Chosen Prey

12

HELEN QATAR WALKED with Lucas down to the river. The ice was gone and a Corps of Engineers workboat was plugging along below them, a guy on the foredeck looking at the bank through binoculars. A cyclist went past, and, despite the cold, a redheaded jogger with bare tummy and a black jog bra. An eagle hung over the water, hunting for a tidbit.

The statue of St. Patrick looked as metallic as ever, staring blankly at the campus as though he'd forgotten something. He was, in fact, trampling on a snake; and the wall behind him was the wall in the photo.

"There," Lucas said to Qatar. "That little stack of rocks at the end of the wall. You were right."

"I can't see what possible good it will do," Qatar said.

"We have all these Catholics and now we've got a location. I don't know if he's associated with the college or if he just lives around here, but for some reason, they were here. You can almost see his shadow."

"An unusual thought for a policeman," Qatar said. "It could lead to poetry, or to country and western."

"God forbid," Lucas said, smiling at her. Then: "I can almost see the guy. One of the first women he killed said he looked like a movie star in an old movie, Day of the Jackal, about an attempted assassination of de Gaulle. The killer looked like the Jackal."

"That is grotesque, the coincidence is," Qatar said. "I'll have to rent the movie. You say it's old?"

"Sixties or seventies," Lucas said.

"Ah. I spent the fifties and sixties watching art films. They were very… bad."

Lucas laughed, and they walked companionably back toward the campus. At the corner of the Wells, Lucas said goodbye and started toward his car. Qatar called after him: "Mr. Davenport…"

Lucas turned. She was halfway up the walk to the museum, and now turned and walked back toward him. "I'm sure this has nothing to do… nothing to do with your case, but a professor in the art history department just committed suicide. Yesterday, or the night before."

"That's interesting," Lucas said, stepping back toward her. "What was his name?"

"It was a her."

"Oh." Not what he wanted. "Huh. A suicide?"

"She apparently jumped off the Ford Bridge. She didn't show up for work yesterday, and then they found her car on Mississippi Boulevard. They thought… I don't know what they thought, but then her body was seen in the river. The St. Paul paper had an article that said the body's condition suggested that she went over the dam."

"Okay. Did the story say anything about depression?" Lucas asked.

"Nothing like that," Qatar said. "My son works in the department, and he said that she was troubled. Quite unpopular. I don't know if that leads to suicide."

"I'll tell you something, Mrs. Qatar: For depressives, nothing can lead to suicide. You get ink on a shirt and decide the only answer is to kill yourself. Unpopularity would be more than enough."

"I'll leave that for you to work out," she said. "In the meantime, I'll try to think what I might have in common with this monster."

THE KILLER AND Aronson had been at St. Pat's, or at least along the bike path next to the St. Pat's campus. There hadn't been any bikes in the photo, which suggested to Lucas that they'd walked. If they were walking… they were on the wrong side of the campus to be casually shopping the college village. So they might well have a connection to the school.

He walked back to the truck and slipped the key in the ignition, paused, and then took out his cell phone. He got the number for the Ramsey County Medical Examiner from dispatch, and hooked up with an investigator named Flanagan.

"Can't tell you much, Lucas. We don't know exactly what killed her. She apparently went off the bridge fully dressed and in one piece, and then, after she went over the dam, she got caught up in some kind of tumbling current and it just beat the hell out of her. We kind of think that a massive blow to the head did the first real damage; looks like she hit a piece of abutment headfirst when she went over."

"Come on, Henry," Lucas said. "You're saying she dove off? Like saying goodbye with a big fuckin' swan dive? Nobody to watch? No audience?"

"No, I'm not saying that. I'm saying that somehow she smacked her head on something hard, and that might have been the first damage."

"You think suicide?"

"One of the things that weren't too damaged were her hands. No signs of defensive wounds. No blood in her car," Flanagan said.

"So are you carrying it as a suicide?"

"We're carrying it as unknown. I don't know if that'll change. Like I said, she was pretty torn up."

"Was she a big woman? Strong?"

"Large, but not especially strong. Pretty much a couch potato."

