Chosen Prey

the six sites that Lake had outlined.
    The officer in charge, Jack McGrady, had worked with Lucas on another case. “We’re gonna get some generators and lights from the highway department. We’ll get some more tents up and get at it.”
    Lucas had shown him the bone in an evidence bag. “The question we all had . . . is it possible that it’s not human?”
    McGrady held the bag up to the sky, looked at the bone for a few seconds, then handed it back to Lucas. “It’s human. A phalange—a little short and squat, so it’s probably from a thumb.”
    “A thumb.”
    “Probably. Can’t tell you what era. . . . Wish you’d picked a better day for this. You know, sunny and cool.”
    Lucas looked down the hillside and at the cop cars lined up along the gravel road, two at each end, with their light bars flashing. “Sorry,” he said, and he was. Then: “What do you mean, ‘era’?”
    “Bones last a long time. This is kind of a pretty hillside, with a view. Maybe you’ve turned up a settler graveyard. Just by coincidence.”
    “I don’t think so,” Lucas said.
    “Neither do I.”
     
    L ATE IN THE afternoon, Lucas and Del went back into Cannon Falls, to the café, and ate open-faced turkey sandwiches with mashed potatoes. The café did a steady business, large quiet men in coveralls, coming and going, and smelling of wet wool, mud, and radiator heat.
    “Mashed potatoes count as a vegetable?” Del asked.
    “Not these,” Lucas asked. “These are some kind of petroleum derivative.”
    They ate in silence for a moment, then, “If those are all graves up there, we’ve got a busy little bee on our hands,” Del said.
    “They’re all graves,” Lucas said. “I can feel it.”
    “In your bones?”
    “Not funny.”
    “Okay, so we’re looking for sources where he might have gotten the bodies for his drawings. If we can find those, maybe we can track back to his computer; we’ve got a photograph that he might have taken. We have a kind of physical description. We’re putting together lists of everybody that all the drawings—what would you call them, victims?—we’re putting together lists of everybody they know. What else?”
    “Ware thinks he might be a priest.”
    “That doesn’t make any sense,” Del said. “A priest who was an art student? In Menomonie? Ware’s either jerking us around, or we really don’t know what’s going on.”
    “But he didn’t say for sure that the guy was a priest, just that something he said made Ware think he might be a priest.”
    “That’s no help.” Del picked up a glob of potato on a spoon and contemplated it. After a minute, he said, “Okay. Answer me this. You know the chick whose picture got pasted up on the bridge across the river?”
    “Yeah?”
    “Why was she picked out?” Del asked. “What’d she do to piss him off, that he went after her like that? Why was she treated different?”
    Lucas leaned back in his chair and said, “Ah, shit. Why didn’t we think of that before? Something’s gotta be going on there.”
    “So we start pulling her apart,” Del said.
    “And maybe we check with the archdiocese, and see if they had any priests who were art students.”
    “In Menomonie.”
    A waitress came by with a pot of coffee. She was a pudgy young woman with heavily teased honey-blond hair. “Are you the cops digging up the Harrelsons’ woods?”
    Del nodded. “Yup.”
    “We heard you found a whole bunch of skeletons.” Her jaw dropped open, waiting for the inside information.
    “We don’t know what we have,” Lucas said politely. “We’re still digging.”
    “That’s a lonely place out there,” she said. “Sometimes kids used it like, you know, a lover’s lane. Park down there at the bottom, then get a blanket and go up on the hill. But it was always spooky.”
    “Really,” Del said. “You ever go up there?”
    “Maybe,” she said. “And maybe not. You want seconds on them potatas? We got plenty more.”
     
    A T SIX, L UCAS called Weather from the site and told her that he wouldn’t be home until very late. “Trying to avoid your obligations, eh?” she asked.
    “You sound like a fuckin’ Canadian, eh?” he said. “Maybe I can get out of here a little earlier than that. . . .”
     
    T HE HILL WAS lit by a half-dozen sets of powerful lights, plus lower-powered reading-style lights in an Army-surplus command tent. A diesel generator hammered away from the roadside, and the parking strip smelled like