John Sanford - Prey 12 - Chosen Prey.txt

by Chosen Prey(lit)

  He was grinning into the shower head, thinking about the coming-backwards discussion, when it struck him.

  “Sonofabitch,” he said. He stepped away from the water and looked down at his feet. Weather said it was the baldness remedy that made you come backwards?

  So the guy was bald, or getting that way. He didn’t look like the Jackal actor—that guy was all teeth and eyes and hair. Take away the hair . . .

  He’d just met a young bald guy from St. Patrick’s who was close to Helen Qatar, and who—was he remembering this right?—Mrs. Qatar had said was in the same department as the Neumann woman. He closed his eyes and pictured Qatar with hair. Holy shit.

  Could be a coincidence. Didn’t feel that way.

  “Fuckin’ James Qatar,” he said aloud. He started to get out of the shower, then jumped back in to rinse the soap off his legs. Saw James Qatar in his mind’s eye. Saw James Qatar’s girlfriend in the corner—young, blond, fairly small, arty-looking. She could have been a model for the women who’d been murdered.

  “Fuckin’ Qatar,” he said wonderingly.

  MARCY WAS IMMERSED in a pile of paper; Del hadn’t made it in yet, and Marshall was drinking coffee and reading a copy of Cosmopolitan. The magazine cover promised to reveal hitherto-unknown love secrets that would win back the man who dumped you, and Marshall appeared to be deep into it.

  Marcy looked up and said, “Hey. Black and Swanson are getting nowhere, but we’re piling up a shitload of data. The FBI just came in with a revised sexual profile, plus backgrounds on all the members of the St. Patrick’s faculty that they have files on. A lot of the older ones had to have clearances because of government work back in the bad old days, and—”

  Lucas interrupted. “Doesn’t matter.”

  “Doesn’t matter?” She stood up. She knew the tone. “Why doesn’t it matter?”

  Marshall had stopped reading as Lucas continued to his office and pushed open the door. Before he went inside he said, “Because when I was in the shower this morning—I was soaping up my hard, washboard abs at the time . . .”

  Marcy was following along behind him. “Before washing your socks on them.”

  “When I realized that the gravedigger is none other than . . .” He paused, letting them guess. Nobody guessed, but they were both paying attention. “. . . James Qatar, Helen Qatar’s son.”

  Marshall looked at Marcy, who looked at Marshall, then they both turned back to Lucas and Marcy said, “I’d like to know why.”

  “I could explain it, but instead of wasting the time right now . . .” He looked at Marshall. “You know anybody at Stout?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. A few people. I know the president. Most of the vice presidents. And all the coaches, and—”

  “Call somebody who might know. Ask them if they show a James Qatar as a student when Laura disappeared.”

  Now Marshall was intent: He could see Lucas was serious. He said, “I can sure as shit do that ,” picked up the phone, put it back down, dug a card case out of his jacket pocket, pulled out a stack of cards, shuffled through them, then picked up the phone again and punched in a long-distance number.

  A minute later, he said, “Janet? This is Terry Marshall with the sheriff’s office. . . . Ah, God, thank you, it was pretty terrible. . . . Yeah, I’ve been over there every other day. . . . Yeah. Listen, I’m working on the case, I’m over in Minneapolis. Could you look in your computer and see if you show a student there, ten years ago—be good if you could look a couple years on either side of that, too—by the name of James Qatar? Yeah, Qatar, Q-A-T-A-R. Yeah, like the country.”

  As they watched, he said, “Yeah,” then doodled a minute on the front of the Cosmo, looked at them, rolled his eyes and shrugged, doodled some more, and then said, “Yeah? What years? Uh-huh. Could you print that whole thing out and fax it to the Minneapolis police department if I give you a fax number? Uh-huh?”

  Marcy jumped up, scribbled a number on a piece of paper, and Marshall read it into the phone. He said “Uh-huh” a couple of more times, then “Thanks” and “Listen, keep this strictly under your hat.”

  He hung up. “You oughta take more showers,” he said. “Qatar was there.”

  Lucas told Marcy, “Get everybody back here—and don’t let any of this leak to the goddamn interdisciplinary group, or wherever it’s called. I don’t want a bunch of feds in blue suits running all over the place. Let’s just keep it quiet, but point everybody at Qatar.”

  She said, “Right,” and started doing that.

  “They told me that sometimes you do this kind of shit,” Marshall said. “But how’d you do it?”

  Lucas told him, and when he finished, Marshall rubbed his chin and said, “I believe you. But basically, it’s all bullshit and lies held together with baling wire.”

  Lucas said, “I wonder if that chick he was with knows him very well? I wonder if she signed in yesterday when they were at the ME’s office—I think if you’re gonna officially look at a body, you wind up signing something. Don’t you? Maybe we ought to look her up.”

  Marcy looked up from the phones. “Now that we got a name, there’s about twenty things we can do. There’re so many things to do, I don’t know where to start.”

