"Hope the motherfucker pushed that door open with his hand," Lucas said. "That's the way you'd do it-run right in there and push it back with your hand."

"Problem is, he's been here," Marshall said. "We got movies of it. If he hit the door with his hand, he could say he did it some other time."

"Yeah, but if there one's big brand-new print on the door, it'll be a brick. Goddamnit to hell, why didn't we get her out of the way? Why didn't we get her out?"

"Why'd he do it? This isn't anything like he did the others."

"It's like he did Neumann," Lucas said.

"If he did Neumann. That could be hard to prove by itself," Del said.

"Hey, who the fuck's side are you on?" Lucas asked, the anger surging up.

"I'm on your fuckin' side, but I'm thinking about the trial," Del snapped. "That's what I'm worried about. We've got Randy the coke freak, and we've got these unconnected killings at St. Pat's that are all close to him, but none of them are in the style of the gravedigger's, and what's worse…"

"What's worse?" Lucas snapped back.

"What's worse is, we had a guy watching him when he had to be over here killing her," Del said, jabbing a finger at Lucas. "How'd he do that, smart guy? What's gonna happen when they get that into court, with a second-man theory? If you take Randy out of the equation, we ain't got squat, and Randy has a good reason to tell us anything we want him to. You think Qatar's lawyer won't make a big deal out of that?"

"Ah, Jesus," Lucas said.

"That is what the lawyers will say," Marshall said. "We can't lose this guy. There's no way."

"We won't. Gonna hang the motherfucker," Lucas said.

THEY ALL STAYED, all the way through the crime-scene work, through the removal of the body, snarling at each other from time to time, all of them in dark moods. Lucas talked to Rose Marie twice, by phone, keeping her up to date, and to Marcy. When it seemed as if nothing new would be found at Barstad's, Lucas asked Del, "You got a car, right? Didn't you?"

"Yeah."

"Let's go on over to Qatar's house. They oughta still be working on it. Let's see what they got."

"I'll tell you one thing-he maybe cleaned up after himself pretty good over here, but he had blood on him when he left," Marshall said. "Bloody coat, bloody pants, bloody shoes-there's gotta be something."

ON THE WAY to Qatar's, Marshall seemed to shrink in the back. "You all right?" Lucas asked.

Marshall started talking, rambling. "My old lady died the second year we were married. She was pregnant at the time. Hit a bridge one day, there was some snow on the road, just a little bit. She was racing my sister to see which one was gonna have a kid first; they both got pregnant at the same time, and it was neck and neck… 'cept my old lady never got to the finish line."

"Never remarried?" Del asked.

"Never had the heart for it," he said. "I still talk to June every night before I go to bed. When Laura was growing up, she was just like a daughter to me; I was over there just about every day. When she got taken off, there wasn't a goddamn thing I could do about it. Big cop in town, knew everything about everything, couldn't find my own goddamn daughter…"

He went on for a while, and Lucas felt Del glance at him just as he looked at Del. Unspoken thought here, as they listened to Marshall ramble: Whoa.

QATAR'S HOUSE WAS neat and beautifully decorated. A crime-scene specialist named Greg Webster was running the crew who were looking at the house, and when he saw Lucas, Marshall, and Del on the walk leading to the porch, he stopped outside and said, "I heard."

"You got anything useful?"

"Not much. We did find a set of women's earrings in his chest of drawers. They look pretty good, so they might be a possibility. We have to check with all the victims we've identified so far… Have you talked to Sandy MacMillan? I heard she got something up at his office."

"What?"

"I don't know. One of the guys just said she was pretty excited-some computer shit."

"We need to get his phone records as far back as they go," Lucas said. "Check him for cell phones… We need to look at picture albums, any loose photographs lying around, any negatives, anything that could be a souvenir."

"We know," Webster said patiently. "We're looking for it all."

"Did you look in the washing machine?"

"Yeah. It's empty. Nothing in the dryer."

"Is Sandy still up at his office?"

"I don't know-she was an hour ago."

MACMILLAN HAD MOVED downtown. When Lucas finally found her, she was in Lucas's office, talking with Marcy.

"Greg Webster said you found something in his office computer," Lucas said.

"No. We didn't find anything-that's what was so interesting. He put a new hard drive in his machine the day that the story broke on finding Aronson. He pulled some files off an old hard drive and reinstalled them on the new one-the dates are right in the machine. The thing is, why would you do that? If you could pull the files off, the old drive was still working. It could have been full, I suppose."

"Bullshit. He was getting rid of evidence. Bet he had Photoshop or one of the other photo programs on it, and some of those drawings."

"Not on the new one."

"Check and see if you can find any software," Lucas said.

"No software except Word and some other minor bullshit. He is hooked into the 'Net, so we're gonna try to track that. Gonna go out to his ISP and see what they have in the way of records."

"Sounds like he's a half-step ahead of us," Lucas said. "Keep digging around. That date will be useful, though."

He told Del and Marshall about it, and Marshall said, "Another brick in the wall."

"No wall so far," Lucas said. "Just a lot of bricks."

THEY WERE STANDING on Qatar's front sidewalk, ready to leave, when Craig Bowden showed up. He parked down the street and jogged back to them, a small man in a yellow windbreaker. Lucas noticed that down the street, two women were sitting on their front porch, watching. Everybody knew…

Bowden looked scared; he was the intelligence cop assigned to watch Qatar overnight.

"I even took notes," he said. "Lights on and off, all that. Television on and off."

"Could he have gotten out the back?"

"Yeah, sure-not with his car, of course, but if he'd wanted to sneak, he could have. There was just one of me, and he wasn't supposed to know we were interested in him."

"What about this morning? Was he carrying anything when he left?"

"I couldn't see when he loaded the car, because it was in the garage. When he got out at St. Pat's, he had a briefcase and a sack."

"A sack?"

"Like a grocery bag."

"Clothes," Marshall said.

"You didn't see him do anything with the sack?"

"No… he went inside and that's the last I saw him. Marc White took over from me."

THEY CALLED WHITE. He had never seen Qatar with a sack. "I never really saw him at all-I just sat and waited and then you guys showed up and busted his ass."

They called Sandy MacMillan again, the crime-scene cop who'd been working Qatar's office. "There were a couple guys there with me-they might have found something and didn't tell me, but I didn't see any sack. I'm sure I didn't see any clothes. I would have heard about it."

"Sack's still gotta be in the building," Lucas said. "Who wants to look for a sack?"

They all rode to St. Pat's together, but hope was dwindling. They'd been run around too much, with too little to show for it: one of those days when nothing was going to work right.

They found a janitor, an elderly man with a drinker's nose, who told them that all the trash cans in the building had been emptied. He didn't remember any brown sacks, and certainly no sacks full of clothes. "I could have missed it, though. I put them all out in the dumpster, and I'd be happy to go out and rip them apart, if you want. Aren't that many, really."