Chosen Prey ld-12

by John Sandford

  The woods were still wet from all the rain, and the hillside, covered with oak leaves, was slippery. He picked his way through the bare saplings, saw the triangle of downed trees, spotted the hole in the hillside and the scuffle marks where cops had worked around the hole. The rain was smoothing the dirt fill in the hole, and leaves were beginning to cover it. In two more weeks, he couldn't have found the spot.

  He walked farther down the hillside, then up to the crest; there were houses not far away, but he couldn't see any. Whoever had put the body here had known what he was doing. The grave had simply been a bit too shallow, and a dog had found it, or coyotes. And then the hunter had come by, scouting for bird sign.

  And that was all, except the sound of the wind in the trees.

  On the way back to town, he called Marcy to tell her that he'd be running around town for a couple of hours, talking to his people, picking up bits and pieces.

  "Afraid to leave them on their own?"

  "I need time to think," he said. "I'm a little worried about giving those drawings to the movie people, but I can't see any other seams in the thing."

  "That's probably our best bet," Marcy agreed.

  LUCAS SPENT THE rest of the morning and early afternoon roaming the metropolitan area, working his personal network, thinking about the Aronson murder and about the possibility of losing his job and maybe having a baby or two. He touched the hickey on his neck.

  Susan Kelly was a pretty woman, but she wasn't at Hot Feet Jazz Dance. Her dog was having a breast cancer operation and she wanted to be there when it woke up, her assistant said. Lori, the assistant, was also a pretty woman, if a little over the edge with the dancing. She grabbed one of the brass rails that lined one wall of the polished-maple practice floor, dropped her head to the floor, and told Lucas from the upside-down position that a creep named Morris Ware was back in action, looking for little girls to pose for his camera.

  "Wonderful. Glad to hear it," Lucas said.

  "You ought to chain-whip him," Lori said.

  Ben Lincoln at Ben's Darts amp; Cues told him that two Harley clubs, the Asia Vets and the Leather Fags, were planning a paint-ball war on a farm south of Shakopee, and it could get rough; some of the Leather Fags were reportedly replacing the paint balls with ball bearings. Larry Hammett at Trax Freight said that somebody had dumped a ton of speed on local over-the-road drivers: "Half the guys on the road are flying; I won't let my daughter take the car out of the fuckin' driveway."

  Lannie Harrison at Tulip's Hose Couplings and Fittings told him a joke: "Guy walks into a bar and orders a scotch-and-soda. The bartender brings it over, puts it on the bar, and walks away. Just as the guy is reaching for the drink, this little teeny monkey runs out from under the bar, lifts up his dick, dips his balls into the scotch-and-soda, then runs back under the bar. The guy is astounded. He calls the bartender over and says, 'Hey. This little monkey just ran out from under the bar…' And the bartender says, 'Yeah, yeah. Sorry about that. Let me get you another drink.' So he brings over a fresh scotch-and-soda and walks away with the old one. Just as the guy is reaching for the fresh drink, this little monkey runs out from under the bar…"

  "Lifts up his dick and dunks his balls in the scotch-and-soda," Lucas said.

  "Yeah? You heard this?"

  "No, but I'm familiar with the form," Lucas said.

  "Okay. So the guy calls the bartender back and said, 'The little monkey…' And the bartender says, 'Listen, pal, you gotta watch your drink. I'll give you one more fresh one.' And the guy says, 'Well, what's the story about the goddamn monkey?' The bartender says, 'I only worked here a couple of weeks. But you see that piano player over there?' He points to a guy at a piano and says, 'He's worked here for twenty years. He can probably tell you about it.' So the guy gets his new drink and goes over to the piano player and says, 'You know that little teeny monkey that runs out from under the bar and lifts up his dick and dips his balls in your scotch-and-soda?'

  "The piano player says, 'No, but if you hum a couple of bars, I can probably fake it.' "

  AT A SOUTHSIDE sweatshop, where illegal Latinos embroidered nylon athletic jackets with team insignias, Jan Murphy told him that a noted University of Minnesota athlete had gotten a job at a package-delivery service. Unlike the other messengers, who drove small white Fords, the athlete's company car was a Porsche C4.

