Closed his eyes for a moment, then said, “Gotcha.”
Aronson stared back at him.
There had to be prints on the bag or the laptop. Nobody could be that careful, that paranoid . . . and the surfaces were perfect for prints. But now, what to do? He sat thinking for another five minutes, vacillating, then stood on the chair and put the package back on the ledge.
Hesitated, then put the panel back in place.
Went down in the basement and found the whiskey-nosed janitor. “It’s taking longer than I thought, and I can’t see well enough, all the way back,” he lied. “I’m gonna bring in a crime- scene crew tomorrow. Don’t let anybody go up there, okay? You don’t have to guard it, but don’t let anybody mess around up there.”
“I’ll keep everybody out. I’ll block it off, if you want.”
“It doesn’t look like there are many people around . . . why don’t you just keep an eye on it? There might be fingerprints somewhere, and we wouldn’t want to mess them up.”
The janitor nodded. “Never thought of fingerprints. Whatever you say—I go home at seven, but I’ll make sure that everybody knows it’s off-limits.”
HE SPENT THAT evening thinking about the phone call to Randy and about the laptop. Did the laptop assemble the bricks into a wall? Or was it just another half-assed brick? Even if they could demonstrate that Qatar did the drawings, and therefore knew Aronson before she died, what if Qatar argued that he met her through the second man—Randy—or vice versa, that Aronson had met Randy through him. After all, only one of the dead women was associated with a drawing. And there were more than a dozen women still alive who’d got them.
Weather said to him, “You’ve been in never-never land again. What’s going on?”
“Working on a little puzzle,” he said.
“Want to talk?”
“No. Not right now.” He looked at her. “Maybe tomorrow.”
She was mildly offended and a little stiff after that, but that had happened before. She always got over it. Again, Lucas lay awake after she slept.
The phone call, when it came, would probably be a little after three o’clock, he thought. The pit of the night. . . .
Three o’clock passed, and he dozed. Woke up briefly at four, then dropped back asleep, more soundly now. The problem may have resolved itself, he thought as he went under.
He really wasn’t prepared when the phone rang at five o’clock.
He was awake instantly, rolling off the bed, Weather waking and saying, “What? What?”
Lucas picked up the phone. “Yeah.”
“Chief? This is Mary Mikolec over at the Center. You asked to be called. We’ve sent a car over to Qatar’s place. He’s running.”
“Okay,” he said. “When did he walk?”
“About fifteen minutes ago.”
“Thanks. . . . Thanks for calling.”
“What’s happening?” Weather asked.
“Qatar’s gone,” Lucas said.
“Are you going?”
“No . . . nothing for me to do,” he said.
“Lucas, what’s going on?”
He sat on the bed and said, “Jesus. I dunno—I might have screwed up, but there’s no way to know. That’s what’s been worrying me.”
“Tell me,” she said. She sat up and put a hand on his shoulder.
He thought about it for a minute, then said, “It was that call to Randy. You gotta ask yourself, who knew the direct-line number into his room? After they moved him out of the ICU, they put him in this little room by himself where he’d be away from everybody else, and you could see the door from the nursing station. The switchboard was told not to switch any calls without an okay from Lansing. I asked the nurses: He didn’t have any visitors. . . . And then you’ve got to ask why somebody would do that. Make that call, even if he could?”
Weather was puzzled. “Well, why?”
“Because he wanted Qatar turned loose, or at least let out on bail. If he was in jail, and if he cut a deal on a plea—second-degree with psychological evaluation, whatever—he’d be out of reach.”
Weather thought about it for half a second, then her hand went to her mouth. “Oh, no. Oh my God.”
“Yeah. I think Terry Marshall probably picked him up. It’s about sixty-forty that Qatar’s dead already.”
“Lucas . . . why did you . . .?”
“Because I wasn’t sure. And even if I thought so, I’m not sure it’s not the right thing. What if Qatar gets out in ten or twelve years and starts killing again? That could happen.”
“Yes, but Lucas—this isn’t right. This is awful.”
“But Qatar—”
“Lucas, this is not about that asshole. This is about Terry. If he’s done this, it’s gonna be terrible for him. The heck with Qatar, it’s Terry.”
