Chosen Prey

down there the other day.” He went through them again. “Goddamnit, Weather, I think it’s the same place.”
     
    M ARSHALL MIGHT KNOW something.
    Lucas looked at his watch: twenty minutes to eleven. Still early enough. He went back through the file and found Marshall’s business card, with a home phone number scrawled on the back. Marshall had said to call anytime.
    He dialed, and the phone rang four times before a man answered, a harsh rasping cigarette voice, thick with sleep. “ ’Lo?”
    “Terry Marshall?”
    “Yeah . . . who’s this?”
    “Terry, I apologize for calling you at this time of night, but this is Lucas Davenport, the deputy chief you talked to.”
    “Yeah, Chief, what’s going on?”
    “I’ve been reading your files, looking at the pictures in the back. Those pictures of your niece in the woods, where did those come from?”
    “Just a minute, let me get my feet on the floor. . . . Uh, the pictures. We think, uh . . . I think that they might have been taken by the killer. When she came up missing, and the story got in the papers, the owner of a local drugstore called and said she’d left some film to be developed. We picked it up and got those pictures—her housemates said she’d gone on a hike with the guy, had been talking about a hike out in the woods. What’s going on?”
    “You don’t know where this is?” Lucas asked.
    “No, no, it’s just woods.”
    “I’ll tell you what, Terry, I may be going crazy, but I think these pictures were taken at the same spot that Aronson’s body was found. There’s something about them. The way the hill sits, the trees. I may be fucked up . . .”
    A long moment of silence, then: “Oh, brother. I never went down to the site. I went to New Richmond, but not to the others.”
    “Think about this,” Lucas said. “If you’re a killer, and if you find one good spot, why go looking for another one?”
    “A graveyard,” Marshall said.
    “That’s what I’m thinking,” Lucas said.
    “You gonna look?” Marshall asked.
    “I’ll get something started as soon as I get in tomorrow.”
    “I’m coming up,” Marshall said.
    “No point in coming up tomorrow. I’ll have to talk to the sheriff down in Goodhue and get some technical guys together. I don’t see us getting down there until the day after tomorrow, at the earliest.”
    “I’ll be there. Jesus. Jesus. Why didn’t I look at that site? I looked at everything else. . . .”
    “It’s your file, man. Never would have come up without your file.”

9
    W EATHER LEFT EARLY the next morning, as she always did, driving out through a cold rain. Lucas thought early-morning operations were crazy—why get everybody up at five-thirty?—and was told that it had to do with nursing shifts. When she was gone, he cleaned up, got in the Tahoe, and drove south out of town to the hill where Aronson had been found.
    He learned nothing. He walked the hillside in his rain suit, stood for a long time looking at the hole where Aronson had been found, but could find nothing else about the hillside distinctive enough to be sure.
    “Feels right, though,” he said to himself. He looked around. A graveyard? He felt a chill, and kept moving.
     
    D OWNTOWN, THE OFFICE was full of cops who didn’t want to go out in the rain. Lucas had changed his rain suit for an umbrella, and was shaking it out when Anthony Carr, Ware’s computer programmer, came by and took a look at the drawings. Marcy tried to embarrass him, but Carr wasn’t embarrassed.
    “I see so much of this shit that I can’t remember what goes with who,” he said. “All of it looks familiar.”
    “We have an art expert who says the drawings are probably made from projected images,” Marcy said. “So the bodies would be exactly like the drawings. We’d like you to check around, see if you can match any of them.”
    Carr shrugged. “All right, I’ll look. I can’t promise. One time I tried to figure out how many of these pictures are out there, but I gave up after a while—but there gotta be hundreds of thousands of them.”
     
    W HEN HE WAS gone, Lucas turned to Marcy and said, “Kidd ever call back?”
    “Like it’s any of your business,” Marcy said.
    “Please tell us,” said Black, her former partner. Black had given up any effort at work, and was punching a lemon-colored Gameboy console with his thumbs. “If you don’t, we’ll start rumors that it was Carr who caught your eye.”
    “Asshole,”