  "A kid's gotta have wheels, this day and age. And who knows, maybe he only handles special deliveries, really important stuff," Lucas said.

  "Oh, that's right," Murphy said, pointing a pistol finger at him, "Mr. Four-Year Letterman, right? Hockey? I'd forgotten."

  At The Diamond Collective, Sandy Hu told him that nothing looked better with a little black dress than a black pearl necklace and matched tear-shaped black pearl earrings, on which she could give him a special police discount, four payments of only $3,499.99 each.

  "Why didn't you just make it four payments of $3,500?"

  " 'Cause my way, it keeps the price under the magic $14,000 barrier."

  "Ah. Well, who would I give it to?" Lucas asked.

  Hu shrugged. "I don't know. But you see a hickey like the one on your neck, you try to sell the guy something expensive."

  She hadn't heard anything new about anybody; she had heard the monkey balls joke.

  Svege Tanner at Strength and Beauty said that over the weekend, somebody took twenty-five thousand dollars in cash from an apartment rented by an outstate legislator named Alex Truant. "The word is, Truant has a girlfriend here in the cities and they'd been dropping some big money at the casinos. With one thing or another, he was like way-deep over his head, so he got hired by the trial lawyers to carry some water for them. That's where the twenty-five came from."

  "Who'd you hear this from?" Lucas asked.

  "The girlfriend," Tanner said. "She works out here. Got an annual ticket."

  "Think she'd talk to somebody?"

  "Yeah. If somebody went to see her right away. Truant whacked her around when the cash came up missing. He thought she took it. She doesn't look so good with a big fuckin' mouse under her eye."

  "Did she? Take it?"

  Tanner shrugged. "I asked, she says no. She's the kind who if she stole twenty-five thousand on Monday, would come in Tuesday wearing a mink coat and driving a fire-engine-red Mustang. If you know what I mean."

  "Not exactly a wizard."

  "Not exactly," Tanner said.

  "Got a phone number?"

  "I do."

  ASHYLOCK NAMED Cole had retired and moved to Arizona. An old doper named Coin had been hit by a car while lying unconscious in the street, and was at Hennepin General, sober for the first time since he'd gone to an antiwar rally in the sixties; he didn't like it. An enormously fat man named Elliot, who ran a metal-fabrication shop but was mostly known for being enormously fat, had come down with prostate cancer, and was going to die from it. Half-Moon Towing was bankrupt and the bad-tempered owner, who collected guns, blamed the city council for cutting him out of the city towing contracts.

  Routine, mostly. A few notes, a few melancholy thoughts about finding a new job. But who else would pay you to have this kind of fun?

  LUCAS MADE IT back to the office and found Marcy waiting with Del and Lane; plus Rie from Sex, and Swanson and Tom Black from Homicide. The start of virtually every homicide investigation-other than the ordinary ones, where they knew who the killer was-began with paper, the details lifted from the murder scene, with interviews, with the reports from various laboratories. Swanson and Black had been pushing the routine.

  "The problem is, Aronson didn't have a boyfriend or a roommate, and the two ex-boyfriends we can find don't look real good for having done it. One of them is married and has a kid now, working his way through college, and the other one lives in Wyoming and barely seemed to remember her," Swanson said.

  "She have a phone book?" Sherrill asked.

  Black shook his head. "Just a bunch of scraps of paper with numbers on them. We checked them
and came up dry. Woman in the next apartment said she heard a male voice over there a couple of times in the month before she disappeared. Never any kind of disturbance or anything."

  "Look at the numbers stored in her cell phone?" Lucas asked. "Anything in her computer? She got a Palm Pilot or anything like that?"

