Chosen Prey ld-12

by John Sandford

  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 index 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?"

  "No
t 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 come 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.

  Getting old.

  Lucas stood in his office door, chatting with Baxter, while Ware slumped on a chair and picked at his cuticles. He'd also aged after the long night in the lockup. Yesterday, his gray-on-black shirt and jacket had looked arty; today they looked drab. Then Sloan banged into the office and asked, cheerfully, "Everybody ready?"

  Lucas nodded, and Sloan dragged an extra chair into the office, plugged in the tape deck, checked the cassette, and then recited everybody's names and the date, looked at Ware, and said, "Looks like you had a pretty bad night."

  "Ahhhh," Ware said in disgust.

  "It's a problem when somebody comes in late," Sloan said. "The courts just won't move themselves around to have round-the-clock bail hearings."

  "I think it's absurd. You're supposed to be treated as if you're innocent until proven guilty."

  "No," Sloan said. "You are innocent until proven guilty."

  "That's right, that's right."

  Baxter looked at Lucas and rolled his eyes. They both knew what Sloan was doing-he was getting on Ware's side. "Why don't you ask a question," Baxter said to Sloan. "We can have the blood-brother ceremony later."

  Morris Ware listened to the story of the drawings, then looked at the drawings. "Very nice," he said, but he said it with a bored tone that sounded genuine.

  "What?" Lucas asked. "They're not to your taste?"

  "No, they are not," Ware said.

  "You like the young stuff," Lucas suggested.

  "I am not interested in bodies," Ware said. "I am interested in qualities- innocence, freshness, dawning awareness…"

  "Let's cut the horseshit, Morrie," Lucas said. "Look at this guy."

  Ware took the printed-out photo of the actor from Day of the Jackal. "Yes?"

  "Who do you know in the sex-freak community who looks like this-a guy with connection to the arts, who knows about computers and photography, is interested in blond women, who might like to strangle them?"

  Ware looked over the photo at Lucas. "If I knew, it'd be worth a lot more than dropping this stupid cocaine charge."

  "On the other hand, if you know and don't tell us, and we find out-that's accessory to first-degree murder. When a known child pornographer is charged with murder, sometimes the juries aren't too fussy about how strong the evidence is," Lucas said.

  "I'm not-Fuck you."

  Sloan eased in: the good guy. "Take it easy, Lucas, we want the guy to cooperate."

  "Dickweed says he's not a pornographer," Lucas snapped.

  Sloan held up a hand, then looked at Ware. "Let's forget the pornography stuff. Who do you know? That's the question."

  Ware looked down at the photo again, then back at Sloan. "You know, this is a fashionable look among the art crowd-that languid, ascot-wearing, private-school look."

  "So you know some people?"

  "I could give you five or six names of people, um, in the art community who, um, also have an interest in nonconventional sexuality."

  "Great," Sloan said.

  "But I don't think any of them will be your man," he said.

  "Why not?" Sloan had the ability to project eagerness for an answer.

  Ware closed his eyes and tilted his head back. "Because I think I met your man. At a photography show at the Institute."

  "The Institute of Art," Sloan said.

  Ware nodded without opening his eyes. "But it was a long time
ago-ten years, maybe. The fellow was maybe twenty-five, and he was looking at a series of nudes by Edward Weston. I can sometimes tell by the way people look at… pictures… that they are enthusiasts. He had the look-and by the way, he doesn't so much look like the man in your photograph as much as he shares an air with him."

  "What'd he say?"

  "He talked about how Weston did photographs that were as clean as fine drawings. He took a pencil from his pocket and used the eraser end to show how you could follow the line of the nude to make a whole new creation. There was a certain frenzy to it."

  Sloan glanced at Lucas, then at Ware. "That's interesting. Do you remember his name, have you seen him since, know where he works, or what he does?"

  Ware opened his eyes and looked at Lucas. "I never knew his name. I can't remember seeing him since that day. I don't know where he works. It was all too long ago… But one thing struck me, given his enthusiasm. I don't know what it was, but something he said made me think that he was a priest. Or studying to be a priest, or something."

  "Really?" Sloan's eyebrows went up.

  "Something he said made me think he might be a priest," Ware said.

  "A priest?"

  "That's the only reason that it all stuck with me: He was a priest, and his enthusiasm was so clear."

  "He was wearing a collar?"

  "No, nothing like that. But if you were a priest and you were going to an exhibit of nudes… maybe you wouldn't wear the collar."

  Sloan ticked it off on his fingers. "So he was an enthusiast, he had a frenzy about him, he compared the nudes to drawings…"

  "One other thing. He was so obviously an enthusiast-and perhaps he saw it in me-that we walked along for a bit, looking at the photographs and talking, and I said something about women being endlessly fascinating. He shook his head and he said, 'Not endlessly. Not endlessly.' He looked at me, and I was a little frightened. Really-frightened."

  Lucas said, interested, "Huh. In the middle of the day, in the museum, you were frightened."

  "Yeah." Ware nodded. "Years ago, back in the eighties, there were rumors of Mexican snuff flicks. You know, some woman gets hauled into a warehouse, is raped and beaten, and then she's killed on camera. There were even a few flicks offered around, for collectors of that kind of thing. Pretty bad fakes, for the most part. But occasionally, you'd get somebody looking for one. Sometimes they were cops, sometimes they were reporters, sometimes they were curiosity seekers. Sometimes they were people who scared you. People who really wanted a snuff flick. I got a whiff of that from the priest."