Chosen Prey by John Sandford

“What are you going to do? Stay on?”
    “That’d be tough,” Lucas said. “A little depends on who gets the top job.”
    “I’ll tell you what, there’s a lot of calculation going on today,” Lester said. “People standing around talking. The bullshit machine is running overtime.”
    “Always happens,” Lucas said, zipping up and moving to the next sink. “How many chiefs you been through?”
    “Nine,” Lester said. “Rose Marie was the ninth. But it was a lot easier to make the change on the first four or five, when I was sitting in a squad with a flashlight and a doughnut.”
     
    D EL AND M ARCY were waiting in the new office. “Swanson and Lane are over at the Cheese-It, trying to find somebody who might have seen Aronson with Bruce Willis,” Marcy said. She handed Lucas a photograph of the actor. “We downloaded a picture of Willis from the net, and we’re gonna have it redrawn, and sort of generalized, with the long black coat. Put it out in the papers.”
    Lucas snapped the photo with his fingertip and said, “That’s good. Get it going. How about the lists?”
    “We got Anderson to set up a computerized sorting program. We type in lists for each woman and push a button and it finds matches. So far, we don’t have any. But we do have something else.”
    “What?”
    “We have nine women calling in—count ’em, nine—saying they got these drawings in the mail.”
    “Nine?”
    “Over three years. Five of them saved the drawings. I’ve got a couple of squads running around right now, picking up the drawings, and four of the women are coming in this afternoon to talk to me and Black. We’re probably gonna have to go out for the others. They can’t get away from their jobs so easy.”
    “If we got nine, then there are probably twenty more,” Lucas said.
    “We’re also getting a little more media space than we thought. There hasn’t been much good crime news lately, so CNN and Fox picked up on the drawings from the local stations last night, and they’re showing them every fifteen minutes all day.”
    “So I can go home and take a nap?”
    “No. You and Del are going to six ad agencies. Gonna look in the art department for buzzcut guys with long dark coats. Also, you got a call from a Terry Marshall—he’s a sheriff’s deputy from over in Menomonie, in Wisconsin. Dunn County. He’s hot to talk. And a guy named Gerry Haack who wants you to call back right away.”
    Del said, “I’ve got the list of ad agencies. We can walk to them.”
    “Let me make the calls, and we’ll go,” Lucas said.
     
    H E CALLED H AACK first. “What?”
    “You told those guys who I was,” Haack screamed. The scream was followed by two rattling whack s, as though Haack had banged the receiver against a wooden wall. “They’re gonna kill me. I’m gonna lose my job.”
    “I didn’t tell them anything,” Lucas said bluntly. “I asked if Aronson was on the corner, and they said no. Then they asked who told me that, and when I wouldn’t say, they guessed. And guess who they thought of first?”
    “Goddamnit, Davenport, you gotta tell them I wasn’t the one. They’re gonna pull my nuts off,” Haack shouted.
    “You’ve been hanging out with the wrong people,” Lucas said. “Your speeder friends might pull your nuts off, but these guys, they’re not bad guys. They might give you a little shit, but that’s about all.”
    “Goddamnit, Davenport.”
    “And Gerry . . . if you call back, make sure you know what you’re talking about, okay? This worked out, no problems. They even gave me a little help. But bad information is usually worse than no information, because we waste time chasing it. Think you can remember that?”
    “Goddamnit . . .”
    Lucas hung up, looked at the slip for the Dunn County cop, and poked in the number. A woman answered on the first ring. “I’m returning a call from Terry Marshall,” Lucas said.
    “I’m afraid he’s gone for the day,” the woman said.