SHE ’D MADE SOME kind of cheese dish with garlic. Qatar liked garlic when he was eating it, but an hour later, after another rugged round of sex, he could smell it in his own sweat, and in Barstad’s sweat mingled with his; he touched his stomach and found it cool and wet.
The sexual education of Ellen Barstad might not be the lark that he’d assumed it would be, Qatar thought. He was in her bathroom again, washing. His penis had gone past the tingling stage: It hurt. This was their fourth time together, if the first unsuccessful bedding was counted. He was beginning to feel the pressure.
The second time together, they had watched a pornographic movie and then tried some of the more modestly deviant practices. The third time, they had moved on. Nothing truly advanced, Qatar thought, though it was as advanced as he’d ever managed.
This time, Barstad’s wrists were tied to the head of the bed with two of his old, too-wide neckties. “James,” she called. She was waiting.
“Good God,” he said under his breath. He knew the tone. His face seemed a little pale, a little drawn, in the bathroom mirror. He didn’t have another one in him, he thought. He turned the water off and went back to the bedroom. Barstad lay flat on the bed, her legs spread slightly, her arms over her head; her eyes were half closed, her face slack. The woman seemed to have no limit.
“Could I get a drink of water before the next one?” she asked.
“My dear, I don’t think there will be a next one, not today,” he said. “I feel like I’ve been pushed through a wringer.”
A wrinkle appeared on her forehead. “What’s a wringer?”
“You know, for wet clothes.”
“What?”
She’d never heard of a wringer, Qatar thought. Too young. He looked down along her body: It was perfect. Everything that he had always thought he’d wanted.
Except.
He was beginning to suspect that what he’d always wanted wasn’t sex; that his particular streak of insanity—he called it that, was comfortable with the word—needed resistance, maybe even a little disgust. An hour earlier, he’d been looking down at the spinal groove in the back of her neck. His hands had ached for her neck. He’d almost done her then—would have, if he’d had the rope. The next time, he’d bring it.
Over the next couple of days, before they got together again, he would think about it, he would see if the killing passion returned. And maybe the thing with Aronson’s body would blow over. She was long dead; there could be no clues—they hadn’t found anything else . . . .
ELLEN BARSTAD WATCHED him thinking about her. Maybe she was pushing too hard—but once she got into it, she found it hard to stop. There were so many . . . her girlfriend called them “pickles.” Little interesting variations, like crazy quilting: You do this and then you do that. Qatar, on the other hand, was basically like all the men she’d known: He just wanted to bang away, and then nap until he could get up again, and then bang away some more. She wanted to try this and then that and then the other thing, to see how it all felt. Was there anything wrong with that? She thought not.
Qatar was being a prig about the whole thing. Maybe, she thought, it was time to find somebody younger. Actually, if she could find somebody completely unformed, maybe a seventeen-year-old, somebody who’d actually be grateful . . . After all, this wasn’t that difficult, was it? All of it was in the books.
“So you’re going home?” Barstad asked.
“Yes. I’m really busy. I’ve been here for two hours.”
“I thought we were going to do the Ping-Pong paddles again today.”
He had to laugh. “Slipped my mind,” he said. Then: “It’s all right to slow down, Ellen. We’re not on a time clock.”
“I suppose,” she said, disappointment in her voice. She rubbed her feet together. “You sure you don’t want a little suck?”
“Ellen . . .” He really did hurt; but how often do you get this kind of offer? Sometimes, he thought, you’ve got to go with common sense. “Okay. But you must take it easy.”
WHEN HE GOT home two hours later, thoroughly used, he turned on the television and went into the kitchen for some Froot Loops. He was eating and reading a two-week-old copy of The New Yorker when he heard the television announcer talking about drawings and murder and that the images might not be appropriate to children.
He knew what they were, even without looking or listening. He didn’t want to believe it; he pushed to his feet so abruptly that milk sloshed out of the bowl onto the magazine.
In the living room, he caught the sight of one of his drawings in the fraction of a second before the cameras cut away, like the quick flash of a queen of hearts in a riffled deck of cards. The reporter was saying something, but he couldn’t seem to make out the words. Then the camera cut away from the reporter, and one after another, a set of his images flashed on the screen, finally ending with a drawing of Aronson.
“. . . police looking for the artist who drew these sexually charged images . . .”
He stood unbelieving, aghast. He’d never let Aronson take home any of the images. He’d shown her this one—it was sexy, but not pornographic—to impress her with his skills. He remembered throwing it aside in his office. He didn’t remember seeing it again.
“She took it,” he said aloud, to the television. “She stole it from me. It wasn’t hers! It was mine!”
He would go to prison, he thought. Nobody would ever understand. He watched until the drawings went away, and the reporter—a slender blonde, he thought, who might be interesting—moved on to politics.
