Chosen Prey (20 page)

"We take the guy before that."

"Only a suggestion," she said.

"I'll keep it in mind."

LUCAS MADE A half-gallon of coffee and poured it into a thermos, got his rain suit off the nail in the garage, and tossed it into the back of the Tahoe. With little hope, he cranked up his IBM and looked at his e-mail--and found a message from a DocJohn. He opened it and brought up a page of scanned X-ray images. He sent the images to his laser printer and two minutes later had eight life-size X-ray images.

THE WEATHER WAS better: still overcast, but dry. Del was waiting in front of his house. His wife waited with him, and when she saw the Tahoe coming, handed Del a cooler. Del said something to her, and when Lucas pulled into the drive, he sheepishly got into the truck. "No more meat loaf," Cheryl said to Lucas.

"I'll remember," Lucas said. "Don't let my meat loaf."

"Lucas . . ." A distinct threat hung in her voice.

"No meat loaf. I swear."

"Have Del tell you about his cholesterol."

Lucas looked at Del, who seemed to shrink down in his seat, then back to his wife. "We'll talk about it," Lucas promised.

On the way out of town, Lucas asked, "What's in the cooler?"

"Bunch of stuff. Mostly cut carrots. Fat-free water crackers."

"I like carrots."

"That's fuckin' great," Del said. "I'm happy for you."

"So are you gonna tell me about your cholesterol?"

Del shrugged. "It's been stuck at two fifty-five. The doc wants it down under two hundred, and if I can't do it by diet, he's gonna put me on Lapovorin."

"Uh-oh. Isn't that what . . . ?"

"Yeah. The guy who comes backwards."

Long pause. Then Lucas said, "Better than a heart bypass. Or dropping dead of a heart attack."

Del said, "Yeah. It kinda scares me, to tell you the truth. The cholesterol does. My mom died of a heart attack when she was fifty-eight."

They rode along for a minute, then Lucas said, "So eat carrots."

Del cracked a grin. "I'm gonna love getting old."

AT THE GRAVEYARD site, there were now a half-dozen TV trucks, along with the line of county sheriff's cars, state cars, a car with federal government tags, Marshall's Jeep, Lake's Subaru, and a few more.

"A simple cop convention yesterday. Now it's a full-scale cluster-fuck," Del said.

"In which nobody knows exactly who's doing what to whom, or with what."

"Or even why."

Lake was waiting on the hillside while his assistant carried the radar along the yellow string. Lucas headed that way first. "Any more?"

"Just the one I told you about this morning, the seventh one. They've got some clothing coming up now."

Lucas looked around the hill. "Where's seven?"

Lake pointed. "Those guys." He pointed farther along the hill. "And those guys, I think, are working on a tree hole, but it's big enough and defined enough that we thought we better dig it out."

"How much longer?"

"This is the last sweep. We'll have some data in a half hour."

Lucas and Del walked up the hill to the command tent. McGrady was still at work, but he looked beat. He peered over his glasses at Lucas. "You're pretty chipper."

"Good night's sleep, pancakes for breakfast, nice conversation with a pretty woman," Lucas said.

"Better'n this, huh?"

Lucas nodded. "You've got seven."

"Yeah." McGrady stumbled backward a step and sank into a canvas field chair. "You know what? The first six didn't bother me that much. The seventh, finding the seventh . . . that kicked my ass."

"I got some X-ray printouts for you. We can get the actual films if we need them. This is for the woman from New Richmond. Nancy Vanderpost."

Lucas handed McGrady the printouts, and McGrady looked at them for a long moment, then said, "Four."

"What?"

"They could be number four."

He walked across the tent to six long cardboard boxes. Inside each box was a stack of clear plastic bags, with the contents of each bag carefully tagged. He rummaged around in the box numbered four and came up with a bag. Inside, Lucas saw several separate bones, including a lower jaw. McGrady looked at the jawbones for a minute, then at Lucas's printouts, then at the jawbone, then at the printout. After a minute, he looked up at Lucas and said softly, "Hello, Nancy."

