22
WHILE MARCY WAS calling in Black, Lane, and Swanson, Lucas got on the phone to Del and caught him at breakfast. "What the hell are you doing up?" Del asked when he took the phone from his wife.
"I need the name of the woman you talked to, the one whose pictures were posted on the bridge."
"Beverly Wood. But I talked to her a couple times, and there's not much there. She has no idea."
"You got a number?"
"Yeah, just a minute. Did something come up?"
"I solved the case this morning," Lucas said modestly. "Maybe talking to her again will give us another confirmation."
"Jeez, that's good," Del said. "Here's the number." He read off Wood's phone number and then said, "I'm not getting any big wry-humor vibrations. You didn't really solve the case, did you?"
"We're meeting here as soon as Marcy can get the other guys back. Probably an hour. Tell you about it when you get here."
"Gimme a hint," Del said.
"I ejaculated backwards," Lucas said.
HE CALLED BEVERLY Wood, was told that she was in a classroom. "Her seminar on women expressionists," he was told. There was no phone in the classroom, but he was no more than ten minutes away. He caught a squad about to leave the building and commandeered it as a taxi.
"Who's gonna protect Washington Avenue from speeders if we've got to haul some deputy chief all over town?" asked the guy at the wheel.
"I can fix it so you have extra traffic time, if you want," Lucas said.
"I don't take shit from guys who drive Porsches," the cop said. "You're speeding when you're sitting in the parking ramp."
BEVERLY WOOD'S CLASS involved eight people slumped around a pale maple table looking at Xerox copies of magazine articles. Lucas stuck his head in, and they all turned to look at him. "Beverly Wood?"
"Yes?"
"I'm with the Minneapolis police. I need to talk to you somewhat urgently. Just for a minute."
"Oh. All right." She looked around at her class. "Nothing scandalous, I can assure you. Lily, why don't you begin the discussion of Gabriele Munter, since I've already read your paper and know your views. I'll be back in a minute"-she looked at Lucas-"I assume."
"Maybe two minutes," Lucas said.
He got her out in the hall and said, "You've talked to Officer Capslock a couple of times about the drawings… but let me ask you-you've got to keep this confidential, by the way-do you know of, or have you heard of, a man named James Qatar?"
She cocked her head. "You've got to be kidding."
"You know him?"
"Not exactly. He published a ridiculous paper on what he called 'riverine expressionism,' in which he suggested that European expressionism found its way into the Midwest during the 1930s by way of the great river valleys. I'm afraid I ridiculed it in my reply."
"You ridiculed him personally?"
"Everything's personal when you're talking about scholarship," she said. "I suggested that the riverine influences probably weren't that great since we had radios, newspapers, books, museums, trains, automobiles, and even airline service at the time."
"But he would have felt ridiculed personally?" Lucas asked.
"I certainly hope so… He's the one who did the drawings?"
"We don't know. His name came up, and we were wondering if you might have had some contact."
"Just that article. I've never laid eyes on the man, as far as I know," she said.
"How long between the time you published the article and when the drawings were posted on the bridge?"
"Let me see…" She looked at the floor and muttered to herself, then looked up again. "Four months? I would have told Officer Capslock, but to tell you the truth, the whole thing was so trivial to me-the review, I mean-that I'd completely forgotten it."
"What if the shoe were on the other foot, and you'd written an article and it was criticized in the same way… Would you have remembered the criticism?"
"Oh, yes, probably forever," she said. "Maybe I shouldn't have, but I had a pretty good time with him."
"Thank you," he said. "Please don't tell anybody about this talk. We don't know who this man is for sure."
"The gravedigger…"
"If he is, we figure it's best not to attract his attention."
THE COP WAS waiting in the squad with the motor running. Lucas opened the door and climbed in, and the cop said, "Four speeders. They passed me with impunity."
"Impunity, huh? You in a vocabulary class?"
