Chosen Prey

by John Sandford

  All the way, calculating, wondering: He hadn’t told Weather or anyone else about the laptop. If he’d taken the laptop downtown after he found it, had processed it, they could have rearrested Qatar on the Aronson charge and he probably wouldn’t have made bail. Marshall’s whole concept would have been short-circuited.

  But then what happens to justice? Ten or fifteen years in jail, with Qatar coming out all clear, even more careful, to kill again? Some of them, some of the Qatars, never stopped. Lucas was still uncertain of the equities. If it weren’t for Weather, he might have let it go. . . .

  HE HIT THE blacktop north of the Pine Creek crossing with enough daylight to see it clearly. He slid through the turn and jumped back on the gas, then cut out on the gravel road. Close now; more light. He saw the DNR parking area coming, and sitting in it . . .

  “Goddamnit.” Marshall’s red Jeep Cherokee.

  Lucas screamed into the lot, braked down beside the Cherokee, and hopped out.

  Looked around . . .

  Marshall and Qatar were up on the hillside. They had stopped walking, and both were looking down at him. Qatar was dressed in pajamas, and his feet were bare. He had been gagged for a while, Lucas thought: Several coils of duct tape were looped around his neck, as though they’d been pulled down from his face. He was shivering, either from fear or simply from the cold.

  Marshall was wearing jeans and a tan barn coat. He had one hand on Qatar’s jacket, and in his other, the big-frame .357.

  Qatar shouted down, “Help me, please. He’s crazy, he’s going to kill me.” There was a catch in his voice. His hands had been cuffed, and he held them out toward Lucas as though he were praying.

  “Terry, goddamnit,” Lucas called. “Don’t do this, man.”

  Marshall called back, “I was about half afraid you’d show up here. I didn’t think you’d be this quick. Ten minutes later and we’d have all been fine.”

  “Terry, we got him,” Lucas shouted, moving closer. “I found his laptop computer. It was in the ceiling in the museum. Me and the janitor found it. It’s got pictures of the women on it, it’s gotta have prints—we got him for everything, man.”

  “Little too late for that,” Marshall said. “This is better anyway. Takes care of a couple of problems: his and mine.”

  “Shoot him,” Qatar screamed at Lucas. “Shoot him.”

  Marshall jerked him another step across the hill, dragging him by the loops of duct tape.

  “Terry, goddamnit, stop it. Stop it.” Lucas was walking up the hill toward them.

  “You gonna shoot me and save this asshole?”

  “No. But you gotta listen. We can still smooth this out: You turn him in, we tell everybody you freaked, you talk to a shrink for a couple of weeks . . .”

  He was fifty feet away. Marshall had gotten Qatar to the dug-over area where the graves were.

  “Oh, horseshit, Lucas, you know better’n that,” Marshall drawled. He might have been smiling. “Minnesota’s the same as Wisconsin: They’d hang me by my nuts. They’d make an example out of me. Cops can’t do this shit.”

  Forty feet. Qatar’s eyes were wide, his shoulders twisting away from Marshall. “Don’t let him . . . You can’t just shoot me,” he shouted at Marshall. “I can’t die today. I can’t . . . I have classes today. I have responsibilities. The college is expecting me.”

  “I don’t think so, pal.”

  Thirty feet. Lucas could see that Qatar’s bare feet were bleeding, apparently from dragging over the rocks and roots of the hillside. Marshall lifted his pistol so that it pointed directly into the back of Qatar’s head. “Stop right there,” he said to Lucas.

  “Terry, please, man, you’re a good guy. And listen to this—one last thing.” Lucas was begging for time. “There’s not much chance, but what if he is innocent? What if we’ve screwed this up somehow?”

  “That’s right,” Qatar said. “This is completely illegal. My lawyer—”

  “Shut up.” Marshall snapped the pistol barrel against the back of his head, and Qatar stopped, his mouth open in midsentence. Marshall said to Lucas, “There’s a tape recorder on the front seat of the car. When I got him in the car, I pulled the duct tape off his mouth and told him what I was gonna do, but I told him that maybe I wouldn’t if he’d tell me about the women. You listen to that tape, you’ll get all the names, and pretty close to the dates, and the places he picked them up. He even says there are two more down in Missouri, some godforsaken place down there.”

  “You promised me,” Qatar said. He tried to twist out of Marshall’s grasp, but Marshall played him like a fish. “You promised.”

  “I lied,” Marshall said.

  “All right, I’ll go to trial, I’ll confess,” Qatar said. “You got me. All right? All right? Just stop this, stop this now. You win. Okay ?”

