Chosen Prey

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.
     
    M ARCY 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