Chosen Prey

by John Sandford

  “Edward Fox. The guy in Day of the Jackal.”

  “Yeah. I’m gonna have to look at it again—get a feel for the guy.”

  JEFF BAXTER, A thirty-something criminal attorney with reddish-blond hair, a pale Nordic complexion, and a prominent English nose, was leaning against a wall outside a courtroom, reading papers in a green file folder. He saw Lucas coming and raised a hand.

  “How’s it going?” Lucas asked.

  “Slow season. It’s all this rain,” Baxter said. “Nobody’s gonna stick up a 7-Eleven in this weather.”

  “Right. When’s the last time you defended a 7-Eleven guy?”

  “I’m talking in theory,” Baxter said. He pushed away from the wall. “Is this just a random, friendly encounter, or did you come over looking for me?”

  “Look, you’re defending Morrie Ware?” Lucas asked.

  “Yeah. Your guys just finished throwing the book at him. I’m not sure how good a case it is.” Baxter was a good attorney and could smell the smallest molecules of a possible deal.

  “However good it is, it got better in the last couple of hours,” Lucas said. “The Dutch cops grabbed Ware’s website in Holland, and I suspect it is chock-full of little children playing with their wee-wees.”

  “Ah, fuck. You know for sure there’re kids?”

  “Not yet. The feds are handling that end of it. But Morrie’s a scuzzbag, whatever they find.”

  “Yeah, well . . . just between you and me, if I ever caught him standing next to one of my kids, I’d stick a gun in his ear. But he does get a lawyer.”

  “That’s why I’m talking to you,” Lucas said. “Ware may be able to help us on another, unrelated case. We’d want somebody to pick his brain . . . and we can probably deal down the cocaine problem.”

  “What other case?”

  “The Aronson murder.”

  “The guy in the black coat?” Baxter asked. “I saw his picture.”

  “Wasn’t him,” Lucas said, shaking his head. “He came in this morning. Didn’t even need an attorney.”

  Baxter made a farting noise with his mouth.

  Lucas grinned. “Yeah, yeah. Anyway, we need to talk to Ware about what he knows about sex freaks in the art community. Since he is one, we thought he might know some more.”

  “You don’t think he’s involved . . .”

  Lucas shook his head. “No reason to think so. We’re just looking to talk, and we can probably deal on the cocaine.”

  “We’d want it to go away. Entirely,” Baxter said. “It’s small-time, anyway.”

  Lucas shrugged. “I can ask, I can’t promise. There’s no way anybody’s gonna deal on the kid-porn stuff.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “So long as you know it’s not part of the deal. And you tell Ware: If he bullshits us, we’ll stick the coke charge right down his throat, along with everything else. If we push the little girl we picked up harder, I think we can get a few more names. I think we can bring in a few more kids who’ll say that Ware feeds them cocaine in exchange for sex and pictures.”

  “So I’ll talk to Morrie,” Baxter said. He looked at his watch. “He’s downstairs, getting his clothes.”

  “Gotta be quick. Like this morning. Like right now. We’ve got big problems with the Aronson thing.”

  “Maybe it’s worth more than you’re offering?”

  Lucas shook his head. “Nah. It’s unlikely that he can give us anything. He’s just a shot in the dark. You better settle for talking down the coke charge.”

  They chatted for another minute, then Lucas headed back to his office, and thought about skinny blond men killing skinny blond women.

  Marcy said, “I talked to that artist. He sounds sorta . . . funky.” In Marcy’s vocabulary, “funky” was usually desirable. “He said he could stop by this afternoon.”

  “Excellent.”

  “What’re you doing? Just gonna wait for Ware?”

  “Yeah, and read the file that the Menomonie guy brought in. Maybe there’s something in it.”

  Going through the file from Menomonie, Lucas began making a list. The three missing women all had several things in common with Aronson. They were all blondes, all in their twenties, all three had some involvement with art—and specifically, he decided, painting. All three in the Menomonie files had taken art classes shortly before their deaths. There were no classes listed in Aronson’s file, but since she was young and in the arts, she almost certainly had taken some not long before. All of them, he thought, either lived in, or recently had lived in, small towns. But the small towns were scattered all over the place, and might not mean anything except that small-town women were a little more vulnerable than big-city kids. And it might not even mean that.

  His list:

  Look at art teachers at the schools they attended; check for criminal records involving sex.

  If the teachers don’t pan out, get class lists and look at students.

  Go back ten years, look for small blondes reported as missing anywhere in southeastern Minnesota or western Wisconsin.

  What about the drawings? The guy who killed Aronson, if he was the same guy who did the drawings, seemed to be under some compulsion to draw the women. There were no drawings listed in the Menomonie files . . . but that didn’t mean there weren’t any. He may have retrieved them after he killed the women.

  He was still going through the file, page by page, when Marcy stuck her head in the door and said, “Ware’s attorney called. They don’t want to talk until they get the deal on paper from the county attorney. That’s going on now, and they’ll be over as soon as they’re done.”

