Chosen Prey (9 page)

More tears gathered at the corners of his eyes. Nobody loved him. Not even Barstad--she just wanted the sex.

"I'm alone," he said. His hand hurt, and he looked down at his knuckles. They were bleeding, badly; how had that happened? He was bewildered by the blood and pain, but he could also feel the anger gathering. "I'm all alone."

Chapter
6.

THE SKY WAS churning, but it was neither snowing nor raining when Lucas made it down to City Hall. He'd had too much coffee, and he stopped at the men's room; Lester, the deputy chief for investigations, was facing into a urinal when Lucas stepped inside and parked next to him. "What do you think about the mayor?" Lester asked.

"Gonna be some changes," Lucas said.

"Don't see any way that Rose Marie'll be reappointed," Lester said gloomily. "I'll probably get stuck out in the weeds somewhere."

"So quit, get a state job, and double-dip. Two pensions are better than one."

"I sort of like it here." Lester shook a couple of times, zipped up and walked over to a sink, and turned on the water. "What are you going to do? Stay on?"

"That'd be tough," Lucas said. "A little depends on who gets the top job."

"I'll tell you what, there's a lot of calculation going on today," Lester said. "People standing around talking. The bullshit machine is running overtime."

"Always happens," Lucas said, zipping up and moving to the next sink. "How many chiefs you been through?"

"Nine," Lester said. "Rose Marie was the ninth. But it was a lot easier to make the change on the first four or five, when I was sitting in a squad with a flashlight and a doughnut."

DEL AND MARCY were waiting in the new office. "Swanson and Lane are over at the Cheese-It, trying to find somebody who might have seen Aronson with Bruce Willis," Marcy said. She handed Lucas a photograph of the actor. "We downloaded a picture of Willis from the net, and we're gonna have it redrawn, and sort of generalized, with the long black coat. Put it out in the papers."

Lucas snapped the photo with his fingertip and said, "That's good. Get it going. How about the lists?"

"We got Anderson to set up a computerized sorting program. We type in lists for each woman and push a button and it finds matches. So far, we don't have any. But we do have something else."

"What?"

"We have nine women calling in--count 'em, nine--saying they got these drawings in the mail."

"Nine?"

"Over three years. Five of them saved the drawings. I've got a couple of squads running around right now, picking up the drawings, and four of the women are coming in this afternoon to talk to me and Black. We're probably gonna have to go out for the others. They can't get away from their jobs so easy."

"If we got nine, then there are probably twenty more," Lucas said.

"We're also getting a little more media space than we thought. There hasn't been much good crime news lately, so CNN and Fox picked up on the drawings from the local stations last night, and they're showing them every fifteen minutes all day."

"So I can go home and take a nap?"

"No. You and Del are going to six ad agencies. Gonna look in the art department for buzzcut guys with long dark coats. Also, you got a call from a Terry Marshall--he's a sheriff's deputy from over in Menomonie, in Wisconsin. Dunn County. He's hot to talk. And a guy named Gerry Haack who wants you to call back right away."

Del said, "I've got the list of ad agencies. We can walk to them."

"Let me make the calls, and we'll go," Lucas said.

HE CALLED HAACK first. "What?"

"You told those guys who I was," Haack screamed. The scream was followed by two rattling whack s, as though Haack had banged the receiver against a wooden wall. "They're gonna kill me. I'm gonna lose my job."

"I didn't tell them anything," Lucas said bluntly. "I asked if Aronson was on the corner, and they said no. Then they asked who told me that, and when I wouldn't say, they guessed. And guess who they thought of first?"

"Goddamnit, Davenport, you gotta tell them I wasn't the one. They're gonna pull my nuts off," Haack shouted.

"You've been hanging out with the wrong people," Lucas said. "Your speeder friends might pull your nuts off, but these guys, they're not bad guys. They might give you a little shit, but that's about all."

"Goddamnit, Davenport."

"And Gerry . . . if you call back, make sure you know what you're talking about, okay? This worked out, no problems. They even gave me a little help. But bad information is usually worse than no information, because we waste time chasing it. Think you can remember that?"

"Goddamnit . . ."

Lucas hung up, looked at the slip for the Dunn County cop, and poked in the number. A woman answered on the first ring. "I'm returning a call from Terry Marshall," Lucas said.

"I'm afraid he's gone for the day," the woman said. "Who's calling?"

"Lucas Davenport. I'm a deputy chief over in Minneapolis."

"Oh. Okay. Terry's on his way there now. I think he's looking for you."

"You know what it's about?"

"Nope. I just got a note. Says if I need to get him, call your office, he expects to be there by noon unless there's a problem with the snow. He's driving."

"There's snow?"

"Around here there is; it looks like a blizzard. You can see it on the radar all the way to Hudson. . . . Must be past you guys."

"Yeah, it's past here. . . . I'll keep an eye out for your guy." He dropped the phone on the hook and went to get Del. As they were leaving, Marcy got off the phone and said, "I just talked to Mallard in Washington. He says the shrinks are looking at the drawings and pulling on their beards, but don't expect anything before tomorrow."

COOL SPRING DAY, the air damp, walking across town, looking at all the muddy cars, eighty-thousand-dollar Mercedes-Benzes that resembled melting mudbergs, and at the women with their red noses and cheeks and plastic boots. "Kind of interesting, having Marcy as a coordinator," Del said, as he hopped over an icy puddle at a corner curb.

"Could be chief someday, if she works things right," Lucas said, hopping after him. "If she's willing to put up with some bullshit."

"Hate to see her go for lieutenant," Del said. "She'd wind up stuck away somewhere, property crime or something. They'd start pushing her through the rounds."

"Got to do it, if you want to go up," Lucas said.

"You didn't do it," Del said.

