Chosen Prey (19 page)

Qatar turned smartly at the front walk, climbed the stoop, and rang the doorbell. Nobody answered. He pulled open the storm door and tried the doorknob. Locked.

All right. He hurried back down the steps and tried the breezeway door. Locked. He looked around, saw nobody, heard nothing but the rain. The house across the street showed a light at the front window, but the drapes were pulled. He left the shelter of the breezeway nook and walked back around to the front of the garage. Tried the main door: locked down. He continued around to the side of the garage. The next house was only twenty feet away, but a hedge ran between them. He could see no lights, so he lowered the umbrella and walked down the length of the garage, the wet leaves of the hedge flicking against his face and neck, chilling him.

Now he was in arrest territory, he thought. If somebody caught him here, they wouldn't listen to a story about dropping by for a cup of tea. He began to feel it in his stomach: the tension, the eager stress of hunting. . . .

The garage had a back door: locked. Cautious bitch, he thought. The breezeway also had a back door, and it was locked. The back of the house had a two-step wooden deck. He climbed the deck in the dark, tried the door: locked. A double window looked out over the deck, ten feet down from the door. He walked over and looked at it--and found a crack in the armor.

The window was positioned over the kitchen sink. Probably a replacement from some past remodeling, it was one of the triple-glazed kind that didn't take a storm window. It was cranked open about an inch, apparently to let some air into the house. A little cool air over the hot dishwater . . . He did it himself.

He looked around: He was safe enough, with the foliage in the backyard covering him. He grabbed the edge of the window and pushed it back and forth. It gave a bit, a bit more; in two minutes he'd managed to work it open far enough that he could reach inside to the crank, and crank it all the way open. With one last look around, he boosted himself into the window opening, clambered awkwardly across the sink, and stepped on a dish full of water when he dropped to the floor.

A dog?

He stopped to listen. Heard nothing but the hum of the furnace. He looked out the window, then reached over and cranked it shut and locked it. There were no lights in the back. Then a furtive sound to his right: He whirled and saw a cat, a gray-striped tiger. The cat took a quick look at him and sprinted for some other part of the house.

The kitchen lights were off; the illumination came from a couple of lamps in the living room and an overhead fixture in a hall that led back to a bedroom. He needed more light. . . . It'd be nothing but bad luck if she got back this quickly, he thought. He snapped on the kitchen light and looked quickly around.

As he suspected, he was leaving puddles of water and muddy footprints on the floor. He spotted a paper towel rack, rolled off a few feet of toweling, wadded it up, dropped it on the floor, and used his feet to push it around like a mop. When both his shoes and the floor were dry, he stuffed the dirty towels into his pocket. A box of garbage bags sat on the kitchen counter. He took one, turned off the light, and headed for the garage.

AFTER ALL THAT, the killing was simple, as it always had been. He found a spade in the garage and walked back into the breezeway.

He waited in the near-dark for twenty minutes, thinking about not much at all. Now that he was here, now that he was committed, there wasn't much to think about, and he relaxed. In the dim light he could just make out the reflection of his face in the breezeway glass; he looked dark, mysterious. The trench-coat collar cut him nicely along his jawline; he tried a smile, tried to catch a good profile. . . .

He remembered the time, a cold rainy night like this one, outside of Paris, or maybe it was Casablanca, 1941 or '42, standing in the shadows waiting for the Nazi to come in. He had a paratrooper's knife in one hand and could see himself in a mirror, a really design-o thirties woolen military trench coat broadening out his shoulders, a beret . . . well, a beret might be too much, maybe a watch cap, though a watch cap tended to make him look a little like one of the Three Stooges; not a watch cap, then, maybe a fedora, snapped down over his eyes, but you could still see his eyes in the mirror. . . .

He was working the fantasy when Neumann's car pulled into the driveway and the garage door started up. Qatar pulled himself back to the present, struggled to get out of vision mode and into the sharp mental state he needed to do the killing. He didn't want to chase her all over, like Elmer Fudd after the Thanksgiving turkey; there couldn't be a pursuit. The door opened into the garage, so he wouldn't have the cover of the door. He'd have to move quickly.

He heard the garage door start down again. The car engine hummed for a moment, then died. The car door opened, then closed; he lifted the spade. Then another car door opened, and he nearly panicked. She'd picked somebody up?

Wait, wait, wait. She's getting the grocery bags out of the backseat. A moment later, the door to the garage opened and Neumann stepped inside. She might have seen him--her eyes turned toward his in that fraction of a second before the spade hit her--but she had no time to react to his presence, or even flinch.

He swung as though he were chopping wood, and the back of the spade hit her on the forehead, crushing her skull like a cantaloupe. He hit her as hard as he'd ever hit a softball; grunted with the follow-through.

Neumann pounded back against the garage wall, then sagged and went down with a soggy thump. The bag of groceries she'd been carrying spilled around her with major brand color: Campbell's soup, Nabisco crackers, Swanson TV dinners, Tampax . . .

Another furtive move, and again Qatar started: The cat was watching from the doorway to the house. It meowed once, then disappeared.

Goddamn cat.

He moved quickly now. He'd had experience with this part. Neumann was dead, there was no question of that. The spade had crushed her skull; he'd felt it, and kneeling by her head, he could see it. She now looked only a little like Charlotte Neumann. There wasn't much blood, but there was some. Before it could trickle onto the floor, he lifted her head by her hair, and fitted it into the garbage bag, then slipped the bag down the rest of her body; her head felt like a collection of bones and hamburger in an old sock.

The body went into the trunk of her car with the spade. He went quickly back into the house, got another garbage bag, filled it with the groceries. He had no intent to steal, but simply to obscure any sign of violence.

