Chosen Prey

by John Sandford

  At home, he smashed the old hard drive, extracted the disks, and cut them to pieces with metal shears. He used the same shears to shred the ZIP disks. He could have dumped the mess into the garbage safely enough, but he was both frightened and meticulous. He put all the pieces in a sack, drove south down the Mississippi, found a private spot, and tossed the sack into the viscous brown water.

  That was that. Let the cops come now, he’d thought, and do all their forensic work on the computer. They’d find nothing but a pristine drive and the usual academic software. No Photoshop, no photo files. Nothing but a bunch of paintings in a series of PowerPoint lectures.

  THE COPS NEVER came. Qatar busied himself reinstalling software on the new drive, rebuilding his art files from the ZIP disks. He stayed off the porn websites, put away his drawing instruments. An overdue tidying-up; a good time to lie low, and perhaps do a little maintenance on his career.

  A new book, perhaps. He’d been toying with the idea of a book on ceramics. He even had a title: Earth, Water, Fire and Air: The Ceramic Arts Revolution in the Upper Midwest, 1960–1999.

  He bought a notebook and made some notes, and made more notes on his office whiteboard. Good for the image, he thought. Nobody here but us intellectuals.

  THE ONE FLY in this intellectual ointment was Barstad. She kept calling, distracting him. He’d destroyed all the images of her, but now found that under the pressure of the obvious danger of detection, his mind kept going to her.

  The imp of the perverse, isn’t that what Poe called it? The irrepressible impulse to do harm to oneself? He had put off another meeting with her, but that night had experienced the most intense fantasies involving Barstad, a camera, and his art.

  All his work to this point had involved grafting women’s faces to images from the ’Net. Now, it occurred to him, he didn’t have to do that. He could get an image of a woman doing anything he wished—at least, he hadn’t yet found anything that she wouldn’t do—and create a genuinely unique work. An original. He needed to work with the idea. He needed to manipulate the woman to create a new vision.

  His drawings continued to come up on the television with the better parts obscured—the TV stations couldn’t seem to get enough of them—but after a day went by, and no cops came . . .

  He began to feel safe.

  Nobody knew.

  If he was careful, he thought, he could begin working again. He began by making another trip to a CompUSA, where he bought a cheap laptop. That night, when Rynkowski Hall had gone dark, when even the janitors had gone home, he walked down the hall to Charlotte Neumann’s office and slipped the door lock with a butter knife. All the locks could be done the same way; the professors knew it, as did the brighter undergraduates.

  Neumann’s office was a simple cube, with a bookcase along one wall. Her copy of Photoshop 6 was in the top left corner, and he lifted it off the shelf, pulled the door closed behind himself, and returned to his office. The installation took no time at all; in an hour, he was walking out of the building. He’d known Rynkowski Hall all of his life, all the nooks and crannies and hiding places. He would hide the computer after each day’s work, he thought, and never again contaminate his daily work. . . .

  BUT THE NEXT day brought bigger trouble; a dirty day, a grinding, bitter drizzle pounding down. Late in the afternoon, he’d gone down to Neumann’s office on a routine errand—classes were about to resume, and a student who didn’t have the proper prerequisites had asked permission to attend one of his classes. Qatar simply needed the permission form. Neumann’s door was open, and she was sitting at her desk. He knocked on the door frame and said, “Charlotte, I need—”

  She heard his voice and turned her head, and her arm spasmodically jerked across her desk, away from him. Her hand held a slip of blue paper; her face was locked with sudden conscious control, which produced a weak smile.

  He continued without a break, “—a prerequisite waiver; I don’t seem to have any more. I’ll need a permission number.”

  “Of course,” she said. “Let me see . . .”

  He looked unwaveringly into her eyes, but he was tracking her hand and the blue paper with his peripheral vision. She casually opened a drawer, slipped her hand in, riffled some papers, and said, “Where did I put those?” When her hand emerged, there was no paper in it. She opened the next drawer down, said, “Ah. Here,” and handed him a half-dozen slips.

  “The number?”

  “Just a second . . .” She pulled down a file in her computer and said, “Make that 3474/AS.”

  “Okay,” he said. He jotted the number on one of the forms and left the office. Stopped and looked back. Was she hiding something from him?

  He was sensitive to the idea because of the discovery of the body, then the images on the television. He cleaned up some last-minute chores around the office, then headed home. He brooded about Neumann. What was she doing? Why did that slip of paper stick in his mind like a thorn?

  BARSTAD CALLED, AND he put her off. “I’ll try to get over later tonight, but if not tonight, tomorrow for sure. I’ve got a surprise treat for you.”

  “A treat?” She sounded delighted. She was a moron. “What kind of treat?”

  “If I told you, it wouldn’t be a surprise,” he said, thinking of his camera. “I’ll call you tonight if I can get away. If I can’t, I know I’ve got time tomorrow afternoon. Can you get away?”

  “Anytime,” she’d said.

  AT SEVEN O’CLOCK that night, with the janitors caucusing in the maintenance room, he went back to Neumann’s with his butter knife and a flashlight. Her desk was unlocked, and he opened the drawer and looked inside. No blue paper. He checked the other drawers, nervous, listening for footfalls. Still nothing.

