Chosen Prey

door open with his hand,” Lucas said. “That’s the way you’d do it—run right in there and push it back with your hand.”
    “Problem is, he’s been here,” Marshall said. “We got movies of it. If he hit the door with his hand, he could say he did it some other time.”
    “Yeah, but if there one’s big brand-new print on the door, it’ll be a brick. Goddamnit to hell, why didn’t we get her out of the way? Why didn’t we get her out?”
    “Why’d he do it? This isn’t anything like he did the others.”
    “It’s like he did Neumann,” Lucas said.
    “If he did Neumann. That could be hard to prove by itself,” Del said.
    “Hey, who the fuck’s side are you on?” Lucas asked, the anger surging up.
    “I’m on your fuckin’ side, but I’m thinking about the trial,” Del snapped. “That’s what I’m worried about. We’ve got Randy the coke freak, and we’ve got these unconnected killings at St. Pat’s that are all close to him, but none of them are in the style of the gravedigger’s, and what’s worse . . .”
    “What’s worse?” Lucas snapped back.
    “What’s worse is, we had a guy watching him when he had to be over here killing her,” Del said, jabbing a finger at Lucas. “How’d he do that, smart guy? What’s gonna happen when they get that into court, with a second-man theory? If you take Randy out of the equation, we ain’t got squat, and Randy has a good reason to tell us anything we want him to. You think Qatar’s lawyer won’t make a big deal out of that?”
    “Ah, Jesus,” Lucas said.
    “That is what the lawyers will say,” Marshall said. “We can’t lose this guy. There’s no way.”
    “We won’t. Gonna hang the motherfucker,” Lucas said.
     
    T HEY ALL STAYED, all the way through the crime-scene work, through the removal of the body, snarling at each other from time to time, all of them in dark moods. Lucas talked to Rose Marie twice, by phone, keeping her up to date, and to Marcy. When it seemed as if nothing new would be found at Barstad’s, Lucas asked Del, “You got a car, right? Didn’t you?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Let’s go on over to Qatar’s house. They oughta still be working on it. Let’s see what they got.”
    “I’ll tell you one thing—he maybe cleaned up after himself pretty good over here, but he had blood on him when he left,” Marshall said. “Bloody coat, bloody pants, bloody shoes—there’s gotta be something.”
     
    O N THE WAY to Qatar’s, Marshall seemed to shrink in the back. “You all right?” Lucas asked.
    Marshall started talking, rambling. “My old lady died the second year we were married. She was pregnant at the time. Hit a bridge one day, there was some snow on the road, just a little bit. She was racing my sister to see which one was gonna have a kid first; they both got pregnant at the same time, and it was neck and neck . . . ’cept my old lady never got to the finish line.”
    “Never remarried?” Del asked.
    “Never had the heart for it,” he said. “I still talk to June every night before I go to bed. When Laura was growing up, she was just like a daughter to me; I was over there just about every day. When she got taken off, there wasn’t a goddamn thing I could do about it. Big cop in town, knew everything about everything, couldn’t find my own goddamn daughter. . . .”
    He went on for a while, and Lucas felt Del glance at him just as he looked at Del. Unspoken thought here, as they listened to Marshall ramble: Whoa.
     
    Q ATAR’S HOUSE WAS neat and beautifully decorated. A crime-scene specialist named Greg Webster was running the crew who were looking at the house, and when he saw Lucas, Marshall, and Del on the walk leading to the porch, he stopped outside and said, “I heard.”
    “You got anything useful?”
    “Not much. We did find a set of women’s earrings in his chest of drawers. They look pretty good, so they might be a possibility. We have to check with all the victims we’ve identified so far. . . . Have you talked to Sandy MacMillan? I heard she got something up at his office.”
    “What?”
    “I don’t know. One of the guys just said she was pretty excited—some computer shit.”
    “We need to get his phone records as far back as they go,” Lucas said. “Check him for cell phones. . . . We need to look at picture albums, any loose photographs lying around, any negatives, anything that could be a souvenir.”
    “We know,” Webster said