He looked at her and said, “It’s only about sixty-forty that Qatar’s dead. If he’s not, it’s about sixty-forty that I know where they’re going.”
Weather said, “The graveyard.”
“That would fit with the way Terry’s mind works, I think.”
“Lucas, you’ve got to call somebody,” she said. “Lucas, you can’t let this happen.”
Lucas put his hands to his head, sitting on the bed, frozen. Then, suddenly, looking up: “All right. I’m going. I can beat them down there. The alarm went off fifteen minutes ago. Maybe I can work something, maybe I can, if there’s time, maybe . . .”
He was out of bed, pulling on his pants, boots. “Gimme my sweatshirt, give me my sweatshirt . . .”
They stumbled all the way through the house, Lucas pulling on clothes, out to the garage. He climbed into the Porsche as the garage door rolled up, and she shouted, “Go! Go!”
29
LUCAS FUMBLED HIS flasher up on the dash and plugged it in, and with the harsh red light cutting holes through the night, he followed it down along the Mississippi, across the river by the airport, across the Minnesota River at the Mendota Bridge, and then south on Highway 55, all the time running the numbers. Marshall wouldn’t be driving more than a mile or two over the speed limit, to avoid any possible traffic cops—it was early for traffic cops, but the first trickle of the rush was beginning, and Marshall wouldn’t want to take any chances.
And that gave Lucas a chance. Giving Marshall a twenty- or twenty-five-minute head start—Marshall was starting farther into town than Lucas was, and facing more traffic—he and Lucas should arrive at the graveyard about the same time. What would happen there, Lucas didn’t know; and if Marshall wasn’t there, if he’d just decided to drop Qatar out in the woods somewhere, in some predug hole, then it was over.
Cell phone, he thought. Maybe he should call the Goodhue County sheriff, get them to send a car. But then, if Marshall wasn’t there, they’d know that Lucas knew who had taken Qatar. . . . He touched his jacket pocket for the phone, still thinking about it. The pocket was empty. The phone was back on the charger on his desk.
One option gone.
He touched his belt: The .45 was there. He’d taken it without thinking. But what for?
THREE PEOPLE WOULD know about all of this—he and Weather, and Marshall—and Del would probably figure it out if he ever sat down to think about it. There would never be any proof. Marshall would be too careful for that. What to do if he got there too late, with Qatar already dead? Just keep going?
He had to run. . . .
He went through the suburbs, through the red lights and around shying cars, watching for movement along the sides of the roads, of people unaware. If he hit another car at this speed, the Porsche would be flattened into a hubcap; if he hit a wandering human, he would instantly convert that human to hamburger.
All the way, calculating, wondering: He hadn’t told Weather or anyone else about the laptop. If he’d taken the laptop downtown after he found it, had processed it, they could have rearrested Qatar on the Aronson charge and he probably wouldn’t have made bail. Marshall’s whole concept would have been short-ci
rcuited.
But then what happens to justice? Ten or fifteen years in jail, with Qatar coming out all clear, even more careful, to kill again? Some of them, some of the Qatars, never stopped. Lucas was still uncertain of the equities. If it weren’t for Weather, he might have let it go. . . .
HE HIT THE blacktop north of the Pine Creek crossing with enough daylight to see it clearly. He slid through the turn and jumped back on the gas, then cut out on the gravel road. Close now; more light. He saw the DNR parking area coming, and sitting in it . . .
“Goddamnit.” Marshall’s red Jeep Cherokee.
Lucas screamed into the lot, braked down beside the Cherokee, and hopped out.
Looked around . . .
Marshall and Qatar were up on the hillside. They had stopped walking, and both were looking down at him. Qatar was dressed in pajamas, and his feet were bare. He had been gagged for a while, Lucas thought: Several coils of duct tape were looped around his neck, as though they’d been pulled down from his face. He was shivering, either from fear or simply from the cold.
Marshall was wearing jeans and a tan barn coat. He had one hand on Qatar’s jacket, and in his other, the big-frame .357.