"You're sure?" Del asked.

"Ninety-nine percent." He dropped the bag back into the box, pulled off his glasses, and said, "Goddamnit. I'm so fuckin' tired."

"You oughta crash for a couple hours," Lucas said.

"Maybe tonight."

LUCAS CALLED MARCY and told her about Vanderpost, then told her to start building a file with the cops from New Richmond. She said she would, and added, "Black was over at the archdiocese, and they're looking for a priest who studied art at UW-Stout in Menomonie, but this monsignor over there said they won't find one. He says he generally knows the background of all the priests in the area, and none of them went to Stout."

"That was thin, anyway," Lucas said.

"Yeah, but listen to this. After Black talked to the guy, he noticed that a bunch of these women listed 'going to Mass' as one of their social activities, and he started to add them up. Of the seventeen people who've gotten drawings so far, eleven are Catholic. That's way too many. Of the three dead women we know about, two were Catholic."

"Yeah?"

"Interesting, huh?"

"Push it."

"We are."

When he got off the phone, Lucas asked McGrady if he'd seen Marshall.

"He wanders around the hill," McGrady said. "He was right up on top the last time I saw him. Sitting on a log."

He was still sitting on the log when Lucas climbed to the top of the hill. He crossed the lip of the crest, and Marshall said, "More bad news." Not a question.

"McGrady says four is Nancy Vanderpost, from New Richmond."

"Ah, jeez."

"You did a hell of a job, man," Lucas said.

"I was nuts for all those years. That's the answer. I kept hoping she'd show up--you'd see those TV shows on amnesia. I knew it was all bullshit, that she was dead."

"You had the guy figured, and that's--"

"What the heck is this?" Marshall was looking past Lucas, down the hill. Del was climbing toward them at a dead run.

"What?" Lucas asked.

"Eight wasn't a tree hole," Del said, gasping for breath.

THEY WERE STANDING around hole eight, looking at a shoe with a dirty bone in it--with the combination of heavy soil and oak litter, the bones showed an irregular coffee color, with lines and pits of bone white. "We need to find a girl who wore red high-top Keds," said the cop in the hole.

"That fad faded a few years ago," Lucas said.

"Yeah, well, she's been here a few years."

Below, another federal car crept slowly past the cluster of cop cars on the road, parked, and three men climbed out. "Baily," Del said.

Lucas looked down the hill. Baily was the FBI's agent in charge at the Minneapolis office, a heavyset man who played a mean game of handball. "Better go get him, take him up to the command tent," Lucas told Del. "I'll round up Marshall and McGrady."

McGrady was at hole six. Lucas said, "The feds are here. Del's bringing Baily up to the command tent."

"Okay. . . . You think they'll come in?"

"Does a chicken have lips?"

Marshall had left his spot at the top of the hill and was wandering past hole three, where the diggers were getting into virgin earth. Lucas caught him by the arm. "Come on and talk to the FBI," Lucas said.

McGrady and Baily were shaking hands when Lucas and Marshall got to the command tent. Baily shook hands with Lucas and said, "Eight."

"Coming out of the ground now," Lucas said. "This is Terry Marshall, a deputy sheriff from Dunn County over in Wisconsin. He broke it."

Lucas explained, and when he finished, Baily nodded at Marshall and said, "Nice piece of work. I'm sorry about your niece."

"I just hope we get the guy," Marshall said. "If he reads the newspapers, he might've taken off like a big-assed bird."

"Got nowhere to run," Baily said. "We've got enough bodies now that we should be able to pinpoint him with victim histories."

"Could be tougher than that," Lucas said. "We've been doing histories on all the women who got the drawings, and so far we've pretty much come up with zip. We got matches, of course, but nothing that looks likely."

"We're setting up a task force, Wisconsin-Minnesota, FBI. We'll run down every single possibility. We'll have all the manpower we need," Baily said. "I talked to the director this morning, and he made this the number-one priority nationwide. Nothing else comes first."

