His list:

Look at art teachers at the schools they attended; check for criminal records involving sex.

If the teachers don't pan out, get class lists and look at students.

Go back ten years, look for small blondes reported as missing anywhere in southeastern Minnesota or western Wisconsin.

What about the drawings? The guy who killed Aronson, if he was the same guy who did the drawings, seemed to be under some compulsion to draw the women. There were no drawings listed in the Menomonie files… but that didn't mean there weren't any. He may have retrieved them after he killed the women.

He was still going through the file, page by page, when Marcy stuck her head in the door and said, "Ware's attorney called. They don't want to talk until they get the deal on paper from the county attorney. That's going on now, and they'll be over as soon as they're done."

"All right."

He went back to the file, and when he looked up again, out through the office window, he saw Marcy talking to a man in a scarlet ski jacket and faded jeans. The man had broad shoulders, like a gymnast's, and a nose that looked like it'd been hit once or twice too often. He was an inch or two shorter than Lucas, but Lucas thought that he might have a couple extra pounds of muscle.

Lucas recognized him from somewhere, a long time ago. As he watched, the man parked a hip on Marcy's desk, grinned, leaned over and said something to her, and she laughed. The artist? He walked over to the door.

"This is Mr. Kidd," Marcy said when Lucas stuck his head out of his office. "I was just coming to get you."

"I saw you dashing for my door," Lucas said dryly. He and Kidd shook hands, and Lucas said, "I know you from somewhere, a long time ago."

Kidd nodded. "We were at the university at the same time. You were a hockey jock."

Lucas snapped his fingers. "You were the wrestler. You pushed Sheets's head through the railings in the field house, and they had to call the fire department to get him out."

"He was an asshole," Kidd said.

"What kind of asshole?" Marcy asked.

"He was gay and predatory," Kidd said. "He was pushing a kid from upstate who sorta leaned that way but didn't lean toward Sheets. I warned him once." To Lucas: "I'm amazed you remember."

"Who was he? Sheets?" Marcy asked. Lucas noticed that she was looking at Kidd with a peculiar intensity.

"Assistant wrestling coach," Lucas and Kidd said at the same time.

"They kick you out?" Marcy asked Kidd.

"Not right away," Kidd said. "The NC-Double-A's were coming. When those were over, they pulled my scholarship and told me to go piss up a rope."

"You were everybody's hero for a while," Lucas said. Kidd said, "Glory days," and Lucas said, "Thanks for coming over."

"Marcy told me about the drawings," Kidd said. "We were just going to take a look…"

"So let's look."

KIDD HANDLED THE drawings carefully, Lucas noticed, like real artworks; stopped once to rub the paper between his fingers. He laid them out one at a time on a conference table, taking his time. Twice he said, "Huh," and once he tapped a drawing with his index finger, indicating something about an oversized foot.

"What?" Marcy asked.

"The foot's wrong," Kidd said absently.

Lucas watched him examine the drawings, and finally, impatiently, asked, "What do you think?"

"He wants to go back to the womb," Kidd said.

"Any womb," Marcy said, adding, "Somebody said that in a movie."

Kidd looked up at Lucas. "Marcy told me about the FBI profile-that he's between twenty-five and forty and has a formal arts education. How many thousands of people would that include?"

"Too many to count," Lucas said. He asked again, "What do you think?"

Kidd didn't reply immediately, but instead turned over three of the sheets and looked at them again. Finally, he said, "He's a porno freak."

"That's a keen observation," Marcy said. "I'll write that down in my Big Book o' Clues."

"I mean a photo-porno freak," Kidd said. "Most of these bodies were drawn from pornographic photographs and the heads were added later. It'd be no problem with a computer program like Photoshop. Kids do it all the time-take the head off a movie star, stick it with a piece of porn, and try to pass it off as a real photograph."

Lucas and Marcy looked at each other, and then Marcy said, "You mean… I mean, how, I mean…"

"Look at these," Kidd said, unrolling one after the other. "What's one glaringly obvious thing you can tell about the bodies?"

"The drawings are all sorta gross," Lucas said. "They're not like art."

"Actually, some good art is fairly gross," Kidd said. "But that's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is, none of the women have nipples showing."

Marcy said, "Nipples?"

"God, I love the way you said that," Kidd said, glancing down at her.

Lucas said, "Ah, Jesus," and Marcy nailed Kidd with an elbow. "Just tell me."

Kidd said, "If you're an artist, especially an artist who does a lot of nudes-"

"Do you do a lot of nudes?" Marcy asked.

"No, I do landscapes mostly. I make exceptions sometimes." Again, the quick grin. "Anyway, if you do a lot of life drawing, and if you have the technical background, you can pretty much look at anyone and draw that person nude." He looked at Marcy. "I can look at you, and I can see your shoulders and the shape of your breasts and the width of your hips, and since I know all those parts, I could do a pretty good drawing. But I couldn't know about the aureoles around your nipples, or the-"

"The what?" Marcy asked. Lucas thought she might have turned a little pink, and suppressed a smile.

"The aureole. I wouldn't know how big and distinct it was. I wouldn't know whether your nipples protrude or how big they are. With a guy, I couldn't tell how long his penis is or whether he's circumcised. Or how hairy his chest is… This guy probably didn't put in nipples because if he'd put in protruding nipples and the woman didn't have that kind of nipple, then it would obviously be a fake. But maybe he didn't think of toes. There are two or three places where you can see lots of toes, which are really pretty distinctive, though nobody looks at them. If I were you, I'd get these women in here and look at their feet."

"Ah… I see what you mean," Lucas said. He shuffled through the drawings. "None of these drawings-"

"None of them have the kind of specifics that individualize the body. That's especially striking since the faces are so individual," Kidd said. "I think the guy never really saw these women nude."

"So he's a photographer? He draws from photographs?" Marcy asked.

"I think he's an artist, but he's using photography. A straight photographer wouldn't draw this well," Kidd said.

"How hard would it be?"

"Not hard. You can take a photograph of somebody, scan it, find a porno shot on the 'Net-there are literally thousands of them, all ages and sizes and shapes and positions-and match them. Then you can eliminate the photographic detail using a Photoshop filter and produce something that almost looks like a drawing. Then you can project that image on a piece of paper, and draw over the projected image. It takes some skill. The FBI is right: This guy has had some training, I think. But not too much. That foot…"

He shuffled through the drawings until he found the one with a foot that looked wrong. "What's happened here is, the bodies extend away from you, so this woman's foot is relatively larger than the rest of her body. It's called foreshortening. I'm not sure, but I think that not only is the foot foreshortened, it's also distorted, and it's distorted in the way that things are when you use a wide-angle lens. If you use a wide-angle camera lens from up close, things at the edge of the picture are unnaturally wide… This looks like a photographed foot to me."