Chosen Prey

by John Sandford

  “I’d get with the FBI again and really push the Internet thing,” Del said. “If we can show he was on those porno websites, and cleaned out his computer the day Aronson made the papers, that’d be strong.”

  “Another brick,” Marshall said. Then: “What if he didn’t do it?”

  Lucas thought about that for a minute, then asked, “What do you think the chances are?”

  Del said, “Two percent and falling.”

  Marshall: “One percent and falling.”

  “One fucking bloody fingerprint or piece of clothing with her blood on it—that’s all we need.”

  Marshall said, “We can’t lose him now. We just can’t.”

  Lucas said, “Hey . . .”

  Marshall looked at him for a couple of seconds, then wearily pushed himself up. “I think I’ll go home. Say hello to my sister, check in with the office, fix the garage-door opener.”

  “We’ll get him,” Del said.

  “Sure,” Marshall said. He glanced at Lucas, then quickly away. “See you tomorrow, maybe.”

  “Let it go,” Lucas said. “We’re doing what we can.”

  27

  WEATHER FOUND HIM sitting in front of the television, watching the PBS national news, a beer in his hand. “That kind of a day?” she asked.

  “Much worse,” he told her.

  She took off her coat and said, “Start from the beginning.”

  He started from the beginning, and he finished by saying, “So we might have gotten Ellen Barstad killed and it’s possible that the guy is gonna walk. I think we got enough—and we didn’t feel like we could leave him out there any longer, not after Neumann and his mother were killed. He’s freaking out. He’s killing everybody. He’s on some kind of psychotic run.”

  Weather was shocked about Barstad. She had nothing to say except, “You’ll get him.”

  “Yeah. . . . But you know what the county attorney’s gonna wind up doing. If they can’t cut some kind of deal with him, they’ll go for a something-else conviction, and that’s always risky.”

  A something-else prosecution rolled out every scrap of evidence, no matter how shaky or distantly circumstantial, teased out every possible murder scenario, threw in a variety of psychiatric testimony, and used the whole show to make an unstated argument that even if the particular murder couldn’t be proven, the defendant had surely done something else he should be in prison for, and should be convicted simply as a matter of public safety. The perfect juror was both frightened and timid; one skeptic on the jury could screw the whole thing. And something-else convictions always left a bad taste with everybody. Not a clean kill.

  “You need a smoking gun.”

  “We’ve been so close in so many ways,” Lucas said. “If we could find just one picture. One piece of clothing with blood on it. Anything . . .”

  LUCAS GOT IN late the next morning, found Marshall already at the office. “I thought you might take a day or two off.”

  “Can’t stay away,” Marshall said. “But my ass is kicked.”

  “Lane wants you to call him at home,” Marcy said to Lucas. “He left a voice mail, said call anytime.”

  Lucas called and Lane answered, his voice thick with sleep. “I just got to bed. I wound up chasing that Lo Andrews guy all over the metro,” he said. “I finally caught up with him about the time the sun was coming up.”

  “He have anything?”

  “Yeah. He was carrying a little coke and we took him down to Ramsey county jail. He’s on hold until we get a statement. The bust is probably bad, though.”

  “Yeah, yeah. What happened?”

  “He says he was with Randy the night Suzanne Brister was killed and that Randy ran out of money and so they took him to an ATM and he maxed out his card. Then he ran out of that, so they went back to Randy’s place and they got a compact sound system and sold that on the street, and they ran out of that, so they dropped him at his place—but an hour later he was back with four hundred dollars that he said he took off some white dude.”

  “Yeah? You think it was Qatar?”

  “I used our warrant and went over to the bank and we looked at Qatar’s ATM use. He took four hundred dollars out of an ATM on Grand Avenue, about eight blocks from Randy’s, at 12:38P .M . same night.”

  “Goddamnit, Lane.”

  “What can I tell you? I’m good,” Lane said.

  “You are good. You gonna nail this down?”

  “I’d like to get a little sleep first, but we’re gonna get with Lo Andrews’s attorney at three o’clock this afternoon. Probably drop the charges on the drug bust, and get the statement.”

  When Lucas got off the line, Marshall, who’d taken up residence at Lane’s desk, said, “Another brick?”

  “A decent one. We can put Qatar eight blocks from Randy’s house the night Suzanne Brister was killed. That’s not all. . . .”

  He explained the rest of it, and Marshall said, “That’s good, but you know what I’d do if I were Qatar’s attorneys? I’d make the case that Qatar smoked pot, maybe even a lot of pot, and maybe used a little cocaine. He’s an artist, right? So they say that’s how he knew Randy. And that Randy was attracted to Qatar by the people Qatar knew—and that’s how Randy met Neumann and Qatar’s mother and all those other people. That Randy was the killer. We’ve got a dead woman, strangled in the style of all the others, in Randy’s apartment, with his fingerprints all over the place, in blood, and he tried to shoot a cop when he busted out—”

  “He was too young for the first ones.”