"Okay… but look, if you decide something different, give me a call."

"Is this about something?" Flanagan asked.

"I don't know."

"St. Paul has the file. We only got the body back last night, so everything is pretty intact. We notified a relative out in California… a sister."

HE WAS SUPPOSED to be rolling around town, and hadn't yet done much rolling. He looked at his watch, then called St. Paul and had the call transferred to Homicide. A detective named Allport took the call. "We don't want no davenports," he said. "We just got a new one, kind of a small classy-looking plaid with an ottoman."

"I'm calling to tell you that your wife wants a divorce. We're moving to Majorca to study oral sex."

"I'll tell you one thing for sure: You got the wrong goddamn wife," Allport said. Then: "I hope to hell this is a social call. I see you're working that graveyard case."

"Yeah. But I came across a really obscure, probably-nothing connection. The last woman killed-Aronson?-was over at St. Pat's just a few days before, maybe with the killer. We think the killer's an artist."

"I saw the drawings. And this chick who went off the bridge taught art at St. Pat's."

"Yeah."

"We got nothing on it, Lucas. She went through a meat grinder under that dam. We looked through her house, we looked through her car, no blood, no signs of a struggle. No nothin'. We talked to a couple of people in her department who said she was angry and aggressive and confrontational and maybe depressed. And maybe an unfulfilled lesbo. So…"

"No sign that she was strangled?"

"She wasn't that beat up. No, she wasn't strangled."

"Okay. Just a thought," Lucas said.

"Where are you at?" Allport asked.

"Over by St. Pat's."

"You aren't more than ten minutes from her house, then. Run across the Lake Street Bridge. She's practically right there. We had her car towed back to her place. You could look at it there, if you want."

Lucas looked at his watch, then said, "How do I get in?"

HE HAD TO wait in the driveway for five minutes before the squad car showed. The patrol cop gave him the keys, and Lucas let himself inside. In ten minutes, he figured out that Neumann must have had a cat; not much else occurred to him. The house was ready for somebody to come back.

Her car was in the garage. He snapped on an overhead light, opened the door, and looked inside. She had not been particularly tidy about her transportation: The backseat was littered with old newspapers, memos, and empty Diet Coke bottles, along with a few wadded-up translucent paper sacks of the kind that usually held bakery. Lucas looked through it, found nothing, looked under the visor and in the glove box. A couple of cash register slips lay on the passenger-side floor, and he picked them up and turned them over. One came from a Kinko's: She had apparently done some copying. The other came from a supermarket. Forty dollars worth of groceries, cat litter, Tampax, and lightbulbs. At the bottom were the date and time: ten o'clock on the night she'd apparently died.

Lucas scratched his head. The house inside had been fairly empty…

He carried the slip back to the house and looked in the refrigerator and cupboards. Found a box of cat litter of the same brand, almost empty. Found a box of Tampax, almost empty.

He went back to the car and popped the trunk. No groceries.

"All right," he said. He called Allport with his cell phone.

"I just got back from lighting candles at the Cathedral. I was praying you wouldn't call back," Allport said.

"I found this cash register receipt," Lucas said.

He explained, and Allport said, "With the thing about the Tampax and the cat litter, it don't sound like she was taking food to a shut-in."

"No. She needed the stuff on this list. She got two quarts of two-percent milk, and there was an empty two-quart carton of two-percent in her garbage under the sink. She got bite-sized shredded wheat, and she had less than half a box of the same stuff in her cupboard."

"Goddamnit, where'd the fuckin' groceries go? I'll talk to the guys who found the car. Maybe they donated them or something."

"You think?"

"No. I don't think. Why don't you stay there for a few minutes. I'm gonna run over and get that cash register tape."

Allport showed up a half hour later, shaking his head. "The guys who found the car said there was nothing in it. No groceries."

"They're telling the truth?"

"Yup."

"Hard to believe that somebody knocked her on the head for her groceries," Lucas said.

"Stranger things have happened. You get some bums around that bridge-"

"Who knocked her on the head, threw her off the bridge, stole her groceries, but left her empty car in the street with the doors locked and two dollars in quarters in the parking-meter change holder."

