Chosen Prey

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