Chosen Prey (41 page)

"What?"

"I don't know. One of the guys just said she was pretty excited--some computer shit."

"We need to get his phone records as far back as they go," Lucas said. "Check him for cell phones. . . . We need to look at picture albums, any loose photographs lying around, any negatives, anything that could be a souvenir."

"We know," Webster said patiently. "We're looking for it all."

"Did you look in the washing machine?"

"Yeah. It's empty. Nothing in the dryer."

"Is Sandy still up at his office?"

"I don't know--she was an hour ago."

MACMILLAN HAD MOVED downtown. When Lucas finally found her, she was in Lucas's office, talking with Marcy.

"Greg Webster said you found something in his office computer," Lucas said.

"No. We didn't find anything--that's what was so interesting. He put a new hard drive in his machine the day that the story broke on finding Aronson. He pulled some files off an old hard drive and reinstalled them on the new one--the dates are right in the machine. The thing is, why would you do that? If you could pull the files off, the old drive was still working. It could have been full, I suppose."

"Bullshit. He was getting rid of evidence. Bet he had Photoshop or one of the other photo programs on it, and some of those drawings."

"Not on the new one."

"Check and see if you can find any software," Lucas said.

"No software except Word and some other minor bullshit. He is hooked into the 'Net, so we're gonna try to track that. Gonna go out to his ISP and see what they have in the way of records."

"Sounds like he's a half-step ahead of us," Lucas said. "Keep digging around. That date will be useful, though."

He told Del and Marshall about it, and Marshall said, "Another brick in the wall."

"No wall so far," Lucas said. "Just a lot of bricks."

THEY WERE STANDING on Qatar's front sidewalk, ready to leave, when Craig Bowden showed up. He parked down the street and jogged back to them, a small man in a yellow windbreaker. Lucas noticed that down the street, two women were sitting on their front porch, watching. Everybody knew. . . .

Bowden looked scared; he was the intelligence cop assigned to watch Qatar overnight.

"I even took notes," he said. "Lights on and off, all that. Television on and off."

"Could he have gotten out the back?"

"Yeah, sure--not with his car, of course, but if he'd wanted to sneak, he could have. There was just one of me, and he wasn't supposed to know we were interested in him."

"What about this morning? Was he carrying anything when he left?"

"I couldn't see when he loaded the car, because it was in the garage. When he got out at St. Pat's, he had a briefcase and a sack."

"A sack?"

"Like a grocery bag."

"Clothes," Marshall said.

"You didn't see him do anything with the sack?"

"No . . . he went inside and that's the last I saw him. Marc White took over from me."

THEY CALLED WHITE. He had never seen Qatar with a sack. "I never really saw him at all--I just sat and waited and then you guys showed up and busted his ass."

They called Sandy MacMillan again, the crime-scene cop who'd been working Qatar's office. "There were a couple guys there with me--they might have found something and didn't tell me, but I didn't see any sack. I'm sure I didn't see any clothes. I would have heard about it."

"Sack's still gotta be in the building," Lucas said. "Who wants to look for a sack?"

They all rode to St. Pat's together, but hope was dwindling. They'd been run around too much, with too little to show for it: one of those days when nothing was going to work right.

They found a janitor, an elderly man with a drinker's nose, who told them that all the trash cans in the building had been emptied. He didn't remember any brown sacks, and certainly no sacks full of clothes. "I could have missed it, though. I put them all out in the dumpster, and I'd be happy to go out and rip them apart, if you want. Aren't that many, really."

They all followed him out to the dumpster. He got a stepladder, climbed the side, jumped in, and began throwing sacks out. There were fifteen of them, one from each of the built-in trash receptacles in the building. The janitor got a new box of bags, and as they broke open each bag, they shifted the contents to a new one and tossed it back into the dumpster.

"Shit," Del said when they finished. "All we got was a bad smell."

"What the hell would he do with them?" Lucas asked.

"Tell you what I would have done," the janitor said. "I would have taken them down to the furnace room. It's a gas furnace, but it's got big gas bars and you could cremate a hog in there. A pair of pants would go up like a moth in a candle."

"Show us," Lucas said.

He did, and as they looked at the flames roaring away, Marshall said, "God almighty."

"Would James Qatar know about this place?" Lucas asked the janitor.

"The little fart grew up here. He was in and out of every corner of this college since he was a baby. Nothing here that he doesn't know. Got all these little hidey-holes--probably knows the place better'n me."

"Okay. Let's get this fire turned off. We'll send somebody around to look underneath it, see if there're any remains of zippers or buttons or whatever."

"What an asshole," the janitor said.

"You didn't like him?"

"I didn't like him from way back. Sneaky little fart. Always sneaking around. Scared the piss out of me more than once--I'd be doing something, and all of a sudden, there'd be Jim, two inches away. You'd never see him coming."

"You know he's been arrested?"

"Yeah. I think he probably did it."

ON THE WAY out of the building, Lucas said, "We ought to check trash cans all around Barstad's place, see if we find any blood. And the cab companies--if he figured out we were watching him, and snuck off, he had to get there somehow. Let's see if we can figure out taxi dispatches from around his place to around Barstad's. What else?"

"I'd get with the FBI again and really push the Internet thing," Del said. "If we can show he was on those porno websites, and cleaned out his computer the day Aronson made the papers, that'd be strong."

"Another brick," Marshall said. Then: "What if he didn't do it?"

Lucas thought about that for a minute, then asked, "What do you think the chances are?"

Del said, "Two percent and falling."

Marshall: "One percent and falling."

