Chosen Prey

completely forgotten it.”
    “What if the shoe were on the other foot, and you’d written an article and it was criticized in the same way. . . . Would you have remembered the criticism?”
    “Oh, yes, probably forever,” she said. “Maybe I shouldn’t have, but I had a pretty good time with him.”
    “Thank you,” he said. “Please don’t tell anybody about this talk. We don’t know who this man is for sure.”
    “The gravedigger . . .”
    “If he is, we figure it’s best not to attract his attention.”
     
    T HE COP WAS waiting in the squad with the motor running. Lucas opened the door and climbed in, and the cop said, “Four speeders. They passed me with impunity.”
    “Impunity, huh? You in a vocabulary class?”
    Del was waiting when he got back, and he took two minutes to explain it. Marshall added, “We got that fax from Stout. He was there for two years, then went to Madison the year after Laura disappeared. He majored in art at Stout, and from Madison, they tell me that he was in art history.”
    “So he’s gotta be able to draw,” Lucas said.
    Marshall asked, “I wonder what he was doing with that pimp?”
    “We can ask Randy,” Lucas said. To Marcy: “We need to get somebody from intelligence to track him down, Qatar, and take a picture of him without him knowing it.”
    “Lane can do that,” Marcy said. “He’s got a darkroom at his house. He’s a good photographer.”
    “All right, that’s good. Let’s get Lane going.”
    When they were all assembled, Lucas laid out what they had: Qatar had been at Stout when Laura Winton disappeared. He’d grown up near St. Pat’s, where his father had been a professor and his mother an administrative employee and later head of the Wells Museum. He fit the image of the man described by Winton, or, at least, he would if he had hair. He had art training. His office was just down the hall from Neumann. His mother died shortly after saying that she’d snoop around a bit. And his current girlfriend was the spitting image of all the women who’d been killed.
    “Her name is Ellen Barstad,” Marcy said. “Believe it or not, there are two Ellen Barstads in Minneapolis, so we’re sorting that out now.”
    “We know he steals valuables from his victims—they’re not souvenirs, though, he’s apparently doing it for the money. Once we get in his house, we’ve got to look at everything with a microscope, in case he keeps anything else. If we could find one thing that comes from the victims, that would be enormous.”
    “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.”
     
    T HEY’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