Chosen Prey

time. You were a hockey jock.”
    Lucas snapped his fingers. “You were the wrestler. You pushed Sheets’s head through the railings in the field house, and they had to call the fire department to get him out.”
    “He was an asshole,” Kidd said.
    “What kind of asshole?” Marcy asked.
    “He was gay and predatory,” Kidd said. “He was pushing a kid from upstate who sorta leaned that way but didn’t lean toward Sheets. I warned him once.” To Lucas: “I’m amazed you remember.”
    “Who was he? Sheets?” Marcy asked. Lucas noticed that she was looking at Kidd with a peculiar intensity.
    “Assistant wrestling coach,” Lucas and Kidd said at the same time.
    “They kick you out?” Marcy asked Kidd.
    “Not right away,” Kidd said. “The NC-Double-A’s were coming. When those were over, they pulled my scholarship and told me to go piss up a rope.”
    “You were everybody’s hero for a while,” Lucas said. Kidd said, “Glory days,” and Lucas said, “Thanks for coming over.”
    “Marcy told me about the drawings,” Kidd said. “We were just going to take a look. . . .”
    “So let’s look.”
     
    K IDD HANDLED THE drawings carefully, Lucas noticed, like real artworks; stopped once to rub the paper between his fingers. He laid them out one at a time on a conference table, taking his time. Twice he said, “Huh,” and once he tapped a drawing with his index finger, indicating something about an oversized foot.
    “What?” Marcy asked.
    “The foot’s wrong,” Kidd said absently.
    Lucas watched him examine the drawings, and finally, impatiently, asked, “What do you think?”
    “He wants to go back to the womb,” Kidd said.
    “Any womb,” Marcy said, adding, “Somebody said that in a movie.”
    Kidd looked up at Lucas. “Marcy told me about the FBI profile—that he’s between twenty-five and forty and has a formal arts education. How many thousands of people would that include?”
    “Too many to count,” Lucas said. He asked again, “What do you think?”
    Kidd didn’t reply immediately, but instead turned over three of the sheets and looked at them again. Finally, he said, “He’s a porno freak.”
    “That’s a keen observation,” Marcy said. “I’ll write that down in my Big Book o’ Clues.”
    “I mean a photo-porno freak,” Kidd said. “Most of these bodies were drawn from pornographic photographs and the heads were added later. It’d be no problem with a computer program like Photoshop. Kids do it all the time—take the head off a movie star, stick it with a piece of porn, and try to pass it off as a real photograph.”
    Lucas and Marcy looked at each other, and then Marcy said, “You mean . . . I mean, how, I mean . . .”
    “Look at these,” Kidd said, unrolling one after the other. “What’s one glaringly obvious thing you can tell about the bodies?”
    “The drawings are all sorta gross,” Lucas said. “They’re not like art.”
    “Actually, some good art is fairly gross,” Kidd said. “But that’s not what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is, none of the women have nipples showing.”
    Marcy said, “Nipples?”
    “God, I love the way you said that,” Kidd said, glancing down at her.
    Lucas said, “Ah, Jesus,” and Marcy nailed Kidd with an elbow. “Just tell me.”
    Kidd said, “If you’re an artist, especially an artist who does a lot of nudes—”
    “Do you do a lot of nudes?” Marcy asked.
    “No, I do landscapes mostly. I make exceptions sometimes.” Again, the quick grin. “Anyway, if you do a lot of life drawing, and if you have the technical background, you can pretty much look at anyone and draw that person nude.” He looked at Marcy. “I can look at you, and I can see your shoulders and the shape of your breasts and the width of your hips, and since I know all those parts, I could do a pretty good drawing. But I couldn’t know about the aureoles around your nipples, or the—”
    “The what?” Marcy asked. Lucas thought she might have turned a little pink, and suppressed a smile.
    “The aureole. I wouldn’t know how big and distinct it was. I wouldn’t know whether your nipples protrude or how big they are. With a guy, I couldn’t tell how long his penis is or whether he’s circumcised. Or how hairy his chest is . . . This guy probably didn’t put in nipples because if he’d put in protruding nipples and the woman didn’t have that kind of nipple, then it would obviously be a