Chosen Prey Read online

  Oh, no, she’d said, I wouldn’t pose nude. That wouldn’t be necessary, he said. He was an art professor, he just wanted some facial studies that he could print digitally. She agreed, and had, eventually, even taken off a few of her clothes: her back turned to him, sitting on a stool, her glorious back tapering down to a sheet crinkled beneath her little round butt. The studies had been all right, but it was at home, with the computer, that he’d done the real drawings.

  He had drawn her, wined her, dined her, and finally, on this bleak winter afternoon, fucked her and nearly killed her because she had not lived up to her images he had created from her photographs. . . .

  THE DAY AFTER the assignation with Barstad, the low stacked-heels of Charlotte Neumann, an ordained Episcopalian priest, author of New Art Modalities: Woman/Sin, Sin/Woman, S/in/ister, which, the week before, had broken through the top-10,000 barrier of the Barnes & Noble on-line bestseller list, and who was, not incidentally, the department chairperson, echoed down the hallway and stopped at his door. A tall ever-angry woman with a prominent nose and a single, dark, four-inch-long eyebrow, Neumann walked in without knocking and said, “I need your student budget line. This afternoon.”

  “I thought we had until next Wednesday?” He posed with a cup of coffee held delicately in both hands, his eyebrows arched. He’d left the steel-blue Hermes silk scarf looped around his neck when he’d taken off his coat, and with the books behind him, the china cup, and the scarf framing his face, he must’ve been a striking portrait, he thought. But it was wasted on Neumann, he thought; she was a natural Puritan.

  “I’ve decided that we could avoid the confusion of last year by having them in my office a week early, which will give me time to eliminate any error,” she said, leaving no doubt that she used the term “error” as might a papal inquisitor: “Last year” Qatar had been two weeks late with the budget.

  “Well, that’s simply impossible,” Qatar said. “If you’d given me any notice at all . . .”

  “You apparently didn’t read last week’s departmental bulletin,” she snarled. There was a light in her eye. She’d caught him out, she thought, and he’d soon get a corrective memo with a copy for his personnel file.

  “Nobodyread last week’s departmental bulletin, Charlotte,” Qatar snarled back. He’d been widely published and was permitted a snarl. “Nobody ever reads the departmental bulletin because the departmental bulletin, is, in the words of the sainted Sartre, shit. Besides, I was on periodic retreat on Thursday and Friday, as you should have known if you’d read the memo I sent you. I never got the bulletin.”

  “I’m sure it was placed in your mailbox.”

  “Elene couldn’t find her own butt, much less my mailbox. She can’t even deliver my paycheck,” Qatar said. Elene was the departmental secretary.

  “All right,” Neuman said. “Then by tomorrow. By noon.” She took one step backward, into the hallway, and slammed the door.

  The impact ejected Qatar from his office chair, sloshing coffee out of his cup, across his fingers, and onto the old carpet. He took a turn around the office, blinded by a red rage that left him shaking. He’d chosen the life of a teacher because it was a high calling, much higher than commerce. If he’d gone for commerce, he’d undoubtedly be rich now; but then, he’d be a merchant, with dirty hands. But sometimes, like this, the idea of possessing an executive power—the power to destroy the Charlotte Neumanns of the world—was very attractive.

  He paced the office for five minutes, imaging scenarios of her destruction, muttering through them, reciting the lines. The visions were so clear that he could walk through them.

  When the rage subsided, he felt cleaner. Purified. He poured another cup of coffee and picked it up with a steady hand. Took a sip, and sighed.

  He would have taken pleasure in throttling the life out of Charlotte Neumann, though not because she appealed to his particular brand of insanity. He thought he might enjoy it the way anyone would whose nominal supervisor enjoyed small tyrannies as Neumann did.

  So he would get angry, he would fantasize, but he would do nothing but snipe and backbite, like any other associate professor.

  She did not engage him—did not light his fire.

  THE NEXT DAY, passing through Saks, he found that the cashmere sweaters had gone on sale. There wasn’t much cold weather left, but the cashmere would wear forever. These particular sweaters, with the slightly rolled neckline, would perfectly frame his face, and the tailored shoulders would give him a nice wedgy stature. He tried the sweater on, and it was perfect. A good pair of jeans would show off his butt—he could have the legs tailored for nine dollars a pair at a sewing place in the skyway. A champagne suede coat and cowboy boots would complete the set . . . but it was all too expensive.

  He put the sweater back and left the store, thinking of Barstad. She did engage his insanity: He could think of Barstad and the rope and find himself instantly and almost painfully erect. Blondes looked so much more naked than darker women; so much more vulnerable.

  The next day was Wednesday: Perhaps he could buy them after all.

  He would take the rope.

  BUT ON TUESDAY evening, still thinking about Barstad and the rope, feeling the hunger growing, he was derailed again. He arrived home early and got a carton of milk from the refrigerator and a box of Froot Loops from the cupboard, and sat at the table to eat. The Star-Tribune was still on the table from the morning; he’d barely glanced at it before he left. Now he sat down, poured milk on the Froot Loops, and folded the paper open at random. His eye fell straight down the page to a small article at the bottom: The two-deck headline said “Woman Strangled/Police Seek Help.”

