Chosen Prey

him that nothing looked better with a little black dress than a black pearl necklace and matched tear-shaped black pearl earrings, on which she could give him a special police discount, four payments of only $3,499.99 each.
    “Why didn’t you just make it four payments of $3,500?”
    “ ’Cause my way, it keeps the price under the magic $14,000 barrier.”
    “Ah. Well, who would I give it to?” Lucas asked.
    Hu shrugged. “I don’t know. But you see a hickey like the one on your neck, you try to sell the guy something expensive.”
    She hadn’t heard anything new about anybody; she had heard the monkey balls joke.
    Svege Tanner at Strength and Beauty said that over the weekend, somebody took twenty-five thousand dollars in cash from an apartment rented by an outstate legislator named Alex Truant. “The word is, Truant has a girlfriend here in the cities and they’d been dropping some big money at the casinos. With one thing or another, he was like way-deep over his head, so he got hired by the trial lawyers to carry some water for them. That’s where the twenty-five came from.”
    “Who’d you hear this from?” Lucas asked.
    “The girlfriend,” Tanner said. “She works out here. Got an annual ticket.”
    “Think she’d talk to somebody?”
    “Yeah. If somebody went to see her right away. Truant whacked her around when the cash came up missing. He thought she took it. She doesn’t look so good with a big fuckin’ mouse under her eye.”
    “Did she? Take it?”
    Tanner shrugged. “I asked, she says no. She’s the kind who if she stole twenty-five thousand on Monday, would come in Tuesday wearing a mink coat and driving a fire-engine-red Mustang. If you know what I mean.”
    “Not exactly a wizard.”
    “Not exactly,” Tanner said.
    “Got a phone number?”
    “I do.”
     
    A SHYLOCK NAMED Cole had retired and moved to Arizona. An old doper named Coin had been hit by a car while lying unconscious in the street, and was at Hennepin General, sober for the first time since he’d gone to an antiwar rally in the sixties; he didn’t like it. An enormously fat man named Elliot, who ran a metal-fabrication shop but was mostly known for being enormously fat, had come down with prostate cancer, and was going to die from it. Half-Moon Towing was bankrupt and the bad-tempered owner, who collected guns, blamed the city council for cutting him out of the city towing contracts.
    Routine, mostly. A few notes, a few melancholy thoughts about finding a new job. But who else would pay you to have this kind of fun?
     
    L UCAS MADE IT back to the office and found Marcy waiting with Del and Lane; plus Rie from Sex, and Swanson and Tom Black from Homicide. The start of virtually every homicide investigation—other than the ordinary ones, where they knew who the killer was—began with paper, the details lifted from the murder scene, with interviews, with the reports from various laboratories. Swanson and Black had been pushing the routine.
    “The problem is, Aronson didn’t have a boyfriend or a roommate, and the two ex-boyfriends we can find don’t look real good for having done it. One of them is married and has a kid now, working his way through college, and the other one lives in Wyoming and barely seemed to remember her,” Swanson said.
    “She have a phone book?” Sherrill asked.
    Black shook his head. “Just a bunch of scraps of paper with numbers on them. We checked them and came up dry. Woman in the next apartment said she heard a male voice over there a couple of times in the month before she disappeared. Never any kind of disturbance or anything.”
    “Look at the numbers stored in her cell phone?” Lucas asked. “Anything in her computer? She got a Palm Pilot or anything like that?”
    “She had a cell phone, but there weren’t any numbers stored at all. The e-mail in her computer was mostly with her parents and her brother. No Palm. We got her local phone records: She had lots of calls out to ad agencies and to friends—we talked to them, they’re all women, and we don’t see a woman for this—and then some random calls out, pizza, stuff like that. We never tried to reconstruct the pizza-delivery guys, and now . . . hell, I don’t know if we could. It’s been too long.”
    “What you’re saying is, you ain’t got shit,” Del said.
    “That’s the way it is,” Black said. “That’s one of the reasons we always thought there was a possibility that she was still