Chosen Prey

was the wall in the photo.
    “There,” Lucas said to Qatar. “That little stack of rocks at the end of the wall. You were right.”
    “I can’t see what possible good it will do,” Qatar said.
    “We have all these Catholics and now we’ve got a location. I don’t know if he’s associated with the college or if he just lives around here, but for some reason, they were here. You can almost see his shadow.”
    “An unusual thought for a policeman,” Qatar said. “It could lead to poetry, or to country and western.”
    “God forbid,” Lucas said, smiling at her. Then: “I can almost see the guy. One of the first women he killed said he looked like a movie star in an old movie, Day of the Jackal, about an attempted assassination of de Gaulle. The killer looked like the Jackal.”
    “That is grotesque, the coincidence is,” Qatar said. “I’ll have to rent the movie. You say it’s old?”
    “Sixties or seventies,” Lucas said.
    “Ah. I spent the fifties and sixties watching art films. They were very . . . bad.”
    Lucas laughed, and they walked companionably back toward the campus. At the corner of the Wells, Lucas said goodbye and started toward his car. Qatar called after him: “Mr. Davenport . . .”
    Lucas turned. She was halfway up the walk to the museum, and now turned and walked back toward him. “I’m sure this has nothing to do . . . nothing to do with your case, but a professor in the art history department just committed suicide. Yesterday, or the night before.”
    “That’s interesting,” Lucas said, stepping back toward her. “What was his name?”
    “It was a her.”
    “Oh.” Not what he wanted. “Huh. A suicide?”
    “She apparently jumped off the Ford Bridge. She didn’t show up for work yesterday, and then they found her car on Mississippi Boulevard. They thought . . . I don’t know what they thought, but then her body was seen in the river. The St. Paul paper had an article that said the body’s condition suggested that she went over the dam.”
    “Okay. Did the story say anything about depression?” Lucas asked.
    “Nothing like that,” Qatar said. “My son works in the department, and he said that she was troubled. Quite unpopular. I don’t know if that leads to suicide.”
    “I’ll tell you something, Mrs. Qatar: For depressives, nothing can lead to suicide. You get ink on a shirt and decide the only answer is to kill yourself. Unpopularity would be more than enough.”
    “I’ll leave that for you to work out,” she said. “In the meantime, I’ll try to think what I might have in common with this monster.”
     
    T HE KILLER AND Aronson had been at St. Pat’s, or at least along the bike path next to the St. Pat’s campus. There hadn’t been any bikes in the photo, which suggested to Lucas that they’d walked. If they were walking . . . they were on the wrong side of the campus to be casually shopping the college village. So they might well have a connection to the school.
    He walked back to the truck and slipped the key in the ignition, paused, and then took out his cell phone. He got the number for the Ramsey County Medical Examiner from dispatch, and hooked up with an investigator named Flanagan.
    “Can’t tell you much, Lucas. We don’t know exactly what killed her. She apparently went off the bridge fully dressed and in one piece, and then, after she went over the dam, she got caught up in some kind of tumbling current and it just beat the hell out of her. We kind of think that a massive blow to the head did the first real damage; looks like she hit a piece of abutment headfirst when she went over.”
    “Come on, Henry,” Lucas said. “You’re saying she dove off? Like saying goodbye with a big fuckin’ swan dive? Nobody to watch? No audience?”
    “No, I’m not saying that. I’m saying that somehow she smacked her head on something hard, and that might have been the first damage.”
    “You think suicide?”
    “One of the things that weren’t too damaged were her hands. No signs of defensive wounds. No blood in her car,” Flanagan said.
    “So are you carrying it as a suicide?”
    “We’re carrying it as unknown. I don’t know if that’ll change. Like I said, she was pretty torn up.”
    “Was she a big woman? Strong?”
    “Large, but not especially strong. Pretty much a couch potato.”
    “Okay . . . but look, if you decide something different, give me a call.”
    “Is this about something?” Flanagan