  The body of an unidentified woman was found Sunday in the Minnesota state forest north of Cannon Falls by a local man who was scouting for wild turkey sign. A preliminary investigation suggested that the woman had been dead for a year or more, said Goodhue County medical examiner Carl Boone.

  “Shit.” He stood up, threw the paper at the kitchen sink. Stormed into the living room, hands clenched. “Shit, shit.”

  Dropped onto a chair, put his hands on his head, and wept. He wept for a full minute, drawing in long gasping breaths, the tears rolling down his cheeks. Any serious art historian, he felt, would have done the same. It was called sensitivity.

  After the minute, he was finished. He washed his face in cold water, patted it dry with paper towels. Looked in the mirror and thought: Barstad. He couldn’t touch her for the time being. If another blonde disappeared, the police would go crazy. He would have to wait. No sweaters. No new clothes. But maybe, he thought, the woman would come through with some actual sex. That would be different.

  But he could still feel her special allure, her blondness. He could feel it in his hands, and in the vein that pulsed in his throat. He wanted her badly. And he would have her, he thought.

  Sooner or later.

  2

  THE WINTER HADN’T been particularly cold, nor had there been much snow; but it seemed like months since they’d last seen the sun. The streetlights still came on at five o’clock, and with the daily cycle of thaw and freeze, the dampness rose out of the ground like a plague of ghouls.

  Lucas Davenport peered through the café window, at the raindrops killing themselves on the vacant riverside deck, and said, “I can’t stand any more rain. I could hear it all day on the windows and roof.”

  The woman across the table nodded, and he continued. “Yesterday, I was up in the courthouse, looking down at the sidewalk. Everybody’s in raincoats and parkas. They looked like cockroaches scuttling around in the dark.”

  “Two more weeks ’til spring,” said the woman across the table. Weather Karkinnen finished a cup of wild rice soup and dabbed at her lips with a napkin. She was a small woman with a minor case of hat hair, which she’d shaken out of a hand-knit watch cap with snowflakes on the sides. She had a crooked nose, broad shoulders, and level blue eyes. “I’ll tell you what: Looking at the river makes me feel cold.
It still looks like a winter river.”

  Lucas looked out at the river and the lights of Wisconsin on the opposite shore. “Doesn’t smell so good, either. Like dead carp.”

  “And worms. Eagles are out, though. Scavenging down the river.”

  “We ought to get out of here,” Lucas said. “Why don’t we go sailing? Take a couple of weeks . . .”

  “I can’t. I’m scheduled eight weeks out,” she said. “Besides, you don’t like sailing. The last time we were on a big boat, you said it was like driving an RV.”

  “You misremember,” Lucas said. He waved at a waitress and pointed at his empty martini glass. She nodded, and he turned back to Weather. “I said it was like driving an RV across North Dakota at seven miles an hour. Except less interesting.”

  Weather had a glass of white wine, and she twirled it between her fingers. She was a surgeon and had the muscled hands of a surgeon. “What about this woman who was strangled? Why don’t you help with that?”

  “It’s being handled,” Lucas said. “Besides, I—”

  “It’s been a while,” Weather said, interrupting. “When did they find her? Last weekend?”

  “Last Sunday,” Lucas said. “Takes time.”

  “A week, and what’ve they got? Anything? And she’d already been dead for eighteen months when they found her.”

  “I dunno. I don’t know what they got. You know I knew her folks?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “They came to see me when she disappeared, asked for help. I called around, talked to some people. Half of them thought she’d split for the Coast, the other half figured she was dead. Nobody had any idea who did it. All they knew was that she was gone, and it didn’t look like she’d planned to go . . . . Other than that, we had zip. Nothing.”

  “So why not get in it? It’s the kind of case you enjoy. You get to figure something out. It’s not some jerk sitting in the kitchen with a can of Schlitz in his lap, waiting for the cops to bust him.”

  “I don’t want to fuck with somebody trying to do a job,” Lucas said. He scrubbed furiously at an old scar that ran down his forehead and across an eyebrow onto a cheek. He was a large man, heavy-shouldered, dark-complected—almost Indian-dark—but with sky-blue eyes. He moved uneasily in his chair, as though it might break under his weight. “Besides, knowing her folks makes it tougher. Knocks me off center. Makes me feel bad.”

  “Oh, bullshit,” Weather said. “You’re moping around looking for sympathy. Maybe you oughta call what’s-her-name. She’d probably give you some sympathy.”

  Lucas deliberately misunderstood the reference to “what’s-her-name.” “Or a pot. If she didn’t give me sympathy, she could give me a pot.”

  Weather’s voice went dangerously quiet. “I didn’t mean that one.”

  Of course she hadn’t, but Lucas could play the game too. “Oh,” he said, and tried his charming smile. But his charming smile hardly ever came off: His eyes could be charming, but his smile just made him look hard.

