Chosen Prey (34 page)

"Not Lapovorin. What he was talking about is a situation that you see in a certain percentage of men who use that baldness drug," Weather said.

"What?" Del asked.

"You know. It's on television all the time," Weather said. "It's got enough weird hormones in it that they recommend that women never handle it. Not even get dust on them."

THE THREE COPS did the dishes while the women talked in the living room. They filled Sloan in on the gravedigger case, and talked a bit about Terry Marshall.

"Tough guy," Del said. "You get that way, I think, when you're one of those country guys. Around here it's all lawyers and shit, but out in the country, a lot of times it's just you, and you got to fix it."

"Know what you mean," Lucas said. "But he's got this soul-brother thing going with Anderson."

"Anderson."

They spent the rest of the evening gossiping about friends and acquaintances. Cheryl Capslock asked Weather if they'd made any decision about children, and when they were going to get married, if they were. "We haven't figured out a wedding date," Weather said. "We're still working on that. We're working on a kid at the same time."

"Good luck," Sloan said. "Let's see, Lucas, you'll be about, mmm, ninety-four when the kid graduates from high school. . . ."

WITH ALL THE talk, nothing tripped with Lucas until the next morning. Weather had already gone, and he was in the shower.

Weather, he thought, might have been slightly irritated with Sloan's crack about Lucas's age, especially since Weather wasn't that much younger. The thought of aging, and the thought of the whole group getting gray, and that they were worrying about cholesterol and reverse ejaculation . . .

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."

Chapter
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 kidding."

"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."