Chosen Prey (18 page)

"You should've heard that guy," Lucas said. "He sounded like somebody was . . . torturing him. Plucking his eyeballs out or something."

"Breaking his heart," Weather said.

They stayed up talking, since Weather wasn't scheduled to operate the next morning; talked about Marshall, about the killer, about the graveyard in the rain. Sat close together; eventually found their way back to the bedroom. Making a baby, Lucas thought later, is something you can do even after a day spent digging up a graveyard.

Maybe even a good time to do it.

Chapter
10.

THE TELEVISED DISPLAY of his drawings had been a hammer blow. As he sat in his office, peering into the depths of his computer, James Qatar would turn each and every time he heard footsteps in the hallway. He possessed a level of courage, but he was not immune to fear. The building was nearly empty during the study term, and the shoe heels of every passerby echoed through his office.

He was waiting for the police. He'd seen the television show on forensic science, how the police could track a killer with a single hair or a flake of dandruff or the imprint of a gym shoe. He knew much of that was exaggeration, but still: It produced a vision.

Qatar was an old-movie buff, and in his vision saw broad-shouldered police thugs with bent noses and yellow-tan woolen double-breasted suits and wide, snap-rimmed hats. They'd have eyes like bloodhounds and they'd jam into the doorway and then one would mutter to the others, "That's him! Get him!" He'd stand up and look around, but there'd be no place to run. One of the cops, a brutal man with dry twisting lips, would pull a pair of chrome handcuffs from his pocket. . . .

The scene was all very retro, very thirties, very movie stylish--but that was the way James Qatar saw it happening.

Never happened.

The same night that he'd seen the drawings on television, he'd driven himself in a panic to a CompUSA, where he'd bought a package of ZIP disks and a new hard drive. At his office, he'd locked the door, dumped all of his lectures to the new ZIPs, then stripped the hard drive out of his computer. He also dug out every ZIP disk in the place, except those he'd bought that morning--some of the disks were unused, but he was taking no chances--and put them in his briefcase with the old hard drive.

He took an hour fussing with Windows, reinstalling it on the new drive, then began the task of reading his lecture files back in. The whole process would take time, but he got started. When he ran out of patience, he headed home, carrying his briefcase.

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.