Chosen Prey

fine lines. He maneuvered it awkwardly around the screen, unfamiliar with the Photoshop protocols, but finally got a face. Barstad. “There you are,” he said. He maneuvered the pointing stick, brought up another one. A woman he didn’t recognize, but he recognized the pose: It had been lifted from a porn site. He scanned the list of files. Found an A1, A2, and A3.
    Opened A1, found the face.
    Closed his eyes for a moment, then said, “Gotcha.”
    Aronson stared back at him.
    There had to be prints on the bag or the laptop. Nobody could be that careful, that paranoid . . . and the surfaces were perfect for prints. But now, what to do? He sat thinking for another five minutes, vacillating, then stood on the chair and put the package back on the ledge.
    Hesitated, then put the panel back in place.
    Went down in the basement and found the whiskey-nosed janitor. “It’s taking longer than I thought, and I can’t see well enough, all the way back,” he lied. “I’m gonna bring in a crime- scene crew tomorrow. Don’t let anybody go up there, okay? You don’t have to guard it, but don’t let anybody mess around up there.”
    “I’ll keep everybody out. I’ll block it off, if you want.”
    “It doesn’t look like there are many people around . . . why don’t you just keep an eye on it? There might be fingerprints somewhere, and we wouldn’t want to mess them up.”
    The janitor nodded. “Never thought of fingerprints. Whatever you say—I go home at seven, but I’ll make sure that everybody knows it’s off-limits.”
     
    H E SPENT THAT evening thinking about the phone call to Randy and about the laptop. Did the laptop assemble the bricks into a wall? Or was it just another half-assed brick? Even if they could demonstrate that Qatar did the drawings, and therefore knew Aronson before she died, what if Qatar argued that he met her through the second man—Randy—or vice versa, that Aronson had met Randy through him. After all, only one of the dead women was associated with a drawing. And there were more than a dozen women still alive who’d got them.
    Weather said to him, “You’ve been in never-never land again. What’s going on?”
    “Working on a little puzzle,” he said.
    “Want to talk?”
    “No. Not right now.” He looked at her. “Maybe tomorrow.”
    She was mildly offended and a little stiff after that, but that had happened before. She always got over it. Again, Lucas lay awake after she slept.
    The phone call, when it came, would probably be a little after three o’clock, he thought. The pit of the night. . . .
    Three o’clock passed, and he dozed. Woke up briefly at four, then dropped back asleep, more soundly now. The problem may have resolved itself, he thought as he went under.
    He really wasn’t prepared when the phone rang at five o’clock.
    He was awake instantly, rolling off the bed, Weather waking and saying, “What? What?”
    Lucas picked up the phone. “Yeah.”
    “Chief? This is Mary Mikolec over at the Center. You asked to be called. We’ve sent a car over to Qatar’s place. He’s running.”
    “Okay,” he said. “When did he walk?”
    “About fifteen minutes ago.”
    “Thanks. . . . Thanks for calling.”
    “What’s happening?” Weather asked.
    “Qatar’s gone,” Lucas said.
    “Are you going?”
    “No . . . nothing for me to do,” he said.
    “Lucas, what’s going on?”
    He sat on the bed and said, “Jesus. I dunno—I might have screwed up, but there’s no way to know. That’s what’s been worrying me.”
    “Tell me,” she said. She sat up and put a hand on his shoulder.
    He thought about it for a minute, then said, “It was that call to Randy. You gotta ask yourself, who knew the direct-line number into his room? After they moved him out of the ICU, they put him in this little room by himself where he’d be away from everybody else, and you could see the door from the nursing station. The switchboard was told not to switch any calls without an okay from Lansing. I asked the nurses: He didn’t have any visitors. . . . And then you’ve got to ask why somebody would do that. Make that call, even if he could?”
    Weather was puzzled. “Well, why?”
    “Because he wanted Qatar turned loose, or at least let out on bail. If he was in jail, and if he cut a deal on a plea—second-degree with psychological evaluation, whatever—he’d be out of reach.”
    Weather thought about it for half a second, then her hand went to