Silent Prey ld-4

by John Sandford

  "No." Kennett looked at Fell, who was lighting a Lucky. "Could I bum one, I…"

  "No." Fell shook her head, carefully not looking at him.

  "God damn it," Kennett said. He stuck one hand in his jacket pocket, put two fingers of the other between his shirt buttons, over his heart. He caught himself, pulled them out, looked at his hand and finally stuck it in the other jacket pocket. "Fuckin' do-gooders."

  "Anything on the Bellevue phones?" Lucas asked, watching the techs get ready to roll the woman's body.

  Kennett's forehead wrinkled. "Think about this, Davenport: We got a guy who deals drugs, but he gets no phone calls. I mean, like, almost none. He got six calls at his apartment last month. There was a phone in the maintenance office he could use, but he didn't, much. At least, that's what his supervisor says."

  "Did he carry a beeper? Maybe a cellular?" Fell asked.

  "Not that we can find," said Kennett.

  "That's bullshit," Lucas said flatly. "He was dealing, right? We know that for sure?"

  "Yeah."

  "Then he's got a phone. We've just got to find it…"

  "Carter's guys are interviewing people over there right now, at Bellevue. Maybe you could listen in for a while?" Kennett said. He looked at Fell. "You're the only guys who've come up with anything."

  At the bottom of the window well, the crime-scene techs rolled the body. The woman's head flopped over, and her wide white eyes suddenly looked up at them.

  "Aw, shit," Fell gagged. She turned away, hunched over the alley cobblestones, and a stream of saliva poured from her mouth.

  "You okay?" Lucas asked, his hand on her back.

  "Yes," she said, straightening. "Sorry. That just caught me, the eyes…"

  Five minutes later, the body was out of the window well. The removal crew had wrapped it in a blanket, but Kennett ordered the wrapper peeled away. "I want to look," he said evenly. "I wish the fuck I could have gotten down there…"

  Kennett and Lucas squatted next to the collapsible gurney as the blanket was lifted. The woman's face was like marble, white, solid, her dying pain and fear still graven on her face. The gag was like the earlier ones, carved from hard rubber, held in place with a wire that had been twisted tight behind her ear.

  "Pliers," Kennett said absently.

  "Treats them like… lumber," Lucas said, groping for the right concept.

  "Or lab animals," Kennett said.

  "Sonofabitch." Lucas leaned to one side, almost toppled, caught himself with his hand, then knelt over the body until his face was only inches from the body's left ear. He looked up at one of the techs and said, "Roll her a little to the right, will you?" He took a pen from his shirt pocket and, to Kennett, said, "Look at this."

  Kennett knelt beside him and Fell squatted behind the two of them, the other detectives crowding in. Lucas used the pen to point at two oval marks on the dead woman's neck muscle.

  "Have you ever seen anything like that?" Lucas asked.

  Kennett shook his head. "Looks like a burn," he said. "Looks like a fuckin' snakebite."

  "Not exactly. It looks like a discharge wound from one of those electroshock self-defense gizmos, stun guns. The St. Paul cops carry them. I went over to see a demonstration. If you keep the discharge points on bare skin for more than a second or two, you can get this kind of injury."

  "That's why there's no fight," Fell said, looking at him.

  Lucas nodded. "He hits them with the shocker. When you get hit, you go down, like right now. Then he comes with the gas."

  "Couldn't be too many places around that sell those things," Kennett said.

  "Police-supply places, but I've seen them in gun magazines, too, mail order," Lucas said.

  Kennett stood and rubbed alley sand from his hands and tipped his head back, as though looking up to heaven. "Please, God, let me find a Midtown address on an order form."

  Lucas and Fell took a cab to Bellevue, windows open, the hot popcorn smell of the city roaring in as they dodged through traffic, and got trapped for five minutes in a narrow one-lane crosstown street. Fell's jaw was working with anger.

  "Thinking about Bekker?"

  "About the body… Jesus. I hope Robin Hood gets him," she said. "Bekker."

  "What? Robin Hood?" He looked at her curiously.

  "Nothing," she said, looking away.

  "No, c'mon, who's Robin Hood?"

  "Ah, it's bullshit," she said, digging in her purse for a cigarette. "Supposedly somebody is knocking off assholes."

