Chosen Prey

inside walls where the students paint all their signs and put up posters and stuff?”
    “Yeah, go ahead,” Lucas said.
    “Anyway, she sees this poster, and there are a couple more like it. The thing is, Patton recognized this woman.” Rie tapped the face of the woman in the drawing. “She figured the woman would not approve, so she takes them down. There are three of them, and I personally think they must have been put up within a few minutes of Patton coming by, because I think somebody would have stolen them pretty quick. They were only Scotch-taped up.”
    “Any prints on the tape?” Lucas asked.
    “No, but I’ll come back to that,” Rie said. “Anyway, Patton was embarrassed about it, and she didn’t know what to ask the other woman—they were once in a class together, and she didn’t know her all that well.”
    “What’s her name?” Weather asked. “The woman in the picture?”
    “Beverly Wood,” Rie said. “So Patton eventually looks up Wood, this is a couple days later, and says, ‘Hey, did you know that somebody posted some pictures of you?’ Wood didn’t know, so Patton showed her, and Wood freaked. She came to see us, with Patton. The thing is, she says, she never posed for any pictures like that. In fact, she’d only had, like, two sexual relationships in her life, and neither had lasted very long. The sex, she says, was all very conventional. No photographs, no drawings, no messing around naked.”
    “Sounds kinda boring,” Lucas said.
    “That’s the point,” Rie said. “She’s not the kind of person who winds up in this kind of picture.”
    “Did you check the guys? The ex-boyfriends?”
    “Yeah, we did,” Rie said. “Both of them deny anything, both of them seem to be fairly nice guys—even Wood said so. Neither one of them has any background in art . . . and whoever did this, I mean, he seems to be pretty good. I mean, a pretty good artist.”
    They all looked again: He was pretty good, whoever he was. “No question that this is Wood? It could be pretty generic.”
    “Nope. That little bump on the nose . . . She’s got that beauty mark by her eye. I mean, you’ve got to see her and talk to her. This is her.”
    “Okay,” Lucas said. He stepped back from the table and looked at Swanson. “What else? You say this happened back in November?”
    “Okay. We checked it for prints and it came up absolutely clean, except for Patton’s prints and a few that Wood put on them. So the guy who drew this knows that somebody might be looking for his prints. He’s careful.”
    “Did you check Patton? And Wood?” Weather asked. “It could be a form of exhibitionism.”
    Rie batted the question away. “We were doing that . . . but you have to understand, we were not even sure that a crime had been committed. Anyway, we checked them. Or we were in the process of checking on them, but in the meantime, Patton and Wood had both talked about the situation, and the Daily Minnesotan got onto it. They sent this kid reporter over and . . . with Wood’s permission, we gave them a little story. We thought the most likely guy to do something like this would be somebody in the art department, and maybe somebody would recognize the style. We got these.”
    Rie unrolled two more sheets of paper, both smaller than the first, and both creased, as though they’d once fit inside an envelope. One was a drawing of a woman masturbating with a vibrator. Another was a low-angle drawing of a nude woman leaning against a door, her hips thrust toward the viewer.
    “These were mailed to two university students, one back in June, last year, the other one in late August or early September. Neither woman reported the drawings. One of them thought it was just a silly trick by one of her art friends, and actually thought the drawing was kind of neat.”
    “That would be the door drawing,” Weather said, carrying cups of microwave coffee.
    “Yeah. Not many woman would think the vibrator drawing was all that cool,” Rie said. “Anyway, this woman”—she touched the masturbation drawing—“not only claims that she never posed for anybody, but nobody has ever seen her nude, not since she was in high school gym class. Nobody, male or female. She’s still a virgin.”
    “Huh,” Lucas said. He looked at the three drawings. There was no question that they’d been done by the same artist. “So we got a weirdo.” Again he looked at Swanson. “And?”
    “That strangled chick that