Free Chosen Prey by John Sandford Page A

clothes.”
    “What?”
    She’d never heard of a wringer, Qatar thought. Too young. He looked down along her body: It was perfect. Everything that he had always thought he’d wanted.
    Except.
    He was beginning to suspect that what he’d always wanted wasn’t sex; that his particular streak of insanity—he called it that, was comfortable with the word—needed resistance, maybe even a little disgust. An hour earlier, he’d been looking down at the spinal groove in the back of her neck. His hands had ached for her neck. He’d almost done her then—would have, if he’d had the rope. The next time, he’d bring it.
    Over the next couple of days, before they got together again, he would think about it, he would see if the killing passion returned. And maybe the thing with Aronson’s body would blow over. She was long dead; there could be no clues—they hadn’t found anything else . . . .
     
    E LLEN B ARSTAD WATCHED him thinking about her. Maybe she was pushing too hard—but once she got into it, she found it hard to stop. There were so many . . . her girlfriend called them “pickles.” Little interesting variations, like crazy quilting: You do this and then you do that. Qatar, on the other hand, was basically like all the men she’d known: He just wanted to bang away, and then nap until he could get up again, and then bang away some more. She wanted to try this and then that and then the other thing, to see how it all felt. Was there anything wrong with that? She thought not.
    Qatar was being a prig about the whole thing. Maybe, she thought, it was time to find somebody younger. Actually, if she could find somebody completely unformed, maybe a seventeen-year-old, somebody who’d actually be grateful . . . After all, this wasn’t that difficult, was it? All of it was in the books.
    “So you’re going home?” Barstad asked.
    “Yes. I’m really busy. I’ve been here for two hours.”
    “I thought we were going to do the Ping-Pong paddles again today.”
    He had to laugh. “Slipped my mind,” he said. Then: “It’s all right to slow down, Ellen. We’re not on a time clock.”
    “I suppose,” she said, disappointment in her voice. She rubbed her feet together. “You sure you don’t want a little suck?”
    “Ellen . . .” He really did hurt; but how often do you get this kind of offer? Sometimes, he thought, you’ve got to go with common sense. “Okay. But you must take it easy.”
     
    W HEN HE GOT home two hours later, thoroughly used, he turned on the television and went into the kitchen for some Froot Loops. He was eating and reading a two-week-old copy of The New Yorker when he heard the television announcer talking about drawings and murder and that the images might not be appropriate to children.
    He knew what they were, even without looking or listening. He didn’t want to believe it; he pushed to his feet so abruptly that milk sloshed out of the bowl onto the magazine.
    In the living room, he caught the sight of one of his drawings in the fraction of a second before the cameras cut away, like the quick flash of a queen of hearts in a riffled deck of cards. The reporter was saying something, but he couldn’t seem to make out the words. Then the camera cut away from the reporter, and one after another, a set of his images flashed on the screen, finally ending with a drawing of Aronson.
    “. . . police looking for the artist who drew these sexually charged images . . .”
    He stood unbelieving, aghast. He’d never let Aronson take home any of the images. He’d shown her this one—it was sexy, but not pornographic—to impress her with his skills. He remembered throwing it aside in his office. He didn’t remember seeing it again.
    “She took it,” he said aloud, to the television. “She stole it from me. It wasn’t hers! It was mine!”
    He would go to prison, he thought. Nobody would ever understand. He watched until the drawings went away, and the reporter—a