  "She had a cell phone, but there weren't any numbers stored at all. The e-mail in her computer was mostly with her parents and her brother. No Palm. We got her local phone records: She had lots of calls out to ad agencies and to friends-we talked to them, they're all women, and we don't see a woman for this-and then some random calls out, pizza, stuff like that. We never tried to reconstruct the pizza-delivery guys, and now… hell, I don't know if we could. It's been too long."

  "What you're saying is, you ain't got shit," Del said.

  "That's the way it is," Black said. "That's one of the reasons we always thought there was a possibility that she was still alive-we came up so empty. She didn't drag around bars. Wasn't a party girl. No drugs, didn't drink much. No alcohol at all in her apartment. She worked at a restaurant called the Cheese-It down by St. Pat's. I suppose she could have run into somebody there, but it's not a meat rack or anything, it's a soup-and-sandwich place for students. She freelanced ad work, designing advertisements, and did some Web design, but we couldn't get hold of anything."

  Swanson was embarrassed. "We're not looking too swift on this thing."

  LUCAS PARCELED OUT assignments.

  "Swanson and Lane: Take all those ad agencies and the restaurant. Find out who she was talking to. Make lists of every name you run."

  He turned to Black, who had once been partnered with Marcy. "Marcy can't do a lot of running around yet, so I want you and her to work out of the office, get these three women in here, the ones who got drawings, and list every person they knew or remember having talked to before they got the drawings. No matter how slight the connection. When they can't remember a name, but remember a guy, get them to call people who would know him. I want a big-mother list."

  To Rie: "I want you and Del to get copies of the drawings and start running them around to the sex freaks. This guy has a screw loose, but I wouldn't be surprised if he's shown a few of these things around. He's an artist, so maybe he's been out looking for a little appreciation. We want more names: all the possibilities that your friends can think of." He snapped his fingers. "Do you remember Morris Ware?"

  "No."

  "I do," Del said. He looked at Rie. "Might've been before your time. He takes pictures of children."

  "He may be back in business," Lucas said. To Del: "Why don't you hang with me tomorrow. If we have time, we'll go look him up."

  "All right."

  "I see a couple of big possibilities for an early break," Lucas said. "The first one is, somebody knows him and turns him in. The second one is, we've got to figure he's had some contact with these women. If we get big enough lists, we should get some cross-references."

  "But we need those big-mother lists," Black said.

  "That's right. The more names we get, the better the chances of a cross. And the more people we can find who have gotten these drawings, the bigger the lists will be."

  "What're you gonna do?" Marcy asked.

  "Go talk to the movie people about some publicity," Lucas said. "We're gonna put the pictures on the street."

  4

  CHANNEL THREE WAS located in a low, rambling stone structure, a fashionable architect's attempt to put a silk purse on a corner that cried out for a pig's ear; Lucas had never liked the place. The building was a brisk crosstown walk from City Hall, and during the walk, Lucas thought for a moment that he'd seen a slice of blue in the sky, then decided that he'd been wrong. There was no blue; there never would be. He grinned at his own mood, and a woman he was passing nodded at him.

  Lucas had a full-sized Xerox of the Aronson drawing in his pocket, along with partial copies of the other three drawings; in those three, the faces had been carefully scissored out. He met Jennifer Carey in the Channel Three parking lot, where she was smoking a cigarette. She was tall and blond and the mother of Lucas's only child, his daughter, Sarah. Sarah lived with Carey and her husband.

  "Lucas," Carey said, snapping the cigarette into the street. A shower of sparks puffed out of the wet blacktop.

  "You know those things cause cancer," Lucas said.

  "Really? I'll have to do a TV show on it." She stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek. "What's happening? Where'd you get the hickey?"

  "That's it, I'm buying a turtleneck," Lucas said.

  "You'd look like a French thug," Carey said. "I could kind of go for it… So you're back with Weather?"

  "Yeah. Looks like," he said.

  "Gonna do the deed?"

  "Probably."

  "Good for you," she said. She looped her arm in his and tugged him along toward the door of the building. "I always liked that woman. I can't imagine how a little thing like a shooting came between you."

  "She had the guy's brains on her face," Lucas said. "It made an impression."

