Chosen Prey

21

WEATHER SAID IT was no big deal, just friends getting together for a beer and a little seafood, but she got to Lucas's place early and spent three hours dusting and vacuuming, and made it smell like nobody lived there but forest elves and evergreens. She was also wearing the engagement ring.

"Sort of stinky right now," she said, "but when you cook up the wild rice and mushrooms the spices'll make this place smell like…" She couldn't think of anything. "Good," she said. "You don't have enough beer, by the way, and when you're at the store, get a couple bottles of pinot noir-everybody drinks that, right? Something nice and buttery."

"Buttery," he said.

"Yes. Ask the clerk. Maybe three bottles. You better get some paper towels, and some regular napkins-you're all out of those."

"Never had any," he said.

"What'd you use?"

"Toilet paper," he said.

She put her fists on her hips. "I'm not exactly, precisely, in the right mood for humor, with the house being the wreck that it is. You wanna go to the store?"

SLOAN HAD TRADED his usual brown suit and wing tips for khakis and a brown sweater with oxblood loafers. Del did his best to look neat, in jeans that had been ironed, brothel-creeper boots, and a blue fleece pullover. Their wives looked like cops' wives: carefully dressed in sweaters and slacks, a little too chunky, with skeptical eyes.

Lucas had set up the charcoal grill in the back, heaped it with charcoal and a half-pint of starter fluid, stood back, and touched it off; he and Del and Sloan all smiled at the foom the fluid made when it ignited, and the resulting fireball. When the charcoal was going, he put the iron pot on top and poured in enough water to cover the lobsters.

"Teach the little fuckers to come back to life as lobsters," Lucas said.

"The only problem is, he's too chicken to put them in. I've got to do that," Weather said.

"Damn things bite," Lucas said. "Did we get some crackers?"

"Those little round ones?" Del asked hopefully.

THEY TALKED ABOUT cases, but not the gravedigger case. They talked about medicine, but not Randy. Weather talked about a skull reconstruction that she was working toward, and how image-manipulation technology allowed her to image a skull three-dimensionally, work out the reconstruction to the millimeter, and fit all the bones together at the end. "Of course, it doesn't always work out that way, and there's some fudging, but it's light-years past five years ago…"

Del's wife had a story about another plastic surgeon who got into an instrument-throwing fit. "He's usually a nice guy-must be something going on."

Weather knew him and pitched in. "He was talking about quitting surgery and going into investment banking-he got really deep in investments. I think it was pretty risky. He told me if I wanted to kick in a quarter-mil, he could make it a mil in a year. I told him I couldn't afford it, but what I really think was, the risk must have been terrific. Maybe he took a hit."

They batted it all around for a while, and finally Cheryl, Del's wife, watching her husband crack a lobster claw and dip it in butter, asked, "I wonder if lobster has as much cholesterol as shrimp?"

"Both are sorta like bugs," Lucas said. He got up and said, "More beer?"

Cheryl looked at the other two women. "Is Del the only one with high cholesterol?"

"Ah, shut up," Del said.

"No, really."

"Sloan's is so low that it's like a race with his blood pressure, to see which one can hit bottom first. I'm sorta borderline," Sloan's wife said.

"I'm okay. Lucas has to think about it, but he's basically okay, if he'd just cut out the doughnuts," Weather said.

"Del's ought to be better with this Lapovorin stuff." Cheryl poked her husband with her elbow. "That doesn't mean you can eat everything in sight. Go back on those terrible pig rinds."

"Shut up. You gonna eat those claws?"

She pushed her plate toward him. "Mr. Sophisticated has been worrying about what that guy told you in the bar," she said to Lucas.

Lucas had to think a minute: the Cobra. "Oh, yeah. Lapovorin makes you come backwards."

"What?"Sloan was interested.

"Ah, Jesus," Del said.

"This guy told us that this woman who got killed by the gravedigger, that the only thing that she said about him-she was laughing about it-was that he was taking Lapovorin and was afraid that he was gonna be screwed up sexually."

"Like he isn't," Weather said.

"Yeah, but this is some kind of real physical thing," Lucas said. "Some kind of ejaculation thing happens, and…"

He hesitated to say it, but Del didn't. "You come backwards. Nothing comes out."

They were all mildly amused, and Weather said, "Del, that's nonsense. I know a little about Lapovorin, and there are no side effects like that at all. You've got to have your liver function checked every once in a while, a blood test-"

"Really?" he said, brightening. "I got the blood test."

"You mean the guy was talking through his ass?" Lucas asked. "I was planning to pimp Del with this for the next ten years."

"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."