  “On the other hand, I could always shoot you, too,” Marshall said to Lucas, but he was showing a grin again. “How’d they ever prove it was me?”

  Lucas shrugged. “They would. Tire tracks, the slugs, nitrites when they picked you up. There’s probably a parade on the way here now.”

  “Yeah, I know, I guess,” Marshall admitted. The smile, if it was ever there, faded away and he took a deep breath and looked around the hillside, tipped his head back to look up through the oak branches. Again he cocked the gun up against Qatar’s head. “Well, I guess there ain’t gonna be any big ceremony in this.”

  Qatar looked at Lucas, his voice level but desperate. “Help me.”

  Lucas said, “Terry . . .”

  “You want to say a couple of words, this is your last chance. You’re gonna be in hell in ten seconds,” Marshall said to Qatar.

  Qatar turned his head away, trembling violently. And then he stopped. Maybe the finality of the situation had finally hit him, maybe he was embarrassed by his pleading, maybe this was simply the real Qatar—Lucas didn’t know. But he reached down, carefully brushed some mud off his pajamas as well as he could with his cuffed hands, and then looked Marshall in the eyes.

  “Your niece—she was a tasty little cunt,” he said. “She took a long time to die.”

  “You cocksucker,” Marshall screamed, and Lucas shouted, “Terry, goddamnit . . .”

  The pistol shot was an earsplitting BANG, and Lucas flinched away from it. Qatar’s face had a bloody hole in it where the hollow-point had exited; his legs went out, and he pitched down onto one of the refilled graves. He twitched once; he was dead. He didn’t look like Edward Fox anymore, not even a bald one.

  “Terry . . . Jesus Christ, Terry . . .” Lucas said. He was twenty feet away.

  Marshall was talking, but talking to Qatar. “I didn’t think you had the guts for that,” he said. “You got to me. You did that.”

  He shook his head, looking down the slope at Qatar’s crumbled body, but now talking to Lucas. “I had a little time to think on the way down here,” Marshall said. “Time to think. I spent ten years of my life looking for the miserable shit. Ruined my life, what was left of it, after June was killed. Took Laura . . . I just wish Laura would have had a chance in life, you know? Where’s Jesus when you need him?” He put the pistol under his own chin and turned his head to look Lucas in the eyes. “But you know what, Lucas?” He took a last look around and a deep breath. “Today’s a nice day for this. You might want to look away for a second. . . .”

  “Terry!”Lucas screamed.

  DEL ARRIVED TWENTY minutes later, pounding into the parking lot in his wife’s Dodge. He jammed the transmission into park and jumped out of the car. Lucas was sitting cross-legged on the hood of the Porsche.

  “Weather called,” Del said. “I got here as soon as I could. Thought maybe I should call somebody, but I didn’t . . . not yet.” Lucas didn’t respond, and Del looked up at the hill. The bodies were out of sight, untouched, except for the handful of dried oak leaves that Lucas had dropped over Marshall’s half-open eyes. “Too late?”

  Lucas sighed, rubbed his forehead with his finge
rs, eyes closed. “Just in time to say goodbye,” he said.

  30

  LUCAS AND WEATHER were working on her boat, an aging S-2. The sky was a perfect blue, and the sun felt as if it wanted to burn down on the back of his neck but didn’t yet have the horsepower.

  “The thing is made of fiberglass—you wouldn’t think you’d have to sit around and sandpaper and varnish,” Lucas grumbled. “What the hell is fiberglass for, anyway? Why did they make the goddamn hatch cover out of wood when they had a fiberglass factory?”

  “Shut up and paint,” Weather said.

  “Aren’t you supposed to have, like, croissants and wine when you’re working on a sailboat? And some friends come by and the guy has got a square chin and the chick is really good-looking and has loop earrings? And they’re both wearing turtlenecks and you get this little vibration of possible group sex?”

  “The more you talk, the sloppier you get. Just paint and shut up and let me scrub.” She was down below, scrubbing what appeared to be chemically hardened chipmunk shit out from under the sink. Lucas was sitting in the cockpit, working on the slip-out hatch board. He secretly believed it was makework to keep him out of the way while she did the real cleanup.

  Around them, in the marina, two dozen people were working on boats, and from where he sat on top of the boat, which was on top of the trailer, he could see a mile across Lake Minnetonka to one of the season’s early regattas.

  “Glad we’re not out there racing,” he said. “Those guys gotta be freezing their asses off.”

  “Best time of year,” she said. She stepped into the companionway, stepped up, and looked toward the racers. “Nice and dry, too—couldn’t be much wind over there.”