“Prison,” he said. An announcement. His career in ruins. They’d lead him out of the building in chains: He could see it in his mind’s eye, long rows of mocking former colleagues and their harridan wives, in a gantlet, and he’d walk down between them enduring their smirks and superior smiles. They would put him in denim shirts and jeans, with a number on his shirt, and he would be locked in a cell with some redneck who’d rape him.
He thought of suicide—really, the only way out. Jumping, he thought. The feeling of flying, and then nothing at all. But he was afraid of heights. He didn’t even like to stand too close to a window.
A gun. Tighten the finger, and nothing . . . But that’d be really messy, and would destroy the side of his head. Too much. Hanging himself, that was out: He’d suffer. He could imagine the pain, clawing at the rope at the last minute, trying to pull himself up. . . . No.
Pills. Pills were a possibility if he had time to accumulate some. He could go to Randy. Randy could get as much as he needed, barbiturates. That’d be the way to go. Simply sleep, never to awake.
A tear rolled down his cheek as he thought about his mother’s distress when his body was found. He dropped into the easy chair by the TV and closed his eyes, imagining it. And was suddenly touched by anger: The bitch wouldn’t miss him. She’d sell all his furniture, and the wine, and the carpets. She’d cash his life insurance, pathetic as it was, and she’d keep it all. He could see it plainly, as a vision: the inventory of his belonging, the clothes going into the trash—into the trash!—the furniture carried away on trucks and even pickups.
Anger swelled in his heart, and he pushed himself out of the chair and paced back to the kitchen, sobbed. Pounded a fist into the other palm, then stuffed his knuckles into his mouth and bit until he felt the skin break. She’d take it as a victory: She’d outlasted him.
Well, fuck her. Fuck her. He shouted it at the walls: “FUCK HER.”
So what to do? He sat down again, stared at the box of Froot Loops. He’d enjoyed making his drawings and he’d known right from the start that he’d be in trouble if he were found out. So he’d been secretive. He still had some of the images stored on the computer at school, but he could get rid of them.
He sighed, and calmed himself. Things weren’t completely out of control. Not yet. He’d have to get busy, get cleaned up, just in case.
His mind skipped back to his mother: bitch. He couldn’t believe her pleasure at his suic
ide. Couldn’t believe it. There wasn’t any doubt about it: The clarity of his vision carried the unmistakable scent of the truth. They hadn’t had much to say to each other for five years, but she could show him enough loyalty to regret his passing.
More tears gathered at the corners of his eyes. Nobody loved him. Not even Barstad—she just wanted the sex.
“I’m alone,” he said. His hand hurt, and he looked down at his knuckles. They were bleeding, badly; how had that happened? He was bewildered by the blood and pain, but he could also feel the anger gathering. “I’m all alone.”
6
THE SKY WAS churning, but it was neither snowing nor raining when Lucas made it down to City Hall. He’d had too much coffee, and he stopped at the men’s room; Lester, the deputy chief for investigations, was facing into a urinal when Lucas stepped inside and parked next to him. “What do you think about the mayor?” Lester asked.
“Gonna be some changes,” Lucas said.
“Don’t see any way that Rose Marie’ll be reappointed,” Lester said gloomily. “I’ll probably get stuck out in the weeds somewhere.”
“So quit, get a state job, and double-dip. Two pensions are better than one.”
“I sort of like it here.” Lester shook a couple of times, zipped up and walked over to a sink, and turned on the water. “What are you going to do? Stay on?”
“That’d be tough,” Lucas said. “A little depends on who gets the top job.”
“I’ll tell you what, there’s a lot of calculation going on today,” Lester said. “People standing around talking. The bullshit machine is running overtime.”
“Always happens,” Lucas said, zipping up and moving to the next sink. “How many chiefs you been through?”
“Nine,” Lester said. “Rose Marie was the ninth. But it was a lot easier to make the change on the first four or five, when I was sitting in a squad with a flashlight and a doughnut.”
DEL AND MARCY were waiting in the new office. “Swanson and Lane are over at the Cheese-It, trying to find somebody who might have seen Aronson with Bruce Willis,” Marcy said. She handed Lucas a photograph of the actor. “We downloaded a picture of Willis from the net, and we’re gonna have it redrawn, and sort of generalized, with the long black coat. Put it out in the papers.”
Lucas snapped the photo with his fingertip and said, “That’s good. Get it going. How about the lists?”
“We got Anderson to set up a computerized sorting program. We type in lists for each woman and push a button and it finds matches. So far, we don’t have any. But we do have something else.”
“What?”
“We have nine women calling in—count ’em, nine—saying they got these drawings in the mail.”
“Nine?”
“Over three years. Five of them saved the drawings. I’ve got a couple of squads running around right now, picking up the drawings, and four of the women are coming in this afternoon to talk to me and Black. We’re probably gonna have to go out for the others. They can’t get away from their jobs so easy.”
“If we got nine, then there are probably twenty more,” Lucas said.
“We’re also getting a little more media space than we thought. There hasn’t been much good crime news lately, so CNN and Fox picked up on the drawings from the local stations last night, and they’re showing them every fifteen minutes all day.”
