Chosen Prey

interrogation, and was at her desk when Lucas and Sloan finished with Ware. Lucas told Baxter that they might need to talk again; Baxter agreed, and escorted Ware out of the office. Sloan said he’d get back with a transcript for the file; he scrubbed Marcy’s head with his knuckles, and left.
    “Get anything?” Marcy asked.
    “We need to talk to Anthony Carr again. You’ll find him in the Ware file. Call him up and tell him to come in.”
    “All right. . . . Tomorrow?”
    “Yeah, it’s gonna have to be tomorrow. We’re running out of time today. How was your lunch with Kidd?”
    Marcy looked up at him, thinking, and then her eyes drifted past to a blank wall. After a couple of seconds, she nodded: “He’s a pretty good guy. He’s a hardass, though. He’s one of those guys who’s gonna do what he’s gonna do and he doesn’t care much about what anybody else thinks about it. He’s a lot more of a hardass than you are.”
    “He’s supposed to be a good painter.”
    “I called up a woman I know. Over at the Institute. She said Kidd paints six or eight paintings a year and gets maybe fifty thousand bucks each. He’s in all the big museums. She asked me if I was going out with him and I said we’d been to lunch, and she sounded like she wanted to crawl through the phone and choke me. I think in that world, you know, the guy is eligible.”
    Lucas said, “Huh. You gonna see him again?”
    “I wouldn’t be surprised. He kinda liked me.”
    “Did you let him touch your gun?”
    “Not yet.”
     
    L UCAS TOOK THE Menomonie files home with him, meaning to look through them during the evening. Weather arrived a few minutes after he did, and they went for a walk along the river, enjoying the cold. Then they walked back to Lucas’s house and ate small triangular sandwiches of cheese, onions, and sardines, with tomato-herb soup, at the dining room table. He told her about Jim Wise, the bullet-headed man who was not the killer; about Ware and his priest; and about Kidd.
    “You think Marcy and this Kidd guy . . . ?”
    “She likes the type,” Lucas said. Then he asked, “How can a sandwich that stinks this bad taste so good?”
    “It’s a great mystery,” Weather said. “So is Kidd a good-looking guy?”
    “Not as good-looking as me.”
    “We could hardly expect that,” she said.
    “But . . . I don’t know. Not bad-looking. Sort of beat-up. Big shoulders: Looks like he could pick you up, put you over his shoulder, and carry you right up to his nest in the tree. I suspect he gets laid a lot.”
    “Hmm. I’m feeling a little tingle myself,” Weather said.
    “Marcy did, for sure,” Lucas said. He looked over his empty plate at hers. “You gonna eat that triangle?”
     
    W EATHER HELPED HIM with the dishes, and afterward, they hiked a mile to a used-book store and hauled a dozen books back. While Weather paged through a book on human osteology, Lucas went back to the file from Menomonie. At the back, there were Xerox copies of perhaps thirty or forty photographs. Most of them were police photos taken in Laura Winton’s apartment or in Nancy Vanderpost’s trailer home by crime-scene crews. One set was mostly of a young woman, identified in notes as Winton, Marshall’s niece. She was shown walking in the woods, and then standing on a sidewalk somewhere. There was a gap in the trees behind her, and Lucas thought it looked a lot like the Mississippi River Valley between Minneapolis and St. Paul, but there were no identifying landmarks, only a small semicircular stone wall.
    He handed the photo to Weather. “Think that’s around here?”
    She looked at it for a long moment, then said, “Could be. Who is it?”
    He explained, and she said, “Then it might be in Menomonie. There’s a river and a big lake there, pretty deep valley. . . . Could be there.”
    “Feels like here.”
    He had to page back through the file to find the spot where he’d taken the photo out, and there was something about the pictures taken in the woods. Were the woods close by? Maybe they went with the stone wall photo, something that he walked by often enough to ring a bell. . . .
    He paged through them again. Then he tumbled: “Holy shit.”
    Weather looked up, hearing a tone in his voice. “What?”
    “These pictures . . . they look like the place where Aronson’s body was found.”
    “What?”
    “These pictures of Winton. They look like they’re taken where Aronson was found. I went