Chosen Prey

by John Sandford

  “I haven’t seen her. Usually she comes over for a cup of coffee or I go over to her place, but it’s all locked up. Now a bunch of women are milling around outside. They were supposed to have a quilting class, and they say whenever she’s had to cancel a class she’s called them. She doesn’t answer her phone. I can’t see inside very well because of the one-way stuff, but I can see a little, and it looks like some stuff has been tipped over or thrown around.”

  “Stay right there,” Lucas said. “I’m on my way.” He dropped the phone, looked around for Del, a little wild-eyed, said “Fuck,” and headed for the door.

  “What? What?” Marcy yelled after him. “Where’re you going?”

  “Call the dispatcher and tell them I want a squad, right now, out front. . . . Right now,” he shouted back. He was running down the hallway when he saw Marshall carrying a carton of yogurt and a cup of coffee.

  “Terry, c’mon, Terry . . .” He kept running, and Marshall ran carefully after him, calling, “What happened, what happened?”

  A squad was cutting across the street toward the front entrance, the driver waving at Lucas. Lucas caught the front door and Marshall piled in the back. Lucas said, “Go that way, across the Hennepin Bridge, lights and siren.” The driver nodded, and they took off, slicing through the traffic like a shark. When they were moving, he turned to look at Marshall in the backseat and said, “Nobody can find Ellen Barstad. The Culver guy from next door says it looks like the place is a little torn up inside.”

  “No, no.” Marshall was shocked. “Not that girl—we’ve been following him, he couldn’t have.”

  “Maybe it’s nothing.”

  Lucas began giving directions to the driver as they made the turn onto Hennepin, and then Marshall said, “But this feels really bad. This feels bad.”

  “She’s from outstate somewhere. Maybe she got freaked and went home.”

  “No, I don’t think so. This has got that bad feeling about it.”

  Lucas nodded. “Yeah, it does.”

  THEY WERE HALFWAY there when Del called: “What the hell’s going on?”

  Lucas told him in three sentences, and Del said, “I’ll see you there.”

  THEY PULLED INTO the parking lot in front of Culver’s shop ten minutes after Lucas and Culver spoke on the phone. Lucas hopped out, spotted Culver talking to two elderly women, and walked over, Marshall a step behind. “Is there a landlord? Who has the keys?”

  “There’s a manager, but he goes around between buildings. I’ve got a cell phone.”

  “Call him and see where he’s at,” Lucas said.

  Culver hurried into his shop. Marshall was already pressing his face to the silvered glass on the door. “He’s right, it looks like some stuff is turned over,” he said.

  Lucas pressed his face to the door and cupped his hands around his eyes. One of the quilt frames had been knocked onto the floor. “Goddamnit.” He stepped back, and over to the door of Culver’s place. Culver was walking toward him with a cell phone to his ear. He was saying, “Where’re you at? We need to get in.”

  Lucas asked, “Where?”

  Culver said, “He’s in Hopkins. He can be here in twenty minutes.”

  “Fuck that,” Lucas said. “Have you got something we can break the glass with?”

  “Here,” Marshall said. He reached under his jacket and produced a large-frame .357 Magnum. He pointed the weapon to one side, as though he’d done this before, stood close to the glass, and punched it with the butt of the gun. The punch knocked a dollar-size hole in the glass. He gave it another light whack and a piece of glass broke out. Marshall carefully reached through the hole and flipped the inside lock.

  Lucas led the way in. The frame was on the floor and . . .

  “Step easy,” he said sharply. He pointed at the track of blood.

  “Ah, no, ah, man . . .” Marshall turned to the door, where Culver was standing, and said, “Stay out of here. Keep everybody out.”

  They walked carefully through the blood spots—“Looks like an impact spray,” Lucas muttered—to the door of the living quarters. Lucas put one finger high on the door, muttered “Don’t touch” to Marshall, and pushed it open.

  ELLEN BARSTAD WAS lying by the sink. She was fully clothed and she was dead. No strangulation, this: Her head lay in a puddle of congealed blood, with patches of dried blood around it. The back of her head appeared to be torn off. Lucas said, “All right, let’s get some people on the way.” He glanced at Marshall. Marshall’s eyes were closed and he had one hand pressed against the middle of his face, the heel of his hand under his chin, the fingers pressed against his forehead. “Terry?”

  “Yeah, yeah . . . Goddamnit, Lucas, I think we did this to her.”

  Lucas swallowed once, trying to get rid of the sour taste in his throat, shook his head. Looked down the length of the kitchen and saw a hammer. “Weapon,” he said.

  Marshall took his hands away from his face. “Had to be something like that to do the damage.” He was closer, and stepped over next to it. “It looks like it’s been wiped. I can see streaks, like . . . paper towel.”

  “Let’s get out of here before we fuck something up,” Lucas said. “Get the lab guys going.”

  Del arrived five minutes later and saw them outside, duct-taping a piece of cardboard over the hole in the glass door. They were just finishing as he came up, and he looked from Marshall to Lucas and said, “Don’t tell me.”

