Chosen Prey (4 page)

"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."

"You could switch and become a Republican," Lucas said.

"Life isn't long enough." She shook her head. "I tried to get him to go for one more term, but he says he's gotta earn some money before he's too old."

"So what are you going to do?" Lucas asked.

"What are you going to do?"

"I . . ." Lucas shrugged.

Rose Marie sighed. "You're a political appointee, Lucas, and I'll tell you what: The only likely internal candidate is Randy Thorn, and he won't reappoint you. He's a control freak, and he doesn't like the way we let you operate."

"You think he'll get it?" Lucas asked.

"He could. He's a damn good uniform chief. All that rah-rah shit and community contacts and brother-cop backslapping. He put on some combat gear last week and went on a raid with the Emergency Response Team. There're a couple of macho assholes on the council who like that stuff."

"Yeah. I'm not sure he's smart enough."

"I'm not, either. It's more likely that the new mayor'll bring somebody in from the outside. Somebody with no other local loyalties. Somebody who's big with the New York no-tolerance style. I doubt that any outsider would reappoint the current deputy chiefs. He'd want to put his own people in. Lester and Thorn are still civil service, and captains. If they don't keep their deputy-chief spots, they'll still have a top slot somewhere. But you're not civil service."

"So we're both history," Lucas said. He leaned back, interlaced his fingers behind his head, and exhaled.

"Maybe. I'm gonna start working on something," Rose Marie said.

"What?"

She waved him off. "I can't even start talking about it yet. I'm gonna have to stab a couple of people in the back. Maybe give a couple blow jobs."

"Not at the same time. You could pull a muscle."

She smiled. "You're taking this pretty well. Which is good, because I'm not. Goddamnit. I wanted one more term. . . . Anyway, I wanted you to know that we're probably on the way out."

"I was starting to have fun again," Lucas said.

"What about you and Weather?" Rose Marie asked. "Is she pregnant yet?"

"I don't know, but it could happen."

Rose Marie laughed, a genuine, head-back, chest-shaking laugh, and then said, "Excellent. That's really perfect."

"And if she is . . ." Lucas squinted at the ceiling, calculating. "You and I oughta be getting fired just about the time the baby arrives."

"Like you need the job. You got more money than Jesus Christ."

"I do need the job. I need some job," Lucas said.

"Then hang on. It's gonna be a ride."

AFTER LEAVING ROUX'S office, Lucas went back to Homicide, got an exact reading on where Aronson's body had been found, marked it on a map and Xeroxed the map, then walked over to the Fourth Street parking ramp and got into his Tahoe. On the way south, out of town, he passed within a block of Aronson's apartment, and remembered talking with her parents when she disappeared: trying to reassure them, when he felt in his cop heart that their daughter was already dead. They'd all been together at her apartment, her parents waiting for a phone call, from her, from anybody, and he remembered wandering around inside . . . .

Aronson's apartment had been in a six-story brown-brick prewar building south of the loop, and her mother had been waiting at the door when Lucas turned the corner on the stairs.

"Glad you could come," she'd said. He remembered that the apartment building hallways had smelled of paint, disinfectant, and insect spray but that Aronson's apartment had the odor of a Christmas sachet.