Chosen Prey

team, and the word might get around. So maybe just one guy at a time, keeping a light tag. No reason to think he’s gonna run.”
    Marcy asked, “What about me?”
    “Go talk to the county attorney. Tell him what we’ve got and find out what we need—how bad we’re hurting and what we can do.”
    “I think we’re hurting a little,” she said. “Like Terry said, we’ve connected a lot of dots but nothing really critical.”
    “Except Randy.”
    “Who we managed to cripple,” she said.
    “Yeah . . . the little prick.”
     
    B EFORE THEY WENT looking for Ellen Barstad, Lucas stopped at Rose Marie’s office to tell her what they were doing.
    “What are the chances?” she asked after he gave her a quick summary.
    “I think he’s the guy. Proving it is gonna be harder. The problem is, except for the first one, they were coming to him—he seemed to be picking on women from out of town, or women who just got to town, so her friends would never see him. Who knows, they may never even have known his real name. . . . We think he gave a fake name to the Winton girl.”
    “Are we watching him?”
    “Yeah. I need you to talk to the intelligence guys. We’re not gonna climb all over him, but we want to know where he is.”
    “I’ll talk to them,” she said. She made a note on her desk pad. Then: “New topic: If you had a chance to take a job with the state, would you take it?”
    He shrugged. “I sorta like it here.”
    “But if you couldn’t stay here?” she pressed.
    “What are you working on?”
    She leaned across the desk. “The guy running the department of public safety? The governor doesn’t like him. He does like me—and he should, since I did most of his homework for him when he was in the state senate. We get along on a chemical level.”
    “So you’re thinking of moving up.”
    “The possibility’s out there,” she said.
    “Well . . .” He rubbed his forehead with his fingertips. “That’s a different kind of work.”
    “Not for you, it wouldn’t be. You’d be doing the same thing you do here—working on your own, big cases, intelligence. Figuring things out. Maybe some political work. You could bring along Del, if you wanted.”
    “I don’t know if Del would go. Maybe he would.”
    She leaned back. “Think about it. I don’t know if the whole thing is gonna work out, anyway. A couple of things have got to fall just right.”
    “But the governor likes you,” Lucas said.
    “He does,” she said. “What’s even more important, he’s gonna be reelected, if he doesn’t fuck up the tax thing, so we’d have at least seven more years. We’d be like Hawaii Five-O.”
    “Jesus, Hawaii Five-O. All right. I’ll think about it.”
    “Keep in touch on this Qatar thing,” she said. “It wouldn’t hurt our image if we nailed this down. Politically, it’s just the right time.”
     
    H E PICKED UP Del and they got a city car and went looking for Barstad. Marcy had straightened out the confusion on the two Ellen Barstads—one of them was an elderly resident of a nursing home—and so they had an address and phone number, but nothing else.
    The address turned out to be in another one of the faceless business parks, not far from the nearly identical one where Ware had his porn studio.
    “I thought it was her home address,” Del said, as they pulled into the parking area. Thirty or forty cars were scattered down the length of the narrow, block-long lot.
    “Maybe she lives here,” Lucas said.
    “There’s a sign on the door.”
    The door was heavy silvered glass, and the sign was in gold stick-on letters: “Barstad Crafts.” The door was locked, but they could see a light in the back. Lucas knocked, then cupped his hands on the glass to peer past the reflections. He knocked again, and a woman stepped into the light in the back, then started toward them. When she got close, Lucas took out his ID case and held it up so she could see it.
    She turned the lock and said, “Yes?”
    Lucas recognized her from the ME’s office. “Ellen Barstad?”
    “Yes?” A worried, tentative smile.
    Lucas introduced himself, and then Del, and said, “We have a serious problem, and we need to talk to you about it. Would you have a few minutes?”
    “Well . . .” She looked carefully at Del and then said to Lucas, “You’re the man who was at the medical examiner’s office.”
    “Yeah.”
    “Okay.” She opened the door all the way and stepped back. “Come in. Let