John Sanford - Prey 12 - Chosen Prey.txt

by Chosen Prey(lit)

  “If he’ll talk,” Del said. “He’s a little asshole, and he’ll be pissed.”

  “More pissed than you might think,” Lucas said. “His legs weren’t moving when he was on the ground. The slug that took him in the stomach might have clipped his spine.”

  Marshall winced, and Del said, “Ah, shit.”

  The crime-scene people were taping the apartment when the three of them climbed back up the stairs and tentatively stepped inside. Allport spotted them, shook his head: “Quite a bit of day-old blood. We don’t think it was his.”

  “Is someone dead? That much blood?” Lucas asked.

  Allport relayed the question to somebody out of sight. A second later, a cop in a tweed jacket and golf slacks stepped into the hallway and looked down at Lucas and said, “Not that much. I’d say it’s gotta be maybe a pint, give or take. Of course, we don’t know how much he cleaned up.”

  “Doesn’t look like he’d done much cleaning,” Del said. “There was still some blood on the wallpaper.”

  “You find any jewelry?” Lucas asked. “Good stuff?”

  “Haven’t looked yet,” the cop said. “Would that be a priority?”

  “Yeah, it would be,” Lucas said. “Get the sequence of events on the entry nailed down first, though. We don’t want that to get confused.”

  The cop nodded and dropped back out of sight. Allport said, “Give us half an hour. Then I’d appreciate if you could slow-walk through the place, see if anything catches your eye.”

  Lucas nodded. “We’ll be back.” To Del and Marshall, as they stepped back out onto the deck: “The day started so pretty that I drove the Porsche.”

  “Still not a bad day,” Marshall said, looking up at the sky. “Still pretty. Even smells good, once you get away from the blood.”

  THEY WASTED THE half hour and a little more at a bagel shop on Grand Avenue, drinking coffee and trying to figure out the next step. They were still shaky from the shooting: talking too fast, digressing into stories, arguing the Aronson case.

  “The woman over at the Catholic school, the museum lady—we gotta talk to her some more,” Marshall said. “She comes up four times on our lists, and she takes you right over to that wall in Laura’s pictures. That place has gotta be involved, and it’s gotta be somebody close to her. Maybe somebody who works at the museum. People come to see her, and he picks them up there.”

  “Black’s running down all the names in the museum and the art department—everybody over twenty-five,” Lucas said.

  “I’m supposed to go to this task force meeting tomorrow with Marcy,” Marshall said. “I’d rather hang with you guys, but if you want, I could go over there and tell them about St. Patrick’s and what we’ve seen so far, and maybe . . . I don’t know, maybe we could get them to do research on everybody in the whole school. Everybody. Maybe there’d be some way to hook up the records from the school computer with the FBI, and run them all off in an hour or something.”

  “That’s a thought,” Lucas said. “I just can’t figure out what a guy at St. Pat’s is doing with a pimp like Randy.”

  “Just a fence,” Del said. “The guy’s a sex freak, so maybe they got hooked up that way, and then he started fencing stuff through Randy.”

  “You know what we should have done?” Marshall said. “When we had that woman over at DDT’s place this morning, the one that used to work with Randy, we should have showed her the picture of the guy from the movie.”

  “Goddamnit,” Lucas said irritably. “I should have thought of that.”

  “I’ll get back to her,” Del said. “Maybe I can hook up with some of Randy’s other girls, too.”

  Still cranked, they all went back to Randy’s. Allport was in the living room with two other cops, and said, “We gotta guy coming down with a recorder and some forms, if you guys could make a preliminary statement before you take off.”

  They all nodded, and Lucas asked, “Anything new?”

  “Can’t find his stash.”

  “Gotta be one,” Lucas said. “He was weird about all that English shit—he had a walking stick, and he used to stroll around in riding boots and breeches and hats with feathers. You oughta look behind mirrors and paintings and check for hollowed-out banisters and all that. Look in the clocks.”

  He was standing at the top of the entry stairs, next to a banister knob, and tried to turn it; it was solid.

  “What’d you hear from the hospital?” Del asked.

  Allport shook his head. “He’s in surgery, and they’re giving us about the usual: Nothing, fuck you very much.”

  “How about the spine thing?”

  He shook his head again. “I haven’t heard a thing.”

  The crime-scene people found Randy’s stash in a hardbound copy of Bulfinch’s Mythology, one of a line of what looked like decorator books in a built-in bookshelf over the television. The pages of the Bulfinch had been haphazardly glued together, and then a hole cut out of the middle. The hole was just big enough to hold a couple of ounces of grass—it didn’t, but it did hold a chamois bag.

  The cop who found the book shook the bag into the palm of one hand, and out tumbled two rings, one diamond and one emerald. Lucas, Del, and Marshall had seen pictures of them.

  “Sonofabitch,” Del said.

  “Now we know for sure,” Lucas said. “He’s the link.”

  They spent another hour at the apartment, giving brief statements to a St. Paul investigator who would be looking into the shooting. When they were done, Marshall asked, “Where can I hook up with this Anderson guy? He’s never around when I come through your office.”

  “He basically works with the computer system,” Lucas said. “I’ll take you around.”

  “Got an idea?” Del asked.

  “No. I just want to look at all these lists he’s making. Have we called these women up, the women in the drawings, to see how many of them have a connection with St. Patrick’s?”

  “Yeah. Many of them do—I mean, everybody in town is gonna know somebody from the place; it’s a big school. But direct connections are pretty thin.”

  “Four hits with this old lady Qatar is a lot,” Del said.