  Romantic relationships were like gears in an old pocket watch, Lucas thought, looking across the table at Weather. They were always turning, some of the gears small and fast, others bigger and slower. The biggest of his life, his relationship with Weather, was lazily clicking around to something serious.

  They’d once been headed for marriage, but that had come undone when Weather had been taken as a hostage by a crazy biker because of a case Lucas had worked on. There’d been an ambush, and the biker had been killed. Weather had . . . gone away; had left her wedding dress hanging in Lucas’s bedroom closet. They’d been apart for a couple of years, and now they were seeing each other again. They’d been in bed for two months, but nothing had been said. No final commitments yet, no ultimatums or we-gotta-talk’s. But if something went wrong again, that would be the end. There could be no renegotiation now, not if there were another breakdown . . . .

  Lucas liked women. Most of them, with a reasonable number of exceptions, liked him back. Enough had liked him well enough to keep a couple of gears spinning at a time. The summer before, he’d had a quick, enjoyable fling with a potter. About the same time, an old college girlfriend had been going through the breakup of her long-term marriage, and he’d started talking to her again. That hadn’t ended. There’d been no dating, no sex, nothing but talk: But Catrin was the gear wheel that most concerned Weather.

  Lucas kept telling her that there was no need to worry. He and Catrin were friends, going way back. Old friends. “Old friends worry me more than new potters,” Weather had said. “Besides, the potter’s a child. You couldn’t date a child for long.”

  The potter was eight years younger than Weather, whose baby alarm was now booming like Big Ben.

  The waitress came with the martini—three olives—and Lucas turned back to the river. “Oh, man, look at that.”

  Weather looked: A seventeen- or eighteen-foot Lund open fishing boat was chugging by, the two occupants bent against the rain. “They’re going out,” Weather said.

  “Walleye fishermen,” Lucas said. “They’re all crazier than a shit-house mouse. Or would it be mice?”

  “Mice, I think.” She smiled a crooked smile under her crooked nose, but her eyes had gone serious, and she said, “So why don’t we get pregnant?”

  Lucas nearly choked on an olive. “What?”

  “I’m gonna be thirty-nine,” she said. “It’s not too late yet, but we’re pushing it.”

  “Well, I just . . .”

  “Think about it,” she said. “No emotional commitment is necessary, as long as I’m inseminated.”

  Lucas’s mouth worked spasmodically, no words forming, until he realized that she was teasing. He popped the second olive and chewed. “You’re the only person who can do that, pull my chain that way.”

  “Lucas, every woman you know pulls your chain,” Weather said. “Titsy pulls it about once every three minutes.”

  Titsy was Marcy Sherrill, a homicide cop. A woman with a fine figure, Lucas thought, who deserved a nickname more dignified than Titsy. “But I always see her coming,” he said. “I know when she’s doing it.”

  “Besides, I was only pulling your chain on the last part,” Weather said. “If you’re not going to do anything with the Photo Queen, I think we should start working on some kids.”

  The Photo Queen was Catrin. “Catrin and I are . . . friends,” Lucas said. “Honest to God. You’d like her, if you’d give her a chance.”

  “I don’t want her to have a chance. She’s had her chance.”

  “So look,” he said, flopping his arms. “I’ve got no problem with the kid thing. If you want to get . . .”

  “If you say ‘a bun in the oven,’ or something like that, I swear to God, I’ll pour a glass of wine in your lap.”

  Lucas swerved: “. . . if you want to get pregnant, we can work something out.”

  “So it’s settled.”

  “Sure. Whatever.”

  “What’s this whatever shit? What’s this . . .”

  Lucas scrubbed at the scar. Christ, a minute ago he’d been idly musing about commitment.

  THE RAIN DWINDLED to a mist as they drove back west toward the Cities. They made it to St. Paul just before nine o’clock and found a strange car in Lucas’s driveway—an aging hatchback, dark, a Volkswagen maybe. Lucas didn’t have any friends who drove Volkswagens. There’d been some bad experiences with people waiting at Lucas’s door. He popped open the Tahoe’s center console; his .45 was snuggled inside. At the same time, Weather said, “Somebody on the porch.”

  Two people, in fact. The taller, heavier one was pushing the doorbell. Lucas slowed, turned into the drive. The two people on the porch turned, and the big one walked quickly into the Tahoe’s headlights.

  “Swanson,” Lucas said, and relaxed.

  Swanson was an old-time homicide dick, a voluntary night-shift guy, a little too old for the job, a little too heavy. Not brilliant, but competent. The woman beside him was a short tomboyi
sh detective from the sex unit: Carolyn Rie, all freckles and braids and teeth. An interesting woman, Lucas thought, and well worth treating with a poker face when Weather was around. She was wearing a leather-and-wool letter jacket, too large, without gloves.

  “Swanson . . . Hey, Carolyn,” Lucas said out the window.

  “Got something you might want to look at,” Swanson said. He waved a roll of paper.

  INSIDE, WEATHER WENT to make coffee while the cops pulled off their coats. “Tell me,” Lucas said.