  "You mean, a vigilante?"

  She grinned. "How else you gonna run this place?" she asked, gesturing out the window. "It's supposed to be cops, but I think it's just bullshit. Wishful thinking."

  "Huh."

  She lit the cigarette, coughed, and looked out the window.

  Whitechurch had been a maintenance foreman. A changing roll of a dozen people worked under his loose supervision, doing minor repairs all over the hospital on the three-to-eleven shift.

  "A great goddamn job if you're stealing stuff," Fell said as they joined Carter in an employees' lounge. Three detectives were interviewing hospital employees, with Carter supervising.

  "Or if you're dealing," said Carter. He looked at his list. "Next one is Jimmy Beale. Goddamn, I got little faith in this."

  "I know what you mean," Lucas said, watching the scared employees trooping through the lounge.

  Beale knew nothing. Neither did any of the rest. Fell burned through a pack of Luckys, left to get another, came back and leaned in the door.

  "God damn it, Mark… it's Mark?" Carter was saying. "God damn it, Mark, we're not getting anywhere and it's hard to believe that a guy could be stealing the place blind and nobody'd know about it. Or dealing dope, and nobody'd know…"

  Mark, tall, narrow, acned, nodded nervously, his Adam's apple working convulsively, sliding up and down his thin neck. "Man, you never seen the dude, you know? I mean, I'd come in and he'd say, Mark, g'wan up to 441D and put on a new doorknob and then see if there's a leak on the drinking fountain up on six, and that's what I'd do. He'd come by, but like, I never hung out with him or nothing."

  When he was gone, Lucas said, "Nobody knew. How many do you believe?"

  "Most of them," Carter said. "I don't think he was dealing here. And if you're stealing stuff, you don't talk about it. Somebody'll try to cut in-or somebody'll try to do the same thing, then feed you to the cops on plea bargain."

  "Somebody must've known," Fell objected. "That was the last of them?"

  "That was the last…" said Carter.

  A woman knocked on the edge of the door and stuck her face in. She had curly white hair and held her hands in front of her as though she were knitting.

  "Are you the police?" she asked timorously.

  "Yeah. C'mon in," Lucas said. He yawned and stretched. "What can we do for you?"

  She stepped inside the room and looked nervously around. "Some of the others were saying you were asking if Lew had a beeper or a walkie-talkie?"

  "Yes. Who are you?"

  "My name is Dotty, um, Bedrick, I work in housekeeping?" She made her sentences into questions. "Last week, Lew split out his pants, right down by housekeeping? There was some kind of pipe thing he was working on and he bent over and they went, split, right up the back?"

  "Uh-huh," Lucas said.

  "Anyway, I was right there? And everybody knows I sew, so he came in and asked if I could do anything? He slipped right out of his pants-he was wearing boxer shorts, of course-he slipped right out and I sewed them up. He was just wearing a T-shirt on top, and the boxer shorts, and I had his pants. There was nothing in there but his wallet and his keys and his pocket change. There wasn't any beeper or anything like that."

  "Hey. Thank you," Lucas said, nodding. "That was a problem for us."

  "Why did you have to know?" Bedrick asked. Lucas thought, Miss Marple.

  "We think that-I'm sure you've heard this from the others-we think he was dealing drugs. If he was,
he needed access to a telephone."

  "Well, there was something odd about the man…"

  She wanted to be led: Lucas put his hands on his waist, pushing his sport coat back on both sides, like a cop on television, let a hip pop out and said, "Yeah?"

  She approved: "Sometimes when the calls came over the speakers for doctors, I've seen him look up at the speakers. And the next thing, he'd be calling in. I saw him do it two or three times. Like he was a doctor. "

  "Sonofagun," Carter said. "There'd be a call for a doctor?"

  "That's right."

  "Jesus," he said, turning to Lucas and Fell, dumbfounded. "That's it."

  "That's it?" chirped Bedrick.

  "That's it," Carter said. He smiled at the old lady and shook his head. "I never had a civilian do that before."

  Fell decided to stay at Bellevue and work the lead. Lucas, shaking his head, decided to head back to Midtown South.

  "You don't think it'll be anything?" Fell asked.