  Checked her bulletin board, found nothing blue. Was about to leave, when he saw all the little tag-ends of paper sticking out from under her desk calendar. He lifted it up, one edge, deflected the beam of the flashlight beneath it. Still nothing; and he’d felt so clever when he lifted the pad, a sense of inevitable discovery.

  Damnit. He let himself out of the office and walked down to his own, turned on a study light, swiveled his chair so that his face was in shadow, and closed his eyes. He knew that blue . . .

  He might have dozed for a few minutes. When he opened his eyes again, they wandered, almost by their own accord, it seemed, to the bottom drawer of an old wooden file cabinet. Had he seen that blue in his own files?

  He dropped to his knees and pulled the drawer out. A half-dozen fat files were stuffed with paper he hadn’t expected to look at again until he retired and had to clean out the cabinet. He riffled through them, and the label “Planes on Plains” caught his eye. Notes, letters, comments on his cubism book. He pulled it, opened it, and saw the blue. He slipped it out, turned it, and recognized it instantly.

  Jesus. Four years old, and somehow she’d remembered, long after he’d forgotten. An invitation to a publication party for Planes on Plains. The publisher, even cheaper than most of that notoriously penurious breed, hadn’t been willing to pay for much of anything, so he’d done the party invitations himself. He’d done a quick little self-portrait for the front page of the blue invitation.

  The drawing looked nothing like the drawings on television, really. But his historian’s eye felt the resemblance—something in the technique, and the choice of line. Neumann was a historian herself. Qatar closed his eyes, swayed, nearly fell, overcome by the image of Neumann taking the paper to the police. They were that close.

  Had she talked to anyone? Maybe not. To make this kind of accusation would be extremely serious, and if she was wrong, could end her career. She’d have to be careful. Sooner or later, though . . .

  “She’s gotta go,” he mumbled.

  Right away. Tonight. He’d seen the logic of it in a flash: If she’d talked to other people about the drawing, he was finished. If he killed her, he might be finished, but then again, he’d killed a lot of people, and the police had never had a sniff of
him. If he moved quickly enough, directly enough, he might pull it off again.

  He walked straight out of his office, down the stairs, and out to his car. He’d been to her house, twice, and it wasn’t far away, just across the river and a little north and east. He drove over, calculating. Park at her house, or down the block? If he parked down the block, he’d have to walk, and that would increase his exposure. If he parked in front, somebody might remember his car when she came up missing. He’d walk, he thought. It was raining. With a raincoat and an umbrella, nobody would recognize him.

  Then he would . . . what? Knock on the door? Try to grapple with her? She was a big woman. Even if he managed to take her down, there’d be a fight, there might be blood—his blood—and she might even make it out of the house. She might scream, she might wake up the neighborhood. There might be somebody else in the house.

  Then he’d be cooked. . . .

  Had to think. Had to think. Was thinking: His mind was a calculating machine, and ran through the possibilities with insane precision.

  HE WAS CRUISING her house, a quick pass, when he saw the lights come on in the garage. The garage door started up, and a car backed down the driveway, into the street, coming after him. He pulled to the side and let her pass. Was it her? He could see only a profile, but thought the profile looked like hers. . . . He didn’t know her car. Now what?

  She turned right at the corner, and he followed, slowly. Another car went by, and he fell in behind it, watching Neumann’s car—if it was her car—continuing ahead. They drove together for four blocks; then the car in front of him slowed and turned, and Neumann was directly in front of him. Down to Grand Avenue, to a supermarket. He pulled into the parking lot behind her and watched as she got out and hurried into the store.

  There were only a few cars in the lot; if he had a gun, he could wait until . . . But then, he had no gun. No point in thinking about it.

  She should be heading back home fairly quickly, he thought. Nobody buys groceries and then goes on to a movie. You take them home, put them away. Get the hamburger in the refrigerator. If she weren’t getting a bunch of groceries, if she were just out for a pack of gum, she wouldn’t have driven past a convenience store to a supermarket.

  He decided. Wheeled the car in a circle and drove as fast as he could—without attracting police attention—back to her house. He parked a block down, got a collapsible umbrella from the backseat, turned up the collar on his raincoat, and got out.

  He saw not a single person along the sidewalk: The rain was so cold and so enduring that the locals were all hunkered down in front of their natural-gas fireplaces, watching Fox, or whatever it was they did in these old houses.

  Neumann’s house was one of the prewar clapboard places that never quite slipped into the slums but had come close. It looked like a child’s drawing: a peaked roof with a single window under the peak, a front door centered under that window, a window on each side of the door, a short stoop leading to the door. The garage sat to one side, originally detached, but now connected to the house with a breezeway.

  Qatar turned smartly at the front walk, climbed the stoop, and rang the doorbell. Nobody answered. He pulled open the storm door and tried the doorknob. Locked.

  All right. He hurried back down the steps and tried the breezeway door. Locked. He looked around, saw nobody, heard nothing but the rain. The house across the street showed a light at the front window, but the drapes were pulled. He left the shelter of the breezeway nook and walked back around to the front of the garage. Tried the main door: locked down. He continued around to the side of the garage. The next house was only twenty feet away, but a hedge ran between them. He could see no lights, so he lowered the umbrella and walked down the length of the garage, the wet leaves of the hedge flicking against his face and neck, chilling him.