Qatar shouted down, “Help me, please. He’s crazy, he’s going to kill me.” There was a catch in his voice. His hands had been cuffed, and he held them out toward Lucas as though he were praying.
“Terry, goddamnit,” Lucas called. “Don’t do this, man.”
Marshall called back, “I was about half afraid you’d show up here. I didn’t think you’d be this quick. Ten minutes later and we’d have all been fine.”
“Terry, we got him,” Lucas shouted, moving closer. “I found his laptop computer. It was in the ceiling in the museum. Me and the janitor found it. It’s got pictures of the women on it, it’s gotta have prints—we got him for everything, man.”
“Little too late for that,” Marshall said. “This is better anyway. Takes care of a couple of problems: his and mine.”
“Shoot him,” Qatar screamed at Lucas. “Shoot him.”
Marshall jerked him another step across the hill, dragging him by the loops of duct tape.
“Terry, goddamnit, stop it. Stop it.” Lucas was walking up the hill toward them.
“You gonna shoot me and save this asshole?”
“No. But you gotta listen. We can still smooth this out: You turn him in, we tell everybody you freaked, you talk to a shrink for a couple of weeks . . .”
He was fifty feet away. Marshall had gotten Qatar to the dug-over area where the graves were.
“Oh, horseshit, Lucas, you know better’n that,” Marshall drawled. He might have been smiling. “Minnesota’s the same as Wisconsin: They’d hang me by my nuts. They’d make an example out of me. Cops can’t do this shit.”
Forty feet. Qatar’s eyes were wide, his shoulders twisting away from Marshall. “Don’t let him . . . You can’t just shoot me,” he shouted at Marshall. “I can’t die today. I can’t . . . I have classes today. I have responsibilities. The college is expecting me.”
“I don’t think so, pal.”
Thirty feet. Lucas could see that Qatar’s bare feet were bleeding, apparently from dragging over the rocks and roots of the hillside. Marshall lifted his pistol so that it pointed directly into the back of Qatar’s head. “Stop right there,” he said to Lucas.
“Terry, please, man, you’re a good guy. And listen to this—one last thing.” Lucas was begging for time. “There’s not much chance, but what if he is innocent? What if we’ve screwed this up somehow?”
“That’s right,” Qatar said. “This is completely illegal. My lawyer—”
“Shut up.” Marshall snapped the pistol barrel against the back of his head, and Qatar stopped, his mouth open in midsentence. Marshall said to Lucas, “There’s a tape recorder on the front seat of the car. When I got him in the car, I pulled the duct tape off his mouth and told him what I was gonna do, but I told him that maybe I wouldn’t if he’d tell me about the women. You listen to that tape, you’ll get all the names, and pretty close to the dates, and the places he picked them up. He even says there are two more down in Missouri, some godforsaken place down there.”
“You promised me,” Qatar said. He tried to twist out of Marshall’s grasp, but Marshall played him like a fish. “You promised.”
“I lied,” Marshall said.
“All right, I’ll go to trial, I’ll confess,” Qatar said. “You got me. All right? All right? Just stop this, stop this now. You win. Okay?”
“On the other hand, I could always shoot you, too,” Marshall said to Lucas, but he was showing a grin again. “How’d they ever prove it was me?”
Lucas shrugged. “They would. Tire tracks, the slugs, nitrites when they picked you up. There’s probably a parade on the way here now.”
“Yeah, I know, I guess,” Marshall admitted. The smile, if it was ever there, faded away and he took a deep breath and looked around the hillside, tipped his head back to look up through the oak branches. Again he cocked the gun up against Qatar’s head. “Well, I guess there ain’t gonna be any big ceremony in this.”
Qatar looked at Lucas, his voice level but desperate. “Help me.”
Lucas said, “Terry . . .”
“You want to say a couple of words, this is your last chance. You’re gonna be in hell in ten seconds,” Marshall said to Qatar.
Qatar turned his head away, trembling violently. And then he stopped. Maybe the finality of the situation had finally hit him, maybe he was embarrassed by his pleading, maybe this was simply the real Qatar—Lucas didn’t know. But he reached down, carefully brushed some mud off his pajamas as well as he could with his cuffed hands, and then looked Marshall in the eyes.
