Chosen Prey

mouth.
    Lucas grinned. “Yeah, yeah. Anyway, we need to talk to Ware about what he knows about sex freaks in the art community. Since he is one, we thought he might know some more.”
    “You don’t think he’s involved . . .”
    Lucas shook his head. “No reason to think so. We’re just looking to talk, and we can probably deal on the cocaine.”
    “We’d want it to go away. Entirely,” Baxter said. “It’s small-time, anyway.”
    Lucas shrugged. “I can ask, I can’t promise. There’s no way anybody’s gonna deal on the kid-porn stuff.”
    “Yeah, I know.”
    “So long as you know it’s not part of the deal. And you tell Ware: If he bullshits us, we’ll stick the coke charge right down his throat, along with everything else. If we push the little girl we picked up harder, I think we can get a few more names. I think we can bring in a few more kids who’ll say that Ware feeds them cocaine in exchange for sex and pictures.”
    “So I’ll talk to Morrie,” Baxter said. He looked at his watch. “He’s downstairs, getting his clothes.”
    “Gotta be quick. Like this morning. Like right now. We’ve got big problems with the Aronson thing.”
    “Maybe it’s worth more than you’re offering?”
    Lucas shook his head. “Nah. It’s unlikely that he can give us anything. He’s just a shot in the dark. You better settle for talking down the coke charge.”
    They chatted for another minute, then Lucas headed back to his office, and thought about skinny blond men killing skinny blond women.
    Marcy said, “I talked to that artist. He sounds sorta . . . funky.” In Marcy’s vocabulary, “funky” was usually desirable. “He said he could stop by this afternoon.”
    “Excellent.”
    “What’re you doing? Just gonna wait for Ware?”
    “Yeah, and read the file that the Menomonie guy brought in. Maybe there’s something in it.”
    Going through the file from Menomonie, Lucas began making a list. The three missing women all had several things in common with Aronson. They were all blondes, all in their twenties, all three had some involvement with art—and specifically, he decided, painting. All three in the Menomonie files had taken art classes shortly before their deaths. There were no classes listed in Aronson’s file, but since she was young and in the arts, she almost certainly had taken some not long before. All of them, he thought, either lived in, or recently had lived in, small towns. But the small towns were scattered all over the place, and might not mean anything except that small-town women were a little more vulnerable than big-city kids. And it might not even mean that.
    His list:
Look at art teachers at the schools they attended; check for criminal records involving sex.
If the teachers don’t pan out, get class lists and look at students.
Go back ten years, look for small blondes reported as missing anywhere in southeastern Minnesota or western Wisconsin.
    What about the drawings? The guy who killed Aronson, if he was the same guy who did the drawings, seemed to be under some compulsion to draw the women. There were no drawings listed in the Menomonie files . . . but that didn’t mean there weren’t any. He may have retrieved them after he killed the women.
    He was still going through the file, page by page, when Marcy stuck her head in the door and said, “Ware’s attorney called. They don’t want to talk until they get the deal on paper from the county attorney. That’s going on now, and they’ll be over as soon as they’re done.”
    “All right.”
    He went back to the file, and when he looked up again, out through the office window, he saw Marcy talking to a man in a scarlet ski jacket and faded jeans. The man had broad shoulders, like a gymnast’s, and a nose that looked like it’d been hit once or twice too often. He was an inch or two shorter than Lucas, but Lucas thought that he might have a couple extra pounds of muscle.
    Lucas recognized him from somewhere, a long time ago. As he watched, the man parked a hip on Marcy’s desk, grinned, leaned over and said something to her, and she laughed. The artist? He walked over to the door.
    “This is Mr. Kidd,” Marcy said when Lucas stuck his head out of his office. “I was just coming to get you.”
    “I saw you dashing for my door,” Lucas said dryly. He and Kidd shook hands, and Lucas said, “I know you from somewhere, a long time ago.”
    Kidd nodded. “We were at the university at the same