Chosen Prey

we could work something out,” he said, his voice thick. And he thought, silently amused: Talk dirty—save your life.
     
    J AMES Q ATAR WAS an art history professor and a writer, a womanizer and genial pervert and pipe smoker, a thief and a laughing man and a killer. He thought of himself as sensitive and engaged, and tried to live up to that image. He kissed Barstad once more on the back of the neck, cupped one of her breasts for a moment, then said, “I’ve got to go. Maybe we could get together Wednesday.”
    “Do you, uh . . .” She was blushing again. “Do you have any sexy movies?”
    “Movies?” He heard her, but he was astonished.
    “You know, sexy movies,” she said, turning into him. “Maybe if we had a sexy movie, we could, you know . . . talk about what works and what doesn’t.”
    “You could be really good at this,” he said.
    “I’ll try,” she said. She was flaming pink, but she was determined.
     
    Q ATAR LEFT THE apartment with a vague feeling of regret. Barstad had mentioned that she had to go to the bank later in the day. She’d gotten enrollment fees for a quilting class, and had two hundred dollars in checks she’d wanted to deposit—and she had almost four hundred dollars in cash, which she would not deposit, to avoid the taxes.
    The money could have been his; and she had some nice jewelry, gifts from her parents, worth maybe another thousand. There was some miscellaneous stuff, as well: cameras, some of her drawing equipment, an IBM laptop, and a Palm III that, together, could have pulled in a couple of hundred more.
    He could have used the cash. The new light topcoats for the coming season were hip-length, and he’d seen the perfect example at Neiman Marcus: six hundred fifty dollars, on sale, with a wool lining. A pair of cashmere sweaters, two pairs of slacks, and the right shoes would cost another two thousand. He’d been only seconds away from it . . . .
    Was sex better than cashmere? He wasn’t sure. It was quite possible, he mused, that no matter what Barstad was willing to do in bed, she would never be as good as Armani.
     
    J AMES Q ATAR WAS five feet, eleven ten inches tall, slender and balding, with a thin blond beard that he kept closely cropped. He liked the three-days-without-shaving look, the open-collar, striped-shirt, busy-intellectual image. He was fair-skinned, with smile lines at the corners of his mouth, and just a hint of crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes. He had delicate hands with long fingers. He worked out daily on a rowing machine, and in the summer on blades; he would not ever have thought of himself as a brave man, but he did have a style of courage built on willpower. He never failed to do what he wanted to do, or needed to.
    The smile lines on his face came from laughing: he wasn’t jolly, exactly, but he’d perfected a long, rolling laugh. He laughed at jokes, at wit, at cynicism, at travail, at cruelty, at life, at death. Years before he’d cornered a coed in his office once, thinking that she might come across, thinking that he might kill her if she did, but she hadn’t. She’d said, instead, “All that laughing doesn’t fool me, Jimbo. You’ve got mean little eyes like a pig. I can see the meanness.”
    On her way out, she’d turned—posing her coed tits perfectly in profile—and said, “I won’t be coming back to class, but I better get an A for the semester. If you read my meaning.” He’d let out his rolling laugh, a little regretfully, peered at her with his mean eyes, and said, “I didn’t like you until now. Now I like you.”
    He’d delivered the A, and considered it earned.
     
    Q ATAR WAS AN art historian and associate professor at St. Patrick’s University, author of Not a Pipe: The Surfaces of Midwestern Painting 1966–1990, which had been favorably reviewed in Chicken Little, the authorative quarterly of late-postmodern arts; and also Planes on Plains: Native Cubists of the Red River Valley 1915–1930, which the reviewer for the Fargo Forum had called “seminal.” He’d begun college as a studio artist, but switched to art history after a cold-eyed appraisal of his talents—good, but not great—and an equally cold appraisal of an average artist’s earning potential.
    He’d done well with his true interests: blond women, art history, wine, murder, and his home, which he’d decorated with Arts and Crafts furniture. Even, since the arrival of digital photography, with art