Chosen Prey

so they’re pouring the drugs into him.” They all looked at Marcy: What happened to Randy seemed like a replay of what had happened to her. She picked up the vibration and said, “I didn’t get the spine. But he’s gonna be hurting, I can promise you that.”
    Swanson had been sitting with his head propped on his hands, and now he looked up at Lucas and said, “Damn good thing you weren’t doing the shooting.”
    “Yeah. The thought’s occurred to just about everybody,” Lucas said. He looked at the three of them, huddled around Marcy’s desk, and asked, “What’s going on? You got something?”
    “Just trying to figure out this Catholic and St. Patrick’s business,” Lane said. “To tell you the truth, we’ve got too many names. We’ve got connections running all over the place. We’ve got so many, we don’t know what we’re doing anymore.”
    “On the other hand,” Marcy said, “I looked at the Minnesota Almanac and guess what? There’s a whole bunch of Catholics among the women who got drawings and the dead ones we’ve identified, BUT . . .” She dug around in a mess of paper and pulled out a slip with penciled numbers. “We don’t have a lot more than the percentage of Catholics in the Minnesota population as a whole. In fact, if the rest of the dead ones turn out not to be Catholics, we’ll be a Catholic short.”
    “In other words, the Catholic thing just went up in smoke,” Lucas said.
    “There’s still St. Patrick’s,” Lane said.
    Lucas pulled up a chair. “Let me look at this stuff, okay? Where’re the names of the people on the faculty? Have you run them past the women who got drawings? We’re gonna have to do that.”
     
    T HEY WERE STILL deep into the papers when Marshall came back, with Anderson a few feet behind. They were an odd pair: Harmon Anderson, an aging computer geek, pale as a boiled egg, and Marshall, as weather-beaten and brown as last year’s oak leaf. “Might have something to look at,” Marshall said gruffly. “Maybe you already thought of it.”
    “I don’t think so,” Anderson said. To Lucas: “Terry’s smarter than he looks.”
    Marshall grunted, maybe in amusement, then pushed the paper at Lucas. “I wanted to know which women named Mrs. Qatar as an acquaintance, so Harmon wrote them down for me. He has a chart on his wall that shows when the women got the drawings, and when he wrote down the ones who knew Mrs. Qatar, I couldn’t help noticing that they were all listed next to each other on the chart. They all got their drawings over a two-month period, a year and a half ago.”
    Lucas said, “Huh. So what . . . ?”
    “They say they don’t know each other, but they seem to be connected somehow with Mrs. Qatar. I started to wonder, could they have been at the same place, at the same time—like just before the first drawing came in? Some kind of public event? These four drawings were just about two weeks apart, so if it takes two weeks to do one, is it possible that they were at an event two weeks before the first one came in?”
    Lucas leaned back in his chair, thinking about it. Then he looked at Lane, who said, “Could be something.”
    “I wonder if Helen Qatar’s secretary keeps a calendar,” Lucas said. “Let me check.” He stepped into his office, rummaged through his collection of business cards, found the card he’d collected from Qatar’s desk, went back to the main bay, and used Marcy’s phone to make the call.
    Qatar’s secretary picked up and said, “Wells Museum, Helen Qatar’s office.”
    “This is Lucas Davenport, the Minneapolis police officer who was there the other day. . . .” He explained what he needed.
    “Let me check with Mrs. Qatar,” she said.
    Qatar picked up a moment later and said, “We’re looking. You think this could be significant?”
    “It would explain a lot,” Lucas said. “We can’t figure how you hook into it, but if you were all at the same place, especially if you were one of the main people . . .”
    “A year and a half ago? In August?”
    “August, early September . . . couldn’t be any later than September fourteenth,” Lucas said. He heard the secretary talking in the background, and then Qatar came back.
    “I think . . .” Then she was gone again, talking to the secretary. A moment later: “We had a preterm gala for alumni and friends of the museum, to try to raise a little money for our museum fellowships.” She was gone again, then back.