"Maybe you didn't notice, but I never went up until I pulled a political job out of my ass," Lucas said.

THE SIX AD agencies took the rest of the morning; hip, smart people in sharp clothes, all with a touch of color, the people looking curiously at the cops. Lucas, in his straight charcoal suit, felt like a Politburo member walking in a flower garden. They showed pictures of Willis in Pulp Fiction, and got shaking heads at four of the agencies, raised eyebrows at two others. They looked at the possibilities presented by these two agencies, without any personal contact, and agreed that they were possible but unlikely.

One was a kid, the right size and shape, but probably too young--his personnel jacket said he was twenty-two, a summer graduate of the University of Minnesota-Morris. His winter coat was a dark blue hip-length parka, and his boss had never seen him in anything else. "Never in a topcoat," she said. "He's pretty country for a topcoat."

Lucas nodded. "So thanks," he said.

"What should I do?" she asked. "If he's being investigated . . ."

"Don't do anything," Lucas said. "Wouldn't be right; the chances of his being involved in anything are pretty slim."

Outside, Del said, "Didn't Aronson come from out there somewhere? Like Morris?"

"No, she was from Thief River," Lucas said.

"That's out there."

"Del, Thief River is about as close to fuckin' Morris as we are to fuckin' Des Moines, for Christ's sakes."

"Excuse my abysmal fuckin' ignorance," Del said.

The second possibility was the right age, and he had a dark topcoat, but the hair and body shape were wrong. The agency chief said the man never had a buzzcut, always the ponytail. They thanked him and left.

"This sucks," Lucas said.

"Be nicer if we were walking around in the summer," Del said. "I'll run them both, but they don't feel so good." He looked up at the gray sky and said, "I wish the sun would come out."

"Maybe in April."

THEY WALKED BACK to City Hall through the Skyways, shouldering through the lunchtime rush and the human traffic jams around the food courts. Lucas got an apple at the courthouse cafeteria, and Del got a tuna-fish sandwich and a Coke. At the office, Marcy, who was talking to a severe-looking young woman, looked up and said, "The Dunn County guy is here. I put him in your office. And we got those pictures made. You say yes, and we send them out."

Lucas took a picture from her. The artist had deftly generalized Willis's features, emphasized the buzzcut and added the long coat. "Good," Lucas said. "Send it."

Terry Marshall was ten or fifteen years older than Lucas, in the indeterminate mid-fifties to early sixties, with a lean, weathered face, brown hair showing swatches of gray, and a short brush-cut mustache. He wore round steel-rimmed glasses that might have made someone else look like John Lennon. Marshall didn't look anything like Lennon; he looked like something that might have eaten Lennon. He was sitting in Lucas's guest chair reading the paper. When Lucas pushed through the door, he stood up and said, "Your girl out there told me to wait here."

For all his wolfish appearance, he seemed a little embarrassed, and Lucas said, "As long as you didn't go through my drawers."

Marshall grinned and said, "Let it never be said that I spent any time in your drawers. Is that girl a secretary, or what? She pushes people around."

"She's a cop," Lucas said. "She does push."

"Ah." Marshall sat down again as Lucas settled behind his desk. "I thought she seemed, I guess . . ." He stopped, looking confused.

"What?"

"She seemed like she might be . . . I don't know. Handicapped, or something."

"We had a guy up here running around shooting people last fall. We caught him in a gas station--it was on TV."

"I remember that," Marshall said.

"Before we caught him, the guy shot Marcy with a hunting rifle. Right through the rib cage from about fifty feet. She got off a couple of rounds as she was down--helped us pin down the car and break the whole thing. But she was pretty messed up."

"Jeez." Marshall leaned forward to look at Marcy through the office window. "She gonna be all right?" There was concern in his voice, and Lucas liked him for it.

"In a while. She's getting pretty antsy already, that's why we've got her in here."

"Never been shot myself."

Marshall seemed to think about that for a minute, and Lucas, just a little impatient, said, "So, what can I do for you?"

"Ah, yeah." Marshall had a beat-up leather briefcase by his foot, and he picked it up, dug through it, and pulled out a legal portfolio. "This file is for you. Nine years ago, we had a young girl--nineteen--disappear. Name was Laura Winton. We never found out what happened to her, but we think she was strangled or smothered and dumped out in the country somewhere. We never did find the guy who did it."

"You think . . ."

"The thing is, he was pretty clever," Marshall said. "He apparently hung around this girl for a week before he killed her. He killed her on Christmas day, during Christmas break at the university. She lived on a street full of older houses that are all cut up into apartments as off-campus student housing. . . . You know what they're like."

"I know. I lived in the same kind of place myself when I was a kid."

Marshall nodded. "Anyway, he hung around her for about a week, and not a single one of her housemates ever saw him. When he killed her, he did it when they were all gone--she had three housemates, and all three were gone for Christmas."

"Why wasn't she gone?"

"Because she was a hometown girl," Marshall said. "She was the older of two daughters and she had two younger brothers, and when she moved out of her house to go to the university, the other daughter got the bedroom to herself. It was just too much trouble to stay overnight when her own place was only a couple of miles away. So she went over to her parents' for Christmas morning, to open gifts and eat lunch, and then she went back to her apartment. As far as we know, nobody ever saw her again, except the killer."

Lucas leaned back. "Why do you think she was strangled?"

Marshall's Adam's apple bobbed, and he looked down at his hands. When he looked up, there was a tightness around his eyes. Terry Marshall could be just as hard--mean--as he needed to be, Lucas thought; it was something you saw in longtime sheriff's deputies, even more than in big-city cops. "When she disappeared . . . there was no reason. There was no note; she was supposed to go back to her folks' the next day. She'd been sorting clothes for the laundry, apparently, when the killer showed up."

"If there was a killer . . ."