Chosen Prey (21 page)

Helen Qatar's office was at the far end of the building, behind a door with a translucent glass panel and a gold-leaf number 1. A heavyset secretary was reading a newspaper when Lucas stepped inside. She looked up and said, "Are you Mike?"

"No, I'm Lucas."

"Do you work with Mike?"

"No, I'm a police officer. I was hoping to speak with Miz Qatar."

"That would be Mrs. Qatar," the secretary said. She leaned toward an old-fashioned intercom, pushed a button, and said, "Mrs. Qatar, there's a cop here to see you."

A perfectly tinny voice came back: "Is he good-looking?"

The secretary looked at Lucas for a second, then said, "He looks like he probably cleans up pretty good, but he also looks like he's got a mean streak."

"Sounds interesting. Send him in."

Inside, Helen Qatar was also reading a newspaper. She had once been a very pretty blonde, Lucas thought, but her fine skin was now a dense map of tiny wrinkles. Her eyes were a perfect china blue behind a pair of small rectangular reading glasses. "Close the door," she said. "You're Lucas Davenport."

Lucas said, "Yes" and closed the door.

Qatar put down the newspaper and said, "Denise and I always read our newspapers at the same time in different rooms. She takes the news rather seriously." Lucas didn't know what to make of the remark, and smiled politely. Qatar took the reading glasses off and put them on the desk. "I talked to that nice gay man you sent over earlier. Is this about the same topic?"

Lucas frowned. "Black told you he was gay?"

"No, no, I surmised it. Is he still in the closet?"

"Technically. Everybody knows, nobody mentions it. Makes life easier."

"Do you have a lot of homophobes in the police department?"

"Probably about the usual number."

"Ah. Well. Is there something else I can help you with?"

"I can't say, really. Black explained all this about the drawings to you, and if you've been reading the paper you know about the burial ground down in Goodhue County."

"It's appalling," she said, turning her chin up.

"We believe the drawings and the killings are connected. We think that the killer has some special relationship with Catholics. We have one witness who might actually have met him, who said that he may be a priest--and this was without knowing that an unusual number of these victims were Catholic."

"Why would a priest kill Catholics?"

"Well, it could be something very simple--perhaps the overwhelming number of people he meets are Catholics. But we don't know that he's a priest: There's just one guy saying that, and he's not exceptionally reliable. There are other things that make it unlikely. . . . We think he may at one time have been associated with a state university, which would be unusual for somebody who not much later became a priest."

"Unless he already was, and was doing advanced study," Qatar said.

"We don't think that was the case. We think he was still pretty young. Anyway, what I'm here for--we're intensely interviewing these people who got the drawings, and we're researching the pasts of all the people who were killed. We're looking at address books and checkbooks and Christmas cards and everything we can find. Your name has come up four times. A lot of other names have come up twice, but you're the only four-time winner. So you have something . . . something in common with the killer."

That brought a moment of silence, then Qatar said, "Good Lord."

"Yeah. I'm sorry to put it that way, but there it is," Lucas said.

"But it may be something simple, like you said with the priest and the idea of killing Catholics. I'm a Catholic, and I know a lot of Catholics because of this school. Not all of my friends are Catholic, but most of them are, so that's probably why I came up four times."

"Probably. But there might be some other connection. I'm nowhere near smart enough to ask you exactly the right question that would give us the answer, so I was hoping you could mull it over and see if you could come up with something."

"Do you think he's connected to the university here?"

"We have no idea. None of the murdered women were, of the ones we've identified."

"Hmm."

"Since you came up four times, and you're an art museum, and he's an artist, apparently . . . although he may also be a photographer."

"We're not really an art museum," she said. "I mean, we don't have much in the way of paintings or sculpture."

"Really? I've never been here before. I assumed because of the name . . ."

"We have thirty thousand glass paperweights and ten million dollars' worth of Mayan pottery," Qatar said.

"Ah." But he was puzzled. "An unusual collection."

She smiled and said, "Our first graduate to become a bishop went off to care for the Indians in Mexico. When he died, the college got his money, which was considerable--he came from a rich milling family--and his pots. We couldn't hardly take one and throw the rest out. And eventually, people figured out that we had the best collection of authentic documented Mayan pots in the country, so we brought them out of the basement and now all sorts of scholars come to look at them."

"The paperweights?"

"Same sort of thing. Jemima Wells, whose son went to school here, left us one million dollars in cash back in 1948, and bequeathed additional funds to build this building, and also required that if we wanted the cash and the building, that we house her paperweight collection in perpetuity. We took the money. As it happens, the paperweights were a joke when we got them--they told terrible stories about us over at St. Thomas. But now we've gone full circle, and the thirty thousand paperweights are worth more than the Mayan pots. Scholars--"

"--come from all over to study them."

"Yes. They do. They shake them and watch the snow fall on the tiny villages."

Lucas stood up, took a card out of his card case, and handed it to her. "You will think about it?"

"Absolutely."

Lucas turned to go, then said, "Black showed you the drawings, I know. Did he show you a picture of the Aronson girl? She was not one of the Catholics, but she was from here in Minneapolis. She disappeared a year and a half ago."

"No. I only saw a couple of the drawings. Not the good ones, from what they say in the paper."

Lucas dug through the file, found the Aronson photo, and passed it across the desk. "This is the most recent photo we have of her."

Qatar put the reading glasses back on and peered at Aronson's photo. After a moment, she said, "A lot of young girls look alike to me now. They look so much the same . . . but I don't think I know her." She handed the photo back.

