Chosen Prey

by John Sandford

  “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 . . .”

  Marshall flushed, bobbed his head. “There was. The thing is, we brought in a crime-scene crew. There was nothing obvious, no big pools of blood or anything, no sign of violence except . . . she had this old carpet, a fake Oriental rug. They found her fingernails in it.”

  “Fingernails.”

  “Three of them. She was trying to pull herself away from somebody, clawing across this rug. Snapped her fingernails off. There was a little fresh blood on one of them, and we type-matched it. It was hers.”

  Lucas thought about it for a minute, then said, “I can see that. A strangulation.”

  Marshall nodded. “If you think about it, it fits . . . and she was going with a guy her housemates called ‘the artist.’ ”

  Lucas leaned forward again. “The artist?”

  “Yeah. He met her at the Union, sort of picked her up. He told her he was an art student and that his name was Tom Lang or Tom Lane. She went out to meet the guy a couple of times, and her housemates had teased her about him—what he looked like, was he ugly, and so on. She said he was cute, blond, skinny, not very tall. She told one of the girls that he looked like a movie star.”

  “Not Bruce Willis?”

  Marshall, puzzled, shook his head. “No, no. Like a guy named Edward Fox. He played the bad guy in a movie called Day of the Jackal.”

  Lucas said, “The assassin? The guy trying to kill Charles de Gaulle?”

  “That’s the guy. I’ve seen the picture about a hundred times. And she said he rode a bike.”

  “A bike.”

  “A bike. That was what we got on him. That was it,” Marshall said.

  “He never drew a picture of her or anything?” Lucas asked.

  “Not that we know of.”

  “Any forensics at all?”

  “No. Not except for the fingernails.” Marshall was floundering, and Lucas looked at him curiously.

  “Did you know this girl?”

  “Yeah, yeah, she was my niece. My sister’s girl. She was like a daughter—I never had a kid, and I just . . .” He shook his head and stopped talking; her image was in his eyes, Lucas thought.

  “Jeez. I’m sorry,” Lucas said.

  “Yeah, well . . .” Marshall came back from wherever he’d gone. “I just hope I haven’t gone goofy. When I saw that thing on TV last night, there wasn’t one thing that didn’t sound like our guy.”

  Lucas leaned back in his chair. “I hate to tell you this, but we found a guy last night who might’ve seen him. He supposedly looks like Bruce Willis. Kind of stocky, buzzcut hair, dark. We do think he might’ve met Aronson in a restaurant, like the guy picking up your niece in the Union,” Lucas said. “Hang on a second. . . .”

  He went to the outer office and retrieved Marcy’s drawing of Willis, brought it back, and passed it to Marshall. “We found an old friend of Aronson’s last night who might’ve seen the guy, just by accident. This is what we think he might look like.”

  Marshall looked at the picture for a moment, then u
p at Lucas, shook his head, and said, “Just the opposite of what Laura told her housemates. Perfect opposite.”

  “Pretty much,” Lucas said.

  Marshall peered at the picture for another moment, sighed, and then said, “Maybe I’m on the wrong track. But there are a couple of other things there in the file. I’ve kept a lookout for women who might have been victims. We didn’t have much to go on, so there are quite a few candidates—people drop out of sight all the time. There was a young girl here in Minnesota who disappeared about two years after Laura was killed: Linda Kyle. Came from Albert Lea and was going to Carlton College in Northfield. Anyway, she disappeared one day, never has been found. She was an art student and had been hanging around galleries up here in Minneapolis when she got bored. She’d had a couple of dates with a guy in the city, but none of her friends ever saw him. No suspects.”

  “Huh. None of her friends ever saw him. It’s like a technique,” Lucas said. Then: “I don’t remember her. I don’t remember the case.”

  “Not too surprising—seven years ago, and they never found anything, and she wasn’t from here,” Marshall said. “Then there’s another one, three years ago, from New Richmond, Wisconsin, just across the St. Croix River.”

  “I know the town,” Lucas said. He drove through it sometimes on the way to his cabin.

  “A woman named Nancy Vanderpost, married but separated, twenty-two years old, and one day she disappeared. Hasn’t been found. She’d been talking about going to Los Angeles and doing performance art. She also had a romance going on here in the Twin Cities, but they never identified the guy. She was living in a trailer home, and when they went in there was no sign of a struggle or anything, but they found . . . fingernails. Two broken fingernails. And they found her purse next to a couch, all of her clothes were there as far as they knew, and the main thing is, all of her insulin was there. She wouldn’t have left that.”

  “The connection is the fingernails and the art in the Cities?” Lucas asked. “And the thing about nobody ever seeing who the woman is dating?”

  Marshall nodded, his Lennon glasses opaque with reflected light, hiding his eyes. “One other thing, a guess. All the trailers in this trailer court are right next to each other. Ten feet apart. If her purse was in the place, then I think that’s where the guy took her out of . . .”

  “If somebody took her out.”

  “Yeah. If. If somebody did, he didn’t shoot her, didn’t beat her to death, didn’t do anything that gave her a chance to scream, didn’t get involved in any loud arguments, wasn’t drinking, and didn’t stab her to death. They brought the state crime lab in to look at her trailer, and there was no trace of blood at all. I think he strangled her. I think that’s what the fingernails mean: These women are beating their hands on the floor.”

