Chosen Prey Read Free

as a weapon.
    Absolutely.
    His first use of it had been almost thoughtless, a sociology professor from the University of Minnesota who had, years before, rejected his interest. He’d snapped her one day as she walked across the pedestrian bridge toward the student union, unaware of his presence. Theirs had not been a planned encounter, but purely accidental.
    After processing the photo, and a dozen trial sketches, he’d produced a brilliant likeness of her face, attached to a grossly gynecological shot from the Internet. The drawing had the weird, sprawling foreshortening that he’d never gotten right in his studio classes.
    He mailed the drawing to her.
    As he prepared to do it, it occurred to him that he might be—probably was—committing a crime of some kind. Qatar was not unfamiliar with crime, and the care that comes with the dedicated commission of capital offenses. He redid the drawing and used a new unhandled envelope, to eliminate any fingerprints.
    After mailing it, he did nothing more. His imagination supplied multiple versions of her reaction, and that was enough.
    Well. Not quite enough. In the past three years, he’d repeated the drawing attacks seventeen times. The thrill was not the same as the killing—lacked the specificity and intensity—but it was deeply pleasurable. He would sit in his old-fashioned wooden rocker, eyes closed, thinking of his women as they opened the letters . . . . And thinking of those others as they fought the rope.
    He’d met Barstad because of the drawings. He’d seen her at work in a bookstore; had attracted her attention when he purchased a book on digital printing. They’d talked for a few minutes at the cash register, and again, a few nights later, as he browsed the art books. She was a fabric artist herself, she said, and used a computer to create quilt patterns. The play of light, she said, that’s the thing. I want my quilts to look like they have window light on them, even in a room without windows. The art talk led to coffee, to a suggestion that she might pose for him.
    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. . . .
     
    T HE 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