Chosen Prey

light his fire.
     
    T HE NEXT DAY, passing through Saks, he found that the cashmere sweaters had gone on sale. There wasn’t much cold weather left, but the cashmere would wear forever. These particular sweaters, with the slightly rolled neckline, would perfectly frame his face, and the tailored shoulders would give him a nice wedgy stature. He tried the sweater on, and it was perfect. A good pair of jeans would show off his butt—he could have the legs tailored for nine dollars a pair at a sewing place in the skyway. A champagne suede coat and cowboy boots would complete the set . . . but it was all too expensive.
    He put the sweater back and left the store, thinking of Barstad. She did engage his insanity: He could think of Barstad and the rope and find himself instantly and almost painfully erect. Blondes looked so much more naked than darker women; so much more vulnerable.
    The next day was Wednesday: Perhaps he could buy them after all.
    He would take the rope.
     
    B UT ON T UESDAY evening, still thinking about Barstad and the rope, feeling the hunger growing, he was derailed again. He arrived home early and got a carton of milk from the refrigerator and a box of Froot Loops from the cupboard, and sat at the table to eat. The Star-Tribune was still on the table from the morning; he’d barely glanced at it before he left. Now he sat down, poured milk on the Froot Loops, and folded the paper open at random. His eye fell straight down the page to a small article at the bottom: The two-deck headline said “Woman Strangled/Police Seek Help.”
The body of an unidentified woman was found Sunday in the Minnesota state forest north of Cannon Falls by a local man who was scouting for wild turkey sign. A preliminary investigation suggested that the woman had been dead for a year or more, said Goodhue County medical examiner Carl Boone.
    “Shit.” He stood up, threw the paper at the kitchen sink. Stormed into the living room, hands clenched. “Shit, shit.”
    Dropped onto a chair, put his hands on his head, and wept. He wept for a full minute, drawing in long gasping breaths, the tears rolling down his cheeks. Any serious art historian, he felt, would have done the same. It was called sensitivity.
    After the minute, he was finished. He washed his face in cold water, patted it dry with paper towels. Looked in the mirror and thought: Barstad. He couldn’t touch her for the time being. If another blonde disappeared, the police would go crazy. He would have to wait. No sweaters. No new clothes. But maybe, he thought, the woman would come through with some actual sex. That would be different.
    But he could still feel her special allure, her blondness. He could feel it in his hands, and in the vein that pulsed in his throat. He wanted her badly. And he would have her, he thought.
    Sooner or later.

2
    T HE WINTER HADN’T been particularly cold, nor had there been much snow; but it seemed like months since they’d last seen the sun. The streetlights still came on at five o’clock, and with the daily cycle of thaw and freeze, the dampness rose out of the ground like a plague of ghouls.
    Lucas Davenport peered through the café window, at the raindrops killing themselves on the vacant riverside deck, and said, “I can’t stand any more rain. I could hear it all day on the windows and roof.”
    The woman across the table nodded, and he continued. “Yesterday, I was up in the courthouse, looking down at the sidewalk. Everybody’s in raincoats and parkas. They looked like cockroaches scuttling around in the dark.”
    “Two more weeks ’til spring,” said the woman across the table. Weather Karkinnen finished a cup of wild rice soup and dabbed at her lips with a napkin. She was a small woman with a minor case of hat hair, which she’d shaken out of a hand-knit watch cap with snowflakes on the sides. She had a crooked nose, broad shoulders, and level blue eyes. “I’ll tell you what: Looking at the river makes me feel cold. It still looks like a winter river.”
    Lucas looked out at the river and the lights of Wisconsin on the opposite shore. “Doesn’t smell so good, either. Like dead carp.”
    “And worms. Eagles are out, though. Scavenging down the river.”
    “We ought to get out of here,” Lucas said. “Why don’t we go sailing? Take a couple of weeks . . .”
    “I can’t. I’m scheduled eight weeks out,” she said. “Besides, you don’t like sailing. The last time we were on a big boat,