James Qatar dropped his feet over the edge of the bed and rubbed the back of his neck, a momentary veil of depression falling upon him. He was sitting naked on the rumpled sheets, the smell of sex lingering like a rude perfume. He could hear Ellen Barstad in the kitchen. She'd turned on the radio she kept by the sink and Cinnamon Girl bubbled through the small rooms. Dishes tinkled against cups, fingernail scratches through the melody of the song.

Ellen Barstad heard the toilet flush a second time and wondered what was keeping him. All this toilet flushing was less than romantic; she needed some romance. Romance, she thought, and a little decent sex. James Qatar had been a severe disappointment, as had been all of the few lovers in her life. All eager to get aboard, and pound away, none much concerned with her, though they said they were.

The rope was in his jacket, balled up. Qatar took it out and pulled his hand down the length of it, as though to strip away its history. Eighteen inches long, it had begun life as the starter rope on an Mercury outboard motor – one end still had the rubber pull-handle. The rope had been with him, he thought, for almost half his life. When he'd eliminated the tangles, he coiled it neatly around the fingers of his left hand, slipped the coil off his fingers, and pushed it carefully into his hip pocket. Old friend.

"I know that wasn't too great," she said, not looking back at him. A pink flush crawled up her neck, but she continued, doggedly. "I haven't had that much experience, and the men... weren't very... good." She was struggling with the words. This was hard. "You could show me a lot about sex; I'd like to know. I really would. I'd like to know everything. If we could find a way to talk about it without being too, you know, embarrassed about it."

She derailed him.

James Qatar was an art history professor and a writer, a womanizer and genial pervert and pipe smoker, a thief and a laughing man and a killer. He thought of himself as sensitive and engaged, and tried to live up to that image. He kissed Barstad once more on the back of the neck, cupped one of her breasts for a moment, then said, "I've got to go. Maybe we could get together Wednesday."

Qatar left the apartment with a vague feeling of regret. Barstad had mentioned that she had to go to the bank later in the day. She'd gotten enrollment fees for a quilting class, and had two hundred dollars in checks she'd wanted to deposit – and she had almost four hundred dollars in cash, which she would not deposit, to avoid the taxes.

James Qatar was five feet, eleven ten inches tall, slender and balding, with a thin blond beard that he kept closely cropped. He liked the three-days-without-shaving look, the open-collar, striped-shirt, busy intellectual image. He was fair-skinned, with smile lines at the corners of his mouth, and just a hint of crows' feet at the corners of his eyes. He had delicate hands with long fingers. He worked out daily on a rowing machine, and in the summer on blades; he would not ever have thought of himself as a brave man, but he did have a style of courage built on will power. He never failed to do what he wanted to do, or needed to...

Qatar was an art historian and associate professor at St. Patrick University, author of Not a Pipe: The Surfaces of Midwestern Painting 1966-1990, which had been favorably reviewed in Chicken Little, the authoritive quarterly of late post-modern arts; and also Planes on Plains, Native Cubists of the Red River Valley 1915-1930, which the reviewer for the Fargo Forum had called seminal. He'd begun college as a studio artist, but switched to art history after a cold-eyed appraisal of his talents – good, but not great – and an equally cold appraisal of an average artist's earning potential.

Produced an object of desire.

Qatar desired women. Blond women, of a particular shape and size. He would fix on a woman and build imaginary stories around her. Some of the woman he knew well, others not at all. He'd once had an intensely sexual relationship with a woman he'd seen only once, for a few seconds, getting into a car in the parking lot of a bagel shop, a flash of long legs and nylons, the hint of a garter belt. He'd dreamt of her for weeks.

His first use of it had been almost thoughtless, a sociology professor from the University of Minnesota who had, years before, rejected his interest. He snapped her one day as she walked across the pedestrian bridge toward the student union, unaware of his presence. Theirs had not been a planned encounter, but purely accidental.

Well. Not quite enough. In the past three years, he'd repeated the drawing attacks seventeen times. The thrill was not the same as the killing – lacked the specificity and intensity – but it was deeply pleasurable. He would sit in his old-fashioned wooden rocker, eyes closed, thinking of his women as they opened the letters... And thinking of those others as they fought the rope.

The day after the assignation with Barstad, the low stacked-heels of Charlotte Neumann, an ordained Episcopalian priest, author of New Art Modalities: Woman/Sin, Sin/Woman, S/in/ister, which, the week before, had broken through the top-10,000 barrier of the Barnes & Noble on-line bestseller list, and who was, not incidentally, the department chairperson, echoed down the hallway and stopped at his door. A tall ever-angry woman with a prominent nose and a single, dark, four-inch-long eyebrow, Neumann walked in without knocking and said, "I need your student budget line. This afternoon."

The next day, passing through Saks, he found that the cashmere sweaters had gone on sale. There wasn't much cold weather left, but the cashmere would wear forever. These particular sweaters, with the slightly rolled neckline, would perfectly frame his face, and the tailored shoulders would give him a nice wedgey stature. He tried the sweater on, and it was perfect. A good pair of jeans would show off his butt – he could have the legs tailored for nine dollars a pair at a sewing place in the skyway. A champaign suede coat and cowboy boots would complete the set...but it was all too expensive.

But on Tuesday evening, still thinking about Barstad and the rope, feeling the hunger growing, he was derailed again. He arrived home early and got a carton of milk from the refrigerator and a box of Froot Loops from the cupboard, and sat at the table to eat. The Star- Tribune was still on the table from the morning; he'd barely glanced at it before he left. Now he sat down, poured milk on the Froot Loops and folded the paper open at random. His eye fell straight down the page to a small article at the bottom: the two-deck headline said Woman Strangled/Police Seek Help.

"Shit." He stood up, threw the paper at the kitchen sink. Stormed into the living room, hands clenched: "Shit, shit."