  “Well, who knows?” Marshall said. “To get like he is now, he must have been a monster when he was young. He would have been, what, twelve or thirteen when Laura disappeared? How many twelve-year-old killers do you think are running around the Cities?”

  Lucas shrugged. “So you make a case. Do you believe it?”

  “Of course not. For one thing, the guy was supposed to be dating Laura.”

  “If that’s the guy who killed her,” Lucas said.

  “C’mon. We know who killed the girls. But I’m worried about a trial.”

  “Always worry about a trial,” Lucas said. “But we’re piling stuff up.”

  “Need a smoking gun, like your girlfriend says.” Marshall said. “With everything else, if we had the gun, I’d be satisfied.”

  QATAR’S PRELIMINARY HEARING had been set for the following Monday. Nothing more turned up. Lab techs searched the debris tray on the furnace at the St. Pat’s museum, found various bits and pieces of metal, but nothing that could be specifically identified as coming from clothing. Lane identified three cab trips from the general area of Qatar’s house to the general area of Barstad’s, but none of the drivers could identify Qatar as a passenger.

  Lo Andrews made his statement, but, as an assistant county attorney pointed out, it was a statement by another heavy doper. Thirty cops were recruited to look inside every trash can and behind every fence within a half-mile of Barstad’s. They found all kind of clothing and shoes, but none of it the kind that Qatar might have worn. It was all old and obviously abandoned, or was identified by the people who owned the trash cans.

  “What if Qatar didn’t do it?” Swanson asked.

  “He did,” Lucas said.

  “I think we’re in trouble,” Marshall said. Marshall had begun to brood. “I’m not sure we should have taken him when we did,” he said. “We could have thrown a net over him, done a full-court press. Sooner or later, he would have fucked up.”

  “By the time we might’ve done that, he’d already have spotted us,” Lucas said. “And the longer we went with a full team on him, the more innocent he’d look.”

  MARSHALL STAYED IN town over the weekend. He got permission to enter Qatar’s house under the warrant, and spent most of the time taking the house apart. He unscrewed every power outlet, dug through all the loose fiberglass insulation between the ceiling joists, looked up and down the chimney, and took the flue mechanism apart.

  He called
Lucas late Sunday afternoon. “You know what I got?”

  “Something good?”

  “I got a face full of glass splinters from the insulation, and I’m covered with soot. I look like I just crawled out of a Three Stooges movie, if somebody’d only hit me with a cream pie. There ain’t nothing in the house.”

  “My fiancé is about to make some meat loaf with gravy and Bisquick biscuits,” Lucas said. “Why don’t you drag your sorry ass over here—we’ll throw your clothes in the washer and give you something to eat.”

  “I’ll do that,” Marshall said.

  MARSHALL LIKED THE food, and Weather liked Marshall.

  “You know what we really wanted for Laura was not revenge,” he told her. “All we wanted was justice. I don’t think we’re gonna get it. I think we’re gonna get a lot of bureaucracy and treatment programs, and Qatar’s probably gonna sue everybody in sight and get them all running around like chickens, and nobody’s gonna want to hear about Laura. Nobody misses her but me and her folks and her family. She hadn’t done anything; hell, she might’ve turned out to be a cook or something, though I think she woulda been better than that. But nobody misses her. If we could just get a little justice for her . . .”

  “HE WAS JUST like all the good old guys back home,” Weather told Lucas after Marshall left. Weather had grown up in a small town in northern Wisconsin. “They want to keep everything simple and right. I really like that, even if it’s a fairy tale.”

  “Problem is, it is a fairy tale . . . at least mostly,” Lucas said.

  EARLY MONDAY MORNING, Lucas took a phone call at home from the county attorney’s secretary: “Mr. Towson would like to talk to you as soon as possible, along with Marcy Sherrill. What would be a good time?”

  “I’ll come down right away—is he in now?”

  “He’s on his way. Would nine o’clock be okay?”

  “That’s fine. You’ll call Marcy?”

  Randall Towson, his chief deputy, Donald Dunn, and Richard Kirk, head of the criminal division, were waiting in Towson’s office when Lucas and Marcy arrived. Towson pointed them at chairs and said, “The Qatar case. You know J. B. Glass is handling it?”

  “I heard,” Lucas said, and Marcy nodded.

  “He’s pretty good. We’re wondering what the reaction would be if we talked to them about a plea—guilty to one count of second-degree with confinement at the mental hospital instead of Stillwater. He’d have to do his time if he were ever found competent.”

  “Uh, I think people would be pretty unhappy.”

  Kirk said, “But the guy’s gotta be crazy, and our priority has to be to get him off the street. If we get the judge to do an upward departure, and he gets twenty, by the time he got out he’d probably be past it as a killer.”

  “Oh, bullshit,” Lucas said irritably. “Most of them might stop killing when they get older, but not all of them do. He could come back out and start killing again in a month. If you get him twenty, and if he only had to do two-thirds of it, he’d be out when he’s about fifty-one, fifty-two. If we take him on a first-degree, he has to do a minimum of thirty. Then I’d feel pretty safe. He wouldn’t get out until he was in his late sixties.”

