Chosen Prey

woman had been threatened.
    Rose Marie called as soon as she was off the air. “I assume that was you, pulling strings with Carey.”
    “Yeah. They owe us.”
    “Good. Talk to you tomorrow. I’m gonna go home and cry.”
    Lucas hung up, looked at his watch, then called Weather and suggested they get together for a late sandwich.
    “I’ll bring pajamas,” she said.
    “Yeah? You have any idea how old I am?”
    “Not nearly as old as you’re gonna be by midnight.”
    He was pulling on his jacket when the phone rang again. He thought it might be Weather with a quick call-back. “Yeah?”
    “Lucas?” A man’s voice.
    “Yeah.”
    “This is Gerry Haack. You remember me?”
    “Yeah, Gerry. What’s happening?” Lucas looked at his watch again.
    “I’m the lawn-care guy. I had that thing.”
    The thing with crystal meth and the rampage through the men’s fine accessories department at Dayton’s. “Yeah, yeah, what can I do for you?”
    “You said I owed you, and I should call if I ever got anything. I got something.”
    “Yeah?” Weather would be walking out the door already. “What you got?”
    “I’m not in the lawn business anymore, I’m working at the Cobra Lounge over in St. Paul. It’s not the greatest place, but I’m trying to get back on my feet, you know—”
    “That’s great, Gerry. So, what you got?”
    “You know this woman that got strangled? Aronson?”
    “Yes.”
    “I just saw the picture on TV, but they didn’t say anything about her selling it.”
    “What?”
    “She was on the corner, man.” Haack’s voice dropped a half-octave and got cozy. Man-to-man.
    “What? What’re you talking about?”
    “She was doing the hokey-pokey for money,” Haack said.
    “You know that for sure?”
    “Yeah. I know a guy she dated a couple of times. Cost him a hundred bucks a time, nothing but blow jobs and straight fucking. Nothing kinky. They sit around here and talk about it at night.”
    “You say you know him?”
    “Well, yeah. You couldn’t ever tell him who let on. They’d kill me.” Now his voice was nervous, as though he were having second thoughts about the tip.
    “Nobody’ll know,” Lucas said. “What’s his name?”
     
    A FTER TALKING TO Haack, Lucas stole another ten minutes to go back through the file on Aronson. Swanson noted that he’d searched state and national records on her and checked her fingerprints with the feds, and she’d come up clean. Still, if Aronson had been on the corner, somebody should have picked it up.
    He’d worked himself into a fury by the time he arrived at the restaurant. “How in the hell can you have a criminal investigation going on for a year, and you don’t know the chick is hustling?”
    “It wasn’t going on for a year. It was a halfhearted missing-persons investigation for a couple of weeks after she disappeared, and then it wasn’t anything,” Weather said. “And maybe she was an amateur. You said she’d never been arrested.”
    “But you gotta know that stuff,” he said. “You gotta talk to enough people that you find it out. Now there’s a question about these other women. Are they pros? One of them claims that she’s still a virgin—not that anybody got out his flashlight and looked. If they’re pros, then we’ve got a whole other problem than the one we started with.”
    “Is that bad, or is that good?”
    He thought about it and said, finally, “Too early to tell. Actually, it might be good. If the guy is hitting on hookers, we’ve limited the number of people we have to look at, and I’ve got pretty good connections in the area.”
    “So twelve hours into the investigation, you’re already a genius. And you look like you’re enjoying yourself, pissed off as you are.”
    “Hmph.” He remembered the mayor’s announcement. “Did you watch any TV tonight?”
    “No. Were you on?”
    “No, but there were a couple of stories . . . . The thing is, I might be out of a job in a few months.” He told her about it, and the unlikeliness that he’d be reappointed by a new chief.
    “So if we do get pregnant, we won’t have to find a nanny,” Weather said.
    “That’s not exactly how . . . You’re jerking my chain. This is serious.”
    “If you really want to keep the job, you can figure out a way to do it,” Weather said. “But maybe it’s time to try something else.”
    “Like what?”
    “I don’t know. Something else. You’ve done one thing all of your life. Maybe you could