"He's a major asshole," Lucas said.

"I don't much give a shit about that. That's your problem," Marshall said. "My problem is, I want a name out of him. He gives me the name, and after that, he can get run over by a steamroller. But I want the name first."

"Did you look at that event over at St. Pat's?" Lucas asked.

"Yup. Copied out every one of Miz Qatar's names into a laptop, gave the disk to Harmon, and he ran them late last night," Marshall said. "Didn't come up with much-except that we figured out one more thing. They got a college alumni magazine called the Shamrock. Some pictures from this get-together were in there, and it was all these women out on a lawn and they were all wearing name tags. So if our guy was there, taking pictures, he could take a shot and know who the woman was, without even asking her name. Or even talking to her."

"Goddamnit. That doesn't help us much," Lucas said. "How many guys on your list?"

"Maybe a hundred and fifty. Harmon's running them against the sex-offender files right now."

Del called from Regions hospital: "They let me in to see Randy, and he is seriously fucked up. He makes a little goddamn noise once in a while, and that's it. His folks got a lawyer and they gave me some shit… I don't know, it's getting tangled up over here."

"Might as well come back," Lucas said.

"Yeah. Nothing's gonna happen today, unless he bites it."

"Allport says that's not much of a risk."

"I dunno," Del said. "The docs say he's got so many weird drugs in him that they're fighting withdrawal symptoms along with everything else. He's got heroin in him, cocaine, maybe some PCP-he was using inhalers… The little prick."

MARCY AND MARSHALL left for St. Paul, the first meeting of the interagency board on what the papers and TV stations were now calling the gravedigger case. The label was created by a Channel Eight anchorman, was picked up by Channel Three, which began using a graphic of a hillside grave with its stories, and finally by the papers. The named looked like it would stick.

After they'd gone, Lucas continued to read through the accumulating paper in the case, without any penetrating insights. When he went out for lunch at midday, he found the clouds had closed down again and a miserable cold drizzle was whimpering through the streets. Cold and damp, he loafed around City Hall, talking with Lester and Sloan, then went through the secret tunnel to the medical examiner's office and talked to an investigator there about strangulation.

At two o'clock, he was back in the office, when Weather called. "Why don't you invite the Capslocks and the Sloans over tomorrow night. We'll get some lobsters."

"All right. Short notice, though," he said.

"They never do anything. And it's been a while since we all got together."

"Who knows," he said. "Tomorrow night-maybe it'll all be over by then."

But he didn't really think so. The case felt like it was slowing down. Everything was pinned on Randy, and Randy had gone to never-never land.

18

THE KILLING OF the unnamed hooker at Randy Whitcomb's brought a temporary semblance of peace to Qatar's soul. He mentally replayed the scene every few minutes, especially the last part, when he hung over her and she began to quiver…

It's the killing, stupid.

He'd always thought it was the sex, that the killing was punishment for the sexual disappointments the woman had inflicted upon him. He knew better now. Any sexual practice he'd ever remotely considered he'd now tried with Barstad. He'd found it, ultimately, to be boring. It was the killing, he thought, and it felt fine -fine-to have that clarified.

He searched for a metaphor. His realization of the exact nature of the beast was, he decided, the psychological equivalent of the first taste of a great French white wine, properly cool, properly tart; a bit of an intellectual tangle, perhaps, but there was a wonderfully clear, clean response at the sensual level.

He wanted another one.

Barstad.

They were meeting twice a week and the sex had gone past strenuous, lurching off into the weeds of intricate variation. He was not so much entertained as amazed, he thought. The last time they met, he'd spanked her with the Ping-Pong paddles until her ass was fiery red, yet she seemed to feel that he'd done an inadequate job. The pain, she said, had been on the very periphery of her pleasure, rather than at the center, where it should have been. She sounded, he thought, like a French literary theorist writing on sex.

Today, he thought, things would be different. He had the starter rope in his back pocket when he arrived at her apartment, and a duffle bag and spade in the backseat of the car. He would bury her so far out in the countryside that she would never be found. If the police wanted to attribute her disappearance to the gravedigger, he thought, let them do it.

He no longer cared. The power was in him. He even enjoyed his new media appellation: "the gravedigger." All right. He whistled as the elevator took him up to Barstad's.

SHE WAS NUDE when she met him at the door: propped it open with one arm and posed, her eyelids drooping. "James," she said. "I've already started."

"I see that," he said. "And I've got a new movie," she said. "A DVD. I pushed the couch back so we could put the futon in front of the

TV."

Sex first, he thought. First the sex, and when he'd been emptied out of all the stray emotions that sex seemed to dissolve, he could better appreciate the clear, cool strangulation. There was, he thought, an aesthetic to it all.

They began with the movie and masturbation, moved on to oral sex, and then the intricacies. He found his mind wandering in the middle of it all, and he looked down at her neck below him and then around for his pants. They were out of reach, and he was unable to detach himself at the moment. He continued, looking down at her neck and the fine groove of her spine, thrilled already by what was coming…

She finished, and he did, and they lay side by side, her head on his shoulder. She always wanted a long second bout, had even urged him toward chemical reinforcement. He would have another opportunity with the rope. What, he thought, would it be like to strangle a woman who was at that moment in the throes of orgasm? Would she stop? Would he?

"James," she murmured into his neck, "I am going to make you very, very unhappy. If you want to punish me, I would accept that. But I want you to hear me out first."

He pulled back, said nothing. What was this?

"It's time to enter a new stage of exploration," she said. She'd always been formal about the sex, as though she were filling out a lab book. What would she do when she got to the end, when she'd exhausted all the possibilities? Build hot rods? Write Haiku? "I've been talking to a woman that I've known for several years. She has had some sexual relationships with other women, and we have decided that we would like to explore that together. Intergender sexuality."

He looked down at her, flabbergasted again. "You want to try women? Lesbianism?"

"Maybe the first time… but we've talked about it and I'd like you to meet her. We're discussing the possibility of the three of us… if you and she can be friends."

The three of them? He sat up. "You told her who I am?"

"Not exactly. Just that you were a professor. I had to do that much. She wanted to know your bona fides. She wouldn't have wanted to sleep with a street person, or a musician or something."

"You told her." He was enraged.

"Yes."

"Goddamnit, I told you I can't be brought into this. I teach at a Catholic school. My whole career, my whole livelihood…"