Chosen Prey

bullshit?” Lucas asked.
    Both Marshall and the doc looked at him. “That was real, as far as I could tell,” the doc said. “He was freaking out. You think it might be something else?”
    He thought about the bald man. “Nah, not really. He seemed a little overcooked,” Lucas said. “On the other hand—do the chemistry.”
    “Wanna watch?”
    “No, thanks. A nice clean piece of paper would be fine,” Lucas said.
    On the way back to City Hall, Lucas said, “This is it—we pull everybody off everything else, and we take St. Pat’s apart. The guy is over there somewhere.”
    “Unless she had a heart attack.”
    “Maybe she did, but you know what? The photograph down by the statue, Ware remembers talking to somebody who might have been a priest, you dug up that thing about the lawn party, Neumann getting killed, now Qatar gone: This shit is telling us something.”
    “Hope it’s not a priest,” Marshall said.
    “So do I.” He stopped and looked back at the ME’s door.
    “What?”
    “I don’t know. I should have figured something out from this, but I didn’t,” Lucas said.
    “There’s so much stuff.”
    “That’s not what I mean,” Lucas said. “I mean, I know something, but I missed it. You ever have that feeling?”
    “Yeah. Street-cop stuff. It’ll come to you.”
     
    “R ANDY’S AWAKE,” D EL said. He caught them walking back toward Lucas’s office. “He’s hurtin’, but he’s up.”
    “You going?” Marshall asked.
    “Yeah.” Del nodded. “I got any company?”
    Marshall nodded and said, “Me,” and Lucas said, “I want to come, but let me talk to Marcy first.”
    Marcy, Black, and Swanson were drinking coffee and looking at paper when he walked in with Del and Marshall trailing. “All right, people, we’re ripping everything up and turning it around. We’re gonna look at nothing but St. Pat’s. The guy is over there somewhere.” He told them about Helen Qatar.
    Swanson said, “Whoa,” and Black said, “Wasn’t her heart—I got a hundred bucks says it wasn’t. Goddamnit, she was a nice old bat.”
    “I’m with you,” Lucas said. “I think she knew the killer, and somehow tipped him off. Marcy, I want you to get everyone you can find over there with copies of the artist’s sketch. I want you to interview all of her old friends. I want you to go through her house. Check her mail. Look at her e-mail, first thing.”
    “We got all the lists we need,” Marcy said. She looked at Black and Swanson. “Now we need complete bios. Let’s start cross-interviewing people. Not about themselves, but about people they know who do art.”
    “All we need is a name,” Lucas said. “If we get a name, Randy should be able to identify him. I want a name.”
     
    R ANDY WAS IN the ICU at Regions Hospital in St. Paul. There was a uniformed St. Paul cop outside the door who nodded at Lucas and said, “His lawyer’s in there.”
    “Who is it?”
    “I don’t know. Somebody from the public defender’s.”
    Lucas knocked, stuck his head inside. Randy was lying almost flat, his head elevated two inches; his shoulders seemed narrow and ratlike in the hospital gown. An IV drip was fastened into one arm. He looked like a deflated version of the Randy they all knew and hated. The lawyer sat next to him, a man Randy’s age, early twenties, in a battered black suit and too-narrow tie. A Samsonite briefcase sat next to him on the floor.
    Lucas said to the lawyer, “I’m with the Minneapolis police. I need to talk with you.”
    “Later,” the lawyer said. “I’m talking with my client right now.”
    “Do you know how much later?”
    “Whenever I’m done,” the lawyer said. “Wait in the hall.”
    “Better be pretty quick,” Lucas said. “We don’t have a lot of time here—”
    “Hey! When I’m done ,” the lawyer said.
    Lucas backed out, and Del said, “Oh, boy.”
    “Officious little prick,” Lucas said. He took his cell phone out of his pocket and called the Minneapolis dispatcher. “Could you get me Harry Page’s number over at the Ramsey Public Defender’s Office?”
    She came back a minute later with the number, and Lucas poked it in. Page, the number-two man in the PD’s office, came on the line a moment later. “Lucas Davenport. I think you still owe me three dollars for that egg-salad sandwich I bought you when we were on that panel up at White Bear—Century College, whatever it was.”
    “Yeah, yeah. Christ, you been whining about it