Chosen Prey

alive—we came up so empty. She didn’t drag around bars. Wasn’t a party girl. No drugs, didn’t drink much. No alcohol at all in her apartment. She worked at a restaurant called the Cheese-It down by St. Pat’s. I suppose she could have run into somebody there, but it’s not a meat rack or anything, it’s a soup-and-sandwich place for students. She freelanced ad work, designing advertisements, and did some Web design, but we couldn’t get hold of anything.”
    Swanson was embarrassed. “We’re not looking too swift on this thing.”
     
    L UCAS PARCELED OUT assignments.
    “Swanson and Lane: Take all those ad agencies and the restaurant. Find out who she was talking to. Make lists of every name you run.”
    He turned to Black, who had once been partnered with Marcy. “Marcy can’t do a lot of running around yet, so I want you and her to work out of the office, get these three women in here, the ones who got drawings, and list every person they knew or remember having talked to before they got the drawings. No matter how slight the connection. When they can’t remember a name, but remember a guy, get them to call people who would know him. I want a big-mother list.”
    To Rie: “I want you and Del to get copies of the drawings and start running them around to the sex freaks. This guy has a screw loose, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s shown a few of these things around. He’s an artist, so maybe he’s been out looking for a little appreciation. We want more names: all the possibilities that your friends can think of.” He snapped his fingers. “Do you remember Morris Ware?”
    “No.”
    “I do,” Del said. He looked at Rie. “Might’ve been before your time. He takes pictures of children.”
    “He may be back in business,” Lucas said. To Del: “Why don’t you hang with me tomorrow. If we have time, we’ll go look him up.”
    “All right.”
    “I see a couple of big possibilities for an early break,” Lucas said. “The first one is, somebody knows him and turns him in. The second one is, we’ve got to figure he’s had some contact with these women. If we get big enough lists, we should get some cross-references.”
    “But we need those big-mother lists,” Black said.
    “That’s right. The more names we get, the better the chances of a cross. And the more people we can find who have gotten these drawings, the bigger the lists will be.”
    “What’re you gonna do?” Marcy asked.
    “Go talk to the movie people about some publicity,” Lucas said. “We’re gonna put the pictures on the street.”

4
    C HANNEL T HREE WAS located in a low, rambling stone structure, a fashionable architect’s attempt to put a silk purse on a corner that cried out for a pig’s ear; Lucas had never liked the place. The building was a brisk crosstown walk from City Hall, and during the walk, Lucas thought for a moment that he’d seen a slice of blue in the sky, then decided that he’d been wrong. There was no blue; there never would be. He grinned at his own mood, and a woman he was passing nodded at him.
    Lucas had a full-sized Xerox of the Aronson drawing in his pocket, along with partial copies of the other three drawings; in those three, the faces had been carefully scissored out. He met Jennifer Carey in the Channel Three parking lot, where she was smoking a cigarette. She was tall and blond and the mother of Lucas’s only child, his daughter, Sarah. Sarah lived with Carey and her husband.
    “Lucas,” Carey said, snapping the cigarette into the street. A shower of sparks puffed out of the wet blacktop.
    “You know those things cause cancer,” Lucas said.
    “Really? I’ll have to do a TV show on it.” She stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek. “What’s happening? Where’d you get the hickey?”
    “That’s it, I’m buying a turtleneck,” Lucas said.
    “You’d look like a French thug,” Carey said. “I could kind of go for it. . . . So you’re back with Weather?”
    “Yeah. Looks like,” he said.
    “Gonna do the deed?”
    “Probably.”
    “Good for you,” she said. She looped her arm in his and tugged him along toward the door of the building. “I always liked that woman. I can’t imagine how a little thing like a shooting came between you.”
    “She had the guy’s brains on her face,” Lucas said. “It made an impression.”
    “The brains? Or the incident? I mean, like a dent? Or did you mean impression, as a metaphor? Because I don’t think