Chosen Prey

patiently. “We’re looking for it all.”
    “Did you look in the washing machine?”
    “Yeah. It’s empty. Nothing in the dryer.”
    “Is Sandy still up at his office?”
    “I don’t know—she was an hour ago.”
     
    M ACMILLAN HAD MOVED downtown. When Lucas finally found her, she was in Lucas’s office, talking with Marcy.
    “Greg Webster said you found something in his office computer,” Lucas said.
    “No. We didn’t find anything—that’s what was so interesting. He put a new hard drive in his machine the day that the story broke on finding Aronson. He pulled some files off an old hard drive and reinstalled them on the new one—the dates are right in the machine. The thing is, why would you do that? If you could pull the files off, the old drive was still working. It could have been full, I suppose.”
    “Bullshit. He was getting rid of evidence. Bet he had Photoshop or one of the other photo programs on it, and some of those drawings.”
    “Not on the new one.”
    “Check and see if you can find any software,” Lucas said.
    “No software except Word and some other minor bullshit. He is hooked into the ’Net, so we’re gonna try to track that. Gonna go out to his ISP and see what they have in the way of records.”
    “Sounds like he’s a half-step ahead of us,” Lucas said. “Keep digging around. That date will be useful, though.”
    He told Del and Marshall about it, and Marshall said, “Another brick in the wall.”
    “No wall so far,” Lucas said. “Just a lot of bricks.”
     
    T HEY WERE STANDING on Qatar’s front sidewalk, ready to leave, when Craig Bowden showed up. He parked down the street and jogged back to them, a small man in a yellow windbreaker. Lucas noticed that down the street, two women were sitting on their front porch, watching. Everybody knew. . . .
    Bowden looked scared; he was the intelligence cop assigned to watch Qatar overnight.
    “I even took notes,” he said. “Lights on and off, all that. Television on and off.”
    “Could he have gotten out the back?”
    “Yeah, sure—not with his car, of course, but if he’d wanted to sneak, he could have. There was just one of me, and he wasn’t supposed to know we were interested in him.”
    “What about this morning? Was he carrying anything when he left?”
    “I couldn’t see when he loaded the car, because it was in the garage. When he got out at St. Pat’s, he had a briefcase and a sack.”
    “A sack?”
    “Like a grocery bag.”
    “Clothes,” Marshall said.
    “You didn’t see him do anything with the sack?”
    “No . . . he went inside and that’s the last I saw him. Marc White took over from me.”
     
    T HEY CALLED WHITE. He had never seen Qatar with a sack. “I never really saw him at all—I just sat and waited and then you guys showed up and busted his ass.”
    They called Sandy MacMillan again, the crime-scene cop who’d been working Qatar’s office. “There were a couple guys there with me—they might have found something and didn’t tell me, but I didn’t see any sack. I’m sure I didn’t see any clothes. I would have heard about it.”
    “Sack’s still gotta be in the building,” Lucas said. “Who wants to look for a sack?”
    They all rode to St. Pat’s together, but hope was dwindling. They’d been run around too much, with too little to show for it: one of those days when nothing was going to work right.
    They found a janitor, an elderly man with a drinker’s nose, who told them that all the trash cans in the building had been emptied. He didn’t remember any brown sacks, and certainly no sacks full of clothes. “I could have missed it, though. I put them all out in the dumpster, and I’d be happy to go out and rip them apart, if you want. Aren’t that many, really.”
    They all followed him out to the dumpster. He got a stepladder, climbed the side, jumped in, and began throwing sacks out. There were fifteen of them, one from each of the built-in trash receptacles in the building. The janitor got a new box of bags, and as they broke open each bag, they shifted the contents to a new one and tossed it back into the dumpster.
    “Shit,” Del said when they finished. “All we got was a bad smell.”
    “What the hell would he do with them?” Lucas asked.
    “Tell you what I would have done,” the janitor said. “I would have taken them down to the furnace room. It’s a gas furnace, but it’s got big gas bars and you could cremate a hog in there. A