Chosen Prey Read Free Page B

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
    T HE 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