THE ARONSON TEAM had been compiling names and addresses, and cross-checking them. Out of a couple of thousand names, they'd found forty-four matches, and were trying to check the matches. "The problem is, there's only one person who comes up more than twice, and that's Helen Qatar, who runs the Wells Museum over at St. Pat's. She comes up four times."

"Catholic school," Lucas said.

"Helen Qatar's a semisedentary sixty-five," Black said. "She couldn't strangle a fuckin' gerbil. Even if she could catch one."

"Still a whole bunch of Catholics."

Black lowered his voice to a whisper. "And guess what? The guy directing the investigation for the City of Minneapolis is a Catholic."

"Lapsed Catholic," Lucas said. As he looked through the sets of matches, he saw nothing that looked like a pattern. Finally he asked, "Who talked to Helen Qatar?"

"I did."

"Show her the pictures?"

"A couple-she didn't recognize the style. She's pretty… old. I didn't roll out any of the vaginal extravaganzas."

"She's in art and she's named four times, and she's a Catholic."

"You want me to talk to her again?"

Lucas thought for a moment, then said, "Nope. I'll go talk to her. Get me out into town."

ST. PATRICK'S UNIVERSITY was on the south side of Minneapolis, south of the Lake Street bridge along the Mississippi, and directly across the river from St. Thomas, its bitter intellectual, political, and athletic rival. Twenty buildings, mostly redbrick, sprawled along the west bank of the river under cover of six hundred oaks and a thousand maples, the maples replacing the elms that had dominated the campus before Dutch elm disease.

Lucas lucked into a metered parking spot a hundred yards from the Wells, got his file off the front seat, bought two hours of parking time, and walked across the street to the museum. The Wells was redbrick, a little newer than most. The floors inside were a shiny brown composite, but Lucas could hear the floorboards creaking beneath the brown stuff. It felt, he thought, like a college should.

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."