Chosen Prey

the manpower we need,” Baily said. “I talked to the director this morning, and he made this the number-one priority nationwide. Nothing else comes first.”
    “Terrific,” Del said. There was a tone in his voice, and when everybody looked at him, he said, “No, I mean it. I really . . . mean it.”
     
    L UCAS AND D EL left the site twenty minutes later: nothing to do that the professionals couldn’t do better. McGrady promised updates by telephone, and Lucas told Baily that he would talk to Rose Marie about setting up a liaison to the task force. “Probably gonna be a sergeant named Marcy Sherrill,” Lucas told him.
    When they were on the road, Lucas looked at Del and said, “That was pretty swift of you, that ‘terrific’ you laid on Baily.”
    “Ah, the FBI’s a bite in the shorts.”
    “Baily ain’t bad,” Lucas said.
    “No, he’s not. But I can see that he’s building a machine, and I’ve never been much of a cog.”
    “You’re more like a flywheel,” Lucas suggested. “Or an air brake.”
    “You know what I think? I think we better get back and start cross-matching what we’ve got. I’m not saying this is a competition, but I’d like to be the ones to catch this asshole.”
    “I hope there’s not a nine.”
     
    B ACK AT C ITY Hall, Lucas spoke briefly with Rose Marie, filling her in on developments, then suggested that Marcy be made liaison with the joint task force. “Give her a little exposure,” Lucas said.
    “She could wind up getting her ass kicked,” Rose Marie said.
    “You don’t know her well enough to know how unlikely that is,” Lucas said. “But I’ll tell you what—I really don’t want to do it. If I’ve only got six months left in the job, I want to spend my time running around town, chasing this guy’s ass.”
    Rose Marie got Marcy on the phone, told her to stop down. When she did, Rose Marie said, “You’ve been unanimously elected as our representative to the joint federal-state task force that’s being set up. You’ve also got to coordinate for us, but I don’t see how that could be much of a problem, since you’ll mostly be doing the same stuff.”
    Marcy nodded. “Thanks. I’ll do it. Anything else?”
    “Go with God,” Rose Marie said.
    Out in the hall, Marcy said, “If you fixed this, I appreciate it.” Lucas opened his mouth to reply, but she held up a finger. “You’re gonna crack wise, but you don’t have to. I appreciate it. Period.”
    Lucas shrugged. “So all right.”
    “If you’re gonna spend all your time running around town, why don’t you figure out why we’re up to our ass in Catholics?”
    “Maybe I’ll do that,” Lucas said.
     
    T HE A RONSON TEAM had been compiling names and addresses, and cross-checking them. Out of a couple of thousand names, they’d found forty-four matches, and were trying to check the matches. “The problem is, there’s only one person who comes up more than twice, and that’s Helen Qatar, who runs the Wells Museum over at St. Pat’s. She comes up four times.”
    “Catholic school,” Lucas said.
    “Helen Qatar’s a semisedentary sixty-five,” Black said. “She couldn’t strangle a fuckin’ gerbil. Even if she could catch one.”
    “Still a whole bunch of Catholics.”
    Black lowered his voice to a whisper. “And guess what? The guy directing the investigation for the City of Minneapolis is a Catholic.”
    “Lapsed Catholic,” Lucas said. As he looked through the sets of matches, he saw nothing that looked like a pattern. Finally he asked, “Who talked to Helen Qatar?”
    “I did.”
    “Show her the pictures?”
    “A couple—she didn’t recognize the style. She’s pretty . . . old. I didn’t roll out any of the vaginal extravaganzas.”
    “She’s in art and she’s named four times, and she’s a Catholic.”
    “You want me to talk to her again?”
    Lucas thought for a moment, then said, “Nope. I’ll go talk to her. Get me out into town.”
     
    S T. P ATRICK’S U NIVERSITY was on the south side of Minneapolis, south of the Lake Street bridge along the Mississippi, and directly across the river from St. Thomas, its bitter intellectual, political, and athletic rival. Twenty buildings, mostly redbrick, sprawled along the west bank of the river under cover of six hundred oaks and a thousand maples, the maples replacing the elms that had dominated the campus before Dutch elm disease.
    Lucas lucked into a metered parking spot a hundred yards from the