Chosen Prey

TV’s been on us like a coat of blue paint.” Then he brightened. “And that’s one thing you got going for you. Nobody but Swanson, Rie, Del, and you and me know about the drawings. None of the news pukes got it yet—that we’ve got another weird motherfucker roaming around.”
    “I hate to tell you this, but we might have to put the drawings on TV,” Lucas said. “If we got two people coming in with drawings because they saw a four-inch article in the Daily Minnesotan, you gotta wonder—how many more are there?”
    Lester leaned back and put his feet up on his desk, unconsciously crossing his ankles as he did it. He scratched the side of his chin and said, “Well, if you gotta. Maybe it’ll take some heat off the Lynette Brown thing.”
    “Maybe,” Lucas said. “You want me to talk to Rose Marie?”
    “That’d be good.”
    On the way out, Lucas paused in the door and said, “You got your feet up.”
    “Ah, fuck me.”
     
    R OSE M ARIE R OUX, the chief of police, was meeting with the mayor. Lucas left a message, asking for a minute of her time, and walked down the stairs to his new office. His old office had been a closet with chairs. The new one still smelled of paint and wet concrete, but had two small offices with doors, desks, and filing cabinets, along with an open bay for the investigators’ desks.
    When the space opened up, there’d been a dogfight over it. Lucas had pointed out that Roux could make two groups happy by giving him a larger office, then passing his old office to somebody who didn’t have an office at all. Besides, he needed it: His intelligence people were interviewing contacts in the hallway. She’d gone along, and mollified the losers with new office chairs and a Macintosh computer for their image files.
    When he walked through the door—even the door was new, and he was modestly proud of it—Marcy Sherrill was sitting in his office with her feet up on his desk. She was on medical leave, and he hadn’t seen her in a week. “You’re gonna pinch a nerve,” he said, as the outer door banged shut behind him.
    “I got nerves of steel,” she said. “They don’t pinch.”
    “Tell me that when you can’t stand up straight,” Lucas grunted, as he moved behind the desk. She was attractive, and single, but she didn’t worry Weather: Marcy and Lucas had already been down the romance road, and had called it off by mutual consent. Marcy was a tough girl and liked to fight. Or had. “How’re you feeling?”
    “Not too bad. Still get the headaches at night.” She’d been shot in the chest with a deer rifle.
    “How much longer?” Lucas asked.
    She shook her head. “They’re gonna take me off the analgesics next week. That’ll stop the headaches, they say, but I’ll get a little more chest pain. They say I should be able to handle it by then. They think.”
    “Keeping up with physical therapy?”
    “Yeah. That hurts worse than the chest and the headaches put together.” She saw him looking her over, and sat up. “Why? You got something for me?”
    “We’re gonna take the Aronson murder. Swanson will brief us this afternoon. Black’s gonna join up temporarily. We need to get Del and Lane to come in. The short version of it is this: We got a freak.”
    “You gonna bring me back on line?” She tried for cool, and got eager instead.
    “Limited duty, if you want,” Lucas said. “We could use somebody to coordinate.”
    “I can do that,” she said. She got up, wobbled carefully once around the office, pain shadowing her eyes. “Goddamnit, I can do that.”
     
    R OSE M ARIE’S SECRETARY called while Lucas and Sherrill were planning an approach to the Aronson case. “Rose Marie would like to see you right now.”
    “Two minutes,” Lucas said, and hung up. To Sherrill: “So maybe the feds can give us a psychological profile of the artist. Get the drawings over to one of those architectural drafting places, with the super Xerox machines, and have them make full-sized copies. Mail them overnight them to Washington. Call what’s-his-name, Mallard. His name’s in my Rolodex. See if he can run interference with the FBI bureaucracy.”
    “Okay. I’ll have Del and Lane here at two o’clock, and get Swanson and Rie to move the files over and do a briefing.”
    “Good. I’m gonna talk to Rose Marie, then go run around town for a while, see what’s happening.”
    “You know you got a hickey?” she asked, tapping the side of her own neck.
    “Yeah,