  “The woman with the pictures on the bridge,” Lucas said. “Let’s start there.”

  22

  WHILE MARCY WAS calling in Black, Lane, and Swanson, Lucas got on the phone to Del and caught him at breakfast. “What the hell are you doing up?” Del asked when he took the phone from his wife.

  “I need the name of the woman you talked to, the one whose pictures were posted on the bridge.”

  “Beverly Wood. But I talked to her a couple times, and there’s not much there. She has no idea.”

  “You got a number?”

  “Yeah, just a minute. Did something come up?”

  “I solved the case this morning,” Lucas said modestly. “Maybe talking to her again will give us another confirmation.”

  “Jeez, that’s good,” Del said. “Here’s the number.” He read off Wood’s phone number and then said, “I’m not getting any big wry-humor vibrations. You didn’t really solve the case, did you?”

  “We’re meeting here as soon as Marcy can get the other guys back. Probably an hour. Tell you about it when you get here.”

  “Gimme a hint,” Del said.

  “I ejaculated backwards,” Lucas said.

  HE CALLED BEVERLY Wood, was told that she was in a classroom. “Her seminar on women expressionists,” he was told. There was no phone in the classroom, but he was no more than ten minutes away. He caught a squad about to leave the building and commandeered it as a taxi.

  “Who’s gonna protect Washington Avenue from speeders if we’ve got to haul some deputy chief all over town?” asked the guy at the wheel.

  “I can fix it so you have extra traffic time, if you want,” Lucas said.

  “I don’t take shit from guys who drive Porsches,” the cop said. “You’re speeding when you’re sitting in the parking ramp.”

  BEVERLY WOOD’S CLASS involved eight people slumped around a pale maple table looking at Xerox copies of magazine articles. Lucas stuck his head in, and they all turned to look at him. “Beverly Wood?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m with the Minneapolis police. I need to talk to you somewhat urgently. Just for a minute.”

  “Oh. All right.” She looked around at her class. “Nothing scandalous, I can assure you. Lily, why don’t you begin the discussion of Gabriele Munter, since I’ve already read your paper and know your views. I’ll be back in a minute”—she looked at Lucas—“I assume.”

  “Maybe two minutes,” Lucas said.

  He got her out in the hall and said, “You’ve talked to Officer Capslock a couple of times about the drawings . . . but let me ask you—you’ve got to keep this confidential, by the way—do you know of, or have you heard of, a man named James Qatar?”

  She cocked her head. “You’ve got to be kid
ding.”

  “You know him?”

  “Not exactly. He published a ridiculous paper on what he called ‘riverine expressionism,’ in which he suggested that European expressionism found its way into the Midwest during the 1930s by way of the great river valleys. I’m afraid I ridiculed it in my reply.”

  “You ridiculed him personally?”

  “Everything’s personal when you’re talking about scholarship,” she said. “I suggested that the riverine influences probably weren’t that great since we had radios, newspapers, books, museums, trains, automobiles, and even airline service at the time.”

  “But he would have felt ridiculed personally?” Lucas asked.

  “I certainly hope so. . . . He’s the one who did the drawings?”

  “We don’t know. His name came up, and we were wondering if you might have had some contact.”

  “Just that article. I’ve never laid eyes on the man, as far as I know,” she said.

  “How long between the time you published the article and when the drawings were posted on the bridge?”

  “Let me see. . . .” She looked at the floor and muttered to herself, then looked up again. “Four months? I would have told Officer Capslock, but to tell you the truth, the whole thing was so trivial to me—the review, I mean—that I’d completely forgotten it.”

  “What if the shoe were on the other foot, and you’d written an article and it was criticized in the same way. . . . Would you have remembered the criticism?”

  “Oh, yes, probably forever,” she said. “Maybe I shouldn’t have, but I had a pretty good time with him.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “Please don’t tell anybody about this talk. We don’t know who this man is for sure.”

  “The gravedigger . . .”

  “If he is, we figure it’s best not to attract his attention.”

  THE COP WAS waiting in the squad with the motor running. Lucas opened the door and climbed in, and the cop said, “Four speeders. They passed me with impunity.”

  “Impunity, huh? You in a vocabulary class?”

  Del was waiting when he got back, and he took two minutes to explain it. Marshall added, “We got that fax from Stout. He was there for two years, then went to Madison the year after Laura disappeared. He majored in art at Stout, and from Madison, they tell me that he was in art history.”

  “So he’s gotta be able to draw,” Lucas said.

  Marshall asked, “I wonder what he was doing with that pimp?”

  “We can ask Randy,” Lucas said. To Marcy: “We need to get somebody from intelligence to track him down, Qatar, and take a picture of him without him knowing it.”

  “Lane can do that,” Marcy said. “He’s got a darkroom at his house. He’s a good photographer.”

  “All right, that’s good. Let’s get Lane going.”

