"You need a smoking gun."
"We've been so close in so many ways," Lucas said. "If we could find just one picture. One piece of clothing with blood on it. Anything…"
LUCAS GOT IN late the next morning, found Marshall already at the office. "I thought you might take a day or two off."
"Can't stay away," Marshall said. "But my ass is kicked."
"Lane wants you to call him at home," Marcy said to Lucas. "He left a voice mail, said call anytime."
Lucas called and Lane answered, his voice thick with sleep. "I just got to bed. I wound up chasing that Lo Andrews guy all over the metro," he said. "I finally caught up with him about the time the sun was coming up."
"He have anything?"
"Yeah. He was carrying a little coke and we took him down to Ramsey county jail. He's on hold until we get a statement. The bust is probably bad, though."
"Yeah, yeah. What happened?"
"He says he was with Randy the night Suzanne Brister was killed and that Randy ran out of money and so they took him to an ATM and he maxed out his card. Then he ran out of that, so they went back to Randy's place and they got a compact sound system and sold that on the street, and they ran out of that, so they dropped him at his place-but an hour later he was back with four hundred dollars that he said he took off some white dude."
"Yeah? You think it was Qatar?"
"I used our warrant and went over to the bank and we looked at Qatar's ATM use. He took four hundred dollars out of an ATM on Grand Avenue, about eight blocks from Randy's, at 12:38P. M. same night."
"Goddamnit, Lane."
"What can I tell you? I'm good," Lane said.
"You are good. You gonna nail this down?"
"I'd like to get a little sleep first, but we're gonna get with Lo Andrews's attorney at three o'clock this afternoon. Probably drop the charges on the drug bust, and get the statement."
When Lucas got off the line, Marshall, who'd taken up residence at Lane's desk, said, "Another brick?"
"A decent one. We can put Qatar eight blocks from Randy's house the night Suzanne Brister was killed. That's not all…"
He explained the rest of it, and Marshall said, "That's good, but you know what I'd do if I were Qatar's attorneys? I'd make the case that Qatar smoked pot, maybe even a lot of pot, and maybe used a little cocaine. He's an artist, right? So they say that's how he knew Randy. And that Randy was attracted to Qatar by the people Qatar knew-and that's how Randy met Neumann and Qatar's mother and all those other people. That Randy was the killer. We've got a dead woman, strangled in the style of all the others, in Randy's apartment, with his fingerprints all over the place, in blood, and he tried to shoot a cop when he busted out-"
"He was too young for the first ones."
"Well, who knows?" Marshall said. "To get like he is now, he must have been a monster when he was young. He would have been, what, twelve or thirteen when Laura disappeared? How many twelve-year-old killers do you think are running around the Cities?"
Lucas shrugged. "So you make a case. Do you believe it?"
"Of course not. For one thing, the guy was supposed to be dating Laura."
"If that's the guy who killed her," Lucas said.
"C'mon. We know who killed the girls. But I'm worried about a trial."
"Always worry about a trial," Lucas said. "But we're piling stuff up."
"Need a smoking gun, like your girlfriend says." Marshall said. "With everything else, if we had the gun, I'd be satisfied."
QATAR'S PRELIMINARY HEARING had been set for the following Monday. Nothing more turned up. Lab techs searched the debris tray on the furnace at the St. Pat's museum, found various bits and pieces of metal, but nothing that could be specifically identified as coming from clothing. Lane identified three cab trips from the general area of Qatar's house to the general area of Barstad's, but none of the drivers could identify Qatar as a passenger.
Lo Andrews made his statement, but, as an assistant county attorney pointed out, it was a statement by another heavy doper. Thirty cops were recruited to look inside every trash can and behind every fence within a half-mile of Barstad's. They found all kind of clothing and shoes, but none of it the kind that Qatar might have worn. It was all old and obviously abandoned, or was identified by the people who owned the trash cans.
"What if Qatar didn't do it?" Swanson asked.
"He did," Lucas said.
"I think we're in trouble," Marshall said. Marshall had begun to brood. "I'm not sure we should have taken him when we did," he said. "We could have thrown a net over him, done a full-court press. Sooner or later, he would have fucked up."
"By the time we might've done that, he'd already have spotted us," Lucas said. "And the longer we went with a full team on him, the more innocent he'd look."
MARSHALL STAYED IN town over the weekend. He got permission to enter Qatar's house under the warrant, and spent most of the time taking the house apart. He unscrewed every power outlet, dug through all the loose fiberglass insulation between the ceiling joists, looked up and down the chimney, and took the flue mechanism apart.
He called Lucas late Sunday afternoon. "You know what I got?"
"Something good?"
"I got a face full of glass splinters from the insulation, and I'm covered with soot. I look like I just crawled out of a Three Stooges movie, if somebody'd only hit me with a cream pie. There ain't nothing in the house."
"My fiancй is about to make some meat loaf with gravy and Bisquick biscuits," Lucas said. "Why don't you drag your sorry ass over here-we'll throw your clothes in the washer and give you something to eat."
"I'll do that," Marshall said.
MARSHALL LIKED THE food, and Weather liked Marshall.
"You know what we really wanted for Laura was not revenge," he told her. "All we wanted was justice. I don't think we're gonna get it. I think we're gonna get a lot of bureaucracy and treatment programs, and Qatar's probably gonna sue everybody in sight and get them all running around like chickens, and nobody's gonna want to hear about Laura. Nobody misses her but me and her folks and her family. She hadn't done anything; hell, she might've turned out to be a cook or something, though I think she woulda been better than that. But nobody misses her. If we could just get a little justice for her…"
"HE WAS JUST like all the good old guys back home," Weather told Lucas after Marshall left. Weather had grown up in a small town in northern Wisconsin. "They want to keep everything simple and right. I really like that, even if it's a fairy tale."
"Problem is, it is a fairy tale… at least mostly," Lucas said.
EARLY MONDAY MORNING, Lucas took a phone call at home from the county attorney's secretary: "Mr. Towson would like to talk to you as soon as possible, along with Marcy Sherrill. What would be a good time?"
"I'll come down right away-is he in now?"
"He's on his way. Would nine o'clock be okay?"
"That's fine. You'll call Marcy?"
Randall Towson, his chief deputy, Donald Dunn, and Richard Kirk, head of the criminal division, were waiting in Towson's office when Lucas and Marcy arrived. Towson pointed them at chairs and said, "The Qatar case. You know J. B. Glass is handling it?"
"I heard," Lucas said, and Marcy nodded.
"He's pretty good. We're wondering what the reaction would be if we talked to them about a plea-guilty to one count of second-degree with confinement at the mental hospital instead of Stillwater. He'd have to do his time if he were ever found competent."
"Uh, I think people would be pretty unhappy."
Kirk said, "But the guy's gotta be crazy, and our priority has to be to get him off the street. If we get the judge to do an upward departure, and he gets twenty, by the time he got out he'd probably be past it as a killer."