Chosen Prey

beating their hands on the floor.”
    “No drawings?”
    “Only hers. She did drawing and music and dance and acting and poetry and journaling and photography and everything else, but I’m told she wasn’t very good at any of it. Just sort of a . . . fucked-up soul, looking for something a little bigger than she was.”
    “Some kind of art guy,” Lucas said.
    “That’s what I think,” Marshall said. “I pushed it hard as I could from Dunn County, but there was nothing to go on, and there was always the possibility that she was in L.A., or that she’d had an insulin problem and had wandered off somewhere and died. There’s all kinds of places around New Richmond where you could get lost.”
    “Her car?”
    “Was parked in town. They found it the day after they went into her place.”
    “I see one difference between what you’ve got and what we’ve got,” Lucas said. “Yours are all small-town kids, and ours isn’t. Like maybe your guy is picking on kids who are a little naive. Aronson was living here in the Cities, and had been—”
    “But the paper said she was originally small-town. Maybe it’s an attitude that pulls him in.”
    “Maybe. . . .” Lucas got his feet up on his desk for a moment, thinking about it, and then said, “You heading back home?”
    “I’d like to hang around this afternoon. It was snowing like crazy when I went through Hudson. I’m afraid they’re gonna close the Interstate over the river. I’d like to see what you’ve got going. I know our part of the case backwards and forwards, and maybe something’ll occur to me.”
    “You’re welcome to hang out long as you want. Get Marcy to run that name—Tom Lang?—through the lists we’re compiling. Maybe you should go over and look at Aronson’s body—talk to the docs, see if she’s missing any nails, or if there’s any abrasions on her hands.”
    “What do you think about my list?”
    “Interesting. Somebody’s probably out there operating.”
    “Somebody always is,” Marshall said.
     
    D EL CAME BACK a few minutes after Marshall left and found Lucas staring at the ceiling of his office. Del said, “I ran those guys from the ad agencies. One of them doesn’t pay his parking tickets. The other one has never talked to a cop, far as I can tell.”
    “Did you run them against the lists?” Lucas asked.
    “Not yet. Marcy was entering stuff. . . .” Lucas had turned in his chair, his eyes drifting away as Del was talking. Del said, “Hey. What’s up?”
    “Huh?”
    “Look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
    Lucas explained about Marshall. “I’ve been looking through his file. It’s got a bad feel to it, Del.”
    “You think he’s onto something?”
    “I’m afraid he might be,” Lucas said.
    “He got anyplace we can go with it?”
    Lucas pushed himself onto his feet. “Not right away. So let’s go look up Morris Ware.”
    Del nodded. “That dickhead. I was hoping he’d moved to one of the fuckin’ coasts with the rest of the perverts. Where’d you hear about him?”
    Lucas pulled his coat on. “That Lori chick over at Hot Feet Jazz Dance, down on . . .”
    “. . . Lyndale. Yeah. Strange chick.”
    “I was over there a couple of days ago. She did one of those dance things where you hold on to a bar and stretch your leg over your head. I spent five minutes talking to her crotch.”
    “And her crotch said Morris Ware . . .”
    “. . . is back out on the street with his Brownie, looking for the young stuff again.”
    “Not surprised,” Del said. “That’s not something you get over.”
    Lucas asked, “Didn’t Ware run with the art crowd, like from over at the Walker?”
    “Yeah, for a while, I think. He did this book, Little Women on the Edge, or something like that. Like on the edge of puberty. It was supposed to be art, naked girls, but it had the smell of puke about it.”

7
    M ORRIS W ARE LIVED in a tidy two-story stucco house under the northern approach lanes for Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport. A Miracle Maids van sat in front of the house, and a pink plastic Miracle Maids bin sat on the porch, next to the front door. The porch might have held a porch swing—there were hooks in the ceiling, and worn spots on the deck—but didn’t. Both the back and front yards were surrounded by low dark-green chain-link fences. A clapboard garage sat astride the driveway behind the fence, and on the lawn, next to the driveway, a Macon Security sign warned