"Guy called-a McGrady? He gave me a cell phone number, said you should call him when you got back."

"All right." Lucas got a can of soup out of the cupboard, dumped it in a microwave-safe bowl, stretched some cling wrap over the bowl, and stuck it in the microwave for two minutes. Then he dialed McGrady's cell phone; McGrady answered on the first ring.

"You know that first skull we pulled out of the ground?"

"Yeah?"

"We're down to the skeletal bones and so on. First of all, it's definitely a female. And we found the hyoid. It's in two pieces, and the break looks like it happened at the time of death. It's not a new break."

"So she was strangled."

"I'll let the medical examiner figure it out, but I'd bet on it," McGrady said.

"Check the others, if you find more."

"We're gonna find more," McGrady said. "We've got two more skulls coming up now."

LUCAS GOT THE soup out of the microwave, stirred it, stuck it back in for another two minutes, and called Rose Marie to fill her in. He told her about Marshall, and she said, "You better keep an eye on him."

"Yeah. But it's his case, in a way. He put the file together."

"Sounds like he might be a little bit of a loose cannon, though," she said. "He can watch, but keep him out of trouble."

HE REPEATED THE story to Weather as he was eating the soup. She dragged a chair around to sit behind him, and put an arm on his shoulder. "You look… forlorn."

"You should've heard that guy," Lucas said. "He sounded like somebody was… torturing him. Plucking his eyeballs out or something."

"Breaking his heart," Weather said.

They stayed up talking, since Weather wasn't scheduled to operate the next morning; talked about Marshall, about the killer, about the graveyard in the rain. Sat close together; eventually found their way back to the bedroom. Making a baby, Lucas thought later, is something you can do even after a day spent digging up a graveyard.

Maybe even a good time to do it.

10

THE TELEVISED DISPLAY of his drawings had been a hammer blow. As he sat in his office, peering into the depths of his computer, James Qatar would turn each and every time he heard footsteps in the hallway. He possessed a level of courage, but he was not immune to fear. The building was nearly empty during the study term, and the shoe heels of every passerby echoed through his office.

He was waiting for the police. He'd seen the television show on forensic science, how the police could track a killer with a single hair or a flake of dandruff or the imprint of a gym shoe. He knew much of that was exaggeration, but still: It produced a vision.

Qatar was an old-movie buff, and in his vision saw broad-shouldered police thugs with bent noses and yellow-tan woolen double-breasted suits and wide, snap-rimmed hats. They'd have eyes like bloodhounds and they'd jam into the doorway and then one would mutter to the others, "That's him! Get him!" He'd stand up and look around, but there'd be no place to run. One of the cops, a brutal man with dry twisting lips, would pull a pair of chrome handcuffs from his pocket…

The scene was all very retro, very thirties, very movie stylish-but that was the way James Qatar saw it happening.

Never happened.

The same night that he'd seen the drawings on television, he'd driven himself in a panic to a CompUSA, where he'd bought a package of ZIP disks and a new hard drive. At his office, he'd locked the door, dumped all of his lectures to the new ZIPs, then stripped the hard drive out of his computer. He also dug out every ZIP disk in the place, except those he'd bought that morning-some of the disks were unused, but he was taking no chances-and put them in his briefcase with the old hard drive.

He took an hour fussing with Windows, reinstalling it on the new drive, then began the task of reading his lecture files back in. The whole process would take time, but he got started. When he ran out of patience, he headed home, carrying his briefcase.

At home, he smashed the old hard drive, extracted the disks, and cut them to pieces with metal shears. He used the same shears to shred the ZIP disks. He could have dumped the mess into the garbage safely enough, but he was both frightened and meticulous. He put all the pieces in a sack, drove south down the Mississippi, found a private spot, and tossed the sack into the viscous brown water.

That was that. Let the cops come now, he'd thought, and do all their forensic work on the computer. They'd find nothing but a pristine drive and the usual academic software. No Photoshop, no photo files. Nothing but a bunch of paintings in a series of PowerPoint lectures.

THE COPS NEVER came. Qatar busied himself reinstalling software on the new drive, rebuilding his art files from the ZIP disks. He stayed off the porn websites, put away his drawing instruments. An overdue tidying-up; a good time to lie low, and perhaps do a little maintenance on his career.

A new book, perhaps. He'd been toying with the idea of a book on ceramics. He even had a title: Earth, Water, Fire and Air: The Ceramic Arts Revolution in the Upper Midwest, 1960… 1999.

He bought a notebook and made some notes, and made more notes on his office whiteboard. Good for the image, he thought. Nobody here but us intellectuals.

THE ONE FLY in this intellectual ointment was Barstad. She kept calling, distracting him. He'd destroyed all the images of her, but now found that under the pressure of the obvious danger of detection, his mind kept going to her.

The imp of the perverse, isn't that what Poe called it? The irrepressible impulse to do harm to oneself? He had put off another meeting with her, but that night had experienced the most intense fantasies involving Barstad, a camera, and his art.

All his work to this point had involved grafting women's faces to images from the 'Net. Now, it occurred to him, he didn't have to do that. He could get an image of a woman doing anything he wished-at least, he hadn't yet found anything that she wouldn't do-and create a genuinely unique work. An original. He needed to work with the idea. He needed to manipulate the woman to create a new vision.

His drawings continued to come up on the television with the better parts obscured-the TV stations couldn't seem to get enough of them-but after a day went by, and no cops came…

He began to feel safe.

Nobody knew.

If he was careful, he thought, he could begin working again. He began by making another trip to a CompUSA, where he bought a cheap laptop. That night, when Rynkowski Hall had gone dark, when even the janitors had gone home, he walked down the hall to Charlotte Neumann's office and slipped the door lock with a butter knife. All the locks could be done the same way; the professors knew it, as did the brighter undergraduates.

Neumann's office was a simple cube, with a bookcase along one wall. Her copy of Photoshop 6 was in the top left corner, and he lifted it off the shelf, pulled the door closed behind himself, and returned to his office. The installation took no time at all; in an hour, he was walking out of the building. He'd known Rynkowski Hall all of his life, all the nooks and crannies and hiding places. He would hide the computer after each day's work, he thought, and never again contaminate his daily work…

BUT THE NEXT day brought bigger trouble; a dirty day, a grinding, bitter drizzle pounding down. Late in the afternoon, he'd gone down to Neumann's office on a routine errand-classes were about to resume, and a student who didn't have the proper prerequisites had asked permission to attend one of his classes. Qatar simply needed the permission form. Neumann's door was open, and she was sitting at her desk. He knocked on the door frame and said, "Charlotte, I need-"