"One fucking bloody fingerprint or piece of clothing with her blood on it--that's all we need."

Marshall said, "We can't lose him now. We just can't."

Lucas said, "Hey . . ."

Marshall looked at him for a couple of seconds, then wearily pushed himself up. "I think I'll go home. Say hello to my sister, check in with the office, fix the garage-door opener."

"We'll get him," Del said.

"Sure," Marshall said. He glanced at Lucas, then quickly away. "See you tomorrow, maybe."

"Let it go," Lucas said. "We're doing what we can."

Chapter
27.

WEATHER FOUND HIM sitting in front of the television, watching the PBS national news, a beer in his hand. "That kind of a day?" she asked.

"Much worse," he told her.

She took off her coat and said, "Start from the beginning."

He started from the beginning, and he finished by saying, "So we might have gotten Ellen Barstad killed and it's possible that the guy is gonna walk. I think we got enough--and we didn't feel like we could leave him out there any longer, not after Neumann and his mother were killed. He's freaking out. He's killing everybody. He's on some kind of psychotic run."

Weather was shocked about Barstad. She had nothing to say except, "You'll get him."

"Yeah. . . . But you know what the county attorney's gonna wind up doing. If they can't cut some kind of deal with him, they'll go for a something-else conviction, and that's always risky."

A something-else prosecution rolled out every scrap of evidence, no matter how shaky or distantly circumstantial, teased out every possible murder scenario, threw in a variety of psychiatric testimony, and used the whole show to make an unstated argument that even if the particular murder couldn't be proven, the defendant had surely done something else he should be in prison for, and should be convicted simply as a matter of public safety. The perfect juror was both frightened and timid; one skeptic on the jury could screw the whole thing. And something-else convictions always left a bad taste with everybody. Not a clean kill.

"You need a smoking gun."

"We've been so close in so many ways," Lucas said. "If we could find just one picture. One piece of clothing with blood on it. Anything . . ."

LUCAS GOT IN late the next morning, found Marshall already at the office. "I thought you might take a day or two off."

"Can't stay away," Marshall said. "But my ass is kicked."

"Lane wants you to call him at home," Marcy said to Lucas. "He left a voice mail, said call anytime."

Lucas called and Lane answered, his voice thick with sleep. "I just got to bed. I wound up chasing that Lo Andrews guy all over the metro," he said. "I finally caught up with him about the time the sun was coming up."

"He have anything?"

"Yeah. He was carrying a little coke and we took him down to Ramsey county jail. He's on hold until we get a statement. The bust is probably bad, though."

"Yeah, yeah. What happened?"

"He says he was with Randy the night Suzanne Brister was killed and that Randy ran out of money and so they took him to an ATM and he maxed out his card. Then he ran out of that, so they went back to Randy's place and they got a compact sound system and sold that on the street, and they ran out of that, so they dropped him at his place--but an hour later he was back with four hundred dollars that he said he took off some white dude."

"Yeah? You think it was Qatar?"

"I used our warrant and went over to the bank and we looked at Qatar's ATM use. He took four hundred dollars out of an ATM on Grand Avenue, about eight blocks from Randy's, at 12:38P .M . same night."

"Goddamnit, Lane."

"What can I tell you? I'm good," Lane said.

"You are good. You gonna nail this down?"

"I'd like to get a little sleep first, but we're gonna get with Lo Andrews's attorney at three o'clock this afternoon. Probably drop the charges on the drug bust, and get the statement."

When Lucas got off the line, Marshall, who'd taken up residence at Lane's desk, said, "Another brick?"

"A decent one. We can put Qatar eight blocks from Randy's house the night Suzanne Brister was killed. That's not all. . . ."

He explained the rest of it, and Marshall said, "That's good, but you know what I'd do if I were Qatar's attorneys? I'd make the case that Qatar smoked pot, maybe even a lot of pot, and maybe used a little cocaine. He's an artist, right? So they say that's how he knew Randy. And that Randy was attracted to Qatar by the people Qatar knew--and that's how Randy met Neumann and Qatar's mother and all those other people. That Randy was the killer. We've got a dead woman, strangled in the style of all the others, in Randy's apartment, with his fingerprints all over the place, in blood, and he tried to shoot a cop when he busted out--"

"He was too young for the first ones."

"Well, who knows?" Marshall said. "To get like he is now, he must have been a monster when he was young. He would have been, what, twelve or thirteen when Laura disappeared? How many twelve-year-old killers do you think are running around the Cities?"

Lucas shrugged. "So you make a case. Do you believe it?"

"Of course not. For one thing, the guy was supposed to be dating Laura."

"If that's the guy who killed her," Lucas said.

"C'mon. We know who killed the girls. But I'm worried about a trial."

"Always worry about a trial," Lucas said. "But we're piling stuff up."

"Need a smoking gun, like your girlfriend says." Marshall said. "With everything else, if we had the gun, I'd be satisfied."

QATAR'S PRELIMINARY HEARING had been set for the following Monday. Nothing more turned up. Lab techs searched the debris tray on the furnace at the St. Pat's museum, found various bits and pieces of metal, but nothing that could be specifically identified as coming from clothing. Lane identified three cab trips from the general area of Qatar's house to the general area of Barstad's, but none of the drivers could identify Qatar as a passenger.

Lo Andrews made his statement, but, as an assistant county attorney pointed out, it was a statement by another heavy doper. Thirty cops were recruited to look inside every trash can and behind every fence within a half-mile of Barstad's. They found all kind of clothing and shoes, but none of it the kind that Qatar might have worn. It was all old and obviously abandoned, or was identified by the people who owned the trash cans.