Chosen Prey

Aronson’s mother was named Dolly. She asked, quietly, “Did you catch him?”
    “Not yet,” Lucas said.
    “I’m praying for it.”
    “Mrs. Aronson, did your daughter have anything expensive, especially jewelry, or anything small and high value like that, that might be missing?”
    “Yes,” she said positively. “We talked to somebody there about it, but we never found out what happened to it. We didn’t want to seem like we were complaining.”
    “We think that the man who killed her may have taken the jewelry.”
    “Oh, no.”
    “But if he did, and we can identify it . . .”
    “Oh, yes. I’d know these two pieces anywhere. An antique pearl necklace and an antique pearl wedding ring. They were my mother’s, and her mother’s before that. I had them myself for thirty years.”
    “Do you have photos or anything?”
    “Actually, my insurance agent does, I believe. Shall I send them?”
    “Yes . . . uh, no. What I would prefer is if you could take them to your local police department and have them make color copies and send the copies. Hang on to the originals in case we need them.”
    “I will do that. I will get them and make the copies and I will send them to you by Express Mail. Or if you need them immediately, I will have Dick drive them down.”
    “Express Mail would be fine,” Lucas said.
    When he got off the phone, he told Marcy, “We need a list of fences.”
    “I’ll talk to the guys in property crime,” she said. “If the guy is taking this stuff, you think he would be stupid enough to sell it here?”
    “How many Minneapolis artists know fences in New York?”
    “All right. I’ll talk to them right now,” Marcy said.
    “How are the lists going?”
    “We’ve got a couple more matches, but nothing hot.”
    “How about IDs from the graveyard?” Lucas asked.
    “Just the ones we knew going in. The state guys are rounding up dental records for women reported missing, who are still missing, that more or less match the ones that we know—more or less blond, more or less interested in art, seventeen to thirty-five at the time of their disappearance.”
    “Bet we get a few,” Lucas said.
    “Ought to start getting some results by tomorrow.”
    “We want to get on top of them: Start making the lists as soon as we get a name.”
    She had a stack of papers in her hands, and she shuffled through them. “There was one girl from Lino Lakes, a Brenda . . . I think. Hmmm . . .” She was so intent that Lucas smiled and asked, “You like this? Running things?”
    “Yes,” she said, looking up. “Not only that, I’m pretty good at it.”
    “I thought you might be,” he said. “I just hope you don’t wind up spending too much time with this task force. Get your name known, but hang around here, not with them. It’s always better to be with the winner.”
    “The winner?”
    “Yeah,” Lucas said. “The task force won’t catch this guy. We will.”
     
    T HAT NIGHT, L UCAS made pasta with his special meat sauce—ground moose tenderloin with off-the-shelf vegetarian spaghetti sauce—with apple-onion salad and Chianti, and had it ready when Weather arrived. She came dragging in, her briefcase a half-inch off the kitchen tile. She sniffed the air and asked, “Moose?”
    “Different this time. I’ve perfected it,” he said.
    “I suppose you’ve used the whole jar of spaghetti sauce.”
    “Nope. I knew you’d be chicken, so I saved some. You can sample the moose, and if you don’t like it, we’ll whip some of the straight stuff into the microwave.” He picked up her attitude. “What happened to you?”
    “I had a really bad day,” she said. “Really bad.”
    “I thought you had the day off,” Lucas said. “Paperwork.”
    “And a couple of office patients. Have I told you about Harvey Simson? The guy who runs the snowmobile and ATV shop?”
    “No.”
    “He was cleaning out a carburetor a month or so ago with some kind of spray solvent, and it exploded. He got third-degree burns on his forearms, and after it was cleaned up, he needed a graft to cover the wound. I was up, so I took some skin off his leg and put it on his arm. No sweat. I saw him a couple of times, met his wife, she’s this nice fat girl, one of the happy ones, and they’ve got a little daughter and another kid on the way. He’s about thirty and he’s finally got the shop going, and they’re starting to make some money, but they didn’t have a whole lot of insurance. So the