Chosen Prey Read Free Page B

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.

    Chapter 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 cafe 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