Chosen Prey

woods—it had melted away in a week. Sometimes, after a long winter, the snow stayed back in the trees into May. Not this year.
    He thought about Qatar, about the bloody clothing from Barstad’s. At three o’clock, he pulled the lightly breathing Porsche into the parking lot at St. Patrick’s, walked across the lawns to Qatar’s office building, and found the janitor with the whiskey nose.
    “If you were gonna hide something in this building where you could get at it quick and whenever you wanted, safely and without anybody seeing, but you didn’t want to hide it in your own office . . .”
    “You mean like if Jim Qatar hid some evidence.”
    “Yeah. Where would you hide it?” Lucas asked.
    The janitor thought for a couple of minutes, then said, “I personally might hide it anywhere, because I can go anywhere in the building and nobody looks at me twice. But if I was Jim Qatar . . . Let me show you. You know about the skeleton cases upstairs?”
    “No.”
    “Next floor up from Qatar’s office. Just up the stairway. Let’s take the elevator,” the janitor said. On the way up, he said, “You think maybe he didn’t burn the clothes?”
    “I don’t know. It seems a little risky. . . . What if somebody saw him down there?”
    “Yeah, but if you know your way around, like he did, you could do it. It’s a little risky, but hell, what’re we talking about? You think he murdered—what, a dozen people?”
    They got out at the top floor. The hallway outside the elevator was lined with glass cases, each holding reconstructed skeletons or stuffed birds or animals—thirty or forty of them, Lucas thought, lining both sides of the narrow hall. The ceiling hung low overhead, a checkerboard of darker and lighter wood panels.
    “This originally was book storage and supplies, but when that moved out, they put these cases up here for the art students,” the janitor said. “They’re supposed to draw from them, and some of them do. Human skeletons down that way, and some muscle things, full-sized.”
    “So Qatar . . .”
    “I’ll show you.” There were hard-backed wooden chairs between cases. “They sit on these, drag them around. . . .” He pulled a chair out, stood on it, and pushed one of the wooden ceiling panels. It lifted easily. “There used to be a higher ceiling—way high, to the top of the building—but dirt filtered down all the time, and there wasn’t any way to clean it, so they put this drop-ceiling in. Years and years ago. Maybe in the sixties, maybe. Anyway, all the kids know about it. There’s a ledge right inside, and sometimes, if they’re working, they’ll just push one of these things up and leave their stuff in here.”
    “All right.” Lucas looked down the hall. There were probably a hundred panels per side: He could spend the rest of the afternoon looking, and probably not finding anything. On the other hand . . .
    “You want to look? Glad to give you a hand.”
    “Nah, you go on,” Lucas said. “I might push up a few of them.”
    “Are you sure? Glad to.”
    “Nah. I can take care of it.”
    Lucas looked him back into the elevator, and when he was gone, and the elevator cables stopped grinding, he dragged a chair out and began pushing up panels in the silence of the long hallway. He found he could place the chair beneath one panel, lift it and the panels on both sides, and so cover three with one move of the chair. He went left down the hall from the elevator, spent twenty minutes, found nothing but an old lunch—very old, maybe a decade.
    Instead of working back down the other side of the hall, he carried his chair back to the elevator and started the other way. On the second panel, he saw a plastic sack stuffed on the ledge. But Qatar had been carrying a grocery sack. . . .
    He had driving gloves in his pockets. He pulled them on, then tugged at the plastic bag. Heavy and hard. He lifted it down carefully and peeled back the garbage bag.
    A laptop: not what he’d been expecting. He stepped down carefully, sat on the chair, and opened the laptop’s cover—found the switch and turned it on. A green light came up instantly: still charged. A student? Windows came up, and then the icons on the left side of the screen. Halfway down he spotted the eye-in-the-square of Photoshop.
    “Sonofabitch,” he muttered. He brought Photoshop up, found a file listed as “B1,” opened it. A photograph of a woman, but skeletonized, reduced to a skein of