"Long shot," Lucas said. He was putting it back when he saw the Xeroxes of the Laura Winton photos. He fished a couple of them out. "How about these? It's possible that the killer took them himself."

Qatar said. "The killer took them?" She squinted at the top one, then shuffled once and looked at the next one. After a minute, she said, "No, I don't know her, I don't recall ever seeing her . . . but . . . Huh."

"What?"

"This background, the background here."

Lucas stepped around the desk to look over her shoulder. She had a finger on the rock wall in the background of the last of the photos.

"I thought it looked like it was along the river," Lucas said. "Here in town."

"I think it is. You know that big bronze statue of St. Patrick squashing a St. Thomas quarterback?"

"I thought it was a snake."

"Could be--they're easily mistaken. Anyway, I think this wall . . ." She tapped the photograph. "I think the end of this wall here is the beginning of the semicircular wall that goes out around the statue. It's on the south side of the statue as you come up toward it, along the bike path."

Lucas looked at the Xerox. "Really. You think?"

Chapter
12.

HELEN QATAR WALKED with Lucas down to the river. The ice was gone and a Corps of Engineers workboat was plugging along below them, a guy on the foredeck looking at the bank through binoculars. A cyclist went past, and, despite the cold, a redheaded jogger with bare tummy and a black jog bra. An eagle hung over the water, hunting for a tidbit.

The statue of St. Patrick looked as metallic as ever, staring blankly at the campus as though he'd forgotten something. He was, in fact, trampling on a snake; and the wall behind him was the wall in the photo.

"There," Lucas said to Qatar. "That little stack of rocks at the end of the wall. You were right."

"I can't see what possible good it will do," Qatar said.

"We have all these Catholics and now we've got a location. I don't know if he's associated with the college or if he just lives around here, but for some reason, they were here. You can almost see his shadow."

"An unusual thought for a policeman," Qatar said. "It could lead to poetry, or to country and western."

"God forbid," Lucas said, smiling at her. Then: "I can almost see the guy. One of the first women he killed said he looked like a movie star in an old movie, Day of the Jackal, about an attempted assassination of de Gaulle. The killer looked like the Jackal."

"That is grotesque, the coincidence is," Qatar said. "I'll have to rent the movie. You say it's old?"

"Sixties or seventies," Lucas said.

"Ah. I spent the fifties and sixties watching art films. They were very . . . bad."

Lucas laughed, and they walked companionably back toward the campus. At the corner of the Wells, Lucas said goodbye and started toward his car. Qatar called after him: "Mr. Davenport . . ."

Lucas turned. She was halfway up the walk to the museum, and now turned and walked back toward him. "I'm sure this has nothing to do . . . nothing to do with your case, but a professor in the art history department just committed suicide. Yesterday, or the night before."

"That's interesting," Lucas said, stepping back toward her. "What was his name?"

"It was a her."

"Oh." Not what he wanted. "Huh. A suicide?"

"She apparently jumped off the Ford Bridge. She didn't show up for work yesterday, and then they found her car on Mississippi Boulevard. They thought . . . I don't know what they thought, but then her body was seen in the river. The St. Paul paper had an article that said the body's condition suggested that she went over the dam."

"Okay. Did the story say anything about depression?" Lucas asked.

"Nothing like that," Qatar said. "My son works in the department, and he said that she was troubled. Quite unpopular. I don't know if that leads to suicide."

"I'll tell you something, Mrs. Qatar: For depressives, nothing can lead to suicide. You get ink on a shirt and decide the only answer is to kill yourself. Unpopularity would be more than enough."

"I'll leave that for you to work out," she said. "In the meantime, I'll try to think what I might have in common with this monster."

THE KILLER AND Aronson had been at St. Pat's, or at least along the bike path next to the St. Pat's campus. There hadn't been any bikes in the photo, which suggested to Lucas that they'd walked. If they were walking . . . they were on the wrong side of the campus to be casually shopping the college village. So they might well have a connection to the school.

He walked back to the truck and slipped the key in the ignition, paused, and then took out his cell phone. He got the number for the Ramsey County Medical Examiner from dispatch, and hooked up with an investigator named Flanagan.

"Can't tell you much, Lucas. We don't know exactly what killed her. She apparently went off the bridge fully dressed and in one piece, and then, after she went over the dam, she got caught up in some kind of tumbling current and it just beat the hell out of her. We kind of think that a massive blow to the head did the first real damage; looks like she hit a piece of abutment headfirst when she went over."

"Come on, Henry," Lucas said. "You're saying she dove off? Like saying goodbye with a big fuckin' swan dive? Nobody to watch? No audience?"

"No, I'm not saying that. I'm saying that somehow she smacked her head on something hard, and that might have been the first damage."

"You think suicide?"

"One of the things that weren't too damaged were her hands. No signs of defensive wounds. No blood in her car," Flanagan said.

"So are you carrying it as a suicide?"

"We're carrying it as unknown. I don't know if that'll change. Like I said, she was pretty torn up."

"Was she a big woman? Strong?"

"Large, but not especially strong. Pretty much a couch potato."

"Okay . . . but look, if you decide something different, give me a call."

"Is this about something?" Flanagan asked.

"I don't know."

"St. Paul has the file. We only got the body back last night, so everything is pretty intact. We notified a relative out in California . . . a sister."

HE WAS SUPPOSED to be rolling around town, and hadn't yet done much rolling. He looked at his watch, then called St. Paul and had the call transferred to Homicide. A detective named Allport took the call. "We don't want no davenports," he said. "We just got a new one, kind of a small classy-looking plaid with an ottoman."