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 tomboyish 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.
Rie took the roll of paper from Swanson and spread it across the dining table. "Oh, my," Lucas said. It was a drawing, detailed, and nearly full-length, of a nude woman whose body was projecting toward the viewer, legs slightly spread, one hand pressed into her vulva. She was fellating a man who was mostly, but not entirely, out of the picture.
Weather picked up on the tone and came over to look. "Gross," she said. She looked closely at Rie. "Where'd you get it?"
"Back in November, a woman named Emily Patton was walking across the Washington Avenue Bridge, the covered part, going over to the university library on the West Bank. This was about six in the morning, still really dark, not many people around. She sees this drawing on one of the walls-you know what I'm talking about? Those inside walls where the students paint all their signs and put up posters and stuff?"
"Yeah, go ahead," Lucas said.
"Anyway, she sees this poster, and there are a couple more like it. The thing is, Patton recognized this woman." Rie tapped the face of the woman in the drawing. "She figured the woman would not approve, so she takes them down. There are three of them, and I personally think they must have been put up within a few minutes of Patton coming by, because I think somebody would have stolen them pretty quick. They were only Scotch-taped up."
"Any prints on the tape?" Lucas asked.
"No, but I'll come back to that," Rie said. "Anyway, Patton was embarrassed about it, and she didn't know what to ask the other woman-they were once in a class together, and she didn't know her all that well."
"What's her name?" Weather asked. "The woman in the picture?"
"Beverly Wood," Rie said. "So Patton eventually looks up Wood, this is a couple days later, and says, 'Hey, did you know that somebody posted some pictures of you?' Wood didn't know, so Patton showed her, and Wood freaked. She came to see us, with Patton. The thing is, she says, she never posed for any pictures like that. In fact, she'd only had, like, two sexual relationships in her life, and neither had lasted very long. The sex, she says, was all very conventional. No photographs, no drawings, no messing around naked."
"Sounds kinda boring," Lucas said.
"That's the point," Rie said. "She's not the kind of person who winds up in this kind of picture."
"Did you check the guys? The ex-boyfriends?"
"Yeah, we did," Rie said. "Both of them deny anything, both of them seem to be fairly nice guys-even Wood said so. Neither one of them has any background in art… and whoever did this, I mean, he seems to be pretty good. I mean, a pretty good artist."
They all looked again: He was pretty good, whoever he was. "No question that this is Wood? It could be pretty generic."
"Nope. That little bump on the nose… She's got that beauty mark by her eye. I mean, you've got to see her and talk to her. This is her."
"Okay," Lucas said. He stepped back from the table and looked at Swanson. "What else? You say this happened back in November?"
"Okay. We checked it for prints and it came up absolutely clean, except for Patton's prints and a few that Wood put on them. So the guy who drew this knows that somebody might be looking for his prints. He's careful."
"Did you check Patton? And Wood?" Weather asked. "It could be a form of exhibitionism."
Rie batted the question away. "We were doing that… but you have to understand, we were not even sure that a crime had been committed. Anyway, we checked them. Or we were in the process of checking on them, but in the meantime, Patton and Wood had both talked about the situation, and the Daily Minnesotan got onto it. They sent this kid reporter over and… with Wood's permission, we gave them a little story. We thought the most likely guy to do something like this would be somebody in the art department, and maybe somebody would recognize the style. We got these."
Rie unrolled two more sheets of paper, both smaller than the first, and both creased, as though they'd once fit inside an envelope. One was a drawing of a woman masturbating with a vibrator. Another was a low-angle drawing of a nude woman leaning against a door, her hips thrust toward the viewer.
"These were mailed to two university students, one back in June, last year, the other one in late August or early September. Neither woman reported the drawings. One of them thought it was just a silly trick by one of her art friends, and actually thought the drawing was kind of neat."
"That would be the door drawing," Weather said, carrying cups of microwave coffee.
"Yeah. Not many woman would think the vibrator drawing was all that cool," Rie said. "Anyway, this woman"-she touched the masturbation drawing-"not only claims that she never posed for anybody, but nobody has ever seen her nude, not since she was in high school gym class. Nobody, male or female. She's still a virgin."
"Huh," Lucas said. He looked at the three drawings. There was no question that they'd been done by the same artist. "So we got a weirdo." Again he looked at Swanson. "And?"
"That strangled chick that got dug up last Sunday? Aronson? This was in her file; we'd found it in a desk drawer. To tell you the truth, I think most everybody had forgotten about it, except Del." Swanson rolled out another drawing. A woman was sitting astride a chair, her legs open to the world, her breasts cupped in her hands. The pose was marginally less pornographic than the first two, but there was no doubt that it'd had been done by the same hand as the other drawings.
"Uh-oh," Lucas said.
"We didn't know about the other drawings, because Sex was handling them," Swanson said. "Del saw them when he stopped to talk to Carolyn, and he remembered the drawing in the Aronson file. We pulled them just this afternoon, and put them together."
"A psycho," Rie said.
"Looks like it," Lucas said. "So what do you want? More people?"
"We thought maybe you'd like to come in, take a look."
"I'm a little tied up."
"Oh, horseshit," Weather said. She looked at Swanson and Rie. "He's so bored, he's talking about renting a sailboat."
And to Lucas: "It would certainly give you something to do until the sun comes out."
3
DEPUTY CHIEF/ INVESTIGATIONS Frank Lester supervised all the nonuniformed investigative units except Lucas's group. He had the spread-ass look of a longtime bureaucrat, but still carried the skeptical thin smile of a street cop. When Lucas walked into his office the next morning, Lester gestured with a cup of coffee and said, "You got a hickey on your neck."