Chosen Prey

had appeared in the papers, he’d thought they’d missed the others.
    With his mind moving like mud, he wandered down a series of narrow blacktop tracks. Lights to the sides marked farmhouses; he passed a lonely Conoco station with two trucks in the parking lot, took a left, and faded into the dark countryside again. He finally crossed a highway with a north arrow, and took that: The Cities were north; he could hardly miss them. Then he passed the Conoco station again, and realized that he’d driven in a circle. He pulled in, went inside, and bought two packages of pink Hostess Snoballs and a Coke, and got directions from the kid behind the counter: “Go right straight up the road here, you’ll cut 494 . . .”
    He jammed the Snoballs into his face as he drove, chewing mindlessly through the sugar and chocolate—they tasted pink—and threw the packaging out onto the highway. The body in the back seemed to glow in the dark; he had to get rid of her. Had to.
    That, it turned out, was as simple as the killing.
    He cut I-494 south of St. Paul and took it back west, eventually finding his way to the Ford Bridge over the Mississippi. He parked at the end of the bridge, looked both ways, then carried the garbage sack out over the water and dumped the body into the Mississippi. He started to let the bag go with it, but caught it at the last minute. It was too dark to see the body hit, but it would soon be going over the dam.
    And on the way back to Neumann’s car, he realized what he’d done. He’d faked a suicide. She was certainly moody enough, dark enough. Lonely. Perhaps he could help the idea along.
    He drove Neumann’s car back to his own, took the groceries out, along with the spade, put them in the trunk of his car, then drove the car back to the bridge and left it parked illegally on Mississippi Boulevard. Then he started walking. Four miles to his own car. Four miles in the rain.
    But he needed the time anyway—the time to think. Life was becoming complicated. He hadn’t had any choice with Neumann, but he’d now done something he’d always carefully avoided in the past.
    He’d killed somebody close to himself. The cops could stand in her office doorway and see his.
    As he walked back, he began to weep again. Life was cruel. Unfair. A man like himself . . .
    James Qatar walked along, snuffling in the dark and the rain.
    And he thought about the friends of James Qatar, before tonight snugly buried on the hillside above the creek. Released now. He wondered if they would come to see him.

11
    L UCAS GOT UP early, kissed Weather goodbye, and went to the telephone. The police in New Richmond knew the dentist used by Nancy Vanderpost, and the cop who answered the phone volunteered to run across the street to see if he had X rays of her fillings.
    Next Lucas called Marcy, who was just out of bed. Del had suggested that there might be something special, or peculiar, about the drawings that were publicly posted, rather than mailed to the victim. Lucas told Marcy to get somebody prying into Beverly Wood’s history. The killer, he thought, was back there somewhere.
    He called Del and made arrangements to pick him up again, and while he was talking, got a beep of an incoming call. He rang off Del and took the incoming call: The New Richmond cop was calling from the dentist’s office. The dentist had X rays, and was offering to scan and e-mail them immediately.
    Lucas gave the dentist his e-mail address, got the dentist’s phone number, then called Larry Lake at Lake’s cell phone number. Lake answered after a single ring: “McGrady decided last night that he wanted one more scan across the bottom of the hill. We think we found another grave. A seventh one. So we’re doing another strip.”
    “Jesus. You sure it’s a seventh? Anything come up yet?”
    “They’re just scraping the leaves off now. These crime guys are pretty fussy about how it’s dug.”
    “Okay. See you in a bit.”
    He called Del back and told him about the seventh, then called Rose Marie. “We’ve got a seventh grave.”
    “Oh, boy. I’ll tell you, the governor called first thing this morning. He wants a federal-state-local task force working on it.”
    “We’re already moving slow enough.”
    “I suggested that he set up a federal-state task force to examine the forensic evidence, which is most of what we’ve got, and to coordinate between the local agencies.”
    “Tell me what that means,” Lucas said.
    “It means