Chosen Prey (13 page)

"Did you see her more than the one time?" Lucas asked.

"Yeah, when she delivered them. The disks with the ads. Our store's down on Lake Street."

"Why'd you meet at Cheese-It? She lived downtown here."

"She worked there. She was up front about it--she was working until she got her feet on the ground--and suggested that I just stop in when I had a minute, and we'd talk. We wound up walking down to a coffee bar so I could sketch out what we wanted. We'd already put a special type font on our signs and business cards, and we wanted to keep going with that in the ad."

They talked for another three minutes, and Lucas was convinced: Not only was he probably the right guy, he probably had nothing to do with the killing. "I've got a guy I want you to talk to, if you have a few minutes. Give a statement," he told Wise.

"You think I'm okay? The whole thing was quite a shock. Seeing the picture in the paper."

"We'll pull the picture," Lucas said. "We'll say that you came forward voluntarily and . . . Whatever sounds good."

LUCAS CALLED SLOAN, who was the best interrogator on the force, took him aside, and explained what he needed. Sloan took Wise off to Homicide to make the statement. Lucas looked at Marcy and said, "Shoots that idea in the ass."

"Not only that, wait'll you hear what the feds have for us," Marcy said.

"Good news or bad?"

"One of each. Which do you want first?"

"Bad."

"You know that profiling stuff on the drawings? It's shit. You could get it out of a book. When I got finished with the FBI stuff, I knew less than when I started. It's like somebody sawed off the top of my head and poured in sawdust."

"Nothing?"

"He's probably between twenty-five and forty and has some formal education in the arts."

"Ah, man. What's the good news?"

"The Dutch cops grabbed Ware's computer site in Holland. The forensic computer people traced it, and it was early morning in Holland already, and they called over there and the cops busted the place. They're doing something that copies all the files out, I don't know what, but they say there are huge files that gotta be pictures. Hundreds of them."

"Has Ware made bail yet?"

"Hearing's right now. The county's asking for a lien on his house."

"Who's his attorney?" Lucas asked.

"Jeff Baxter."

"All right. We want to talk to him, soon as he gets out of the hearing. In fact, I'll walk on over there and see if I can catch him."

"Too bad about the drawings," Marcy said.

"Yeah. . . ." Lucas pulled at his lip for a moment, then said, "There's an art guy over in St. Paul. Supposed to be a big name. He's a painter. I don't know anything about him except that I called him one time. There was a question about a painting, and he just told me the answer right off the top of his head. A guy over at the U says he's a genius. Maybe if we asked him to take a look . . ."

"What's his name?" Marcy asked.

Lucas scratched his head. "Uh, Kidd. I can't remember his first name, but he's supposed to be pretty famous."

"I'll run him down," she said. "What're you doing the rest of the day?"

"Talk to Baxter and Ware, if I can. Think about it. Read all the paper. Goddamnit, I wish Wise had run for the border instead of coming in here. We woulda had him in a day."

"Two problems: He wasn't there, and he didn't do it."

"Yeah, yeah. But you know what this does? That guy from Menomonie--this puts his whole theory back in play. A skinny blond guy who looks like some other movie star, not Bruce Willis."

"Edward Fox. The guy in Day of the Jackal."

"Yeah. I'm gonna have to look at it again--get a feel for the guy."

JEFF BAXTER, A thirty-something criminal attorney with reddish-blond hair, a pale Nordic complexion, and a prominent English nose, was leaning against a wall outside a courtroom, reading papers in a green file folder. He saw Lucas coming and raised a hand.

"How's it going?" Lucas asked.

"Slow season. It's all this rain," Baxter said. "Nobody's gonna stick up a 7-Eleven in this weather."

"Right. When's the last time you defended a 7-Eleven guy?"

"I'm talking in theory," Baxter said. He pushed away from the wall. "Is this just a random, friendly encounter, or did you come over looking for me?"

"Look, you're defending Morrie Ware?" Lucas asked.

"Yeah. Your guys just finished throwing the book at him. I'm not sure how good a case it is." Baxter was a good attorney and could smell the smallest molecules of a possible deal.

"However good it is, it got better in the last couple of hours," Lucas said. "The Dutch cops grabbed Ware's website in Holland, and I suspect it is chock-full of little children playing with their wee-wees."

"Ah, fuck. You know for sure there're kids?"

"Not yet. The feds are handling that end of it. But Morrie's a scuzzbag, whatever they find."

"Yeah, well . . . just between you and me, if I ever caught him standing next to one of my kids, I'd stick a gun in his ear. But he does get a lawyer."

"That's why I'm talking to you," Lucas said. "Ware may be able to help us on another, unrelated case. We'd want somebody to pick his brain . . . and we can probably deal down the cocaine problem."

"What other case?"

"The Aronson murder."

"The guy in the black coat?" Baxter asked. "I saw his picture."

"Wasn't him," Lucas said, shaking his head. "He came in this morning. Didn't even need an attorney."

Baxter made a farting noise with his mouth.

Lucas grinned. "Yeah, yeah. Anyway, we need to talk to Ware about what he knows about sex freaks in the art community. Since he is one, we thought he might know some more."

"You don't think he's involved . . ."

Lucas shook his head. "No reason to think so. We're just looking to talk, and we can probably deal on the cocaine."

"We'd want it to go away. Entirely," Baxter said. "It's small-time, anyway."

Lucas shrugged. "I can ask, I can't promise. There's no way anybody's gonna deal on the kid-porn stuff."

"Yeah, I know."

"So long as you know it's not part of the deal. And you tell Ware: If he bullshits us, we'll stick the coke charge right down his throat, along with everything else. If we push the little girl we picked up harder, I think we can get a few more names. I think we can bring in a few more kids who'll say that Ware feeds them cocaine in exchange for sex and pictures."

"So I'll talk to Morrie," Baxter said. He looked at his watch. "He's downstairs, getting his clothes."

"Gotta be quick. Like this morning. Like right now. We've got big problems with the Aronson thing."

"Maybe it's worth more than you're offering?"

Lucas shook his head. "Nah. It's unlikely that he can give us anything. He's just a shot in the dark. You better settle for talking down the coke charge."

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."