Chosen Prey

a minute, then at Lucas’s printouts, then at the jawbone, then at the printout. After a minute, he looked up at Lucas and said softly, “Hello, Nancy.”
    “You’re sure?” Del asked.
    “Ninety-nine percent.” He dropped the bag back into the box, pulled off his glasses, and said, “Goddamnit. I’m so fuckin’ tired.”
    “You oughta crash for a couple hours,” Lucas said.
    “Maybe tonight.”
     
    L UCAS CALLED M ARCY and told her about Vanderpost, then told her to start building a file with the cops from New Richmond. She said she would, and added, “Black was over at the archdiocese, and they’re looking for a priest who studied art at UW–Stout in Menomonie, but this monsignor over there said they won’t find one. He says he generally knows the background of all the priests in the area, and none of them went to Stout.”
    “That was thin, anyway,” Lucas said.
    “Yeah, but listen to this. After Black talked to the guy, he noticed that a bunch of these women listed ‘going to Mass’ as one of their social activities, and he started to add them up. Of the seventeen people who’ve gotten drawings so far, eleven are Catholic. That’s way too many. Of the three dead women we know about, two were Catholic.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Interesting, huh?”
    “Push it.”
    “We are.”
    When he got off the phone, Lucas asked McGrady if he’d seen Marshall.
    “He wanders around the hill,” McGrady said. “He was right up on top the last time I saw him. Sitting on a log.”
    He was still sitting on the log when Lucas climbed to the top of the hill. He crossed the lip of the crest, and Marshall said, “More bad news.” Not a question.
    “McGrady says four is Nancy Vanderpost, from New Richmond.”
    “Ah, jeez.”
    “You did a hell of a job, man,” Lucas said.
    “I was nuts for all those years. That’s the answer. I kept hoping she’d show up—you’d see those TV shows on amnesia. I knew it was all bullshit, that she was dead.”
    “You had the guy figured, and that’s—”
    “What the heck is this?” Marshall was looking past Lucas, down the hill. Del was climbing toward them at a dead run.
    “What?” Lucas asked.
    “Eight wasn’t a tree hole,” Del said, gasping for breath.
     
    T HEY WERE STANDING around hole eight, looking at a shoe with a dirty bone in it—with the combination of heavy soil and oak litter, the bones showed an irregular coffee color, with lines and pits of bone white. “We need to find a girl who wore red high-top Keds,” said the cop in the hole.
    “That fad faded a few years ago,” Lucas said.
    “Yeah, well, she’s been here a few years.”
    Below, another federal car crept slowly past the cluster of cop cars on the road, parked, and three men climbed out. “Baily,” Del said.
    Lucas looked down the hill. Baily was the FBI’s agent in charge at the Minneapolis office, a heavyset man who played a mean game of handball. “Better go get him, take him up to the command tent,” Lucas told Del. “I’ll round up Marshall and McGrady.”
    McGrady was at hole six. Lucas said, “The feds are here. Del’s bringing Baily up to the command tent.”
    “Okay. . . . You think they’ll come in?”
    “Does a chicken have lips?”
    Marshall had left his spot at the top of the hill and was wandering past hole three, where the diggers were getting into virgin earth. Lucas caught him by the arm. “Come on and talk to the FBI,” Lucas said.
    McGrady and Baily were shaking hands when Lucas and Marshall got to the command tent. Baily shook hands with Lucas and said, “Eight.”
    “Coming out of the ground now,” Lucas said. “This is Terry Marshall, a deputy sheriff from Dunn County over in Wisconsin. He broke it.”
    Lucas explained, and when he finished, Baily nodded at Marshall and said, “Nice piece of work. I’m sorry about your niece.”
    “I just hope we get the guy,” Marshall said. “If he reads the newspapers, he might’ve taken off like a big-assed bird.”
    “Got nowhere to run,” Baily said. “We’ve got enough bodies now that we should be able to pinpoint him with victim histories.”
    “Could be tougher than that,” Lucas said. “We’ve been doing histories on all the women who got the drawings, and so far we’ve pretty much come up with zip. We got matches, of course, but nothing that looks likely.”
    “We’re setting up a task force, Wisconsin–Minnesota, FBI. We’ll run down every single possibility. We’ll have all