Chosen Prey

companionway, stepped up, and looked toward the racers. “Nice and dry, too—couldn’t be much wind over there.”
    “Love sailboat racing,” Lucas said. “No wind, they still race.”
    “That’s Lew Smith way out on the end—look at him, he must think something’s coming.”
    Lucas leaned back and closed his eyes. It all smelled good: the day, the lake, the marina, even the varnish. If everything were like this all the time . . .
    Well, he’d go nuts. But it was nice to be like this every once in a while. He opened his eyes and looked at Weather. She was still talking, but it was all about racing and who was being lifted above whom, and who was looking at a header, and he really couldn’t care about any of it. What he did care about was Weather, and he smiled, watching her enthusiasm.
    Sailing.
     
    F OR TWO FRANTIC days after Qatar and Marshall died on the hillside, Lucas had shuttled between grand juries in Goodhue and Hennepin counties. The papers and television stations were wild for the story, and that might yet go on for a while. They all wanted to know why Lucas had gone down to the graveyard. Lucas could only say that it had been a hunch that came to him when he got the call from the 911 Center.
    Why didn’t he call Goodhue? Because he had no real knowledge that Marshall was involved and didn’t want to damage a friend if he was wrong, and had been so disturbed by the possibility that he’d launched himself onto the road without his cell phone, and once on the way, it seemed best to continue . . . blah, blah, blah.
    Cops and lawyers came and went, but as long as Lucas’s story stayed simple, there were no seams to cut onto. On the day after the shooting, he sent a crime-scene crew to St. Patrick’s to talk to the janitor, with instructions to search the overhead on the skeleton floor, and anything else the janitor suggested. The crew found the computer an hour into the search, and the laptop had Qatar’s prints all over it. The computer forensics people did their work, and up popped drawings of Aronson and another woman from the graveyard.
    At the same time, an illegal copy of the tape recording that Marshall made of Qatar found its way to Channel Three, and then to every TV and radio station that wanted it. Lucas didn’t know who leaked it—he suspected Del, but Del professed to be mystified, as did Marcy, Sloan, and Rose Marie. Qatar’s babbling confession, and his naming of names, led to quick IDs on the unidentified bodies from the graveyard, and to a new search in the countryside a few miles east of Columbia, Missouri.
    The usual Minnesotans were shocked by the police misconduct that had led to Qatar’s killing, but Rose Marie had a quiet word with old friends in the Democratic Party’s political-feminist hierarchy; with that, and with the constant playing of the tape across nine-tenths of the electromagnetic spectrum, the controversy withered. There was some expected grumbling from the Minnesota Civil Liberties Union about police-sponsored lynchings, which everybody agreed was the MCLU’s perfect right. Free speech, and all that.
    That cleaned up the case.
    Del had wondered, privately, just how early Lucas had suspected Marshall. Lucas shook his head and walked away from the question. Avoided the lie, but Del knew him well enough to understand the walk.
    Rose Marie also had a few questions that she didn’t ask. She did take Lucas aside and said, “The governor was impressed. I gave him ten minutes on what a great crime-detection bunch we have over here, and you know what he said?”
    “What’d he say?” They were in her office, and she was looking more cheerful than she had in weeks.
    “He said, ‘I don’t care about how good they detected—what I liked was the way they handled it.’ ”
    “So that’s good,” Lucas said.
    “That’s very good.”
     
    T IDYING UP THE loose ends on the case hadn’t tidied up Lucas’s head. A vague melancholia settled over him, a mood that Weather picked up. She began arranging events and talked to Marcy behind his back; Marcy began arranging events, and suggested that Lucas and Weather and she and Kidd go out to dinner. Lucas said “Sometime,” and kept wandering around town.
    He could have stopped the whole train, he thought. He’d never made up his mind; he’d never gotten clear on what he should do. He could have made a decision, but he hadn’t—a private failing, and a serious one, he thought.
     
    T HAT NIGHT,