  "It might be-but with Whitechurch dead, I don't know how you'd find out," he said.

  "I want to stay anyway," she said. "It's all we've got."

  All we've got,Lucas thought. Yeah. We find Bekker's supplier, the best damned lead all week, and Bekker kills him right under our noses. Some hotshot cops they were. There had to be another way to approach this situation, to find a way in…

  At Midtown South, Lucas could hear Kennett all the way out to the reception desk.

  "… know it's hot, but I don't give a shit," he was saying. "I don't want people around here reading the goddamn reports, I want everybody out on the street. I want the fuckin' junkies to know there's a war going on. Instead of coming in here, I want you out on the street with your people, rousting these assholes. Somebody knows where he's at…"

  Lucas leaned in the door. Seven or eight detectives were sitting uncomfortably around the conference room, while Kennett sat on a folding chair at the front, his fingers over his heart, an angry flush on his face. He looked over the cops to Lucas and snapped, "Tell me something good."

  "Did you talk to Carter?"

  "I'm supposed to call him back," Kennett said, looking at a phone slip. "What happened?"

  "An old lady maybe told us how Whitechurch got his calls."

  "Well, goddamn," somebody said.

  Lucas shook his head: "But it might not be good. He may have had doctor code names for his clients. When a buyer needed to call in, the switchboard-or somebody-would page the doctor. Whitechurch would pick up a phone and answer the page. There are thousands of doctors in there every day, thousands of phone calls. Hundreds of pages."

  "Sonofabitch," Kennett said. He ran his hand through his hair, and a swatch of it stood up straight, in a peak. "Carter's pushing it?"

  "Yeah. Six guys and Fell stayed to help."

  Kennett thought about it for a second, then exhaled in exasperation and asked, "Anything else?"

  "No. I'm still reading paper on him, but I think… Look, I had an idea on the way over. Entirely different direction. Carter's taking the phone angle, you got guys on everything else. I was thinking again about how hard Bekker is to find, about where he's getting his money, about all the things we don't know about him. So I was thinking, maybe I should talk to the guys who did know Bekker."

  "Like who?"

  "Like the guys who were in jail with him. Maybe I ought to go back to the Cities. I could run down the people who were in the next cells to his. Maybe he said something to somebody, or somebody gave him an idea of how to hole up…"

  "That's not bad," said Kennett, scratching his breastbone. "Kind of a long shot, though, and it takes you out of the action here." He thought about it some more. "I'll tell you what. Read paper for the rest of the day, think about the phones. Day after tomorrow's the lecture. If we've got nothing by then, let's talk about it… You see the art?"

  "Art?"

  Kennett said, "Jim…"

  One of the detectives handed Lucas a brown envelope. Lucas opened it and found a sheath of eight-by-ten color photos. Whitechurch, dead in the hallway, flat on his back. Blood on the tile behind his head, and on the wall. A twenty-dollar bill half pinned under the body.

  "What's the money?" Lucas said.

  "They must have been hassling over the cash when Bekker shot him," said the cop named Jim. "One of the janitors heard the shots. Not being stupid, he hollered before he went to look. Then he kind of carefully stuck his head through a fire door and saw Whitechurch on the ground. The outside door was just closing. Bekker must've grabbed what he could and run for it."

  "He didn't take the eyelids," Lucas said. Except for the blood, Whitechurch might have been a sleeping drunk.

  "Nope. Just poked him in the eyes and grabbed the dope, if there was any. They got a print, by the way, off a bill. It was Bekker."

  "All right, let's get out there," Kennett said to the cops. There was an unhappy silence, all of them on their feet and moving through the door, shaking heads. "Hey. Everybody. Tell your people to put on the vests, huh? They're gonna be talking to some pissed-off people."

  Huerta, bumping past Kennett, stopped to pat him on the head, pushing his hair down.

  Kennett said, "What?" and Huerta, grinning, said, "Just knocking down your mohawk. With all that white hair stickin' up you looked like Steve Martin in The Jerk, except skinny and old."

  "Yeah, old, kiss my ass, Huerta," Kennett said, laughing, straightening his hair.

  Lucas, astonished, watched Huerta walk away, then looked back at Kennett.

  "What?" Kennett asked, puzzled, raking at his hair again.

