Chosen Prey

2

THE WINTER HADN'T been particularly cold, nor had there been much snow; but it seemed like months since they'd last seen the sun. The streetlights still came on at five o'clock, and with the daily cycle of thaw and freeze, the dampness rose out of the ground like a plague of ghouls.

Lucas Davenport peered through the cafй window, at the raindrops killing themselves on the vacant riverside deck, and said, "I can't stand any more rain. I could hear it all day on the windows and roof."

The woman across the table nodded, and he continued. "Yesterday, I was up in the courthouse, looking down at the sidewalk. Everybody's in raincoats and parkas. They looked like cockroaches scuttling around in the dark."

"Two more weeks 'til spring," said the woman across the table. Weather Karkinnen finished a cup of wild rice soup and dabbed at her lips with a napkin. She was a small woman with a minor case of hat hair, which she'd shaken out of a hand-knit watch cap with snowflakes on the sides. She had a crooked nose, broad shoulders, and level blue eyes. "I'll tell you what: Looking at the river makes me feel cold. It still looks like a winter river."

Lucas looked out at the river and the lights of Wisconsin on the opposite shore. "Doesn't smell so good, either. Like dead carp."

"And worms. Eagles are out, though. Scavenging down the river."

"We ought to get out of here," Lucas said. "Why don't we go sailing? Take a couple of weeks…"

"I can't. I'm scheduled eight weeks out," she said. "Besides, you don't like sailing. The last time we were on a big boat, you said it was like driving an RV."

"You misremember," Lucas said. He waved at a waitress and pointed at his empty martini glass. She nodded, and he turned back to Weather. "I said it was like driving an RV across North Dakota at seven miles an hour. Except less interesting."

Weather had a glass of white wine, and she twirled it between her fingers. She was a surgeon and had the muscled hands of a surgeon. "What about this woman who was strangled? Why don't you help with that?"

"It's being handled," Lucas said. "Besides, I-"

"It's been a while," Weather said, interrupting. "When did they find her? Last weekend?"

"Last Sunday," Lucas said. "Takes time."

"A week, and what've they got? Anything? And she'd already been dead for eighteen months when they found her."

"I dunno. I don't know what they got. You know I knew her folks?"

"No, I didn't."

"They came to see me when she disappeared, asked for help. I called around, talked to some people. Half of them thought she'd split for the Coast, the other half figured she was dead. Nobody had any idea who did it. All they knew was that she was gone, and it didn't look like she'd planned to go… Other than that, we had zip. Nothing."

"So why not get in it? It's the kind of case you enjoy. You get to figure something out. It's not some jerk sitting in the kitchen with a can of Schlitz in his lap, waiting for the cops to bust him."

"I don't want to fuck with somebody trying to do a job," Lucas said. He scrubbed furiously at an old scar that ran down his forehead and across an eyebrow onto a cheek. He was a large man, heavy-shouldered, dark-complected-almost Indian-dark-but with sky-blue eyes. He moved uneasily in his chair, as though it might break under his weight. "Besides, knowing her folks makes it tougher. Knocks me off center. Makes me feel bad."

"Oh, bullshit," Weather said. "You're moping around looking for sympathy. Maybe you oughta call what's-her-name. She'd probably give you some sympathy."

Lucas deliberately misunderstood the reference to "what's-her-name." "Or a pot. If she didn't give me sympathy, she could give me a pot."

Weather's voice went dangerously quiet. "I didn't mean that one."

Of course she hadn't, but Lucas could play the game too. "Oh," he said, and tried his charming smile. But his charming smile hardly ever came off: His eyes could be charming, but his smile just made him look hard.

Romantic relationships were like gears in an old pocket watch, Lucas thought, looking across the table at Weather. They were always turning, some of the gears small and fast, others bigger and slower. The biggest of his life, his relationship with Weather, was lazily clicking around to something serious.

They'd once been headed for marriage, but that had come undone when Weather had been taken as a hostage by a crazy biker because of a case Lucas had worked on. There'd been an ambush, and the biker had been killed. Weather had… gone away; had left her wedding dress hanging in Lucas's bedroom closet. They'd been apart for a couple of years, and now they were seeing each other again. They'd been in bed for two months, but nothing had been said. No final commitments yet, no ultimatums or we-gotta-talk's. But if something went wrong again, that would be the end. There could be no renegotiation now, not if there were another breakdown…

Lucas liked women. Most of them, with a reasonable number of exceptions, liked him back. Enough had liked him well enough to keep a couple of gears spinning at a time. The summer before, he'd had a quick, enjoyable fling with a potter. About the same time, an old college girlfriend had been going through the breakup of her long-term marriage, and he'd started talking to her again. That hadn't ended. There'd been no dating, no sex, nothing but talk: But Catrin was the gear wheel that most concerned Weather.

