They got out at the top floor. The hallway outside the elevator was lined with glass cases, each holding reconstructed skeletons or stuffed birds or animals-thirty or forty of them, Lucas thought, lining both sides of the narrow hall. The ceiling hung low overhead, a checkerboard of darker and lighter wood panels.

"This originally was book storage and supplies, but when that moved out, they put these cases up here for the art students," the janitor said. "They're supposed to draw from them, and some of them do. Human skeletons down that way, and some muscle things, full-sized."

"So Qatar…"

"I'll show you." There were hard-backed wooden chairs between cases. "They sit on these, drag them around…" He pulled a chair out, stood on it, and pushed one of the wooden ceiling panels. It lifted easily. "There used to be a higher ceiling-way high, to the top of the building-but dirt filtered down all the time, and there wasn't any way to clean it, so they put this drop-ceiling in. Years and years ago. Maybe in the sixties, maybe. Anyway, all the kids know about it. There's a ledge right inside, and sometimes, if they're working, they'll just push one of these things up and leave their stuff in here."

"All right." Lucas looked down the hall. There were probably a hundred panels per side: He could spend the rest of the afternoon looking, and probably not finding anything. On the other hand…

"You want to look? Glad to give you a hand."

"Nah, you go on," Lucas said. "I might push up a few of them."

"Are you sure? Glad to."

"Nah. I can take care of it."

Lucas looked him back into the elevator, and when he was gone, and the elevator cables stopped grinding, he dragged a chair out and began pushing up panels in the silence of the long hallway. He found he could place the chair beneath one panel, lift it and the panels on both sides, and so cover three with one move of the chair. He went left down the hall from the elevator, spent twenty minutes, found nothing but an old lunch-very old, maybe a decade.

Instead of working back down the other side of the hall, he carried his chair back to the elevator and started the other way. On the second panel, he saw a plastic sack stuffed on the ledge. But Qatar had been carrying a grocery sack…

He had driving gloves in his pockets. He pulled them on, then tugged at the plastic bag. Heavy and hard. He lifted it down carefully and peeled back the garbage bag.

A laptop: not what he'd been expecting. He stepped down carefully, sat on the chair, and opened the laptop's cover-found the switch and turned it on. A green light came up instantly: still charged. A student? Windows came up, and then the icons on the left side of the screen. Halfway down he spotted the eye-in-the-square of Photoshop.

"Sonofabitch," he muttered. He brought Photoshop up, found a file listed as "B1," opened it. A photograph of a woman, but skeletonized, reduced to a skein of fine lines. He maneuvered it awkwardly around the screen, unfamiliar with the Photoshop protocols, but finally got a face. Barstad. "There you are," he said. He maneuvered the pointing stick, brought up another one. A woman he didn't recognize, but he recognized the pose: It had been lifted from a porn site. He scanned the list of files. Found an A1, A2, and A3.

Opened A1, found the face.

Closed his eyes for a moment, then said, "Gotcha."

Aronson stared back at him.

There had to be prints on the bag or the laptop. Nobody could be that careful, that paranoid… and the surfaces were perfect for prints. But now, what to do? He sat thinking for another five minutes, vacillating, then stood on the chair and put the package back on the ledge.

Hesitated, then put the panel back in place.

Went down in the basement and found the whiskey-nosed janitor. "It's taking longer than I thought, and I can't see well enough, all the way back," he lied. "I'm gonna bring in a crime- scene crew tomorrow. Don't let anybody go up there, okay? You don't have to guard it, but don't let anybody mess around up there."

"I'll keep everybody out. I'll block it off, if you want."

"It doesn't look like there are many people around… why don't you just keep an eye on it? There might be fingerprints somewhere, and we wouldn't want to mess them up."

The janitor nodded. "Never thought of fingerprints. Whatever you say-I go home at seven, but I'll make sure that everybody knows it's off-limits."

HE SPENT THAT evening thinking about the phone call to Randy and about the laptop. Did the laptop assemble the bricks into a wall? Or was it just another half-assed brick? Even if they could demonstrate that Qatar did the drawings, and therefore knew Aronson before she died, what if Qatar argued that he met her through the second man-Randy-or vice versa, that Aronson had met Randy through him. After all, only one of the dead women was associated with a drawing. And there were more than a dozen women still alive who'd got them.

Weather said to him, "You've been in never-never land again. What's going on?"

"Working on a little puzzle," he said.

"Want to talk?"

"No. Not right now." He looked at her. "Maybe tomorrow."

She was mildly offended and a little stiff after that, but that had happened before. She always got over it. Again, Lucas lay awake after she slept.

The phone call, when it came, would probably be a little after three o'clock, he thought. The pit of the night…

Three o'clock passed, and he dozed. Woke up briefly at four, then dropped back asleep, more soundly now. The problem may have resolved itself, he thought as he went under.

He really wasn't prepared when the phone rang at five o'clock.

He was awake instantly, rolling off the bed, Weather waking and saying, "What? What?"

Lucas picked up the phone. "Yeah."

"Chief? This is Mary Mikolec over at the Center. You asked to be called. We've sent a car over to Qatar's place. He's running."

"Okay," he said. "When did he walk?"

"About fifteen minutes ago."

"Thanks… Thanks for calling."

"What's happening?" Weather asked.

"Qatar's gone," Lucas said.

"Are you going?"

"No… nothing for me to do," he said.

"Lucas, what's going on?"

He sat on the bed and said, "Jesus. I dunno-I might have screwed up, but there's no way to know. That's what's been worrying me."

"Tell me," she said. She sat up and put a hand on his shoulder.

He thought about it for a minute, then said, "It was that call to Randy. You gotta ask yourself, who knew the direct-line number into his room? After they moved him out of the ICU, they put him in this little room by himself where he'd be away from everybody else, and you could see the door from the nursing station. The switchboard was told not to switch any calls without an okay from Lansing. I asked the nurses: He didn't have any visitors… And then you've got to ask why somebody would do that. Make that call, even if he could?"

Weather was puzzled. "Well, why?"

"Because he wanted Qatar turned loose, or at least let out on bail. If he was in jail, and if he cut a deal on a plea-second-degree with psychological evaluation, whatever-he'd be out of reach."

Weather thought about it for half a second, then her hand went to her mouth. "Oh, no. Oh my God."

"Yeah. I think Terry Marshall probably picked him up. It's about sixty-forty that Qatar's dead already."

"Lucas… why did you…?"

"Because I wasn't sure. And even if I thought so, I'm not sure it's not the right thing. What if Qatar gets out in ten or twelve years and starts killing again? That could happen."

"Yes, but Lucas-this isn't right. This is awful."

"But Qatar-"

"Lucas, this is not about that asshole. This is about Terry. If he's done this, it's gonna be terrible for him. The heck with Qatar, it's Terry."