  Now he was in arrest territory, he thought. If somebody caught him here, they wouldn’t listen to a story about dropping by for a cup of tea. He began to feel it in his stomach: the tension, the eager stress of hunting. . . .

  The garage had a back door: locked. Cautious bitch, he thought. The breezeway also had a back door, and it was locked. The back of the house had a two-step wooden deck. He climbed the deck in the dark, tried the door: locked. A double window looked out over the deck, ten feet down from the door. He walked over and looked at it—and found a crack in the armor.

  The window was positioned over the kitchen sink. Probably a replacement from some past remodeling, it was one of the triple-glazed kind that didn’t take a storm window. It was cranked open about an inch, apparently to let some air into the house. A little cool air over the hot dishwater . . . He did it himself.

  He looked around: He was safe enough, with the foliage in the backyard covering him. He grabbed the edge of the window and pushed it back and forth. It gave a bit, a bit more; in two minutes he’d managed to work it open far enough that he could reach inside to the crank, and crank it all the way open. With one last look around, he boosted himself into the window opening, clambered awkwardly across the sink, and stepped on a dish full of water when he dropped to the floor.

  A dog?

  He stopped to listen. Heard nothing but the hum of the furnace. He looked out the window, then reached over and cranked it shut and locked it. There were no lights in the back. Then a furtive sound to his right: He whirled and saw a cat, a gray-striped tiger. The cat took a quick look at him and sprinted for some other part of the house.

  The kitchen lights were off; the illumination came from a couple of lamps in the living room and an overhead fixture in a hall that led back to a bedroom. He needed more light. . . . It’d be nothing but bad luck if she got back this quickly, he thought. He snapped on the kitchen light and looked quickly around.

  As he suspected, he was leaving puddles of water and muddy footprints on the floor. He spotted a paper towel rack, rolled off a few feet of toweling, wadded it up, dropped it on the floor, and used his feet to push it around like a mop. When both his shoes and the floor were dry, he stuffed the dirty towels into his pocket. A box of garbage bags sat on the kitchen counter. He took one, turned off the light, and headed for the garage.

  AFTER ALL THAT, the killing was simple, as it always had been. He found a spade in the garage and walked back into the breezeway.

  He waited in the near-dark for twenty minutes, thinking about not much at all. Now that he was here, now that he was committed, there wasn’t much to think about, and he relaxed. In the dim light he could just make out the reflection of his face in the breezeway glass; he looked dark, mysterious. The trench-coat collar cut him nicely along his jawline; he tried a smile, tried to catch a good profile. . . .

  He remembered the time, a cold rainy night like this one, outside of Paris, or maybe it was Casablanca, 1941 or ’42, standing in the shadows waiting for the Nazi to come in. He had a paratrooper’s knife in one hand and could see himself in a mirror, a really design-o thirties woolen military trench coat broadening out his shoulders, a beret . . . well, a beret might be too much, maybe a watch cap, though a watch cap tended to make him look a little like one of the Three Stooges; not a watch cap, then, maybe a fedora, snapped down over his eyes, but you could still see his eyes in the mirror. . . .

  He was working the fantasy when Neumann’s car pulled into the driveway and the garage door started up. Qatar pulled himself back to the present, struggled to get out of vision mode and into the sharp mental state he needed to do the killing. He didn’t want to chase her all over, like Elmer Fudd after the Thanksgiving turkey; there couldn’t be a pursuit. The door opened into the garage, so he wouldn’t have the cover of the door. He’d have to move quickly.

  He heard the garage door start down again. The car engine hummed for a moment, then died. The car door opened, then closed; he lifted the spade. Then another car door opened, and he nearly panicked. She’d picked somebody up?

  Wait, wait, wait. She’s getting the grocery bags out of the backseat. A moment later, the door to th
e garage opened and Neumann stepped inside. She might have seen him—her eyes turned toward his in that fraction of a second before the spade hit her—but she had no time to react to his presence, or even flinch.

  He swung as though he were chopping wood, and the back of the spade hit her on the forehead, crushing her skull like a cantaloupe. He hit her as hard as he’d ever hit a softball; grunted with the follow-through.

  Neumann pounded back against the garage wall, then sagged and went down with a soggy thump. The bag of groceries she’d been carrying spilled around her with major brand color: Campbell’s soup, Nabisco crackers, Swanson TV dinners, Tampax . . .

  Another furtive move, and again Qatar started: The cat was watching from the doorway to the house. It meowed once, then disappeared.

  Goddamn cat.

  He moved quickly now. He’d had experience with this part. Neumann was dead, there was no question of that. The spade had crushed her skull; he’d felt it, and kneeling by her head, he could see it. She now looked only a little like Charlotte Neumann. There wasn’t much blood, but there was some. Before it could trickle onto the floor, he lifted her head by her hair, and fitted it into the garbage bag, then slipped the bag down the rest of her body; her head felt like a collection of bones and hamburger in an old sock.