Del was waiting when he got back, and he took two minutes to explain it. Marshall added, "We got that fax from Stout. He was there for two years, then went to Madison the year after Laura disappeared. He majored in art at Stout, and from Madison, they tell me that he was in art history."
"So he's gotta be able to draw," Lucas said.
Marshall asked, "I wonder what he was doing with that pimp?"
"We can ask Randy," Lucas said. To Marcy: "We need to get somebody from intelligence to track him down, Qatar, and take a picture of him without him knowing it."
"Lane can do that," Marcy said. "He's got a darkroom at his house. He's a good photographer."
"All right, that's good. Let's get Lane going."
When they were all assembled, Lucas laid out what they had: Qatar had been at Stout when Laura Winton disappeared. He'd grown up near St. Pat's, where his father had been a professor and his mother an administrative employee and later head of the Wells Museum. He fit the image of the man described by Winton, or, at least, he would if he had hair. He had art training. His office was just down the hall from Neumann. His mother died shortly after saying that she'd snoop around a bit. And his current girlfriend was the spitting image of all the women who'd been killed.
"Her name is Ellen Barstad," Marcy said. "Believe it or not, there are two Ellen Barstads in Minneapolis, so we're sorting that out now."
"We know he steals valuables from his victims-they're not souvenirs, though, he's apparently doing it for the money. Once we get in his house, we've got to look at everything with a microscope, in case he keeps anything else. If we could find one thing that comes from the victims, that would be enormous."
"We gotta get in and grab his computers," Lane said. "If Marcy's artist friend is right, and he's drawing from computer photos, then maybe they'll have everything we need."
"Good," Lucas said. He made a note on his legal pad. Then: "I would like to know why we weren't onto him sooner, with all the time we put in at St. Pat's."
Black said, "Because we were looking for people connected with art, and the art department and the museums. That's hundreds of people. And after that, we were just asking around. Qatar and Neumann were in the history department." He shrugged. "We never looked in history."
THEY'D ALL GATHERED at the desks in the work bay, but as the talk continued, they'd pulled chairs around until they were in a rough circle, facing each other, intent. When they'd talked out all the possibilities and probabilities, Lucas said, "Check me on this. I see two keys: We need Randy to identify him as the guy who sold him the jewelry, and maybe-maybe-we can do something with his girlfriend."
"I can get a headshot," Lane said. "It might take me a day or two if we don't want him to spot me."
"Push it hard," Lucas said. "I'd love to get something today, so we can get it over to Randy."
"How about the girlfriend?" Del asked.
"That's you and me," Lucas said.
Marshall said, "And me."
Lucas nodded and turned to Swanson and Black. "You two, I want you back at St. Pat's. See if there's any way we can nail down whether he was at that museum reunion party-but keep it tight, undercover. I need a bio on him. Something that could put him with the other dead women that we've identified."
"Are we gonna track him?" Marcy asked.
"I'll get some guys from intelligence. We don't need a full team, I don't think-that's too dangerous. We'd have to talk with his neighbors and college faculty people to pull off a team, and the w
ord might get around. So maybe just one guy at a time, keeping a light tag. No reason to think he's gonna run."
Marcy asked, "What about me?"
"Go talk to the county attorney. Tell him what we've got and find out what we need-how bad we're hurting and what we can do."
"I think we're hurting a little," she said. "Like Terry said, we've connected a lot of dots but nothing really critical."
"Except Randy."
"Who we managed to cripple," she said.
"Yeah… the little prick."
BEFORE THEY WENT looking for Ellen Barstad, Lucas stopped at Rose Marie's office to tell her what they were doing.
"What are the chances?" she asked after he gave her a quick summary.
"I think he's the guy. Proving it is gonna be harder. The problem is, except for the first one, they were coming to him-he seemed to be picking on women from out of town, or women who just got to town, so her friends would never see him. Who knows, they may never even have known his real name… We think he gave a fake name to the Winton girl."
"Are we watching him?"