Lucas kept telling her that there was no need to worry. He and Catrin were friends, going way back. Old friends. "Old friends worry me more than new potters," Weather had said. "Besides, the potter's a child. You couldn't date a child for long."

The potter was eight years younger than Weather, whose baby alarm was now booming like Big Ben.

The waitress came with the martini-three olives-and Lucas turned back to the river. "Oh, man, look at that."

Weather looked: A seventeen- or eighteen-foot Lund open fishing boat was chugging by, the two occupants bent against the rain. "They're going out," Weather said.

"Walleye fishermen," Lucas said. "They're all crazier than a shit-house mouse. Or would it be mice?"

"Mice, I think." She smiled a crooked smile under her crooked nose, but her eyes had gone serious, and she said, "So why don't we get pregnant?"

Lucas nearly choked on an olive. "What?"

"I'm gonna be thirty-nine," she said. "It's not too late yet, but we're pushing it."

"Well, I just…"

"Think about it," she said. "No emotional commitment is necessary, as long as I'm inseminated."

Lucas's mouth worked spasmodically, no words forming, until he realized that she was teasing. He popped the second olive and chewed. "You're the only person who can do that, pull my chain that way."

"Lucas, every woman you know pulls your chain," Weather said. "Titsy pulls it about once every three minutes."

Titsy was Marcy Sherrill, a homicide cop. A woman with a fine figure, Lucas thought, who deserved a nickname more dignified than Titsy. "But I always see her coming," he said. "I know when she's doing it."

"Besides, I was only pulling your chain on the last part," Weather said. "If you're not going to do anything with the Photo Queen, I think we should start working on some kids."

The Photo Queen was Catrin. "Catrin and I are… friends," Lucas said. "Honest to God. You'd like her, if you'd give her a chance."

"I don't want her to have a chance. She's had her chance."

"So look," he said, flopping his arms. "I've got no problem with the kid thing. If you want to get…"

"If you say 'a bun in the oven,' or something like that, I swear to God, I'll pour a glass of wine in your lap."

Lucas swerved: "… if you want to get pregnant, we can work something out."

"So it's settled."

"Sure. Whatever."

"What's this whatever shit? What's this…"

Lucas scrubbed at the scar. Christ, a minute ago he'd been idly musing about commitment.

THE RAIN DWINDLED to a mist as they drove back west toward the Cities. They made it to St. Paul just before nine o'clock and found a strange car in Lucas's driveway-an aging hatchback, dark, a Volkswagen maybe. Lucas didn't have any friends who drove Volkswagens. There'd been some bad experiences with people waiting at Lucas's door. He popped open the Tahoe's center console; his. 45 was snuggled inside. At the same time, Weather said, "Somebody on the porch."

Two people, in fact. The taller, heavier one was pushing the doorbell. Lucas slowed, turned into the drive. The two people on the porch turned, and the big one walked quickly into the Tahoe's headlights.

"Swanson," Lucas said, and relaxed.

Swanson was an old-time homicide dick, a voluntary night-shift guy, a little too old for the job, a little too heavy. Not brilliant, but competent. The woman beside him was a short tomboyish detective from the sex unit: Carolyn Rie, all freckles and braids and teeth. An interesting woman, Lucas thought, and well worth treating with a poker face when Weather was around. She was wearing a leather-and-wool letter jacket, too large, without gloves.

"Swanson… Hey, Carolyn," Lucas said out the window.

"Got something you might want to look at," Swanson said. He waved a roll of paper.

INSIDE, WEATHER WENT to make coffee while the cops pulled off their coats. "Tell me," Lucas said.

Rie took the roll of paper from Swanson and spread it across the dining table. "Oh, my," Lucas said. It was a drawing, detailed, and nearly full-length, of a nude woman whose body was projecting toward the viewer, legs slightly spread, one hand pressed into her vulva. She was fellating a man who was mostly, but not entirely, out of the picture.

Weather picked up on the tone and came over to look. "Gross," she said. She looked closely at Rie. "Where'd you get it?"

"Back in November, a woman named Emily Patton was walking across the Washington Avenue Bridge, the covered part, going over to the university library on the West Bank. This was about six in the morning, still really dark, not many people around. She sees this drawing on one of the walls-you know what I'm talking about? Those inside walls where the students paint all their signs and put up posters and stuff?"