  "The brains? Or the incident? I mean, like a dent? Or did you mean impression, as a metaphor? Because I don't think brains would really-"

  "Shut up."

  "God, I love that tone," she said. "Why don't we get your handcuffs and find an empty van?"

  "I got a story for you," Lucas said.

  "Really?" The bullshit stopped. "A good one? Or am I doing your

  PR?"

  "It's decent," Lucas said.

  "So walk this way," she said. He followed her into the building and through a maze of hallways to her office. A stack of court transcripts occupied her visitor's chair; she moved them to her desk and said, "Sit down."

  "This is a purely unofficial visit," Lucas said. He took the Xerox copy of the Aronson drawing out of his pocket.

  "The best kind," Carey said. "What's that paper?"

  "There are a couple of conditions."

  "You know the kind of conditions we can accept… Can we accept them?" she asked.

  "Yeah."

  "Then… gimme."

  Lucas pushed the paper across the desk and Carey unfolded it, looked it over, and said, "She could lose a few pounds."

  "She has," Lucas said. "Death will do that for you."

  "She's dead?" Carey looked at him over the drawing.

  "That's Julie Aronson. Her body-"

  "Found her down south, I know the story," Carey said. She turned her lips down. "We've sorta hashed that over. Not that we can't use it."

  "Hang on, for Christ's sakes. Goddamn movie people," Lucas said. "The thing is, several women have gotten drawings like this-three more that we know of. Two got them in the mail, and a third set was posted on a bulletin board over at the U. We got a freak."

  She brightened. "You got more pictures?"

  He gave her the other three. She looked at them one at a time, said, "Man," and then, "These might possibly make a story. It'd be better if we could interview the victims."

  "I'd have to check. You won't get them today."

  "Could we hold off until we get them? Until tomorrow? That'd really pump the story."

  "No. If you don't want to use these today, I'll take them to Eight," Lucas said.

  "No no no… this is fine," she said hastily. "The biggest thing we've got going tonight is a promo for a soap opera. We'll do the drawings tonight, and then if we could get interviews tomorrow… that might even be better. Carry the story longer."

  "Good. And you've got to use them at both five and six o'clock. We want all the other stations screaming for them, scrambling around to catch up, playing them big at ten o'clock. We're really trying to plaster them around."

  Carey was no dummy. She looked at him closely and said, "You could do that by calling a press conference. Why the exclusive for us?"

  "Because you used to be my sweetie?"

  "Bullshit, Lucas."

  "Because we want you to owe us?"

  "There we go.
Why?"

  "Another story's about to break out of City Hall, and there are some consequences that I'd like to… manipulate." He put a hand to his cheek and thought for a second. "That came out wrong."

  "But it's probably right," Carey said. "Manipulate. What's the second story?"

  "If I tell you, you can't bury the drawings under the other story. The drawings have gotta be prominent."

  "Deal," she said. She looked at her watch. "But there's not much time. What is it?"

  "The mayor's not going to run this fall," Lucas said, leaning forward, elbows on his knees. "One consequence is that Rose Marie is out-he can't reappoint her just before the election. I suspect a few other top people are gonna fall, too."

  Carey stood up, reached toward the phone, stopped. "Who knows this?"

  "The mayor's walking around City Hall right now, talking to his top people, maybe a couple of people on the council. Word will leak tonight."

  "Okay." She picked up the Aronson drawing, held it vertically like a poster, and said, "You know, it's really pretty good." Then she folded it, businesslike, and said, "Get out of here. I'll get the police guy to come see you in twenty minutes about the drawings. I'll tell him I got them from an insider, but not you. You can be surprised-he won't know where it's coming from. I'll get the mayor myself."

  "The Aronson picture… I mean, her ass is in it. I don't know if you show asses at five o'clock, but you've got to show enough that people get the idea of the style. Same with the others… We need to find the guy who drew them."

  "I think we can show an ass," Carey said.

  "The more the better," Lucas said. "We need a little pop, a little shock. Some talk."