Chosen Prey

working on something,” Rose Marie said.
    “What?”
    She waved him off. “I can’t even start talking about it yet. I’m gonna have to stab a couple of people in the back. Maybe give a couple blow jobs.”
    “Not at the same time. You could pull a muscle.”
    She smiled. “You’re taking this pretty well. Which is good, because I’m not. Goddamnit. I wanted one more term. . . . Anyway, I wanted you to know that we’re probably on the way out.”
    “I was starting to have fun again,” Lucas said.
    “What about you and Weather?” Rose Marie asked. “Is she pregnant yet?”
    “I don’t know, but it could happen.”
    Rose Marie laughed, a genuine, head-back, chest-shaking laugh, and then said, “Excellent. That’s really perfect.”
    “And if she is . . .” Lucas squinted at the ceiling, calculating. “You and I oughta be getting fired just about the time the baby arrives.”
    “Like you need the job. You got more money than Jesus Christ.”
    “I do need the job. I need some job,” Lucas said.
    “Then hang on. It’s gonna be a ride.”
     
    AFTER LEAVING ROUX’S office, Lucas went back to Homicide, got an exact reading on where Aronson’s body had been found, marked it on a map and Xeroxed the map, then walked over to the Fourth Street parking ramp and got into his Tahoe. On the way south, out of town, he passed within a block of Aronson’s apartment, and remembered talking with her parents when she disappeared: trying to reassure them, when he felt in his cop heart that their daughter was already dead. They’d all been together at her apartment, her parents waiting for a phone call, from her, from anybody, and he remembered wandering around inside . . . .
    Aronson’s apartment had been in a six-story brown-brick prewar building south of the loop, and her mother had been waiting at the door when Lucas turned the corner on the stairs.
    “Glad you could come,” she’d said. He remembered that the apartment building hallways had smelled of paint, disinfectant, and insect spray but that Aronson’s apartment had the odor of a Christmas sachet.
    The place felt like murder. A crime scene crew had been through it, leaving behind a kind of random untidiness—a disheveled feel, if apartments can be disheveled. All the cupboard doors were open; all the chests and closets and boxes and files and suitcases, all cracked open and left. The general air of bleakness, of disturbance, of violation, was exacerbated by the light that flooded the rooms: The crew had pinned back the drapes to let in as much light as possible, and on the day of Lucas’s visit, that light had been chilling.
    Four rooms: living room, separate small kitchen, bedroom, and bath. Lucas had walked through, his hands in his pockets, peering at the debris of a short independent life: stuffed animals on the bed; an Animal Planet TV poster on one green plaster wall, showing a jaguar in a jungle somewhere; a plastic inflatable statue of The Scream; knickknacks on the shelves, with photos. Mostly people who looked like parents, or sisters . . . .
    “Knickknack,” he said aloud at the traffic out the window of the Tahoe. He’d taken from the apartment a feeling of loneliness, or shyness. A woman who arranged fuzzy things around herself so that she might feel some affection. He remembered looking in her medicine cabinet for birth control pills, and finding none.
     
    T HE GRAVE SITE was on a hillside south of Hastings, according to his map; all the roads were clearly marked. He still got lost, missing a turn, trying to recover by cutting cross-country, stymied by a closed road. Eventually, he turned into a DNR parking lot that had been built to provide public access to a trout stream. Above the parking lot, the Homicide cops had said, halfway up the hill, and a hundred and fifty feet farther south. A triangle of old fallen trees was just below the grave site; the cops had used the trees as benches.
    The woods were still wet from all the rain, and the hillside, covered with oak leaves, was slippery. He picked his way through the bare saplings, saw the triangle of downed trees, spotted the hole in the hillside and the scuffle marks where cops had worked around the hole. The rain was smoothing the dirt fill in the hole, and leaves were beginning to cover it. In two more weeks, he couldn’t have found the spot.
    He walked farther down the hillside, then up to the crest; there were houses not far away, but he couldn’t see