Chosen Prey

asked.
    “I don’t know.”
    “St. Paul has the file. We only got the body back last night, so everything is pretty intact. We notified a relative out in California . . . a sister.”
     
    H E WAS SUPPOSED to be rolling around town, and hadn’t yet done much rolling. He looked at his watch, then called St. Paul and had the call transferred to Homicide. A detective named Allport took the call. “We don’t want no davenports,” he said. “We just got a new one, kind of a small classy-looking plaid with an ottoman.”
    “I’m calling to tell you that your wife wants a divorce. We’re moving to Majorca to study oral sex.”
    “I’ll tell you one thing for sure: You got the wrong goddamn wife,” Allport said. Then: “I hope to hell this is a social call. I see you’re working that graveyard case.”
    “Yeah. But I came across a really obscure, probably-nothing connection. The last woman killed—Aronson?—was over at St. Pat’s just a few days before, maybe with the killer. We think the killer’s an artist.”
    “I saw the drawings. And this chick who went off the bridge taught art at St. Pat’s.”
    “Yeah.”
    “We got nothing on it, Lucas. She went through a meat grinder under that dam. We looked through her house, we looked through her car, no blood, no signs of a struggle. No nothin’. We talked to a couple of people in her department who said she was angry and aggressive and confrontational and maybe depressed. And maybe an unfulfilled lesbo. So . . .”
    “No sign that she was strangled?”
    “She wasn’t that beat up. No, she wasn’t strangled.”
    “Okay. Just a thought,” Lucas said.
    “Where are you at?” Allport asked.
    “Over by St. Pat’s.”
    “You aren’t more than ten minutes from her house, then. Run across the Lake Street Bridge. She’s practically right there. We had her car towed back to her place. You could look at it there, if you want.”
    Lucas looked at his watch, then said, “How do I get in?”
     
    H E HAD TO wait in the driveway for five minutes before the squad car showed. The patrol cop gave him the keys, and Lucas let himself inside. In ten minutes, he figured out that Neumann must have had a cat; not much else occurred to him. The house was ready for somebody to come back.
    Her car was in the garage. He snapped on an overhead light, opened the door, and looked inside. She had not been particularly tidy about her transportation: The backseat was littered with old newspapers, memos, and empty Diet Coke bottles, along with a few wadded-up translucent paper sacks of the kind that usually held bakery. Lucas looked through it, found nothing, looked under the visor and in the glove box. A couple of cash register slips lay on the passenger-side floor, and he picked them up and turned them over. One came from a Kinko’s: She had apparently done some copying. The other came from a supermarket. Forty dollars worth of groceries, cat litter, Tampax, and lightbulbs. At the bottom were the date and time: ten o’clock on the night she’d apparently died.
    Lucas scratched his head. The house inside had been fairly empty. . . .
    He carried the slip back to the house and looked in the refrigerator and cupboards. Found a box of cat litter of the same brand, almost empty. Found a box of Tampax, almost empty.
    He went back to the car and popped the trunk. No groceries.
    “All right,” he said. He called Allport with his cell phone.
    “I just got back from lighting candles at the Cathedral. I was praying you wouldn’t call back,” Allport said.
    “I found this cash register receipt,” Lucas said.
    He explained, and Allport said, “With the thing about the Tampax and the cat litter, it don’t sound like she was taking food to a shut-in.”
    “No. She needed the stuff on this list. She got two quarts of two-percent milk, and there was an empty two-quart carton of two-percent in her garbage under the sink. She got bite-sized shredded wheat, and she had less than half a box of the same stuff in her cupboard.”
    “Goddamnit, where’d the fuckin’ groceries go? I’ll talk to the guys who found the car. Maybe they donated them or something.”
    “You think?”
    “No. I don’t think. Why don’t you stay there for a few minutes. I’m gonna run over and get that cash register tape.”
    Allport showed up a half hour later, shaking his head. “The guys who found the car said there was nothing in it. No groceries.”
    “They’re telling the