  “She’s gone,” Lucas said. Del stepped toward the door and Lucas said, “Watch the blood in the work area. Don’t touch the door going into the back.”

  Del disappeared inside, came back a minute later. His face carried the same expression as Marshall’s.

  “When did he do it?”

  “Looks like last night,” Lucas said. “The blood puddles had started to dry out. Maybe we can get a temperature and tell that way. We taped over the door to try to keep the ambient the same inside.”

  “Christ, he looks like he freaked out,” Del said. “Looks like he chased her from the front door, maybe picked up that hammer off the frame—”

  Lucas interrupted. “Sure it was hers?”

  “Yeah, I’m pretty sure—I saw it sitting there the other day, and the one I saw isn’t there anymore. Picked it up, took a swing, cut her, but she made it into the back.”

  “Hope the motherfucker pushed that door open with his hand,” Lucas said. “That’s the way you’d do it—run right in there and push it back with your hand.”

  “Problem is, he’s been here,” Marshall said. “We got movies of it. If he hit the door with his hand, he could say he did it some other time.”

  “Yeah, but if there one’s big brand-new print on the door, it’ll be a brick. Goddamnit to hell, why didn’t we get her out of the way? Why didn’t we get her out?”

  “Why’d he do it? This isn’t anything like he did the others.”

  “It’s like he did Neumann,” Lucas said.

  “If he did Neumann. That could be hard to prove by itself,” Del said.

  “Hey, who the fuck’s side are you on?” Lucas asked, the anger surging up.

  “I’m on your fuckin’ side, but I’m thinking about the trial,” Del snapped. “That’s what I’m worried about. We’ve got Randy the coke freak, and we’ve got these unconnected killings at St. Pat’s that are all close to him, but none of them are in the style of the gravedigger’s, and what’s worse . . .”

  “What’s worse?” Lucas snapped back.

  “What’s worse is, we had a guy watching him when he had to be over here killing her,” Del said, jabbing a finger at Lucas. “How’d he do that, smart guy? What’s gonna happen when they get that into court, with a second-man theory? If you take Randy out of the equation, we ain’t got squat, and Randy has a good reason to tell us anything we want him to. You think Qatar’s lawyer won’t make a big deal out of that?”

  “Ah, Jesus,” Lucas said.

  “That is what the lawyers will say,” Marshal
l said. “We can’t lose this guy. There’s no way.”

  “We won’t. Gonna hang the motherfucker,” Lucas said.

  THEY ALL STAYED, all the way through the crime-scene work, through the removal of the body, snarling at each other from time to time, all of them in dark moods. Lucas talked to Rose Marie twice, by phone, keeping her up to date, and to Marcy. When it seemed as if nothing new would be found at Barstad’s, Lucas asked Del, “You got a car, right? Didn’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Let’s go on over to Qatar’s house. They oughta still be working on it. Let’s see what they got.”

  “I’ll tell you one thing—he maybe cleaned up after himself pretty good over here, but he had blood on him when he left,” Marshall said. “Bloody coat, bloody pants, bloody shoes—there’s gotta be something.”

  ON THE WAY to Qatar’s, Marshall seemed to shrink in the back. “You all right?” Lucas asked.

  Marshall started talking, rambling. “My old lady died the second year we were married. She was pregnant at the time. Hit a bridge one day, there was some snow on the road, just a little bit. She was racing my sister to see which one was gonna have a kid first; they both got pregnant at the same time, and it was neck and neck . . . ’cept my old lady never got to the finish line.”

  “Never remarried?” Del asked.

  “Never had the heart for it,” he said. “I still talk to June every night before I go to bed. When Laura was growing up, she was just like a daughter to me; I was over there just about every day. When she got taken off, there wasn’t a goddamn thing I could do about it. Big cop in town, knew everything about everything, couldn’t find my own goddamn daughter. . . .”

  He went on for a while, and Lucas felt Del glance at him just as he looked at Del. Unspoken thought here, as they listened to Marshall ramble: Whoa.

  QATAR’S HOUSE WAS neat and beautifully decorated. A crime-scene specialist named Greg Webster was running the crew who were looking at the house, and when he saw Lucas, Marshall, and Del on the walk leading to the porch, he stopped outside and said, “I heard.”

  “You got anything useful?”

  “Not much. We did find a set of women’s earrings in his chest of drawers. They look pretty good, so they might be a possibility. We have to check with all the victims we’ve identified so far. . . . Have you talked to Sandy MacMillan? I heard she got something up at his office.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. One of the guys just said she was pretty excited—some computer shit.”

  “We need to get his phone records as far back as they go,” Lucas said. “Check him for cell phones. . . . We need to look at picture albums, any loose photographs lying around, any negatives, anything that could be a souvenir.”

  “We know,” Webster said patiently. “We’re looking for it all.”

  “Did you look in the washing machine?”

  “Yeah. It’s empty. Nothing in the dryer.”

  “Is Sandy still up at his office?”