"Probably not," Allport said glumly.

"Maybe the groceries depressed her and she took them with her," Lucas suggested. "You find any dead Tampax floating down the river?"

"Goddamnit."

WHEN LUCAS GOT back to City Hall, Marcy Sherrill told him that the task force would meet the next day to get organized. "McGrady called. They think the hill's clean. They think they got all of them."

"So we're all done."

"Not quite. The feds want to resurvey the whole hill. They're bringing in a team from Washington."

"Lake is pretty good, I think. If he can't find any more, then there probably aren't any."

"Eight's enough. Nine would be excessive."

"Yeah… All right, I got two things." He told her about the wall at St. Pat's and the professor found in the river. "What I want you to do is get a couple of guys working on St. Pat's connections. Get the names of everybody in the St. Pat's art department and run them. If you can't do it personally, get Sloan to do it. Black can be a little sloppy with that kind of thing. And do a background on this professor, the one who went over the dam."

"I'll do that. Are you off again?"

"Nope. I've got to make a couple of phone calls. Something just popped into my head."

He began by calling St. Paul Homicide and getting contact numbers for Charlotte Neumann, the art professor. She had no local relatives, so he started with the department secretary. After identifying himself, he asked, "Did Miz Neumann have any expensive jewelry?"

"Uh, a few pieces, I guess. She was a widow, you know."

"No, I didn't."

"Oh, yes, her husband was quite a bit older, a very well-known architect in Rochester. She had a nice diamond engagement ring-beautiful rose-cut diamond, a carat and a half, I think-and her wedding ring was gold, of course."

"Did she wear it?"

"Oh, yes. Not the diamond very often, but she wore the wedding ring, on her right hand. She also had an older woman's gold Rolex watch, which she liked because she worked in clay as her… artistic expression, I suppose you'd say. She said the dust didn't get in the Rolex like it did other watches. She also had a ring with a small green stone which might have been an emerald, but I'm not sure. Oh, and sapphire-and-diamond earrings. The earrings were very modest, but the sapphires were huge. A carat each. So blue they almost looked black. And, hmm… I think that was about it."

"No pearls?"

"Oh, sure, she had a string of pearls with matching earrings. I don't know how expensive they were. She wore them for routine cocktails sessions and so on. Social gatherings at the president's house."

"Listen: Thank you. You've really helped a lot." Lucas hung up and redialed St. Paul Homicide. "When you guys went through Neumann's house, did you inventory the valuables?"

"Sure. Want me to shoot you the list? There's not much on it."

Lucas felt the tingle. "You have it? The list?"

"Yeah, just a minute." The phone clunked on Allport's desk, and he went away. He was back in a minute, and he said, "She didn't accumulate a lot."

"She wore an older gold Rolex watch, had a diamond engagement ring, with a big diamond, maybe a carat and a half, pearls, a greenstone ring that might have been an emerald, and diamond-and-sapphire earrings. Big sapphires. Very expensive."

Long silence. Then: "You're really busting my balls, man."

"None of it's on the list?"

"No. I'll check with the guys," Allport said.

"She also wore a gold wedding band on her right hand," Lucas said.

"No wedding band. Nothing like that."

"What do you think?"

"I think I'm gonna wind up working overtime."

Lucas leaned toward his door and yelled, "MARCY."

She yelled back: "WHAT?"

"Do you have the number for Aronson's folks?"

She dug it out and brought it in. "What's going on?"

"Tell you in a minute," he said. She sat down, and Lucas dialed the number. Aronson's mother was named Dolly. She asked, quietly, "Did you catch him?"

"Not yet," Lucas said.

"I'm praying for it."

"Mrs. Aronson, did your daughter have anything expensive, especially jewelry, or anything small and high value like that, that might be missing?"

"Yes," she said positively. "We talked to somebody there about it, but we never found out what happened to it. We didn't want to seem like we were complaining."

"We think that the man who killed her may have taken the jewelry."

"Oh, no."

