"You think he could kill his mother?"

"The gravedigger could because he's crazier'n hell," Lucas said. "But we saw him over at the ME's office and he was pretty fucked up. Marshall had to hold him."

"I'm always pleased when strong men allow themselves to show a little tenderness," Marcy said to Marshall.

"Fuck you, little lady," Marshall drawled. He'd caught on to Marcy's act. "I just patted him on the back."

"What happened with Randy?"

"We ran into this officious little prick…" Lucas told her the rest of the story, while Del and Marshall found chairs.

"Gotta get back to him," Marcy said. "He's still got the key."

"I know, I know… Goddamnit, it looked like it was gonna be easy. Instead, it's like counting votes in Florida."

A lot seemed to be happening, but there didn't seem much to do-the trouble was sweeping them along, and they couldn't get a handle on it. "So what do we do?" Del asked Marcy.

"There're plenty of people to talk to down at St. Pat's."

"Ah, shit," Del said. "All right, I'll do it."

"I'm gonna go talk to Harmon," Marshall said. "Maybe the computers will spit something out."

"They did, this morning. Those names Ware gave us-remember those-we got two hits. One guy for dope, possession of cocaine after a traffic stop, the other guy for crim sex III, problem with his wife. I pulled the mug shots, and they do sorta look like our picture."

Lucas shook his head. "Keep them in mind, but they're not our guy. Not even Ware thought so. I'll go on down to St. Pat's with Del, and we'll hook up with the other guys. He's down at St. Pat's."

THE REST OF the afternoon was tedious. They all stopped at two o'clock to catch a cup of coffee and a sandwich, then went back-looking for professors, talking with students, pushing to find friends of Helen Qatar. At the end of the day, they'd struck out.

"I got one possible, an anthropologist who took drawing lessons so he could draw signs and statues and shit like that. He's a little crazy and he looks sorta right, but he claims he got his Ph. D. from USC six years ago and never set foot in Minnesota before then… and other people in his department say that's right," Del said.

"Better'n me," Swanson said. "I didn't find anybody."

"I got a guy who looked like a very distant possibility, but, uh…" Black turned away and said, "I need another sandwich."

"But what?" Lucas asked. "What about the guy?"

"He sorta came on to me," Black said. "He, uh, isn't oriented toward women at all-and I got that confirmed from his department."

"Maybe something repressed," Swanson said. "Maybe when he's pushing fudge, all he's thinking about is killing women."

They all sat chewing for a moment, then Del started to laugh, and then both Lucas and Swanson. Black, who was gay, said, "Fuck all of you bigots."

JUST BEFORE THEY quit, Lucas said to Del, "You and Cheryl are coming for lobsters tonight, right?"

"Hell yes. Gotta keep this mass-murder shit in proportion."

20

"IHAD NO idea that you could show this depth of emotion, even about the death of a parent," Barstad said as they left the ME's office. "It's a side of you that I haven't seen before, James. I'm encouraged and…"

And blah-blah-blah, Qatar thought, tuning her out. There were still tears in his eyes, crouched at the corners, but they were quickly drying.

His mother. There had been some good times: Learning to ride a bicycle. Christmases come and gone. The first drawing materials she'd bought for him, and how, when he'd wanted to learn to paint, she'd gone down in the basement, and with his father's tools and a bunch of boards, laboriously put together a professional-quality easel. His first drawing lessons; his first life lessons; his first live naked woman, a redhead.

And some bad times.

He could remember Howard Cord, a history professor who wore red bow ties and seersucker suits, and smelled of tobacco and chalk, and how he would come over late in the evening, after he'd been sent to bed, and bang his mother's brains loose. She must've known that he could hear it all, in his bedroom right above hers, all the groaning and mumbled pleas for this or that. Must have suspected that he'd lifted a floorboard and cut a hole in a heating vent so he could watch. Watch her doing all that…

And not just Howard Cord; there had been ten or fifteen men from the time his father left, and then died, and he went off to school. Academics, mostly, his mother passed from hand to hand through the University of St. Patrick's and then St. Thomas; a priest or two, he thought.

But they were only bad times. In analyzing his own craziness, which did not come without psychological penalty, he really couldn't blame his mother's galloping sexuality for his problems. They went much further back. He remembered still the intense pleasure of burning ants with a magnifying glass when he was not yet in grade school; remembered even the acrid scent of the little puffs of smoke. He drowned gerbils in grade school, put them in the aquarium during recess, while Mrs. Bennett was out in the schoolyard; and he still remembered the quiet of the schoolroom, and the distant shouts of the other children, barely audible through the windows, and the frantic paddling of the gerbils. They looked like they might last a little too long, so he pushed them under, both of them, one at a time, and watched their slowly diminishing struggles through the glass walls…

He'd already known enough to hide himself and his impulses. He'd slipped out of the room in time to have a few words with the teacher on the playground, to establish his presence there.

And when the gerbils had been found, he'd happily helped plan the funeral.

His personal craziness had been there all along, the cross he must bear. Bear it he did. His mother was not to blame.

"… Blah-blah-blah?" she asked.

He hadn't heard any of it. He had, in fact, brought her along as a prop. His woman, should any of the cops think there might be something odd about him. They had been all over campus. "What?"

"What now? There's not much to do until you know when… she'll be released," Barstad said.

"I don't think I can deal with it right now," he said. "I'll call the funeral home this afternoon. Let them handle it. We weren't religious, so there won't be any church services." The tears were gone now. "Why don't we-I don't know-should I take you home?"

"We could walk around for a while."

"I haven't eaten. I don't know if I could eat," Qatar said "Maybe a little something."

They walked to the Pillsbury Building, went up the escalator and through the warren of shops in the skyway. "It's really like a Middle Eastern bazaar," Barstad said. They were in the back of a coffee shop, eating baklava and drinking strong coffee. "You could get exactly what we're eating and drinking anywhere between Istanbul and Cairo, in the same circumstances, except the people are polite there and the coffee isn't as good."

"Never been there, the Middle East," Qatar said vaguely. Then: "Have you ever noticed that men with a certain shape of skull don't look good with high collars? They need flat collars?"

"What?"

"Would I look right in a turtleneck, do you think? Or would it come so far up my neck that my face would look like… that I'd look like, like a Renaissance burgher?" He crossed his hands, thumbs under his chin as though he were strangling himself, to show her the line of the sweater. "It frames the face, you see, but it also isolates it."

"I see," she said. "Well, if the person were tanned or sunburned, I think there's a possibility that the head would look wooden. You'd look like a wood carving on a pedestal."

"Hmm," he said. Actually, that sounded interesting. "Let's walk some more," he said.