Now. Out . . .

But just a minute. There was no immediate rush. He could take a few seconds to look around. She talked all the time about her dead husband, letting you know about how well off they'd been. There might be something here in the house . . .

She had twenty-three dollars in her wallet, and he took it all. In her bedroom, he found nothing but cheap costume jewelry in her jewelry box. But in another, smaller box in the bottom of her chest of drawers, he found another three rings, a pair of earrings, and a necklace; they positively thumped with authenticity. These would be worth a few dollars.

In another drawer, he found two coin cards, and in each card, ten gold American twenty-dollar pieces from the nineteenth century. For the gold content alone, he thought, they should be worth close to three hundred dollars each; and if they were rare at all, maybe much more.

When he finished looking through the house, he thought himself perhaps fifteen thousand dollars richer.

A dream, he thought, to get so much by accident.

The dream quickly turned into a nightmare when he backed her car out of the garage and left for his disposal place. Getting into the countryside was easy enough; getting the body into the ground would be another problem, he thought, with the rain and cold. The leaves would be slippery and the slope was steep . . . although he'd enjoy the time on the hillside, there with his other friends. All the friends of James Qatar, gathered in the dark under the oak trees . . .

But when he crossed the creek and turned the corner, he was caught in a sudden blaze of light. There was no place to turn: He was stuck with the road. He slowed, but went ahead. They were right by his hill. What were they doing, police in the rain? A car accident?

As he crept up on the scene, a cop stepped into the road and waved him along. Qatar slowly moved past, lifting his hand to the cop as he went by, but turning his head, so the cop couldn't see his face. He turned it toward the hill and saw the men working on the hillside, saw a shovel held by a man in the road, saw three TV vans . . .

He was more stunned than panicked. They'd found his special place after all. The discovery of Aronson had made it possible, but when nothing had appeared in the papers, he'd thought they'd missed the others.

With his mind moving like mud, he wandered down a series of narrow blacktop tracks. Lights to the sides marked farmhouses; he passed a lonely Conoco station with two trucks in the parking lot, took a left, and faded into the dark countryside again. He finally crossed a highway with a north arrow, and took that: The Cities were north; he could hardly miss them. Then he passed the Conoco station again, and realized that he'd driven in a circle. He pulled in, went inside, and bought two packages of pink Hostess Snoballs and a Coke, and got directions from the kid behind the counter: "Go right straight up the road here, you'll cut 494 . . ."

He jammed the Snoballs into his face as he drove, chewing mindlessly through the sugar and chocolate--they tasted pink--and threw the packaging out onto the highway. The body in the back seemed to glow in the dark; he had to get rid of her. Had to.

That, it turned out, was as simple as the killing.

He cut I-494 south of St. Paul and took it back west, eventually finding his way to the Ford Bridge over the Mississippi. He parked at the end of the bridge, looked both ways, then carried the garbage sack out over the water and dumped the body into the Mississippi. He started to let the bag go with it, but caught it at the last minute. It was too dark to see the body hit, but it would soon be going over the dam.

And on the way back to Neumann's car, he realized what he'd done. He'd faked a suicide. She was certainly moody enough, dark enough. Lonely. Perhaps he could help the idea along.

He drove Neumann's car back to his own, took the groceries out, along with the spade, put them in the trunk of his car, then drove the car back to the bridge and left it parked illegally on Mississippi Boulevard. Then he started walking. Four miles to his own car. Four miles in the rain.

But he needed the time anyway--the time to think. Life was becoming complicated. He hadn't had any choice with Neumann, but he'd now done something he'd always carefully avoided in the past.

He'd killed somebody close to himself. The cops could stand in her office doorway and see his.

As he walked back, he began to weep again. Life was cruel. Unfair. A man like himself . . .

James Qatar walked along, snuffling in the dark and the rain.

And he thought about the friends of James Qatar, before tonight snugly buried on the hillside above the creek. Released now. He wondered if they would come to see him.

Chapter
11.

LUCAS GOT UP early, kissed Weather goodbye, and went to the telephone. The police in New Richmond knew the dentist used by Nancy Vanderpost, and the cop who answered the phone volunteered to run across the street to see if he had X rays of her fillings.

Next Lucas called Marcy, who was just out of bed. Del had suggested that there might be something special, or peculiar, about the drawings that were publicly posted, rather than mailed to the victim. Lucas told Marcy to get somebody prying into Beverly Wood's history. The killer, he thought, was back there somewhere.

He called Del and made arrangements to pick him up again, and while he was talking, got a beep of an incoming call. He rang off Del and took the incoming call: The New Richmond cop was calling from the dentist's office. The dentist had X rays, and was offering to scan and e-mail them immediately.

Lucas gave the dentist his e-mail address, got the dentist's phone number, then called Larry Lake at Lake's cell phone number. Lake answered after a single ring: "McGrady decided last night that he wanted one more scan across the bottom of the hill. We think we found another grave. A seventh one. So we're doing another strip."

"Jesus. You sure it's a seventh? Anything come up yet?"

"They're just scraping the leaves off now. These crime guys are pretty fussy about how it's dug."

"Okay. See you in a bit."

He called Del back and told him about the seventh, then called Rose Marie. "We've got a seventh grave."

"Oh, boy. I'll tell you, the governor called first thing this morning. He wants a federal-state-local task force working on it."

"We're already moving slow enough."

"I suggested that he set up a federal-state task force to examine the forensic evidence, which is most of what we've got, and to coordinate between the local agencies."

"Tell me what that means," Lucas said.

"It means that we stay independent, but we send Xeroxes of everything to the task force, if there is a task force. But if there is a task force, it probably won't get started for a few days, so if we really want to look good . . ."