Chosen Prey

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.”

22
    W HILE M ARCY 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.
     
    H E CALLED B EVERLY 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.”
     
    B EVERLY W OOD’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