  “No drawings?”

  “Only hers. She did drawing and music and dance and acting and poetry and journaling and photography and everything else, but I’m told she wasn’t very good at any of it. Just sort of a . . . fucked-up soul, looking for something a little bigger than she was.”

  “Some kind of art guy,” Lucas said.

  “That’s what I think,” Marshall said. “I pushed it hard as I could from Dunn County, but there was nothing to go on, and there was always the possibility that she was in L.A., or that she’d had an insulin problem and had wandered off somewhere and died. There’s all kinds of places around New Richmond where you could get lost.”

  “Her car?”

  “Was parked in town. They found it the day after they went into her place.”

  “I see one difference between what you’ve got and what we’ve got,” Lucas said. “Yours are all small-town kids, and ours isn’t. Like maybe your guy is picking on kids who are a little naive. Aronson was living here in the Cities, and had been—”

  “But the paper said she was originally small-town. Maybe it’s an attitude that pulls him in.”

  “Maybe. . . .” Lucas got his feet up on his desk for a moment, thinking about it, and then said, “You heading back home?”

  “I’d like to hang around this afternoon. It was snowing like crazy when I went through Hudson. I’m afraid they’re gonna close the Interstate over the river. I’d like to see what you’ve got going. I know our part of the case backwards and forwards, and maybe something’ll occur to me.”

  “You’re welcome to hang out long as you want. Get Marcy to run that name—Tom Lang?—through the lists we’re compiling. Maybe you should go over and look at Aronson’s body—talk to the docs, see if she’s missing any nails, or if there’s any abrasions on her hands.”

  “What do you think about my list?”

  “Interesting. Somebody’s probably out there operating.”

  “Somebody always is,” Marshall said.

  DEL CAME BACK a few minutes after Marshall left and found Lucas staring at the ceiling of his office. Del said, “I ran those guys from the ad agencies. One of them doesn’t pay his parking tickets. The other one has never talked to a cop, far as I can tell.”

  “Did you run them against the lists?” Lucas asked.

  “Not yet. Marcy was entering stuff. . . .” Lucas had turned in his chair, his eyes drifting away as Del was talking. Del said, “Hey. What’s up?”

  “Huh?”

  “Look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  Lucas explained about Marshall. “I’ve been looking through his file. It’s got a bad feel to it, Del.”

  “You think he’s onto something?”

  “I’m afraid he might be,” Lucas said.

  “He got anyplace we can go with it?”

  Lucas pushed himself onto his feet. “Not right away. So let’s go look up Morris Ware.”

  Del nodded. “That dickhead. I was hoping he’d moved to one of the fuckin’ coasts with the rest of the perverts. Where’d you hear about him?”

  Lucas pulled his coat on. “That Lori chick over at Hot Feet Jazz Dance, down on . . .”

  “. . . Lyndale. Yeah. Strange chick.”

  “I was over there a couple of days ago. She did one of those dance things where you hold on to a bar and stretch your leg over your head. I spent five minutes talking to her crotch.”

  “And her crotch said Morris Ware . . .”

  “. . . is back out on the street with his Brownie, looking for the young stuff again.”

  “Not surprised,” Del said. “That’s not something you get over.”

  Lucas asked, “Didn’t Ware run with the art crowd, like from over at the Walker?”

  “Yeah, for a while, I think. He did this book, Little Women on the Edge, or something like that. Like on the edge of puberty. It was supposed to be art, naked girls, but it had the smell of puke about it.”

  7

  MORRIS WARE LIVED in a tidy two-story stucco house under the northern approach lanes for Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport. A Miracle Maids van sat in front of the house, and a pink plastic Miracle Maids bin sat on the porch, next to the front door. The porch might have held a porch swing—there were hooks in the ceiling, and worn spots on the deck—but didn’t. Both the back and front yards were surrounded by low dark-green chain-link fences. A clapboard garage sat astride the driveway behind the fence, and on the lawn, next to the driveway, a Macon Security sign warned against burglary: “Armed Response Authorized.”

  “Light in the window,” Lucas said.

  “Of course. It’s almost two o’clock,” Del said. “This fuckin’ place.”

  “Not very cold, though,” Lucas said, as they pushed through the front gate and headed for the stairs.

  “Not for Moscow,” Del said. “For any other place, this is cold.”

  A machine was whining inside the house. Lucas rang the doorbell, and they both heard a thump. A man’s eyes appeared in the small window cut in the front door, and a second later, the door opened.

  “Yeah?” The guy in the doorway wore white coveralls and a white paper hat that covered his hair. He was thin, slat-
faced, with a two-day stubble.

  “Minneapolis police,” Lucas said. “We’re looking for Morris Ware.”

  “Uh, Mr. Ware isn’t here. We’re the housecleaners.”

  “You’re a Miracle Maid?” Lucas asked.

  “Yeah. That’s what I am.” He sounded like he didn’t believe it himself.

  “Do you know where Ware’d be?” Del asked.

  The man’s eyes flicked to Del, lingered for a moment, and a rime of skepticism appeared. “Do you guys have any ID?”

  Both Lucas and Del nodded automatically and flipped their IDs. “So . . .”