Chosen Prey

question comes up, how are they gonna pay for the burn work? They’re not poor enough to get aid, but they’re not rich enough to write a check. So Harvey said not to worry, he’d cover it. He went to the bank, and the bank knew him well enough to give him another loan on his shop, and he’s right up to date.”
    She put her head down and snuffled a couple of times, something Lucas hadn’t often seen with her patients. “Well, Jesus, what . . .”
    “So he came in today so I could take a last look, and I’m asking him how everything is, and everything’s fine, and he’s hoping we get an early spring so he can start moving the ATVs, and so on, and then he mentions he’s got some kind of skin fungus going that he can’t seem to shake, right in the middle of his back, and it itches. So I say, let me take a look. . . .”
    “Ah, shit,” Lucas said.
    She bobbed her head. “Yup. A big fat melanoma. He’s known he’s had it for weeks, or maybe three or four months. God knows how long he had it before that. I sent him right over to Sharp, but . . . I think he’s history. Just been too much time.”
    “Jeez.” Lucas patted her on the back.
    “Yeah. I can handle the ones where I know what’s going on. But when it just jumps up like this, a guy younger than you are yourself, and he looks perfectly healthy and he’s gonna be dead in a year . . . Man. I don’t know. I’m wondering if I ought to have a kid at all.”
    “Hey. If everybody worried about what would happen to their kid if they died, nobody would have kids. You just do it.”
    “Yeah . . .”
    “Tell you what’s worse: If you have the kid, and the kid dies. That’s worse.”
    “I guess.” She sighed. “Fuckin’ moose, huh?”
     
    M ARCY HAD PHOTOS of Aronson’s jewelry when Lucas arrived at the office in the morning, as well as insurance photograph of Neumann’s diamond and emerald rings.
    “Aronson’s parents came in this morning,” she said. “They decided they didn’t want to take a chance on the mail, so they drove down last night, stayed in a motel, and brought them in first thing.”
    Lucas looked at the photos. Both the necklace and the ring had been shot against a black background, and had been enlarged to show detail. “Better than I hoped,” he said. “Get the property guys to run these around town. Paper the place.”
    “That’s sorta under way,” Marcy said. “We got some copies made, and Del’s taking them around to people he knows, and he knows most of them. . . . Property’s already doing some more.”
    “Okay. . . . Do you know if the state’s still working the hill?”
    “They are—McGrady called. They’ve got an ID on another one of the dead women. Ellice Hampton, from Clear Lake, Iowa. She disappeared four years ago, twenty-eight. She was unemployed and living with her parents when she disappeared. She’d been working with an insurance company in Des Moines, in the advertising and publicity department. She did advertising layouts for print media and was active in community theater. She’d been looking for work in both Des Moines and Minneapolis. Blond, good-looking, small, and busty. Divorced—ex-husband was a cop in Mason City, and he’s in the clear.”
    “Another artsy type.”
    “That’s the impression I get. I called down Clear Lake, but they’ve got nothing at all on the case—she vanished, and her parents didn’t even know where she’d been planning to go that day, if she’d been planning to go anywhere. When they got home from their jobs, she wasn’t there, though her car was. She just never came back.”
    “Is there any point in doing a list?”
    “From what the Clear Lake cop said, her parents really didn’t know too much about her friends either in Des Moines or up here. They don’t even know if she had any friends up here.”
    “Goddamnit.”
    “He’s careful about that. He cuts the woman out of her usual crowd, moves in, must feed them some kind of bullshit to keep them from talking, and then kills them.”
    “Maybe tells them he’s married or something,” Lucas said.
    “Still, you’d think . . .”
    “Yeah. Somebody would know.”
    They thought about that for a minute, then Marcy said, “So anyway, that’s three people we’ve ID’d from the graveyard, five to go.”
     
    W ITH NOTHING SPECIFIC to work on, Lucas had to decide whether to drive down the graveyard—where he wouldn’t have much to do—or review paper. The idea of