Chosen Prey

fake. But maybe he didn’t think of toes. There are two or three places where you can see lots of toes, which are really pretty distinctive, though nobody looks at them. If I were you, I’d get these women in here and look at their feet.”
    “Ah . . . I see what you mean,” Lucas said. He shuffled through the drawings. “None of these drawings—”
    “None of them have the kind of specifics that individualize the body. That’s especially striking since the faces are so individual,” Kidd said. “I think the guy never really saw these women nude.”
    “So he’s a photographer? He draws from photographs?” Marcy asked.
    “I think he’s an artist, but he’s using photography. A straight photographer wouldn’t draw this well,” Kidd said.
    “How hard would it be?”
    “Not hard. You can take a photograph of somebody, scan it, find a porno shot on the ’Net—there are literally thousands of them, all ages and sizes and shapes and positions—and match them. Then you can eliminate the photographic detail using a Photoshop filter and produce something that almost looks like a drawing. Then you can project that image on a piece of paper, and draw over the projected image. It takes some skill. The FBI is right: This guy has had some training, I think. But not too much. That foot . . .”
    He shuffled through the drawings until he found the one with a foot that looked wrong. “What’s happened here is, the bodies extend away from you, so this woman’s foot is relatively larger than the rest of her body. It’s called foreshortening. I’m not sure, but I think that not only is the foot foreshortened, it’s also distorted, and it’s distorted in the way that things are when you use a wide-angle lens. If you use a wide-angle camera lens from up close, things at the edge of the picture are unnaturally wide. . . . This looks like a photographed foot to me.”
    “The woman who was killed did commercial art and design—ads and stuff,” Marcy said. “We thought maybe somebody she met in the business.”
    “Uh.” Kidd looked at the stack of drawings, then shook his head. “I don’t think he’s a commercial artist. If he took art classes, they’d be in fine art.”
    “What’s the difference?”
    “It’s subtle. Commercial artists learn a lot of shortcuts, shorthand ways of doing things—they’re paid to produce recognizable images, and to do it quickly. They’re not struggling to get down something that’s unique. These drawings look like the guy was trying pretty hard, and he really doesn’t show any of the bag of tricks that a commercial artist has. When he doesn’t get the noses right, he doesn’t cheat by doing a shorthand nose, he fights it. He tries to get it right.”
    “So an artist.”
    “Not a very good one,” Kidd said. “He doesn’t know the anatomy that well. There are a couple of places where you’ve got an image that might come off a photograph.” He went through the drawings again and found one with a woman who had one arm extended over her head. “See this one? There’s no feeling of a joint where her shoulder is. It’s just a silhouette like you might get from a photo, but it’s an awkward one.”
    They talked for a few more minutes, working through the photos, and Kidd picked out two with fairly distinctive big toes. “Check these. I’d be willing to bet they don’t match.”
    Jeff Baxter stepped into the office; Morris Ware trailed behind, looking stunned. Lucas looked past Kidd and said, “This is the right place.”
    “You’ve seen the paper from the county attorney?” Baxter asked.
    “Not yet.”
    “If you say okay, they’ll drop the coke charge. Morrie gives you full cooperation on anything he knows about the local sex scene that doesn’t impinge on his current case.”
    Lucas nodded. “That’s fine with me. Why don’t you go into my office, and I’ll bring another guy back to talk to you.” He gestured to his office. “Right in there. We’ll just be a minute.”
    Kidd was collecting his jacket, and Lucas said, “Thanks for coming. You told us more about the killer in ten minutes than the feds did in two days.”
    “Yet another reason to eat the FBI,” Kidd said. And to Marcy: “Speaking of eating, isn’t there a cafeteria around here someplace? I don’t know Minneapolis very well.”
    “Yeah, but the food is not exactly gourmet,” she said.
    “Better a cafeteria than starve to death.”
    “I could probably show you