  “We’d do that, if we didn’t feel a little shaky on the case,” Dunn said.

  “You gotta take some risks sometimes,” Lucas said. Cops hated the conservative prosecution policies: The county attorney’s office had a near one-hundred-percent conviction rate—which looked terrific on campaign literature—mostly because they prosecuted only the sure things. Everything else was dealt down or dismissed.

  “We’re not just risking a loss,” Kirk pointed out. “If we lose him, he kills somebody else.”

  “But I’ll tell you what,” Marcy said. “If you go to J. B. with that kind of an offer, he’s gonna smell blood. He’ll turn you down. If you make an offer, it’s gotta be tougher than that.”

  Towson shook his head. “How can we make it tougher? If we go up one notch to first degree, the way the mandatory sentencing works now, he’d go down for the max—same thing he’d get if he fought it. Without a death penalty, we’ve got nothing to deal with except dropping the degree of guilt.”

  “Why don’t you talk to Wisconsin?” Lucas asked. “They have a couple of counts on the guy, they think. Work out a deal where if he takes one count of first degree over here, he serves his time, and Wisconsin drops out. If he doesn’t agree, he goes to trial in both states. One of us’ll get him.”

  Towson was drumming on his calendar pad with a yellow pencil. “That’s an option,” he said to Dunn. “Weak, though.”

  “The problem is, I’ve looked at the Wisconsin cases, and they’ve got less than we do. About the only thing that connects him to Wisconsin is that he was at Stout.”

  “And Aronson’s pearls and the method of the murders and the fact that they were buried together. There’s really a lot there,” Lucas said.

  “Tell you what,” Towson said. “We won’t make any move on a deal until we’re through looking at everything. If you’ve got anything else, roll it out. And maybe J. B. will make the first offer.”

  “Who’s handling the preliminary?” Lucas asked.

  “I am,” Kirk said. “We’re just gonna sketch the case, put Whitcomb up and get a statement about the jewelry, and that pretty much ought to do it. You coming?”

  “Yeah, I want to look at him again,” Lucas said. “He’s a strange duck.”

  MARSHALL WAS BACK for the preliminary hearing, dressed in a brown corduroy suit and fancy brown cowboy boots, his hair slicked down.

  “You look like Madonna’s boyfriend,” Marcy told him.

  “Aw, shoot, you get off my case,” he said. He didn’t quite dig his toe into the tile.

  The hearing was routine—Qatar in a dark suit and tie, but his face drawn and white, his eyes ringed as though he’d been weeping—until Randy Whitcomb was rolled in.

  Randy, strapped into a wheelchair, looking out at the chamber under a lowered brow, scanning the rows of press people and gawkers, finally found Lucas and fixed his gaze. Marcy, sitting next to Lucas, whispered, “Is he looking at you?”

  “Yeah. And he looks pissed,” Lucas whispered back.

  Kirk took Whitcomb through the preliminaries.

  Yes, Randy said, he’d bought the pearls from a man who said he was from St. Pat’s. Yes, he’d bought the diamond rings from the same man. He’d sold the pearls on the street, he said. He didn’t know who had them now.

  “Do you see the man who sold you the jewelry here in the courtroom?” Kirk asked.

  Randy looked around for a full minute, scanning up and down each row, then said, “No. I don’t see him.”

  Kirk took a step back. “Look at this man here at the defense table.”

  Glass, Qatar’s defense attorney, surprised as anyone, struggled to his feet, but before he could object to Kirk’s direction, Randy leaned toward the microphone and said, “I never seen him before in my life.”

  A moan swept the courtroom. Marshall said, “What happened?” and Marcy said, “The little jerk.”

  Lucas didn’t say anything, because he could feel Randy staring at him and knew he wasn’t finished. “How do you like that, asshole?” Randy bellowed into the microphone. He pointed at Lucas and yelled, “You cocksucker, how you like them apples?”

  The judge was beating on his desk, but Randy kept shouting, and finally the judge told the bailiff to wheel him out. Randy went, screaming all the way, and Lucas stood up and said, “We gotta find out what happened. We gotta get the little sonofabitch. Where’s Lansing? Did anybody see Lansing?”

  Lansing was in the hallway. As soon as Lucas and Marcy stepped outside, Randy, whose outburst had subsided, began screaming again: “You keep that motherfucker away from me; you keep that motherfucker away.”

  Lansing came over and said, “You heard him.”

  Lucas reached forward and pinched a piece of Lansing’s coat lapel between his thumb and forefinger. “It�
�s not up to me to give you advice, but I will, because you’re so young and dumb. You better find out what happened, or you could be looking at the end of your legal career. You cut this deal, and we’ve got the case hanging on it. We’re all in shit city now—you not the least of us.”

  Lansing swallowed and stepped back. “I know. I’ll find out what happened.”

  “Get back,” Lucas said.

  MARSHALL CAME OUT and said, “Well, shit. That really put the dog amongst the cheeseburgers.”