"But if he did, and we can identify it…"

"Oh, yes. I'd know these two pieces anywhere. An antique pearl necklace and an antique pearl wedding ring. They were my mother's, and her mother's before that. I had them myself for thirty years."

"Do you have photos or anything?"

"Actually, my insurance agent does, I believe. Shall I send them?"

"Yes… uh, no. What I would prefer is if you could take them to your local police department and have them make color copies and send the copies. Hang on to the originals in case we need them."

"I will do that. I will get them and make the copies and I will send them to you by Express Mail. Or if you need them immediately, I will have Dick drive them down."

"Express Mail would be fine," Lucas said.

When he got off the phone, he told Marcy, "We need a list of fences."

"I'll talk to the guys in property crime," she said. "If the guy is taking this stuff, you think he would be stupid enough to sell it here?"

"How many Minneapolis artists know fences in New York?"

"All right. I'll talk to them right now," Marcy said.

"How are the lists going?"

"We've got a couple more matches, but nothing hot."

"How about IDs from the graveyard?" Lucas asked.

"Just the ones we knew going in. The state guys are rounding up dental records for women reported missing, who are still missing, that more or less match the ones that we know-more or less blond, more or less interested in art, seventeen to thirty-five at the time of their disappearance."

"Bet we get a few," Lucas said.

"Ought to start getting some results by tomorrow."

"We want to get on top of them: Start making the lists as soon as we get a name."

She had a stack of papers in her hands, and she shuffled through them. "There was one girl from Lino Lakes, a Brenda… I think. Hmmm…" She was so intent that Lucas smiled and asked, "You like this? Running things?"

"Yes," she said, looking up. "Not only that, I'm pretty good at it."

"I thought you might be," he said. "I just hope you don't wind up spending too much time with this task force. Get your name known, but hang around here, not with them. It's always better to be with the winner."

"The winner?"

"Yeah," Lucas said. "The task force won't catch this guy. We will."

THAT NIGHT, LUCAS made pasta with his special meat sauce-ground moose tenderloin with off-the-shelf vegetarian spaghetti sauce-with apple-onion salad and Chianti, and had it ready when Weather arrived. She came dragging in, her briefcase a half-inch off the kitchen tile. She sniffed the air and asked, "Moose?"

"Different this time. I've perfected it," he said.

"I suppose you've used the whole jar of spaghetti sauce."

"Nope. I knew you'd be chicken, so I saved some. You can sample the moose, and if you don't like it, we'll whip some of the straight stuff into the microwave." He picked up her attitude. "What happened to you?"

"I had a really bad day," she said. "Really bad."

"I thought you had the day off," Lucas said. "Paperwork."

"And a couple of office patients. Have I told you about Harvey Simson? The guy who runs the snowmobile and ATV shop?"

"No."

"He was cleaning out a carburetor a month or so ago with some kind of spray solvent, and it exploded. He got third-degree burns on his forearms, and after it was cleaned up, he needed a graft to cover the wound. I was up, so I took some skin off his leg and put it on his arm. No sweat. I saw him a couple of times, met his wife, she's this nice fat girl, one of the happy ones, and they've got a little daughter and another kid on the way. He's about thirty and he's finally got the shop going, and they're starting to make some money, but they didn't have a whole lot of insurance. So the question comes up, how are they gonna pay for the burn work? They're not poor enough to get aid, but they're not rich enough to write a check. So Harvey said not to worry, he'd cover it. He went to the bank, and the bank knew him well enough to give him another loan on his shop, and he's right up to date."

She put her head down and snuffled a couple of times, something Lucas hadn't often seen with her patients. "Well, Jesus, what…"

"So he came in today so I could take a last look, and I'm asking him how everything is, and everything's fine, and he's hoping we get an early spring so he can start moving the ATVs, and so on, and then he mentions he's got some kind of skin fungus going that he can't seem to shake, right in the middle of his back, and it itches. So I say, let me take a look…"

"Ah, shit," Lucas said.

She bobbed her head. "Yup. A big fat melanoma. He's known he's had it for weeks, or maybe three or four months. God knows how long he had it before that. I sent him right over to Sharp, but… I think he's history. Just been too much time."