  “Love sailboat racing,” Lucas said. “No wind, they still race.”

  “That’s Lew Smith way out on the end—look at him, he must think something’s coming.”

  Lucas leaned back and closed his eyes. It all smelled good: the day, the lake, the marina, even the varnish. If everything were like this all the time . . .

  Well, he’d go nuts. But it was nice to be like this every once in a while. He opened his eyes and looked at Weather. She was still talking, but it was all about racing and who was being lifted above whom, and who was looking at a header, and he really couldn’t care about any of it. What he did care about was Weather, and he smiled, watching her enthusiasm.

  Sailing.

  FOR TWO FRANTIC days after Qatar and Marshall died on the hillside, Lucas had shuttled between grand juries in Goodhue and Hennepin counties. The papers and television stations were wild for the story, and that might yet go on for a while. They all wanted to know why Lucas had gone down to the graveyard. Lucas could only say that it had been a hunch that came to him when he got the call from the 911 Center.

  Why didn’t he call Goodhue? Because he had no real knowledge that Marshall was involved and didn’t want to damage a friend if he was wrong, and had been so disturbed by the possibility that he’d launched himself onto the road without his cell phone, and once on the way, it seemed best to continue . . . blah, blah, blah.

  Cops and lawyers came and went, but as long as Lucas’s story stayed simple, there were no seams to cut onto. On the day after the shooting, he sent a crime-scene crew to St. Patrick’s to talk to the janitor, with instructions to search the overhead on the skeleton floor, and anything else the janitor suggested. The crew found the computer an hour into the search, and the laptop had Qatar’s prints all over it. The computer forensics people did their work, and up popped drawings of Aronson and another woman from the graveyard.

  At the same time, an illegal copy of the tape recording that Marshall made of Qatar found its way to Channel Three, and then to every TV and radio station that wanted it. Lucas didn’t know who leaked it—he suspected Del, but Del professed to be mystified, as did Marcy, Sloan, and Rose Marie. Qatar’s babbling confession, and his naming of names, led to quick IDs on the unidentified bodies from the graveyard, and to a new search in the countryside a few miles east of Columbia, Missouri.

  The usual Minnesotans were shocked by the police misconduct that had led to Qatar’s killing, but Rose Marie had a quiet word with old friends in the Democratic Party’s political-feminist hierarchy; with that, and with the constant playing of the tape across nine-tenths of the electromagnetic spectrum, the controversy withered. There was some expected grumbling from the Minnesota Civil Liberties Union about police-sponsored lynchings, which everybody agreed was the MCLU’s perfect right. Free speech, and all that.

  That cleaned up the case.

  Del had wondered, privately, just how early Lucas had suspected Marshall. Lucas shook his head and walked away from the question. Avoided the lie, but Del knew him well enough to understand the walk.

  Rose Marie also had a few questions that she didn’t ask. She did take Lucas aside and said, “The governor was impressed. I gave him ten minutes on what a great crime-detection bunch we have over here, and you know what he said?”

  “What’d he say?” They were in her office, and she was looking more cheerful than she had in weeks.

  “He said, ‘I don’t care about how good they detected—what I liked was the way they handled it.’ ”

  “So that’s good,” Lucas said.

  “That’s very good.”

  TIDYING UP THE loose ends on the case hadn’t tidied up Lucas’s head. A vague melancholia settled over him, a mood that Weather picked up. She began arranging events and talked to Marcy behind his back; Marcy began arranging events, and suggested that Lucas and Weather and she and Kidd go out to dinner. Lucas said “Sometime,” and kept wandering around town.

  He could have stopped the whole train, he thought. He’d never made up his mind; he’d never gotten clear on what he should do. He could have made a decision, but he hadn’t—a private failing, and a serious one, he thought.

  THAT NIGHT, AFTER the sailboat, after a salad of roasted chicken breasts and walnuts and lettuce, after a bowl of wild rice soup, after a beer or two, he was puttering in his study, the whole case still tingling at the back of his brain. After a while, he sighed and walked down to the bathroom. The door was shut and locked.

  “Weather?”

  “Yes. Just a minute.”

  “That’s okay, I can run down—”

  “No, no, just a minute.” He could hear her moving around, and tried the door. Locked.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Uh . . .”

  “Okay, I’ll run down to the—”

  “No, no . . . I’m, uh, I’m just, uh, peeing on a stick.”

  “What?”

  “Peeing on a stick.”

  “Weather? What . . . ?”

  “I’m peeing on a stick. Okay?”