Chosen Prey (30 page)

"Goddamnit. That doesn't help us much," Lucas said. "How many guys on your list?"

"Maybe a hundred and fifty. Harmon's running them against the sex-offender files right now."

Del called from Regions hospital: "They let me in to see Randy, and he is seriously fucked up. He makes a little goddamn noise once in a while, and that's it. His folks got a lawyer and they gave me some shit. . . . I don't know, it's getting tangled up over here."

"Might as well come back," Lucas said.

"Yeah. Nothing's gonna happen today, unless he bites it."

"Allport says that's not much of a risk."

"I dunno," Del said. "The docs say he's got so many weird drugs in him that they're fighting withdrawal symptoms along with everything else. He's got heroin in him, cocaine, maybe some PCP--he was using inhalers. . . . The little prick."

MARCY AND MARSHALL left for St. Paul, the first meeting of the interagency board on what the papers and TV stations were now calling the gravedigger case. The label was created by a Channel Eight anchorman, was picked up by Channel Three, which began using a graphic of a hillside grave with its stories, and finally by the papers. The named looked like it would stick.

After they'd gone, Lucas continued to read through the accumulating paper in the case, without any penetrating insights. When he went out for lunch at midday, he found the clouds had closed down again and a miserable cold drizzle was whimpering through the streets. Cold and damp, he loafed around City Hall, talking with Lester and Sloan, then went through the secret tunnel to the medical examiner's office and talked to an investigator there about strangulation.

At two o'clock, he was back in the office, when Weather called. "Why don't you invite the Capslocks and the Sloans over tomorrow night. We'll get some lobsters."

"All right. Short notice, though," he said.

"They never do anything. And it's been a while since we all got together."

"Who knows," he said. "Tomorrow night--maybe it'll all be over by then."

But he didn't really think so. The case felt like it was slowing down. Everything was pinned on Randy, and Randy had gone to never-never land.

Chapter
18.

THE KILLING OF the unnamed hooker at Randy Whitcomb's brought a temporary semblance of peace to Qatar's soul. He mentally replayed the scene every few minutes, especially the last part, when he hung over her and she began to quiver. . . .

It's the killing, stupid.

He'd always thought it was the sex, that the killing was punishment for the sexual disappointments the woman had inflicted upon him. He knew better now. Any sexual practice he'd ever remotely considered he'd now tried with Barstad. He'd found it, ultimately, to be boring. It was the killing, he thought, and it felt fine --fine--to have that clarified.

He searched for a metaphor. His realization of the exact nature of the beast was, he decided, the psychological equivalent of the first taste of a great French white wine, properly cool, properly tart; a bit of an intellectual tangle, perhaps, but there was a wonderfully clear, clean response at the sensual level.

He wanted another one.

Barstad.

They were meeting twice a week and the sex had gone past strenuous, lurching off into the weeds of intricate variation. He was not so much entertained as amazed, he thought. The last time they met, he'd spanked her with the Ping-Pong paddles until her ass was fiery red, yet she seemed to feel that he'd done an inadequate job. The pain, she said, had been on the very periphery of her pleasure, rather than at the center, where it should have been. She sounded, he thought, like a French literary theorist writing on sex.

Today, he thought, things would be different. He had the starter rope in his back pocket when he arrived at her apartment, and a duffle bag and spade in the backseat of the car. He would bury her so far out in the countryside that she would never be found. If the police wanted to attribute her disappearance to the gravedigger, he thought, let them do it.

He no longer cared. The power was in him. He even enjoyed his new media appellation: "the gravedigger." All right. He whistled as the elevator took him up to Barstad's.

SHE WAS NUDE when she met him at the door: propped it open with one arm and posed, her eyelids drooping. "James," she said. "I've already started."

"I see that," he said. "And I've got a new movie," she said. "A DVD. I pushed the couch back so we could put the futon in front of the TV."

Sex first, he thought. First the sex, and when he'd been emptied out of all the stray emotions that sex seemed to dissolve, he could better appreciate the clear, cool strangulation. There was, he thought, an aesthetic to it all.

They began with the movie and masturbation, moved on to oral sex, and then the intricacies. He found his mind wandering in the middle of it all, and he looked down at her neck below him and then around for his pants. They were out of reach, and he was unable to detach himself at the moment. He continued, looking down at her neck and the fine groove of her spine, thrilled already by what was coming. . . .

She finished, and he did, and they lay side by side, her head on his shoulder. She always wanted a long second bout, had even urged him toward chemical reinforcement. He would have another opportunity with the rope. What, he thought, would it be like to strangle a woman who was at that moment in the throes of orgasm? Would she stop? Would he?

"James," she murmured into his neck, "I am going to make you very, very unhappy. If you want to punish me, I would accept that. But I want you to hear me out first."

He pulled back, said nothing. What was this?

"It's time to enter a new stage of exploration," she said. She'd always been formal about the sex, as though she were filling out a lab book. What would she do when she got to the end, when she'd exhausted all the possibilities? Build hot rods? Write Haiku? "I've been talking to a woman that I've known for several years. She has had some sexual relationships with other women, and we have decided that we would like to explore that together. Intergender sexuality."

He looked down at her, flabbergasted again. "You want to try women? Lesbianism?"

"Maybe the first time . . . but we've talked about it and I'd like you to meet her. We're discussing the possibility of the three of us . . . if you and she can be friends."

The three of them? He sat up. "You told her who I am?"

"Not exactly. Just that you were a professor. I had to do that much. She wanted to know your bona fides. She wouldn't have wanted to sleep with a street person, or a musician or something."