"Yeah. I need you to talk to the intelligence guys. We're not gonna climb all over him, but we want to know where he is."
"I'll talk to them," she said. She made a note on her desk pad. Then: "New topic: If you had a chance to take a job with the state, would you take it?"
He shrugged. "I sorta like it here."
"But if you couldn't stay here?" she pressed.
"What are you working on?"
She leaned across the desk. "The guy running the department of public safety? The governor doesn't like him. He does like me-and he should, since I did most of his homework for him when he was in the state senate. We get along on a chemical level."
"So you're thinking of moving up."
"The possibility's out there," she said.
"Well…" He rubbed his forehead with his fingertips. "That's a different kind of work."
"Not for you, it wouldn't be. You'd be doing the same thing you do here-working on your own, big cases, intelligence. Figuring things out. Maybe some political work. You could bring along Del, if you wanted."
"I don't know if Del would go. Maybe he would."
She leaned back. "Think about it. I don't know if the whole thing is gonna work out, anyway. A couple of things have got to fall just right."
"But the governor likes you," Lucas said.
"He does," she said. "What's even more important, he's gonna be reelected, if he doesn't fuck up the tax thing, so we'd have at least seven more years. We'd be like Hawaii Five-O."
"Jesus, Hawaii Five-O. All right. I'll think about it."
"Keep in touch on this Qatar thing," she said. "It wouldn't hurt our image if we nailed this down. Politically, it's just the right time."
HE PICKED UP Del and they got a city car and went looking for Barstad. Marcy had straightened out the confusion on the two Ellen Barstads-one of them was an elderly resident of a nursing home-and so they had an address and phone number, but nothing else.
The address turned out to be in another one of the faceless business parks, not far from the nearly identical one where Ware had his porn studio.
"I thought it was her home address," Del said, as they pulled into the parking area. Thirty or forty cars were scattered down the length of the narrow, block-long lot.
"Maybe she lives here," Lucas said.
"There's a sign on the door."
The door was heavy silvered glass, and the sign was in gold stick-on letters: "Barstad Crafts." The door was locked, but they could see a light in the back. Lucas knocked, then cupped his hands on the glass to peer past the reflections. He knocked again, and a woman stepped into the light in the back, then started toward them. When she got close, Lucas took out his ID case and held it up so she could see it.
She turned the lock and said, "Yes?"
Lucas recognized her from the ME's office. "Ellen Barstad?"
"Yes?" A worried, tentative smile.
Lucas introduced himself, and then Del, and said, "We have a serious problem, and we need to talk to you about it. Would you have a few minutes?"
"Well…" She looked carefully at Del and then said to Lucas, "You're the man who was at the medical examiner's office."
"Yeah."
"Okay." She opened the door all the way and stepped back. "Come in. Let me lock the door behind you."
The front of the store was an open bay, with quilt frames made out of brightly painted one-by-two lumber leaning against the walls, and another lying flat on a series of sawhorses. All held quilts in various stages of completion.
"I give classes," she said.
"This is a really nice quilt," Del said, and he meant it. The quilt was a traditional log-cabin style, but the colors had been carefully chosen and placed, so that light seemed to be falling across the quilt from one side to the other; it was almost as if the quilt were spread across a bed by a sunlit window.
Barstad picked up on his sincerity and asked, "Do you have quilts?"
"Two of them," Del said. "My sister-in-law makes them. Nothing like this, though."
They spent a moment looking at the quilt, bonding. And then Barstad, flattered, said, "What can I do for you? Is there a problem?"
Del said, "Let's get some chairs." There were several chairs scattered around the room, and he reached for one.
"Why don't you come in back," she said. "I can make some coffee, if you don't mind microwave."
She did live in the place. The back part of the commercial space had been carefully divided into small rooms with drywall partitions. She might have done it herself, Lucas thought: A green Army-type tool bag and a drywall square sat in one corner of the main room, on a white-plastic bucket of drywall compound.
