Chosen Prey (35 page)

"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."

"Keep in touch on this Qatar thing," she said. "It wouldn't hurt our image if we nailed this down. Politically, it's just the right time."

HE PICKED UP Del and they got a city car and went looking for Barstad. Marcy had straightened out the confusion on the two Ellen Barstads--one of them was an elderly resident of a nursing home--and so they had an address and phone number, but nothing else.

The address turned out to be in another one of the faceless business parks, not far from the nearly identical one where Ware had his porn studio.

"I thought it was her home address," Del said, as they pulled into the parking area. Thirty or forty cars were scattered down the length of the narrow, block-long lot.

"Maybe she lives here," Lucas said.

"There's a sign on the door."

The door was heavy silvered glass, and the sign was in gold stick-on letters: "Barstad Crafts." The door was locked, but they could see a light in the back. Lucas knocked, then cupped his hands on the glass to peer past the reflections. He knocked again, and a woman stepped into the light in the back, then started toward them. When she got close, Lucas took out his ID case and held it up so she could see it.

She turned the lock and said, "Yes?"

Lucas recognized her from the ME's office. "Ellen Barstad?"

"Yes?" A worried, tentative smile.

Lucas introduced himself, and then Del, and said, "We have a serious problem, and we need to talk to you about it. Would you have a few minutes?"

"Well . . ." She looked carefully at Del and then said to Lucas, "You're the man who was at the medical examiner's office."

"Yeah."

"Okay." She opened the door all the way and stepped back. "Come in. Let me lock the door behind you."

The front of the store was an open bay, with quilt frames made out of brightly painted one-by-two lumber leaning against the walls, and another lying flat on a series of sawhorses. All held quilts in various stages of completion.

"I give classes," she said.

"This is a really nice quilt," Del said, and he meant it. The quilt was a traditional log-cabin style, but the colors had been carefully chosen and placed, so that light seemed to be falling across the quilt from one side to the other; it was almost as if the quilt were spread across a bed by a sunlit window.

Barstad picked up on his sincerity and asked, "Do you have quilts?"

"Two of them," Del said. "My sister-in-law makes them. Nothing like this, though."

They spent a moment looking at the quilt, bonding. And then Barstad, flattered, said, "What can I do for you? Is there a problem?"

Del said, "Let's get some chairs." There were several chairs scattered around the room, and he reached for one.

"Why don't you come in back," she said. "I can make some coffee, if you don't mind microwave."

She did live in the place. The back part of the commercial space had been carefully divided into small rooms with drywall partitions. She might have done it herself, Lucas thought: A green Army-type tool bag and a drywall square sat in one corner of the main room, on a white-plastic bucket of drywall compound.

He could see one end of a bed in a side room, and a toilet and sink in a corner between the bedroom and the living room space. A kitchen had been carved out of another corner and equipped with a half-sized office refrigerator, an old electric stove, and what once had been a standard industrial sink. Shelves and cupboards were fashioned from chromed industrial kitchen racks. Altogether, he thought, it looked snug, artsy-craftsy, and even a little snazzy.

As she got cups, Lucas said, "You were at the ME's office with James Qatar."

"Yes. James and I have been dating."

"We are doing . . . research . . . on Mr. Qatar," Lucas said. "He's basically the guy we want to talk about."

"Do you think he killed his mother?"

Lucas looked at Del, who shrugged, and Lucas asked, "Where did that question come from?"

"I don't know," she said. "His mother's dead in a weird way, and the cops show up and ask questions. Was she murdered?"

"We think she may have been," Lucas said. "Was there anything in particular that caused you to ask the question?"

"Yes," she said. "James is a would-be clothes horse. He loves to get dressed up. When I was studying fabric I did quite a bit with fashion, you know, and I never met anybody with as much need to project himself through clothing as James does. . . . It's like when he tries to picture himself, the main thing he sees are clothes, but he never has enough money to get the really good ones." She reached out and touched Lucas's jacket. "He would love something like this."

"Uh . . ."

"Just a minute, I'm getting there," she said. The microwave beeped, and she took the three cups out and passed them around. Watching her talk and move around, Lucas had concluded that she was an attractive woman hiding behind a plain facade--part of the curious Minnesota female ethic of dressing down. She went on: "Anyway, he called me after his mother was found, said he needed moral support to look at her body. So I went with him, and we identified her, and he was all weepy when you showed up. I felt like I was a prop. But I'll tell you, the weeping stopped one minute after we left, and we went on a shopping spree. For him. He paid two thousand dollars for a pinkie ring, for God's sake. Probably three thousand dollars more in Saks and Neiman's, and he just doesn't have that kind of money. I think it came from his mother's house."

"Huh. Not a lot of grief," Lucas suggested.

"Not when he wasn't around the medical examiner's or you police," she said.

Del said, "Look, we don't want you to betray a friendship--"

"Of course you do," she said. "What do you want me to do?"

Lucas cocked his head. "I get the impression that you're not all that friendly."

"We've been sleeping together for three weeks--but it's just about to end, to tell you the truth. He's not exactly the package I was looking for. I think . . ." She paused, and actually seemed to think about it. "I knew he might have been a little freaky in some ways, right from the start. He had that shine in his eyes. But I had some things I wanted from him, too, so that was okay . . . and he's clean and everything. But after that deal with his mom, he sorta scared me."

Lucas looked at Del and said, "I guess we tell her about it."

Chapter
23.

BARSTAD HAD NOTHING to contribute but impressions. Qatar was capable of violence, she said, "Sometimes we have pretty rough sex," she said, but she added that there had been no hint of anything else.

"When you say rough sex, you mean he forces you?" Lucas asked.

"No, usually I have to suggest it," she said. "He's not very creative."

"Oh." Lucas carefully didn't look at Del.

She said, "How about if I asked him about it? Killing people. Don't you guys bug apartments and stuff? I could get him here and ask him and you could record it."

"That might be a little crude--just coming out and asking," Del said. "Especially if it pissed him off and he picked up a steam iron and popped you on the head with it. We could get in quick, but not that quick."

"But I'm not stupid," Barstad said. "If he looked like he was getting ready to do something, I'd scream my head off. He doesn't carry a gun. Believe me, I know that for sure. He doesn't even carry a pocketknife."

"You seem pretty willing to get into this," Lucas observed.

"Hey. It's interesting," she said. "You think he might have killed his mom, I'm willing to help out."

"There's more to it than that, about Qatar," Lucas said.

Del said, "If you've seen the TV stories on this guy they call the gravedigger . . ."

She straightened. "You're kidding me," she breathed. "Oh, man."

"A violent guy--if he's the right guy," Lucas said.

"Well, let's get him," Barstad said enthusiastically. "I can bring him over here. We can work out something for me to say, either leading him on or just putting it right to him."

Lucas nodded. "We can work on it," he said. "We appreciate this."

She said, "Those women the gravedigger killed. They said he likes a type. I thought about it, because . . ." She looked down at herself.

Del said, "Yeah. You're the type. Exactly."

They talked a while longer, about the possibilities of bugging the apartment. "If it worked . . . we're really looking for every scrap we can find, so it would be very helpful," Lucas told her. "We don't want you to get in over your head."