Chosen Prey

with.”
    “But what you’ll get will be circumstantial: maybe really solid, but maybe not. He could beat it.”
    “That’s always a risk.”
    Marshall blew more smoke, and his jaw worked. After a minute he said, “That would be . . . tragic.”
    “At this point, I don’t think it’ll happen,” Lucas said.
    “So tell me what you’ve got. I’ve been down here all the time. I keep meaning to come up to see you, but I can’t get myself away from . . .” He looked down the hill, and his jaw worked again. “. . . all the holes.”
    Lucas ran the case past him, everything that they had learned. Marshall’s eyebrows went up when he heard about the photo of Laura Winton at St. Pat’s, and about the death of Neumann.
    “You think they’re all connected?”
    “The Neumann thing . . . that’s just not right. We know he was at St. Pat’s, we know the art teacher died after the drawings were put on TV, we know that Aronson was missing jewelry, and so was Neumann. That’s what we think. The St. Paul cops haven’t gone public with it, but I think Neumann was killed as a kind of . . . cleanup. She figured something out.”
    “A cleanup,” Marshall said. He pitched his cigarette down the hill. “The fucker ought to be skinned alive.”
    Lucas’s cell phone rang a moment later, and he fumbled it out of his pocket. “Yeah?”
    “This is Del. Where are you?”
    “Talking with Marshall, down at the graveyard. What’s going on?”
    “We gotta break,” Del said. “Get your ass back up here.”
    “What happened?”
    Del explained quickly, and Lucas said, “I’m on my way,” hung up, and to Marshall: “Gotta run.”
    “Something?”
    Lucas was already headed down the hill, and he called back, “Maybe.”
    Marshall said, “I’m coming,” and they both scrambled down the wet hill and hopped the ditch, Lucas hurrying to his car, Marshall jogging heavily to his, swinging then through U-turns and accelerating away to the north.

13
    L UCAS WAS P ORSCHE-TRAINED, and showed it, even in the hippo-like Tahoe; he could see Marshall laboring to keep up as the Dunn County deputy tracked him across Dakota County toward the Cities. Once he was on the highway, he put the truck on cruise control to remind himself to slow down. Marshall got on his taillights and stayed there. Lucas led him into a parking garage downtown, called Del while the other cop parked, and after Marshall had climbed into the Tahoe, continued out. Del was waiting on the corner at City Hall.
    “Tell Terry what you told me,” Lucas said, as Del climbed in the back.
    “I was running a picture of Neumann’s and Aronson’s jewelry around town,” Del told Marshall. “There’s a guy Lucas and I both know, Bob Brown’s his name, he deals in estate jewelry. Tries to keep it as legit as he can. I showed him the pictures, and as he soon as he saw the Aronson ring and the pearl necklace, he recognized them. They came in six months ago. He’d sold the necklace, but the ring was still there, and it’s got the ‘Love Forever.’ I gave him a receipt; it’s back at the office.”
    Lucas said to Marshall, “The ring had ‘Love Forever’ engraved inside.”
    “So there’s no question, then,” Marshall said. “Where’d he get them?”
    “Off a bartender named Frank Stans at the Bolo Lounge, a nudie bar out on Highway 55—that’s just west of here, fifteen minutes,” Del said. “Stans told him he bought the stuff across the bar from a guy who said he inherited it.”
    “What are the chances that Stans . . . ?”
    “Stans is a black guy, and he’s dealt with Bob on other stuff. So it’s unlikely,” Del said.
    “And we know where he’s at? This Stans guy?” Marshall said.
    Del looked at his watch. “His shift started about ten minutes ago.”
    Marshall cracked a grin and said, “The big city.”
    “What?” Del asked over the seat back.
    “Over in Wisconsin, the nudie bars don’t get going until after dinner.”
    “I got a cabin in Wisconsin, up north,” Lucas said. “I was going deer hunting a couple of years ago, and when I got up there, Friday night, late, it was snowing. So I’m in my cabin, checking everything out, and find out I’d picked up a box of varmint rounds for my .243. So I’m wandering around trying to find some place open that sells .243s, and I stop at a convenience store and they told me that the only place open that might sell them was this nudie bar. I went over, and sure enough,