  When they were all assembled, Lucas laid out what they had: Qatar had been at Stout when Laura Winton disappeared. He’d grown up near St. Pat’s, where his father had been a professor and his mother an administrative employee and later head of the Wells Museum. He fit the image of the man described by Winton, or, at least, he would if he had hair. He had art training. His office was just down the hall from Neumann. His mother died shortly after saying that she’d snoop around a bit. And his current girlfriend was the spitting image of all the women who’d been killed.

  “Her name is Ellen Barstad,” Marcy said. “Believe it or not, there are two Ellen Barstads in Minneapolis, so we’re sorting that out now.”

  “We know he steals valuables from his victims—they’re not souvenirs, though, he’s apparently doing it for the money. Once we get in his house, we’ve got to look at everything with a microscope, in case he keeps anything else. If we could find one thing that comes from the victims, that would be enormous.”

  “We gotta get in and grab his computers,” Lane said. “If Marcy’s artist friend is right, and he’s drawing from computer photos, then maybe they’ll have everything we need.”

  “Good,” Lucas said. He made a note on his legal pad. Then: “I would like to know why we weren’t onto him sooner, with all the time we put in at St. Pat’s.”

  Black said, “Because we were looking for people connected with art, and the art department and the museums. That’s hundreds of people. And after that, we were just asking around. Qatar and Neumann were in the history department.” He shrugged. “We never looked in history.”

  THEY’D ALL GATHERED at the desks in the work bay, but as the talk continued, they’d pulled chairs around until they were in a rough circle, facing each other, intent. When they’d talked out all the possibilities and probabilities, Lucas said, “Check me on this. I see two keys: We need Randy to identify him as the guy who sold him the jewelry, and maybe—maybe—we can do something with his girlfriend.”

  “I can get a headshot,” Lane said. “It might take me a day or two if we don’t want him to spot me.”

  “Push it hard,” Lucas said. “I’d love to get something today, so we can get it over to Randy.”

  “How about the girlfriend?” Del asked.

  “That’s you and me,” Lucas said.

  Marshall said, “And me.”

  Lucas nodded and turned to Swanson and Black. “You two, I want you back at St. Pat’s. See if there’s any way we can nail down whether he was at that museum reunion party—but keep it tight, undercover. I need a bio on him. Something that could put him with the other dead women that we’ve identified.”

  “Are we gonna track him?” Marcy asked.

  “I’ll get some guys from intelligence. We don’t need a full team, I don’t think—that’s too dangerous. We’d have to talk with his neighbors and college faculty people to pull off a team, and the word might get around. So maybe just one guy at a time, keeping a light tag. No reason to think he’s gonna run.”

  Marcy asked, “What about me?”

  “Go talk to the county attorney. Tell him what we’ve got and find out what we need—how bad we’re hurting and what we can do.”

  “I think we’re hurting a little,” she said. “Like Terry said, we’ve connected a lot of dots but nothing really critical.”

  “Except Randy.”

  “Who we managed to cripple,” she said.

  “Yeah . . . the little prick.”

  BEFORE THEY WENT looking for Ellen Barstad, Lucas stopped at Rose Marie’s office to tell her what they were doing.

  “What are the chances?” she asked after he gave her a quick summary.

  “I think he’s the guy. Proving it is gonna be harder. The problem is, except for the first one, they were coming to him—he seemed to be picking on women from out of town, or women who just got to town, so her friends would never see him. Who knows, they may never even have known his real name. . . . We think he gave a fake name to the Winton girl.”

  “Are we watching him?”

  “Yeah. I need you to talk to the intelligence guys. We’re not gonna climb all over him, but we want to know where he is.”

  “I’ll talk to them,” she said. She made a note on her desk pad. Then: “New topic: If you had a chance to take a job with the state, would you take it?”

  He shrugged. “I sorta like it here.”

  “But if you couldn’t stay here?” she pressed.

  “What are you working on?”

  She leaned across the desk. “The guy running the department of public safety? The governor doesn’t like him. He does like me—and he should, since I did most of his homework for him when he was in the state senate. We get along on a chemical level.”

  “So you’re thinking of moving up.”

  “The possibility’s out there,” she said.

  “Well . . .” He rubbed his forehead with his fingertips. “That’s a different kind of work.”

  “Not for you, it wouldn’t be. You’d be doing the same thing you do here—working on your own, big cases, intelligence. Figuring things out. Maybe some political work. You could bring along Del
, if you wanted.”

  “I don’t know if Del would go. Maybe he would.”

  She leaned back. “Think about it. I don’t know if the whole thing is gonna work out, anyway. A couple of things have got to fall just right.”

  “But the governor likes you,” Lucas said.

  “He does,” she said. “What’s even more important, he’s gonna be reelected, if he doesn’t fuck up the tax thing, so we’d have at least seven more years. We’d be like Hawaii Five-O.”

  “Jesus, Hawaii Five-O. All right. I’ll think about it.”