“So I can go home and take a nap?”
“No. You and Del are going to six ad agencies. Gonna look in the art department for buzzcut guys with long dark coats. Also, you got a call from a Terry Marshall—he’s a sheriff’s deputy from over in Menomonie, in Wisconsin. Dunn County. He’s hot to talk. And a guy named Gerry Haack who wants you to call back right away.”
Del said, “I’ve got the list of ad agencies. We can walk to them.”
“Let me make the calls, and we’ll go,” Lucas said.
HE CALLED HAACK first. “What?”
“You told those guys who I was,” Haack screamed. The scream was followed by two rattling whack s, as though Haack had banged the receiver against a wooden wall. “They’re gonna kill me. I’m gonna lose my job.”
“I didn’t tell them anything,” Lucas said bluntly. “I asked if Aronson was on the corner, and they said no. Then they asked who told me that, and when I wouldn’t say, they guessed. And guess who they thought of first?”
“Goddamnit, Davenport, you gotta tell them I wasn’t the one. They’re gonna pull my nuts off,” Haack shouted.
“You’ve been hanging out with the wrong people,” Lucas said. “Your speeder friends might pull your nuts off, but these guys, they’re not bad guys. They might give you a little shit, but that’s about all.”
“Goddamnit, Davenport.”
“And Gerry . . . if you call back, make sure you know what you’re talking about, okay? This worked out, no problems. They even gave me a little help. But bad information is usually worse than no information, because we waste time chasing it. Think you can remember that?”
“Goddamnit . . .”
Lucas hung up, looked at the slip for the Dunn County cop, and poked in the number. A woman answered on the first ring. “I’m returning a call from Terry Marshall,” Lucas said.
“I’m afraid he’s gone for the day,” the woman said. “Who’s calling?”
“Lucas Davenport. I’m a deputy chief over in Minneapolis.”
“Oh. Okay. Terry’s on his way there now. I think he’s looking for you.”
“You know what it’s about?”
“Nope. I just got a note. Says if I need to get him, call your office, he expects to be there by noon unless there’s a problem with the snow. He’s driving.”
“There’s snow?”
“Around here there is; it looks like a blizzard. You can see it on the radar all the way to Hudson. . . . Must be past you guys.”
“Yeah, it’s past here. . . . I’ll keep an eye out for your guy.” He dropped the phone on the hook and went to get Del. As they were leaving, Marcy got off the phone and said, “I just talked to Mallard in Washington. He says the shrinks are looking at the drawings and pulling on their beards, but don’t expect anything before tomorrow.”
COOL SPRING DAY, the air damp, walking across town, looking at all the muddy cars, eighty-thousand-dollar Mercedes-Benzes that resembled melting mudbergs, and at the women with their red noses and cheeks and plastic boots. “Kind of interesting, having Marcy as a coordinator,” Del said, as he hopped over an icy puddle at a corner curb.
“Could be chief someday, if she works things right,” Lucas said, hopping after him. “If she’s willing to put up with some bullshit.”
“Hate to see her go for lieutenant,” Del said. “She’d wind up stuck away somewhere, property crime or something. They’d start pushing her through the rounds.”
“Got to do it, if you want to go up,” Lucas said.
“You didn’t do it,” Del said.
“Maybe you didn’t notice, but I never went up until I pulled a political job out of my ass,” Lucas said.
THE SIX AD agencies took the rest of the morning; hip, smart people in sharp clothes, all with a touch of color, the people looking curiously at the cops. Lucas, in his straight charcoal suit, felt like a Politburo member walking in a flower garden. They showed pictures of Willis in Pulp Fiction, and got shaking heads at four of the agencies, raised eyebrows at two others. They looked at the possibilities presented by these two agencies, without any personal contact, and agreed that they were possible but unlikely.
One was a kid, the right size and shape, but probably too young—his personnel jacket said he was twenty-two, a summer graduate of the University of Minnesota–Morris. His winter coat was a dark blue hip-length parka, and his boss had never seen him in anything else. “Never in a topcoat,” she said. “He’s pretty country for a topcoat.”
Lucas nodded. “So thanks,” he said.
“What should I do?” she asked. “If he’s being investigated . . .”
<
br /> “Don’t do anything,” Lucas said. “Wouldn’t be right; the chances of his being involved in anything are pretty slim.”
Outside, Del said, “Didn’t Aronson come from out there somewhere? Like Morris?”
“No, she was from Thief River,” Lucas said.
“That’s out there.”
“Del, Thief River is about as close to fuckin’ Morris as we are to fuckin’ Des Moines, for Christ’s sakes.”
“Excuse my abysmal fuckin’ ignorance,” Del said.
The second possibility was the right age, and he had a dark topcoat, but the hair and body shape were wrong. The agency chief said the man never had a buzzcut, always the ponytail. They thanked him and left.
“This sucks,” Lucas said.