"Jeez." Lucas patted her on the back.

"Yeah. I can handle the ones where I know what's going on. But when it just jumps up like this, a guy younger than you are yourself, and he looks perfectly healthy and he's gonna be dead in a year… Man. I don't know. I'm wondering if I ought to have a kid at all."

"Hey. If everybody worried about what would happen to their kid if they died, nobody would have kids. You just do it."

"Yeah…"

"Tell you what's worse: If you have the kid, and the kid dies. That's worse."

"I guess." She sighed. "Fuckin' moose, huh?"

MARCY HAD PHOTOS of Aronson's jewelry when Lucas arrived at the office in the morning, as well as insurance photograph of Neumann's diamond and emerald rings.

"Aronson's parents came in this morning," she said. "They decided they didn't want to take a chance on the mail, so they drove down last night, stayed in a motel, and brought them in first thing."

Lucas looked at the photos. Both the necklace and the ring had been shot against a black background, and had been enlarged to show detail. "Better than I hoped," he said. "Get the property guys to run these around town. Paper the place."

"That's sorta under way," Marcy said. "We got some copies made, and Del's taking them around to people he knows, and he knows most of them… Property's already doing some more."

"Okay… Do you know if the state's still working the hill?"

"They are-McGrady called. They've got an ID on another one of the dead women. Ellice Hampton, from Clear Lake, Iowa. She disappeared four years ago, twenty-eight. She was unemployed and living with her parents when she disappeared. She'd been working with an insurance company in Des Moines, in the advertising and publicity department. She did advertising layouts for print media and was active in community theater. She'd been looking for work in both Des Moines and Minneapolis. Blond, good-looking, small, and busty. Divorced-ex-husband was a cop in Mason City, and he's in the clear."

"Another artsy type."

"That's the impression I get. I called down Clear Lake, but they've got nothing at all on the case-she vanished, and her parents didn't even know where she'd been planning to go that day, if she'd been planning to go anywhere. When they got home from their jobs, she wasn't there, though her car was. She just never came back."

"Is there any point in doing a list?"

"From what the Clear Lake cop said, her parents really didn't know too much about her friends either in Des Moines or up here. They don't even know if she had any friends up here."

"Goddamnit."

"He's careful about that. He cuts the woman out of her usual crowd, moves in, must feed them some kind of bullshit to keep them from talking, and then kills them."

"Maybe tells them he's married or something," Lucas said.

"Still, you'd think…"

"Yeah. Somebody would know."

They thought about that for a minute, then Marcy said, "So anyway, that's three people we've ID'd from the graveyard, five to go."

WITH NOTHING SPECIFIC to work on, Lucas had to decide whether to drive down the graveyard-where he wouldn't have much to do-or review paper. The idea of reviewing paper bored him, and after a visit to Homicide to talk to Black, he noticed a shaft of sunlight out on the street.

"Sun's out," he said to Black as he left.

"Today only," Black said. "More rain or snow coming for the weekend."

The sunlight made the decision for him. He was out of downtown ahead of the rush, running through the sun-dappled countryside. The countryside still had the cold colors of winter, but when he cracked the windows, he could smell spring on the way. Still a little snow in the north shadows, along the shaded sides of the fence lines and the glacial hills, but the water was moving in the drainage ditches, and farmers had their tractors out of the machine sheds and the sun felt yellower and warmer than in the weeks just past.

On the grave-site hill, everything changed. The hill faced away from the afternoon sun, and under the oak trees, there was a river of mud, and men grubbing for bones. The hill, he thought, looked like an old browned photograph of a World War I trench site during a cease-fire, except for the brilliant blue slashes of a dozen plastic tarps.

McGrady had gotten some rest. He was sitting on a camp chair, reading a copy of Maxim, when Lucas climbed up to the command tent. "I always liked pictures of sexy women," he said, almost absently. "Like the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. But somehow, after all the liberation bullshit, we finally got around to the point where women have stopped being objects and have become products. Have you ever looked at this rag?"

"No." But he was amused.