  “All right.”

  He went back to the file, and when he looked up again, out through the office window, he saw Marcy talking to a man in a scarlet ski jacket and faded jeans. The man had broad shoulders, like a gymnast’s, and a nose that looked like it’d been hit once or twice too often. He was an inch or two shorter than Lucas, but Lucas thought that he might have a couple extra pounds of muscle.

  Lucas recognized him from somewhere, a long time ago. As he watched, the man parked a hip on Marcy’s desk, grinned, leaned over and said something to her, and she laughed. The artist? He walked over to the door.

  “This is Mr. Kidd,” Marcy said when Lucas stuck his head out of his office. “I was just coming to get you.”

  “I saw you dashing for my door,” Lucas said dryly. He and Kidd shook hands, and Lucas said, “I know you from somewhere, a long time ago.”

  Kidd nodded. “We were at the university at the same time. You were a hockey jock.”

  Lucas snapped his fingers. “You were the wrestler. You pushed Sheets’s head through the railings in the field house, and they had to call the fire department to get him out.”

  “He was an asshole,” Kidd said.

  “What kind of asshole?” Marcy asked.

  “He was gay and predatory,” Kidd said. “He was pushing a kid from upstate who sorta leaned that way but didn’t lean toward Sheets. I warned him once.” To Lucas: “I’m amazed you remember.”

  “Who was he? Sheets?” Marcy asked. Lucas noticed that she was looking at Kidd with a peculiar intensity.

  “Assistant wrestling coach,” Lucas and Kidd said at the same time.

  “They kick you out?” Marcy asked Kidd.

  “Not right away,” Kidd said. “The NC-Double-A’s were coming. When those were over, they pulled my scholarship and told me to go piss up a rope.”

  “You were everybody’s hero for a while,” Lucas said. Kidd said, “Glory days,” and Lucas said, “Thanks for coming over.”

  “Marcy told me about the drawings,” Kidd said. “We were just going to take a look. . . .”

  “So let’s look.”

  KIDD HANDLED THE drawings carefully, Lucas noticed, like real artworks; stopped once to rub the paper between his fingers. He laid them out one at a time on a conference table, taking his time. Twice he said, “Huh,” and once he tapped a drawing with his i
ndex finger, indicating something about an oversized foot.

  “What?” Marcy asked.

  “The foot’s wrong,” Kidd said absently.

  Lucas watched him examine the drawings, and finally, impatiently, asked, “What do you think?”

  “He wants to go back to the womb,” Kidd said.

  “Any womb,” Marcy said, adding, “Somebody said that in a movie.”

  Kidd looked up at Lucas. “Marcy told me about the FBI profile—that he’s between twenty-five and forty and has a formal arts education. How many thousands of people would that include?”

  “Too many to count,” Lucas said. He asked again, “What do you think?”

  Kidd didn’t reply immediately, but instead turned over three of the sheets and looked at them again. Finally, he said, “He’s a porno freak.”

  “That’s a keen observation,” Marcy said. “I’ll write that down in my Big Book o’ Clues.”

  “I mean a photo-porno freak,” Kidd said. “Most of these bodies were drawn from pornographic photographs and the heads were added later. It’d be no problem with a computer program like Photoshop. Kids do it all the time—take the head off a movie star, stick it with a piece of porn, and try to pass it off as a real photograph.”

  Lucas and Marcy looked at each other, and then Marcy said, “You mean . . . I mean, how, I mean . . .”

  “Look at these,” Kidd said, unrolling one after the other. “What’s one glaringly obvious thing you can tell about the bodies?”

  “The drawings are all sorta gross,” Lucas said. “They’re not like art.”

  “Actually, some good art is fairly gross,” Kidd said. “But that’s not what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is, none of the women have nipples showing.”

  Marcy said, “Nipples?”

  “God, I love the way you said that,” Kidd said, glancing down at her.

  Lucas said, “Ah, Jesus,” and Marcy nailed Kidd with an elbow. “Just tell me.”

  Kidd said, “If you’re an artist, especially an artist who does a lot of nudes—”

  “Do you do a lot of nudes?” Marcy asked.

  “No, I do landscapes mostly. I make exceptions sometimes.” Again, the quick grin. “Anyway, if you do a lot of life drawing, and if you have the technical background, you can pretty much look at anyone and draw that person nude.” He looked at Marcy. “I can look at you, and I can see your shoulders and the shape of your breasts and the width of your hips, and since I know all those parts, I could do a pretty good drawing. But I couldn’t know about the aureoles around your nipples, or the—”

  “The what?” Marcy asked. Lucas thought she might have turned a little pink, and suppressed a smile.

  “The aureole. I wouldn’t know how big and distinct it was. I wouldn’t know whether your nipples protrude or how big they are. With a guy, I couldn’t tell how long his penis is or whether he’s circumcised. Or how hairy his chest is . . . This guy probably didn’t put in nipples because if he’d put in protruding nipples and the woman didn’t have that kind of nipple, then it would obviously be a fake. But maybe he didn’t think of toes. There are two or three places where you can see lots of toes, which are really pretty distinctive, though nobody looks at them. If I were you, I’d get these women in here and look at their feet.”

