Chosen Prey

through his office.
    He was waiting for the police. He’d seen the television show on forensic science, how the police could track a killer with a single hair or a flake of dandruff or the imprint of a gym shoe. He knew much of that was exaggeration, but still: It produced a vision.
    Qatar was an old-movie buff, and in his vision saw broad-shouldered police thugs with bent noses and yellow-tan woolen double-breasted suits and wide, snap-rimmed hats. They’d have eyes like bloodhounds and they’d jam into the doorway and then one would mutter to the others, “That’s him! Get him!” He’d stand up and look around, but there’d be no place to run. One of the cops, a brutal man with dry twisting lips, would pull a pair of chrome handcuffs from his pocket. . . .
    The scene was all very retro, very thirties, very movie stylish—but that was the way James Qatar saw it happening.
    Never happened.
    The same night that he’d seen the drawings on television, he’d driven himself in a panic to a CompUSA, where he’d bought a package of ZIP disks and a new hard drive. At his office, he’d locked the door, dumped all of his lectures to the new ZIPs, then stripped the hard drive out of his computer. He also dug out every ZIP disk in the place, except those he’d bought that morning—some of the disks were unused, but he was taking no chances—and put them in his briefcase with the old hard drive.
    He took an hour fussing with Windows, reinstalling it on the new drive, then began the task of reading his lecture files back in. The whole process would take time, but he got started. When he ran out of patience, he headed home, carrying his briefcase.
    At home, he smashed the old hard drive, extracted the disks, and cut them to pieces with metal shears. He used the same shears to shred the ZIP disks. He could have dumped the mess into the garbage safely enough, but he was both frightened and meticulous. He put all the pieces in a sack, drove south down the Mississippi, found a private spot, and tossed the sack into the viscous brown water.
    That was that. Let the cops come now, he’d thought, and do all their forensic work on the computer. They’d find nothing but a pristine drive and the usual academic software. No Photoshop, no photo files. Nothing but a bunch of paintings in a series of PowerPoint lectures.
     
    T HE COPS NEVER came. Qatar busied himself reinstalling software on the new drive, rebuilding his art files from the ZIP disks. He stayed off the porn websites, put away his drawing instruments. An overdue tidying-up; a good time to lie low, and perhaps do a little maintenance on his career.
    A new book, perhaps. He’d been toying with the idea of a book on ceramics. He even had a title: Earth, Water, Fire and Air: The Ceramic Arts Revolution in the Upper Midwest, 1960–1999.
    He bought a notebook and made some notes, and made more notes on his office whiteboard. Good for the image, he thought. Nobody here but us intellectuals.
     
    T HE ONE FLY in this intellectual ointment was Barstad. She kept calling, distracting him. He’d destroyed all the images of her, but now found that under the pressure of the obvious danger of detection, his mind kept going to her.
    The imp of the perverse, isn’t that what Poe called it? The irrepressible impulse to do harm to oneself? He had put off another meeting with her, but that night had experienced the most intense fantasies involving Barstad, a camera, and his art.
    All his work to this point had involved grafting women’s faces to images from the ’Net. Now, it occurred to him, he didn’t have to do that. He could get an image of a woman doing anything he wished—at least, he hadn’t yet found anything that she wouldn’t do—and create a genuinely unique work. An original. He needed to work with the idea. He needed to manipulate the woman to create a new vision.
    His drawings continued to come up on the television with the better parts obscured—the TV stations couldn’t seem to get enough of them—but after a day went by, and no cops came . . .
    He began to feel safe.
    Nobody knew.
    If he was careful, he thought, he could begin working again. He began by making another trip to a CompUSA, where he bought a cheap laptop. That night, when Rynkowski Hall had gone dark, when even the janitors had gone home, he walked down the hall to Charlotte Neumann’s office and slipped the door lock with a butter knife. All the locks could be done the same way;