"Yeah, go ahead," Lucas said.

"Anyway, she sees this poster, and there are a couple more like it. The thing is, Patton recognized this woman." Rie tapped the face of the woman in the drawing. "She figured the woman would not approve, so she takes them down. There are three of them, and I personally think they must have been put up within a few minutes of Patton coming by, because I think somebody would have stolen them pretty quick. They were only Scotch-taped up."

"Any prints on the tape?" Lucas asked.

"No, but I'll come back to that," Rie said. "Anyway, Patton was embarrassed about it, and she didn't know what to ask the other woman-they were once in a class together, and she didn't know her all that well."

"What's her name?" Weather asked. "The woman in the picture?"

"Beverly Wood," Rie said. "So Patton eventually looks up Wood, this is a couple days later, and says, 'Hey, did you know that somebody posted some pictures of you?' Wood didn't know, so Patton showed her, and Wood freaked. She came to see us, with Patton. The thing is, she says, she never posed for any pictures like that. In fact, she'd only had, like, two sexual relationships in her life, and neither had lasted very long. The sex, she says, was all very conventional. No photographs, no drawings, no messing around naked."

"Sounds kinda boring," Lucas said.

"That's the point," Rie said. "She's not the kind of person who winds up in this kind of picture."

"Did you check the guys? The ex-boyfriends?"

"Yeah, we did," Rie said. "Both of them deny anything, both of them seem to be fairly nice guys-even Wood said so. Neither one of them has any background in art… and whoever did this, I mean, he seems to be pretty good. I mean, a pretty good artist."

They all looked again: He was pretty good, whoever he was. "No question that this is Wood? It could be pretty generic."

"Nope. That little bump on the nose… She's got that beauty mark by her eye. I mean, you've got to see her and talk to her. This is her."

"Okay," Lucas said. He stepped back from the table and looked at Swanson. "What else? You say this happened back in November?"

"Okay. We checked it for prints and it came up absolutely clean, except for Patton's prints and a few that Wood put on them. So the guy who drew this knows that somebody might be looking for his prints. He's careful."

"Did you check Patton? And Wood?" Weather asked. "It could be a form of exhibitionism."

Rie batted the question away. "We were doing that… but you have to understand, we were not even sure that a crime had been committed. Anyway, we checked them. Or we were in the process of checking on them, but in the meantime, Patton and Wood had both talked about the situation, and the Daily Minnesotan got onto it. They sent this kid reporter over and… with Wood's permission, we gave them a little story. We thought the most likely guy to do something like this would be somebody in the art department, and maybe somebody would recognize the style. We got these."

Rie unrolled two more sheets of paper, both smaller than the first, and both creased, as though they'd once fit inside an envelope. One was a drawing of a woman masturbating with a vibrator. Another was a low-angle drawing of a nude woman leaning against a door, her hips thrust toward the viewer.

"These were mailed to two university students, one back in June, last year, the other one in late August or early September. Neither woman reported the drawings. One of them thought it was just a silly trick by one of her art friends, and actually thought the drawing was kind of neat."

"That would be the door drawing," Weather said, carrying cups of microwave coffee.

"Yeah. Not many woman would think the vibrator drawing was all that cool," Rie said. "Anyway, this woman"-she touched the masturbation drawing-"not only claims that she never posed for anybody, but nobody has ever seen her nude, not since she was in high school gym class. Nobody, male or female. She's still a virgin."

"Huh," Lucas said. He looked at the three drawings. There was no question that they'd been done by the same artist. "So we got a weirdo." Again he looked at Swanson. "And?"

"That strangled chick that got dug up last Sunday? Aronson? This was in her file; we'd found it in a desk drawer. To tell you the truth, I think most everybody had forgotten about it, except Del." Swanson rolled out another drawing. A woman was sitting astride a chair, her legs open to the world, her breasts cupped in her hands. The pose was marginally less pornographic than the first two, but there was no doubt that it'd had been done by the same hand as the other drawings.

"Uh-oh," Lucas said.

"We didn't know about the other drawings, because Sex was handling them," Swanson said. "Del saw them when he stopped to talk to Carolyn, and he remembered the drawing in the Aronson file. We pulled them just this afternoon, and put them together."

"A psycho," Rie said.

"Looks like it," Lucas said. "So what do you want? More people?"

"We thought maybe you'd like to come in, take a look."

"I'm a little tied up."

"Oh, horseshit," Weather said. She looked at Swanson and Rie. "He's so bored, he's talking about renting a sailboat."

And to Lucas: "It would certainly give you something to do until the sun comes out."