  “I don’t know—she was an hour ago.”

  MACMILLAN HAD MOVED downtown. When Lucas finally found her, she was in Lucas’s office, talking with Marcy.

  “Greg Webster said you found something in his office computer,” Lucas said.

  “No. We didn’t find anything—that’s what was so interesting. He put a new hard drive in his machine the day that the story broke on finding Aronson. He pulled some files off an old hard drive and reinstalled them on the new one—the dates are right in the machine. The thing is, why would you do that? If you could pull the files off, the old drive was still working. It could have been full, I suppose.”

  “Bullshit. He was getting rid of evidence. Bet he had Photoshop or one of the other photo programs on it, and some of those drawings.”

  “Not on the new one.”

  “Check and see if you can find any software,” Lucas said.

  “No software except Word and some other minor bullshit. He is hooked into the ’Net, so we’re gonna try to track that. Gonna go out to his ISP and see what they have in the way of records.”

  “Sounds like he’s a half-step ahead of us,” Lucas said. “Keep digging around. That date will be useful, though.”

  He told Del and Marshall about it, and Marshall said, “Another brick in the wall.”

  “No wall so far,” Lucas said. “Just a lot of bricks.”

  THEY WERE STANDING on Qatar’s front sidewalk, ready to leave, when Craig Bowden showed up. He parked down the street and jogged back to them, a small man in a yellow windbreaker. Lucas noticed that down the street, two women were sitting on their front porch, watching. Everybody knew. . . .

  Bowden looked scared; he was the intelligence cop assigned to watch Qatar overnight.

  “I even took notes,” he said. “Lights on and off, all that. Television on and off.”

  “Could he have gotten out the back?”

  “Yeah, sure—not with his car, of course, but if he’d wanted to sneak, he could have. There was just one of me, and he wasn’t supposed to know we were interested in him.”

  “What about this morning? Was he carrying anything when he left?”

  “I couldn’t see when he loaded the car, because it was in the garage. When he got out at St. Pat’s, he had a briefcase and a sack.”

  “A sack?”

  “Like a grocery bag.”

  “Clothes,” Marshall said.

  “You didn’t see him do anything with the sack?”

  “No . . . he went inside and that’s the last I saw him. Marc White took over from me.”

  THEY CALLED WHITE. He had never seen Qatar with a sack. “I never really saw him at all—I just sat and waited and then you guys showed up and busted his ass.”

  They called Sandy MacMillan again, the crime-scene cop who’d been working Qatar’s office. “There were a couple guys there with me—they might have found something and didn’t tell me, but I didn’t see any sack. I’m sure I didn’t see any clothes. I would have heard about it.”

  “Sack’s still gotta be in the building,” Lucas said. “Who wants to look for a sack?”

  They all rode to St. Pat’s together, but hope was dwindling. They’d been run around too much, with too little to show for it: one of those days when nothing was going to work right.

  They found a janitor, an elderly man with a drinker’s nose, who told them that all the trash cans in the building had been emptied. He didn’t remember any brown sacks, and certainly no sacks full of clothes. “I could have missed it, though. I put them all out in the dumpster, and I’d be happy to go out and rip them apart, if you want. Aren’t that many, really.”

  They all followed him out to the dumpster. He got a stepladder, climbed the side, jumped in, and began throwing sacks out. There were fifteen of them, one from each of the built-in trash receptacles in the building. The janitor got a new box of bags, and as they broke open each bag, they shifted the contents to a new one and tossed it back into the dumpster.

  “Shit,” Del said when they finished. “All we got was a bad smell.”

  “What the hell would he do with them?” Lucas asked.

  “Tell you what I would have done,” the janitor said. “I would have taken them down to the furnace room. It’s a gas furnace, but it’s got big gas bars and you could cremate a hog in there. A pair of pants would go up like a moth in a candle.”

  “Show us,” Lucas said.

  He did, and as they looked at the flames roaring away, Marshall said, “God almighty.”

  “Would James Qatar know about this place?” Lucas asked the janitor.

  “The little fart grew up here. He was in and out of every corner of this college since he was a baby. Nothing here that he doesn’t know. Got all these little hidey-holes—probably knows the place better’n me.”

  “Okay. Let’s get this fire turned off. We’ll send somebody around to look underneath it, see if there’re any remains of zippers or buttons or whatever.”

  “W
hat an asshole,” the janitor said.

  “You didn’t like him?”

  “I didn’t like him from way back. Sneaky little fart. Always sneaking around. Scared the piss out of me more than once—I’d be doing something, and all of a sudden, there’d be Jim, two inches away. You’d never see him coming.”

  “You know he’s been arrested?”

  “Yeah. I think he probably did it.”

  ON THE WAY out of the building, Lucas said, “We ought to check trash cans all around Barstad’s place, see if we find any blood. And the cab companies—if he figured out we were watching him, and snuck off, he had to get there somehow. Let’s see if we can figure out taxi dispatches from around his place to around Barstad’s. What else?”