"You told her." He was enraged.

"Yes."

"Goddamnit, I told you I can't be brought into this. I teach at a Catholic school. My whole career, my whole livelihood . . ."

She put a finger out to his lips to shut him up, and said, "She's very discreet. She understands all of that. She's married, and her husband has no idea."

"You fuckin' moron. You fuckin'--"

She said, "Hit me, James. In the face. Hard. C'mon, hit me."

He said, "You're nuts."

"I'm a seeker, James." Her face was placid, lit from within. "Hit me."

He slapped her.

"Harder, James."

The second time, he hit her hard. He'd counted on killing her, but that was now an impossibility--impossible, at least, until he had time to better figure out what she'd told the other woman. He hit her with an open hand, hard enough to knock her flat. She looked up at him, blood on her lips, her eyes glittering. "Rape me."

He shook his head: "Listen . . . I . . ." He looked down at himself: He was shaking like a Jell-O mold.

"James. C'mon, James, please . . ."

HE WAS AT home that evening, eating a bowl of Froot Loops, reading the back of the box, when his mother called. She sounded ill: "James, I need to see you."

"Something wrong? You sound . . . afflicted."

"I am afflicted," she said. "Sorely. I need to talk to you immediately."

"All right, then," he said, "Let me finish my cereal and I'll be over."

She rang off and he sat down again, but rather than go back to the text on the box, he began considering the tone of her voice. She had definitely sounded ill--and there was an unaccustomed urgency in her tone. Maybe she really was ill. Her mother had died of pancreatic cancer at a younger age than she was now. . . .

His mother, he thought, all those years with a good salary; a woman born at the end of the Great Depression, of parents who'd suffered through chronic unemployment and the loss of a house, who had inflicted her with the fear that she'd wind up alone and penniless and too old to help herself. That fear had kept her working beyond the normal retirement age.

And kept her piling money into her Fidelity account and into her 201K plan. She had a half-million in Fidelity, God-only-knew-what in the 201K, and the college provided excellent medical, so the estate wouldn't be soaked up by medical costs or nursing care.

A half-million. His mother, gone. He put his head in his hands and wept, the tears streaming down his face, his chest heaving, a catch in his voice box. After a minute, he gathered himself.

A half-million. A Porsche Boxster S could be had for fifty thousand.

The image of himself in a Boxster, a tan leather jacket--not suede, he thought, suede was passe, but something reflective of the suede idea, with light driving gloves of a darker brown--lifting a hand to a small, blond, admiring coed on a street corner: The image was so real that he nearly experienced the reality itself, sitting in his kitchen chair. A cool clear fall afternoon, leaves scuttling along the street, the smell of yard smoke in the air, a day perfectly fitting for the not-suede jacket, the girl in a plaid skirt and white long-sleeve blouse, a cardigan over her shoulders. . . .

His mother had said she was afflicted. He hurried out to his car.

HE PARKED IN the driveway, climbed the stoop at the side door, and stopped for a second to look at the house--he hadn't even considered the house, but in this neighborhood, in this condition, the house itself had to be worth a quarter-million. And they had done no estate planning: none. The thought of losing it, even a piece of it, to taxes, again brought the welling tears. He squared his shoulders and rang the doorbell.

Helen came to the door, pushed open the storm door, said curtly, "Come in." She didn't sound ill, he thought.

"Are you okay?" he asked.

"No." She led the way back to an L-corner where she had her television, and sat in her rocker. Qatar trailed along, and when she sat down, perched on the couch. She took a remote control from her reading table, pointed it at the television, and a moment later Qatar found himself looking, with some puzzlement, at an old movie. The movie ran for two or three seconds, and she paused it. A nice-looking actor was caught full-face.

"The police have come to see me three times," she said. "It has to do with this man who buried all those girls on that hill. They have learned that this man had some training in art; that he spent time at Stout, in Wisconsin; that he has some connection with St. Patrick's and myself; that he probably murdered Charlotte Neumann . . ."

Qatar had tightened the grip on himself as she began to speak. He was an exceptional liar, always had been, his face loose and observant, questioning, wondering where the speaker was going, ready with the surprise and denial.

"And," his mother concluded, "they have learned that he looked like this man."

"Yes?"

"James. That is you, ten years ago. Even five. That is you," she said.

His chin dropped. Then he said, voice rising, "You think, you think . . . Mother, you think it's me? My God, this man is a monster. You think it's me?"

Her head bobbed. "I'm afraid that's what I think, James. I want you to convince me that it's not true. But I remember all those poor cats, with their heads twisted."

"That was not me. That was Carl Stevenson, I told you then it was Carl."

She shook her head, "James . . ."

"What can I tell you?" He was on his feet. "Mother, I did not do this."

"Convince me."

He shook his head. "This is crazy. This is completely crazy. Lord, I hope you haven't told anybody about this. It's my life, my career. I had nothing--nothing--to do with any of this, but just the accusation or even the suggestion would finish me. My God, Mother, how can you think this?"

She looked at him, tears in her eyes now. "I want to believe that, but I don't. I knew about the cats. I hid it even from myself, but I saw you one day, going out in the garage, and I found the cat later."

And suddenly she broke down and began to cry, a series of breath-catching moans--a sense of agony that brought tears to Qatar's eyes, not because of his mother's pain, but because of the injustice and the lack of understanding, that she should betray him by her lack of belief.

"That was not me," he insisted. "Mother, who have you talked to about this?"

"Nobody," she said, shaking her head. "I know the effect this could have on your life. I took care--but now I have something to pray over. My own flesh and blood."