“Your niece—she was a tasty little cunt,” he said. “She took a long time to die.”
“You cocksucker,” Marshall screamed, and Lucas shouted, “Terry, goddamnit . . .”
The pistol shot was an earsplitting BANG, and Lucas flinched away from it. Qatar’s face had a bloody hole in it where the hollow-point had exited; his legs went out, and he pitched down onto one of the refilled graves. He twitched once; he was dead. He didn’t look like Edward Fox anymore, not even a bald one.
“Terry . . . Jesus Christ, Terry . . .” Lucas said. He was twenty feet away.
Marshall was talking, but talking to Qatar. “I didn’t think you had the guts for that,” he said. “You got to me. You did that.”
He shook his head, looking down the slope at Qatar’s crumbled body, but now talking to Lucas. “I had a little time to think on the way down here,” Marshall said. “Time to think. I spent ten years of my life looking for the miserable shit. Ruined my life, what was left of it, after June was killed. Took Laura . . . I just wish Laura would have had a chance in life, you know? Where’s Jesus when you need him?” He put the pistol under his own chin and turned his head to look Lucas in the eyes. “But you know what, Lucas?” He took a last look around and a deep breath. “Today’s a nice day for this. You might want to look away for a second. . . .”
“Terry!” Lucas screamed.
DEL ARRIVED TWENTY minutes later, pounding into the parking lot in his wife’s Dodge. He jammed the transmission into park and jumped out of the car. Lucas was sitting cross-legged on the hood of the Porsche.
“Weather called,” Del said. “I got here as soon as I could. Thought maybe I should call somebody, but I didn’t . . . not yet.” Lucas didn’t respond, and Del looked up at the hill. The bodies were out of sight, untouched, except for the handful of dried oak leaves that Lucas had dropped over Marshall’s half-open eyes. “Too late?”
Lucas sighed, rubbed his forehead with his fingers, eyes closed. “Just in time to say goodbye,” he said.
30
LUCAS AND WEATHER were working on her boat, an aging S-2. The sky was a perfect blue, and the sun felt as if it wanted to burn down on the back of his neck but didn’t yet have the horsepower.
“The thing is made o
f fiberglass—you wouldn’t think you’d have to sit around and sandpaper and varnish,” Lucas grumbled. “What the hell is fiberglass for, anyway? Why did they make the goddamn hatch cover out of wood when they had a fiberglass factory?”
“Shut up and paint,” Weather said.
“Aren’t you supposed to have, like, croissants and wine when you’re working on a sailboat? And some friends come by and the guy has got a square chin and the chick is really good-looking and has loop earrings? And they’re both wearing turtlenecks and you get this little vibration of possible group sex?”
“The more you talk, the sloppier you get. Just paint and shut up and let me scrub.” She was down below, scrubbing what appeared to be chemically hardened chipmunk shit out from under the sink. Lucas was sitting in the cockpit, working on the slip-out hatch board. He secretly believed it was makework to keep him out of the way while she did the real cleanup.
Around them, in the marina, two dozen people were working on boats, and from where he sat on top of the boat, which was on top of the trailer, he could see a mile across Lake Minnetonka to one of the season’s early regattas.
“Glad we’re not out there racing,” he said. “Those guys gotta be freezing their asses off.”
“Best time of year,” she said. She stepped into the companionway, stepped up, and looked toward the racers. “Nice and dry, too—couldn’t be much wind over there.”
“Love sailboat racing,” Lucas said. “No wind, they still race.”
“That’s Lew Smith way out on the end—look at him, he must think something’s coming.”
Lucas leaned back and closed his eyes. It all smelled good: the day, the lake, the marina, even the varnish. If everything were like this all the time . . .
Well, he’d go nuts. But it was nice to be like this every once in a while. He opened his eyes and looked at Weather. She was still talking, but it was all about racing and who was being lifted above whom, and who was looking at a header, and he really couldn’t care about any of it. What he did care about was Weather, and he smiled, watching her enthusiasm.
Lucas Davenport Collection: Books 11-15 Page 70
