Chosen Prey

Gaulle?”
    “That’s the guy. I’ve seen the picture about a hundred times. And she said he rode a bike.”
    “A bike.”
    “A bike. That was what we got on him. That was it,” Marshall said.
    “He never drew a picture of her or anything?” Lucas asked.
    “Not that we know of.”
    “Any forensics at all?”
    “No. Not except for the fingernails.” Marshall was floundering, and Lucas looked at him curiously.
    “Did you know this girl?”
    “Yeah, yeah, she was my niece. My sister’s girl. She was like a daughter—I never had a kid, and I just . . .” He shook his head and stopped talking; her image was in his eyes, Lucas thought.
    “Jeez. I’m sorry,” Lucas said.
    “Yeah, well . . .” Marshall came back from wherever he’d gone. “I just hope I haven’t gone goofy. When I saw that thing on TV last night, there wasn’t one thing that didn’t sound like our guy.”
    Lucas leaned back in his chair. “I hate to tell you this, but we found a guy last night who might’ve seen him. He supposedly looks like Bruce Willis. Kind of stocky, buzzcut hair, dark. We do think he might’ve met Aronson in a restaurant, like the guy picking up your niece in the Union,” Lucas said. “Hang on a second. . . .”
    He went to the outer office and retrieved Marcy’s drawing of Willis, brought it back, and passed it to Marshall. “We found an old friend of Aronson’s last night who might’ve seen the guy, just by accident. This is what we think he might look like.”
    Marshall looked at the picture for a moment, then up at Lucas, shook his head, and said, “Just the opposite of what Laura told her housemates. Perfect opposite.”
    “Pretty much,” Lucas said.
    Marshall peered at the picture for another moment, sighed, and then said, “Maybe I’m on the wrong track. But there are a couple of other things there in the file. I’ve kept a lookout for women who might have been victims. We didn’t have much to go on, so there are quite a few candidates—people drop out of sight all the time. There was a young girl here in Minnesota who disappeared about two years after Laura was killed: Linda Kyle. Came from Albert Lea and was going to Carlton College in Northfield. Anyway, she disappeared one day, never has been found. She was an art student and had been hanging around galleries up here in Minneapolis when she got bored. She’d had a couple of dates with a guy in the city, but none of her friends ever saw him. No suspects.”
    “Huh. None of her friends ever saw him. It’s like a technique,” Lucas said. Then: “I don’t remember her. I don’t remember the case.”
    “Not too surprising—seven years ago, and they never found anything, and she wasn’t from here,” Marshall said. “Then there’s another one, three years ago, from New Richmond, Wisconsin, just across the St. Croix River.”
    “I know the town,” Lucas said. He drove through it sometimes on the way to his cabin.
    “A woman named Nancy Vanderpost, married but separated, twenty-two years old, and one day she disappeared. Hasn’t been found. She’d been talking about going to Los Angeles and doing performance art. She also had a romance going on here in the Twin Cities, but they never identified the guy. She was living in a trailer home, and when they went in there was no sign of a struggle or anything, but they found . . . fingernails. Two broken fingernails. And they found her purse next to a couch, all of her clothes were there as far as they knew, and the main thing is, all of her insulin was there. She wouldn’t have left that.”
    “The connection is the fingernails and the art in the Cities?” Lucas asked. “And the thing about nobody ever seeing who the woman is dating?”
    Marshall nodded, his Lennon glasses opaque with reflected light, hiding his eyes. “One other thing, a guess. All the trailers in this trailer court are right next to each other. Ten feet apart. If her purse was in the place, then I think that’s where the guy took her out of . . .”
    “If somebody took her out.”
    “Yeah. If. If somebody did, he didn’t shoot her, didn’t beat her to death, didn’t do anything that gave her a chance to scream, didn’t get involved in any loud arguments, wasn’t drinking, and didn’t stab her to death. They brought the state crime lab in to look at her trailer, and there was no trace of blood at all. I think he strangled her. I think that’s what the fingernails mean: These women are