  "Steve Martin?" Lucas asked.

  "Asshole," Kennett grumbled.

  "They're probably calling you the same thing, you putting them on the street like that," Lucas said. Switching the topic away from Steve Martin, covering, covering…

  "I know," Kennett said soberly, looking after the detectives. "Jesus, roustin' junkies in this heat… it's gonna stink and the junkies'll be pissed and the cops are gonna be pissed and somebody's gonna get hurt."

  "Not a hell of a lot of choice," Lucas said. "Keep pushing everywhere. With Whitechurch dead, Bekker's gotta find a new source." • • • An hour later, Lucas lay on his bed at the Lakota and thought about what Huerta had said. That he looked like Steve Martin, with all that white hair…

  All right. You're on the street. There's been a killing. A car speeds by and inside is an old white guy. That's what Cornell Reed told Bobby Rich's snitch. An old white guy. How would you know he was old, when he was in a moving car? If he had white hair…

  And then there was Mrs. Logan, and what she'd said, in the apartment beneath Petty's…

  Kennett fit. He was a longtime intelligence operative. He was high up, with good access to inside information. He was tough but apparently well liked; he had charisma. He had white hair.

  Kennett was sleeping with Lily. How did that cut across it? How did she wind up in the sack with a guy who might be a suspect? And the biggest question: with several hundred possible suspects, how did Kennett wind up in Lucas' lap, available for daily inspection?

  O'Dell was one answer. Lily was another. Or both together.

  He lay on the bed with the Magic Marker and his art pad, trying to put together a list. Finally he came up with:

  1. Cornell Reed.

  CHAPTER

  15

  Lucas was flat on his back, half asleep, when Fell called. The room was semidark; he'd turned out all the lights but the one in the bathroom, and then half closed the door.

  "I'm downstairs," she said. "If you're awake, let's get something to eat."

  "Anything at Bellevue?" Lucas asked.

  "I'll tell you about it."

  "Ten minutes," he said.

  He was fifteen minutes. He shaved, going easy over the bruises, brushed his teeth and took a quick shower, put on a fresh shirt, dabbed on after-shave. When he got down to the lobby, Fell looked him over and said, "Great. You make me feel like a rag."
/>   "You look fine," he said, but she didn't. She looked worn, dirty around the eyes. The dress that had been crisp that morning hung slackly from her shoulders. "There's an Italian place a couple of blocks down that's friendly."

  "Good. I couldn't handle anything complicated." As they were going out the door, she said, "I'm sorry about ditching you and going with Kennett, but this case really could mean a lot for me. And Mrs. Bedrick, she was mine… ours… and I wanted to be there to get the credit."

  Lucas nodded and said, "No problem." On the sidewalk, he added, "You don't sound happy."

  "I'm not. Bellevue's a rat's nest. They have a dial-in paging system, so now we're trying to figure out if we can match up the calls. And we're looking for people who might have been paging doctors who shouldn't have, that somebody else might have noticed. There are about two thousand suspects."

  "Can you thin them out?"

  "Maybe. We're trying extortion. Kennett worked out a routine with an assistant D.A. Everybody we talk to, we tell them the same thing: if we find out who Whitechurch's phone contact is before she comes forward, we'll charge her as an accomplice in the Bekker murders. If she comes forward and cooperates, we'll give her immunity on Bekker. And she can bring a lawyer and refuse to cooperate on anything else… So there's a chance. If we can scare her enough."

  "How do you know it's a her? "

  Fell grinned up at him: "That's Kennett. He said, 'Have you ever heard a male voice on a hospital intercom?' We all thought about it, and decided, Not very often. If a male voice kept calling out the names of nonexistent doctors-that's what we think she was doing, whoever she is, calling out code names-he'd be noticed. So we're pretty sure it's a her."

  "What if it's just the switchboard?"

  "Then we're fucked… although Carter thinks it probably isn't. A switchboard might start recognizing names and voices…" • • • The Whetstone had an old-fashioned knife-grinding wheel in the window, a dozen tables in front, a few booths in back. Between the booths was a wooden floor, worn smooth and soft by a century of sliding feet. A couple turned slowly in the middle of it, dancing to a slow, sleepy jazz tune from an aging jukebox.