  “Gotta be something there,” Marshall said.

  “Just like there is with Randy,” Lucas said. “But how do you connect an elderly museum lady with an asshole like Randy? I looked at her, and I couldn’t tell you.”

  BACK AT CITY Hall, Lucas dropped Marshall with Anderson, the computer guy, and Del headed back to DDT’s: “I’ll show her the pictures, and maybe Charmin’ can give me the name of some of his other girls,” he said.

  Lucas went back to the office, where Marcy was talking with Lane and Swanson. “Did you hear about Randy?” she asked.

  “What?” He stopped in his tracks. “He died?”

  “No, but he won’t be walking anywhere for a while. Allport just called and said the surgeons are trying to fix his lower vertebrae so he doesn’t do any more damage to his spinal cord, but there’s already been some damage and they don’t think he’s gonna have full use of his legs. Not right away, anyway. He’ll have to do rehab, and you know how that goes.”

  “Ah, shit.” Lucas shook his head and said, “Nobody knows what happened. He just opened up.”

  “You don’t look too shook,” Marcy said.

  “I didn’t even see anything, until it was all over,” Lucas said. “We came in the front, he ran out the back and opened up.” He told them the story in detail, and about the rings.

  “Allport told me about the rings,” Marcy said. “Christ, if Randy hadn’t had a gun, we’d have the guy now.”

  “Did Allport say if he was conscious?”

  “Docs have really cut him up—they figure it’ll be the day after tomorrow before he makes any sense, and maybe longer than that. They had to go into his gut and he’s gonna have a lot of pain, 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. Sh
e 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.”

  THEY 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. “August twenty-ninth. We invited six hundred people. We don’t know how many came, but all the food was eaten, and the party was crashed by a number of students coming back to school.”

  “These other women who identified you as an acquaintance. Would they have been invited?” Lucas asked. Marcy whispered: “Guest list.” “Do you have a guest list?”

  “We wouldn’t have a guest list anymore,” Qatar said, a tingle of excitement in her voice. “But we invited everybody on our contacts lists, and I think all four of them are on it. When officer Black gave me the four names, I knew three of them as acquaintances, but the fourth one didn’t ring a bell. When I looked in our files, though, there she was.”

  “If you could find a guest list, that would be a mammoth help to us,” Lucas said.

  “We’ll look. I don’t think we’ll find one, but I bet we could reconstruct it.”

  “That would be terrific, Mrs. Qatar.”

  “We’ll try to get something for you tomorrow,” she said. “I never did get a chance to look at that film. Maybe I’ll do that tonight.”

  “Anything you can do, we’d appreciate,” Lucas said.

  “Just like Miss Marple,” she said, with relish.

  17

  WEATHER SLEPT OVER —not for the sex, she said, but because she missed him. “I think we’re settling in,” she said, as she lay on the bed with a book on her chest. “Are we going to talk about the house?”

  “What about the house?”

  “Do we want a bigger one?” she asked.

  He looked around: He’d been in the place for better than ten years, and it fit him reasonably well—but if there were children and a wife, things might be a little tight.

  “Maybe.”

  The talk kept him up even after Weather was sleeping: night thoughts about big changes. The idea of a change didn’t worry him much, he realized, somewhat surprised at himself. When he really thought about it, he didn’t think as much about this house as he did of the house he might have.

  More space; a media room and a workshop. A real study, instead of a converted bedroom. A nice master suite, extra bedrooms for the kids. Kids. What all would they need? With Weather committed to surgery, maybe they ought to think about a full-time housekeeper. . . .

  He liked the neighborhood, and the neighbors. He would miss it, and them, if they moved. How about this: Maybe live in Weather’s place for a while, and remodel this place, or even take it out and design and build something new?

  There was plenty of room to expand into the backyard. He’d need a bigger garage, for sure, maybe with four places. A bigger basement workshop would be nice, and maybe they could build a completely dry basement this time.

  When he went to sleep, he was thinking about table saws. He didn’t have much use for one, but he’d been looking at them in hardware stores. Interesting tools. Lots of parts. You could sit in the basement and fool around with a table saw for hours. Big table saw, and maybe a planer/jointer. He could make furniture. . . . Zzz.

  WHEN THE PHONE rang, it was still dark. Weather moaned, “I’d forgotten about this part. The calls in the middle of the night.”

  “Five-thirty,” he said; the clock’s green numerals glowed at him through the dark. He found the phone, picked it up, groggy. “Yeah?”

  “Chief Davenport?” He could hear traffic in the background.

  “Speaking.”

  “This is John Davis, I’m a St. Paul patrol sergeant. Lieutenant Allport said I ought to give you a call.”

  Lucas sat up. “Yeah, John, what’s going on?”

  “I’m with a garbage crew out on East Seventh, out at the Kanpur Indian restaurant? They pulled a body out of the dumpster an hour or so ago. We don’t have an ID, but she’s young, small, blond, naked, and she’s been strangled with
a rope. It might not have anything to do with your case, but Allport says to tell you that she fits the profile of all them women you been digging up . . .”

  “Ah, jeez.”

  “. . . and she fits the description of a woman who was supposed to be living with Randy Whitcomb. We don’t know for sure yet, but we’re taking some blood samples and oughta know pretty quick. We’re trying to find a neighbor of Whitcomb’s who saw her a few times. One of our guys supposedly talked to this neighbor, but we don’t have her name yet.”

  “All right.” Lucas thought for a minute, felt the power of the bed pulling him down. “If I came down, would there be anything for me to see?”