  “Ah . . . I see what you mean,” Lucas said. He shuffled through the drawings. “None of these drawings—”

  “None of them have the kind of specifics that individualize the body. That’s especially striking since the faces are so individual,” Kidd said. “I think the guy never really saw these women nude.”

  “So he’s a photographer? He draws from photographs?” Marcy asked.

  “I think he’s an artist, but he’s using photography. A straight photographer wouldn’t draw this well,” Kidd said.

  “How hard would it be?”

  “Not hard. You can take a photograph of somebody, scan it, find a porno shot on the ’Net—there are literally thousands of them, all ages and sizes and shapes and positions—and match them. Then you can eliminate the photographic detail using a Photoshop filter and produce something that almost looks like a drawing. Then you can project that image on a piece of paper, and draw over the projected image. It takes some skill. The FBI is right: This guy has had some training, I think. But not too much. That foot . . .”

  He shuffled through the drawings until he found the one with a foot that looked wrong. “What’s happened here is, the bodies extend away from you, so this woman’s foot is relatively larger than the rest of her body. It’s called foreshortening. I’m not sure, but I think that not only is the foot foreshortened, it’s also distorted, and it’s distorted in the way that things are when you use a wide-angle lens. If you use a wide-angle camera lens from up close, things at the edge of the picture are unnaturally wide. . . . This looks like a photographed foot to me.”

  “The woman who was killed did commercial art and design—ads and stuff,” Marcy said. “We thought maybe somebody she met in the business.”

  “Uh.” Kidd looked at the stack of drawings, then shook his head. “I don’t think he’s a commercial artist. If he took art classes, they’d be in fine art.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “It’s subtle. Commercial artists learn a lot of shortcuts, shorthand ways of doing things—they’re paid to produce recognizable images, and to do it quickly. They’re not struggling to get down something that’s unique. These drawings look like the guy was trying pretty hard, and he really doesn’t show any of the bag of tricks that a commercial artist has. When he doesn’t get the noses right, he doesn’t cheat by doing a shorthand nose, he fights it. He tries to get it right.”

  “So an artist.”

  “Not a very good one,” Kidd said. “He doesn’t know the anatomy that well. There are a couple of places where you’ve got an image that might come off a photograph.” He went through the drawings again and found one with a woman who had one arm extended over her head. “See this one? There’s no feeling of a joint where her shoulder is. It’s just a silhouette like you might get from a photo, but it’s an awkward one.”

  They talked for a few more minutes, working through the photos, and Kidd picked out two with fairly distinctive big toes. “Check these. I’d be willing to bet they don’t match.”

  Jeff Baxter stepped into the office; Morris Ware trailed behind, looking stunned. Lucas looked past Kidd and said, “This is the right place.”

  “You’ve seen the paper from the county attorney?” Baxter asked.

  “Not yet.”

  “If you say okay, they’ll drop the coke charge. Morrie gives you full cooperation on anything he knows about the local sex scene that doesn’t impinge on his current case.”

  Lucas nodded. “That’s fine with me. Why don’t you go into my office, and I’ll bring another guy back to talk to you.” He gestured to his office. “Right in there. We’ll just be a minute.”

  Kidd was collecting his jacket, and Lucas said, “Thanks for coming. You told us more about the killer in ten minutes than the feds did in two days.”

  “Yet another reason to eat the FBI,” Kidd said. And to Marcy: “Speaking of eating, isn’t there a cafeteria around here someplace? I don’t know Minneapolis very well.”

  “Yeah, but the food is not exactly gourmet,” she said.

  “Better a cafeteria than starve to death.”

  “I could probably show you a better place,” she offered.

  Lucas thought Kidd’s eyelids may have dropped a tenth of an inch as he said, “That’d be good.”

  “The guy comes over to catch a killer and winds up hustling my staff,” Lucas said, bending his head back to talk to the ceiling.

  “With a staff like this . . .” Kidd said.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

  KIDD AND MARCY left together—Kidd was asking, “Can I touch your gun?”—and Lucas, shaking his head at the ways of singles sex, called Sloan and asked him to com
e over. “We got that porno guy I was telling you about. He’s gonna converse.”

  “I’ll bring the tape deck,” Sloan said.

  Sloan was a narrow-faced man who tended to dress in shades of gray and brown, and always had, from his first day in plainclothes. He was one of Lucas’s best friends, and for years had never seemed to change. But Lucas had noticed in the past few months that Sloan’s hair was swiftly going white. Like most cops, Sloan had always been a little salt-and-pepper, but over the winter he’d gotten perceptibly older. The white seemed to emphasize the lines of his face and the narrowness of his stature. And the last time they’d talked, Sloan had remarked that he’d be eligible to retire in a couple of years.