McGrady flipped it over his shoulder onto the ground. "I'm just getting old, I guess. Couple of the younger guys were looking at it, thought it's great."

"Still eight bodies," Lucas said. He didn't care about Maxim, had never heard of it.

"Yeah, still eight. I think that's all it's going to be unless we find a whole new graveyard somewhere. We think one of them might be a girl from Lino Lakes, but we can't track down any dental records. I don't know what the hang-up is."

"Marcy said something about the parents moving a couple of times, and they're still trying to track them down. From what I saw of the records, I'm not sure how good a fit she is."

"Blond, busty, and missing."

"But some of her friends think she was about to run away to California; and she wasn't interested in art."

"If we find the parents, we could do some DNA and skip the dentals," McGrady said. He yawned, and then said, "Another day out here, I think. If we don't find anything new."

"You still got TV…"

"Yup. But they're getting bored, I think. No new bodies." They both looked down the hill at the television vans. The crews were sitting along the edge of the road on blue tarps; two of the cameramen were playing chess and one of the reporters was sprawled out on his back, talking on a cell phone.

Lucas looked up the hill and saw Marshall sitting at the top, looking down. "But you still got Marshall."

"The guy spooks the hell out of me," McGrady said. "Good guy, but a little intense."

They talked for a few more minutes, then Lucas walked up the hill to where Marshall was sitting on a garbage bag. "How's it going?"

Marshall was smoking a Marlboro. He grinned and blew smoke and nodded. "Getting a handle on it," he said. "I got a little overworked there for a while. How's it going on your end?"

He sounded so mellow that Lucas couldn't help smiling back. "We're making some progress. We reviewed the cases we know about, and decided that our guy is stealing everything he can from the women he kills-everything small and worthwhile, anyway. Jewelry, cash, maybe small cameras. We've got photos of stuff that was taken from Aronson-and maybe another woman-and we're gonna run them around to every fence in town."

Marshall bobbed his head and then said, "I'm starting to worry about what happens when we identify him."

"That could be a while, yet," Lucas said.

"I know the kind of work you guys do-that you do-and I think that sooner or later, you're gonna figure him out. Am I right?"

Lucas shrugged. "I believe we will. We always have a few who slip past us, but once we get any kind of a handle on this guy, I think we'll be able to pin him with those drawings. Once we get a name, we can start connecting some dots, and we've got a lot of dots to start with."

"But what you'll get will be circumstantial: maybe really solid, but maybe not. He could beat it."

"That's always a risk."

Marshall blew more smoke, and his jaw worked. After a minute he said, "That would be… tragic."

"At this point, I don't think it'll happen," Lucas said.

"So tell me what you've got. I've been down here all the time. I keep meaning to come up to see you, but I can't get myself away from…" He looked down the hill, and his jaw worked again. "… all the holes."

Lucas ran the case past him, everything that they had learned. Marshall's eyebrows went up when he heard about the photo of Laura Winton at St. Pat's, and about the death of Neumann.

"You think they're all connected?"

"The Neumann thing… that's just not right. We know he was at St. Pat's, we know the art teacher died after the drawings were put on TV, we know that Aronson was missing jewelry, and so was Neumann. That's what we think. The St. Paul cops haven't gone public with it, but I think Neumann was killed as a kind of… cleanup. She figured something out."

"A cleanup," Marshall said. He pitched his cigarette down the hill. "The fucker ought to be skinned alive."

Lucas's cell phone rang a moment later, and he fumbled it out of his pocket. "Yeah?"

"This is Del. Where are you?"

"Talking with Marshall, down at the graveyard. What's going on?"

"We gotta break," Del said. "Get your ass back up here."

"What happened?"

Del explained quickly, and Lucas said, "I'm on my way," hung up, and to Marshall: "Gotta run."

"Something?"

Lucas was already headed down the hill, and he called back, "Maybe."

Marshall said, "I'm coming," and they both scrambled down the wet hill and hopped the ditch, Lucas hurrying to his car, Marshall jogging heavily to his, swinging then through U-turns and accelerating away to the north.