Chosen Prey

Wells, got his file off the front seat, bought two hours of parking time, and walked across the street to the museum. The Wells was redbrick, a little newer than most. The floors inside were a shiny brown composite, but Lucas could hear the floorboards creaking beneath the brown stuff. It felt, he thought, like a college should.
    Helen Qatar’s office was at the far end of the building, behind a door with a translucent glass panel and a gold-leaf number 1. A heavyset secretary was reading a newspaper when Lucas stepped inside. She looked up and said, “Are you Mike?”
    “No, I’m Lucas.”
    “Do you work with Mike?”
    “No, I’m a police officer. I was hoping to speak with Miz Qatar.”
    “That would be Mrs. Qatar,” the secretary said. She leaned toward an old-fashioned intercom, pushed a button, and said, “Mrs. Qatar, there’s a cop here to see you.”
    A perfectly tinny voice came back: “Is he good-looking?”
    The secretary looked at Lucas for a second, then said, “He looks like he probably cleans up pretty good, but he also looks like he’s got a mean streak.”
    “Sounds interesting. Send him in.”
    Inside, Helen Qatar was also reading a newspaper. She had once been a very pretty blonde, Lucas thought, but her fine skin was now a dense map of tiny wrinkles. Her eyes were a perfect china blue behind a pair of small rectangular reading glasses. “Close the door,” she said. “You’re Lucas Davenport.”
    Lucas said, “Yes” and closed the door.
    Qatar put down the newspaper and said, “Denise and I always read our newspapers at the same time in different rooms. She takes the news rather seriously.” Lucas didn’t know what to make of the remark, and smiled politely. Qatar took the reading glasses off and put them on the desk. “I talked to that nice gay man you sent over earlier. Is this about the same topic?”
    Lucas frowned. “Black told you he was gay?”
    “No, no, I surmised it. Is he still in the closet?”
    “Technically. Everybody knows, nobody mentions it. Makes life easier.”
    “Do you have a lot of homophobes in the police department?”
    “Probably about the usual number.”
    “Ah. Well. Is there something else I can help you with?”
    “I can’t say, really. Black explained all this about the drawings to you, and if you’ve been reading the paper you know about the burial ground down in Goodhue County.”
    “It’s appalling,” she said, turning her chin up.
    “We believe the drawings and the killings are connected. We think that the killer has some special relationship with Catholics. We have one witness who might actually have met him, who said that he may be a priest—and this was without knowing that an unusual number of these victims were Catholic.”
    “Why would a priest kill Catholics?”
    “Well, it could be something very simple—perhaps the overwhelming number of people he meets are Catholics. But we don’t know that he’s a priest: There’s just one guy saying that, and he’s not exceptionally reliable. There are other things that make it unlikely. . . . We think he may at one time have been associated with a state university, which would be unusual for somebody who not much later became a priest.”
    “Unless he already was, and was doing advanced study,” Qatar said.
    “We don’t think that was the case. We think he was still pretty young. Anyway, what I’m here for—we’re intensely interviewing these people who got the drawings, and we’re researching the pasts of all the people who were killed. We’re looking at address books and checkbooks and Christmas cards and everything we can find. Your name has come up four times. A lot of other names have come up twice, but you’re the only four-time winner. So you have something . . . something in common with the killer.”
    That brought a moment of silence, then Qatar said, “Good Lord.”
    “Yeah. I’m sorry to put it that way, but there it is,” Lucas said.
    “But it may be something simple, like you said with the priest and the idea of killing Catholics. I’m a Catholic, and I know a lot of Catholics because of this school. Not all of my friends are Catholic, but most of them are, so that’s probably why I came up four times.”
    “Probably. But there might be some other connection. I’m nowhere near smart enough to ask you exactly the right question that would give us the answer, so I was hoping you could mull it over and see if you could come up with