Chosen Prey

pair of pants would go up like a moth in a candle.”
    “Show us,” Lucas said.
    He did, and as they looked at the flames roaring away, Marshall said, “God almighty.”
    “Would James Qatar know about this place?” Lucas asked the janitor.
    “The little fart grew up here. He was in and out of every corner of this college since he was a baby. Nothing here that he doesn’t know. Got all these little hidey-holes—probably knows the place better’n me.”
    “Okay. Let’s get this fire turned off. We’ll send somebody around to look underneath it, see if there’re any remains of zippers or buttons or whatever.”
    “What an asshole,” the janitor said.
    “You didn’t like him?”
    “I didn’t like him from way back. Sneaky little fart. Always sneaking around. Scared the piss out of me more than once—I’d be doing something, and all of a sudden, there’d be Jim, two inches away. You’d never see him coming.”
    “You know he’s been arrested?”
    “Yeah. I think he probably did it.”
     
    O N THE WAY out of the building, Lucas said, “We ought to check trash cans all around Barstad’s place, see if we find any blood. And the cab companies—if he figured out we were watching him, and snuck off, he had to get there somehow. Let’s see if we can figure out taxi dispatches from around his place to around Barstad’s. What else?”
    “I’d get with the FBI again and really push the Internet thing,” Del said. “If we can show he was on those porno websites, and cleaned out his computer the day Aronson made the papers, that’d be strong.”
    “Another brick,” Marshall said. Then: “What if he didn’t do it?”
    Lucas thought about that for a minute, then asked, “What do you think the chances are?”
    Del said, “Two percent and falling.”
    Marshall: “One percent and falling.”
    “One fucking bloody fingerprint or piece of clothing with her blood on it—that’s all we need.”
    Marshall said, “We can’t lose him now. We just can’t.”
    Lucas said, “Hey . . .”
    Marshall looked at him for a couple of seconds, then wearily pushed himself up. “I think I’ll go home. Say hello to my sister, check in with the office, fix the garage-door opener.”
    “We’ll get him,” Del said.
    “Sure,” Marshall said. He glanced at Lucas, then quickly away. “See you tomorrow, maybe.”
    “Let it go,” Lucas said. “We’re doing what we can.”

27
    W EATHER FOUND HIM sitting in front of the television, watching the PBS national news, a beer in his hand. “That kind of a day?” she asked.
    “Much worse,” he told her.
    She took off her coat and said, “Start from the beginning.”
    He started from the beginning, and he finished by saying, “So we might have gotten Ellen Barstad killed and it’s possible that the guy is gonna walk. I think we got enough—and we didn’t feel like we could leave him out there any longer, not after Neumann and his mother were killed. He’s freaking out. He’s killing everybody. He’s on some kind of psychotic run.”
    Weather was shocked about Barstad. She had nothing to say except, “You’ll get him.”
    “Yeah. . . . But you know what the county attorney’s gonna wind up doing. If they can’t cut some kind of deal with him, they’ll go for a something-else conviction, and that’s always risky.”
    A something-else prosecution rolled out every scrap of evidence, no matter how shaky or distantly circumstantial, teased out every possible murder scenario, threw in a variety of psychiatric testimony, and used the whole show to make an unstated argument that even if the particular murder couldn’t be proven, the defendant had surely done something else he should be in prison for, and should be convicted simply as a matter of public safety. The perfect juror was both frightened and timid; one skeptic on the jury could screw the whole thing. And something-else convictions always left a bad taste with everybody. Not a clean kill.
    “You need a smoking gun.”
    “We’ve been so close in so many ways,” Lucas said. “If we could find just one picture. One piece of clothing with blood on it. Anything . . .”
     
    L UCAS GOT IN late the next morning, found Marshall already at the office. “I thought you might take a day or two off.”
    “Can’t stay away,” Marshall said. “But my ass is kicked.”
    “Lane wants you to call him at home,” Marcy said to Lucas. “He left a voice mail, said call anytime.”
    Lucas