sure they know it’s a big favor, and that we’re gonna need a payback,” she said. She nodded to herself and repeated, almost under her breath, “Need a payback.”

  “Sure. So what’s going on?” Lucas asked uncertainly. “You sound a little stressed.”

  “A little stressed,” she echoed. She pushed herself onto her feet, drifted to her window, and looked out at the street. “I just talked to His
Honor.”

  “Yeah, they said he was here.” Lucas tipped his head toward the outer office.

  “He’s not going to run this fall. He’s decided.” She turned away from the window to look at Lucas. “Which means I’m history. My term ends in September. He can’t reappoint me, not with a new mayor coming in a month later. The council would never approve it. He thinks Figueroa is probably the leading candidate to replace him, but Carlson or Rankin could jump up and get it. None of those people would reappoint me.”

  “Huh,” Lucas said. Then: “Why don’t you run?”

  She shook her head. “You make too many party enemies in this job. If I could get through the party primary, I could probably win the general election, but I’d never get through the primary. Not in Minneapolis.”