He could see one end of a bed in a side room, and a toilet and sink in a corner between the bedroom and the living room space. A kitchen had been carved out of another corner and equipped with a half-sized office refrigerator, an old electric stove, and what once had been a standard industrial sink. Shelves and cupboards were fashioned from chromed industrial kitchen racks. Altogether, he thought, it looked snug, artsy-craftsy, and even a little snazzy.
As she got cups, Lucas said, "You were at the ME's office with James Qatar."
"Yes. James and I have been dating."
"We are doing… research… on Mr. Qatar," Lucas said. "He's basically the guy we want to talk about."
"Do you think he killed his mother?"
Lucas looked at Del, who shrugged, and Lucas asked, "Where did that question come from?"
"I don't know," she said. "His mother's dead in a weird way, and the cops show up and ask questions. Was she murdered?"
"We think she may have been," Lucas said. "Was there anything in particular that caused you to ask the question?"
"Yes," she said. "James is a would-be clothes horse. He loves to get dressed up. When I was studying fabric I did quite a bit with fashion, you know, and I never met anybody with as much need to project himself through clothing as James does… It's like when he tries to picture himself, the main thing he sees are clothes, but he never has enough money to get the really good ones." She reached out and touched Lucas's jacket. "He would love something like this."
"Uh…"
"Just a minute, I'm getting there," she said. The microwave beeped, and she took the three cups out and passed them around. Watching her talk and move around, Lucas had concluded that she was an attractive woman hiding behind a plain facade-part of the curious Minnesota female ethic of dressing down. She went on: "Anyway, he called me after his mother was found, said he needed moral support to look at her body. So I went with him, and we identified her, and he was all weepy when you showed up. I felt like I was a prop. But I'll tell you, the weeping stopped one minute after we left, and we went on a shopping spree. For him. He paid two thousand dollars for a pinkie ring, for God's sake. Probably three thousand dollars more in Saks and Neiman's, and he just doesn't have that kind of money. I
think it came from his mother's house."
"Huh. Not a lot of grief," Lucas suggested.
"Not when he wasn't around the medical examiner's or you police," she said.
Del said, "Look, we don't want you to betray a friendship-"
"Of course you do," she said. "What do you want me to do?"
Lucas cocked his head. "I get the impression that you're not all that friendly."
"We've been sleeping together for three weeks-but it's just about to end, to tell you the truth. He's not exactly the package I was looking for. I think…" She paused, and actually seemed to think about it. "I knew he might have been a little freaky in some ways, right from the start. He had that shine in his eyes. But I had some things I wanted from him, too, so that was okay… and he's clean and everything. But after that deal with his mom, he sorta scared me."
Lucas looked at Del and said, "I guess we tell her about it."
23
BARSTAD HAD NOTHING to contribute but impressions. Qatar was capable of violence, she said, "Sometimes we have pretty rough sex," she said, but she added that there had been no hint of anything else.
"When you say rough sex, you mean he forces you?" Lucas asked.
"No, usually I have to suggest it," she said. "He's not very creative."
"Oh." Lucas carefully didn't look at Del.
She said, "How about if I asked him about it? Killing people. Don't you guys bug apartments and stuff? I could get him here and ask him and you could record it."
"That might be a little crude-just coming out and asking," Del said. "Especially if it pissed him off and he picked up a steam iron and popped you on the head with it. We could get in quick, but not that quick."
"But I'm not stupid," Barstad said. "If he looked like he was getting ready to do something, I'd scream my head off. He doesn't carry a gun. Believe me, I know that for sure. He doesn't even carry a pocketknife."
"You seem pretty willing to get into this," Lucas observed.
"Hey. It's interesting," she said. "You think he might have killed his mom, I'm willing to help out."
"There's more to it than that, about Qatar," Lucas said.
Del said, "If you've seen the TV stories on this guy they call the gravedigger…"
Chosen Prey ld-12 Page 25
