Chosen Prey

answer.
    Ware closed his eyes and tilted his head back. “Because I think I met your man. At a photography show at the Institute.”
    “The Institute of Art,” Sloan said.
    Ware nodded without opening his eyes. “But it was a long time ago—ten years, maybe. The fellow was maybe twenty-five, and he was looking at a series of nudes by Edward Weston. I can sometimes tell by the way people look at . . . pictures . . . that they are enthusiasts. He had the look—and by the way, he doesn’t so much look like the man in your photograph as much as he shares an air with him.”
    “What’d he say?”
    “He talked about how Weston did photographs that were as clean as fine drawings. He took a pencil from his pocket and used the eraser end to show how you could follow the line of the nude to make a whole new creation. There was a certain frenzy to it.”
    Sloan glanced at Lucas, then at Ware. “That’s interesting. Do you remember his name, have you seen him since, know where he works, or what he does?”
    Ware opened his eyes and looked at Lucas. “I never knew his name. I can’t remember seeing him since that day. I don’t know where he works. It was all too long ago. . . . But one thing struck me, given his enthusiasm. I don’t know what it was, but something he said made me think that he was a priest. Or studying to be a priest, or something.”
    “Really?” Sloan’s eyebrows went up.
    “Something he said made me think he might be a priest,” Ware said.
    “A priest?”
    “That’s the only reason that it all stuck with me: He was a priest, and his enthusiasm was so clear.”
    “He was wearing a collar?”
    “No, nothing like that. But if you were a priest and you were going to an exhibit of nudes . . . maybe you wouldn’t wear the collar.”
    Sloan ticked it off on his fingers. “So he was an enthusiast, he had a frenzy about him, he compared the nudes to drawings . . .”
    “One other thing. He was so obviously an enthusiast—and perhaps he saw it in me—that we walked along for a bit, looking at the photographs and talking, and I said something about women being endlessly fascinating. He shook his head and he said, ‘Not endlessly. Not endlessly.’ He looked at me, and I was a little frightened. Really—frightened.”
    Lucas said, interested, “Huh. In the middle of the day, in the museum, you were frightened.”
    “Yeah.” Ware nodded. “Years ago, back in the eighties, there were rumors of Mexican snuff flicks. You know, some woman gets hauled into a warehouse, is raped and beaten, and then she’s killed on camera. There were even a few flicks offered around, for collectors of that kind of thing. Pretty bad fakes, for the most part. But occasionally, you’d get somebody looking for one. Sometimes they were cops, sometimes they were reporters, sometimes they were curiosity seekers. Sometimes they were people who scared you. People who really wanted a snuff flick. I got a whiff of that from the priest.”
    “But you don’t really know that he was a priest,” Sloan said.
    “Something he said . . .”
    On another topic: “Have you ever seen anything like these drawings on the Internet?”
    “Not really. Porn guys like photographs. They like specifics: You show them a clitoris the size of a chili pepper, they want you to blow it up as big as a zucchini. And they always want better color and better resolution. . . . They’re crazy.”
    “Have you seen photographs that look like the bodies in these drawings?”
    “Well, sure, the drawings . . . those are all pretty standard poses,” he said.
    “I mean specifically: photos that could have been used for these drawings.”
    Ware shook his head. “I couldn’t tell you that. I’m not out on the Internet that much. You oughta ask Tony Carr.”
    Carr was the computer tech who’d been at Ware’s when the door was kicked. “What about him?” Sloan asked.
    “He knows all the sites. What he does is, he loots them, then he burns the images onto CDs and peddles the CDs. He’s basically interested in money, not the porn, but he knows about every site out there.”
    “How about Henrey?” Lucas asked.
    “He’s just a hired gun. He’s not particularly creative, and he’s no good with lights—not good enough for product photography or anything hard, anyway. He can do boudoir stuff okay.”
    “So he’s not much.”
    Ware shook his head. “He’s a dummy.”
     
    M ARCY HAD RETURNED during the