"Terrific," Del said. There was a tone in his voice, and when everybody looked at him, he said, "No, I mean it. I really . . . mean it."

LUCAS AND DEL left the site twenty minutes later: nothing to do that the professionals couldn't do better. McGrady promised updates by telephone, and Lucas told Baily that he would talk to Rose Marie about setting up a liaison to the task force. "Probably gonna be a sergeant named Marcy Sherrill," Lucas told him.

When they were on the road, Lucas looked at Del and said, "That was pretty swift of you, that 'terrific' you laid on Baily."

"Ah, the FBI's a bite in the shorts."

"Baily ain't bad," Lucas said.

"No, he's not. But I can see that he's building a machine, and I've never been much of a cog."

"You're more like a flywheel," Lucas suggested. "Or an air brake."

"You know what I think? I think we better get back and start cross-matching what we've got. I'm not saying this is a competition, but I'd like to be the ones to catch this asshole."

"I hope there's not a nine."

BACK AT CITY Hall, Lucas spoke briefly with Rose Marie, filling her in on developments, then suggested that Marcy be made liaison with the joint task force. "Give her a little exposure," Lucas said.

"She could wind up getting her ass kicked," Rose Marie said.

"You don't know her well enough to know how unlikely that is," Lucas said. "But I'll tell you what--I really don't want to do it. If I've only got six months left in the job, I want to spend my time running around town, chasing this guy's ass."

Rose Marie got Marcy on the phone, told her to stop down. When she did, Rose Marie said, "You've been unanimously elected as our representative to the joint federal-state task force that's being set up. You've also got to coordinate for us, but I don't see how that could be much of a problem, since you'll mostly be doing the same stuff."

Marcy nodded. "Thanks. I'll do it. Anything else?"

"Go with God," Rose Marie said.

Out in the hall, Marcy said, "If you fixed this, I appreciate it." Lucas opened his mouth to reply, but she held up a finger. "You're gonna crack wise, but you don't have to. I appreciate it. Period."

Lucas shrugged. "So all right."

"If you're gonna spend all your time running around town, why don't you figure out why we're up to our ass in Catholics?"

"Maybe I'll do that," Lucas said.

THE ARONSON TEAM had been compiling names and addresses, and cross-checking them. Out of a couple of thousand names, they'd found forty-four matches, and were trying to check the matches. "The problem is, there's only one person who comes up more than twice, and that's Helen Qatar, who runs the Wells Museum over at St. Pat's. She comes up four times."

"Catholic school," Lucas said.

"Helen Qatar's a semisedentary sixty-five," Black said. "She couldn't strangle a fuckin' gerbil. Even if she could catch one."

"Still a whole bunch of Catholics."

Black lowered his voice to a whisper. "And guess what? The guy directing the investigation for the City of Minneapolis is a Catholic."

"Lapsed Catholic," Lucas said. As he looked through the sets of matches, he saw nothing that looked like a pattern. Finally he asked, "Who talked to Helen Qatar?"

"I did."

"Show her the pictures?"

"A couple--she didn't recognize the style. She's pretty . . . old. I didn't roll out any of the vaginal extravaganzas."

"She's in art and she's named four times, and she's a Catholic."

"You want me to talk to her again?"

Lucas thought for a moment, then said, "Nope. I'll go talk to her. Get me out into town."

ST. PATRICK'S UNIVERSITY was on the south side of Minneapolis, south of the Lake Street bridge along the Mississippi, and directly across the river from St. Thomas, its bitter intellectual, political, and athletic rival. Twenty buildings, mostly redbrick, sprawled along the west bank of the river under cover of six hundred oaks and a thousand maples, the maples replacing the elms that had dominated the campus before Dutch elm disease.

Lucas lucked into a metered parking spot a hundred yards from the Wells, got his file off the front seat, bought two hours of parking time, and walked across the street to the museum. The Wells was redbrick, a little newer than most. The floors inside were a shiny brown composite, but Lucas could hear the floorboards creaking beneath the brown stuff. It felt, he thought, like a college should.