Eyes of Prey ld-3

by John Sandford

  "Sex freak?"

  "Well, not exactly. The sex, I guess, was pretty conventional, it's just that he'd kind of lose control. He'd come after her with this really ferocious rush, and then afterwards, it was almost like she was a piece of furniture. Didn't want to hear her talk, didn't want to cuddle up. Usually he'd bring something to read, until he got it up again, and then he'd start freaking out all over."

  "Hmph. That's not exactly the worst thing I've ever heard…"

  "Well, I'm gonna see her again tomorrow."

  "Is there any way we can let Bekker know you're seeing her?"

  Del sounded surprised. "What for?"

  "Maybe push him a little? We got the surveillance running, so there shouldn't be any problem for her."

  "Well… yeah, I guess we could work something out. Maybe I could get her to call him, let it slip somehow…"

  "Try," Lucas said.

  CHAPTER 19

  The phone rang at three in the morning.

  Cassie lay on her back, barely visible in the light from a streetlamp filtering through the blinds, the sheet pulled up around her throat, clutched there with two fists, as though she were dreaming sad dreams.

  Lucas tiptoed into the kitchen and picked it up.

  The dispatcher, with an overlay of personal concern: "Lucas, this is Kathy, at Dispatch. Sorry to wake you up, but there's a guy on the phone, says he's a doctor, says it's about your daughter…"

  His heart stopped. "Jesus. Patch him through."

  "I'll push the button…"

  There was a moment of electronic vacancy, then the sound of somebody breathing, waiting.

  "This is Davenport," Lucas snapped.

  There was no immediate response, but the feeling of a presence, a background sound that might have been a distant highway.

  "Hello, God damn it, this is Davenport."

  A man's voice came back, low, gravelly, atonal, artificially clipped, the words evenly spaced, as though a robot were reading from a script: "There is nothing wrong with your daughter. Do you know who this is?"

  Lucas had listened to the tapes. Loverboy. "I… yes, I think so."

  "Give me your phone number." The voice was from Star Wars, from Darth Vader. No contractions. No sloppy constructions. Scripted and pared to the bone. "Do not make a call. I will call you back within five seconds. If your line is busy, I will be gone. I have a pencil."

  Lucas gave him the phone number. "You're gonna call…"

  "Five seconds." There was a click and Lucas said, "Kathy, Kathy? Are you still on the line? God damn it." The dispatcher was gone, and Lucas hung up. A second or two later, the phone rang once.

  Lucas snatched it up. "Yeah."

  "I want to help, but I can not help directly," the voice grated, still on the script. "I will not come out. How can I help?"

  "Did you send us a picture? I gotta know, just for identification."

  "Yes. The cyclops. The killer does not look like the cyclops. The killer feels like the cyclops. His head looks like a pumpkin. There's something wrong with it."

  "Not to say you're lying, but that sounds like the one-armed man, in that TV show a long time ago," Lucas said, letting a tint of skepticism color his voice. Reaching for control. Cassie came into the kitchen, sleepy, rubbing her eyes, drawn by the tone of his voice.

  "Yes, The Fugitive," Loverboy said. "I thought of that. Where did you get an artist's drawing of me?"

  Loverboy had seen Carly Bancroft on TV3. "Let me ask the questions for a minute, okay? If you get spooked, I don't want you ditching me before I get them out. Do you know of any connection between either of the Bekkers and Philip George?"

  "No." There was a moment of hesitation, and then, off the script, voiced a notch higher, inflection: "I've speculated…" He changed his mind, and his voice, in midsentence: "No." The robot control again.

  "Look," Lucas said. "You've got a conscience. We've got a fuckin' monster out there killing people and he might not be done yet. We need every scrap we can get on the case."

  "Get Michael Bekker."

  "We don't know he's involved."

  Back on script, all inflection gone: "He is a monster. But he did not kill Stephanie personally. I did not make that mistake."

  "Look, give me the connection between you and George, if you think there is one," Lucas said, going soft. "If you want to stay out there, and you get caught later, I'll testify that you were feeding me information, that you helped, okay? Maybe help you out."

  Another pause. Then: "No. I can not. You have thirty more seconds."

  "Hold on… why?"

  "Because you may trace the call. I budgeted two minutes. You have twenty-five seconds left…"

  "Wait, wait, we've got to set up some way for me to reach you… If I need you, bad…"

  "Put an advertisement in the Tribune personals… Say you are no longer responsible for the debts of your wife. Sign it 'Lucas Smith.' I will call about this time. Two minutes. Look at Bekker. Stephanie was scared of him. Look at Bekker."

  "Gimme one more question, one more," Lucas pleaded. "Why's Bekker a monster? What'd he do to Stephanie…?"

  Click.

  "God damn it," Lucas said, looking at the phone.

  "Who was it?" Cassie asked, moving up beside him. Her soft fingers trickled down his spine, warm, reassuring.

  "Stephanie Bekker's lover," Lucas said. He poked a seven-digit number and the other end was picked up instantly: Dispatch.

  "This is Davenport. Let me talk to Kathy."

  "How's your daughter?" the woman asked a second later.

  "That was all bullshit," Lucas said. "But it's okay, the guy had to get through to me. I'll need the tapes on your part of the call, so you might want to mark them."

  "Well… there aren't tapes," the dispatcher said. "He came in on the nonemergency line, the thirty-eight."

  "God damn it," Lucas said. He scratched his head. "Listen, write down what you remember he said and give it to Anderson in the morning. Write down everything you remember, what his voice sounded like, the whole nine yards."

  "Heavy-duty?" she asked.

  "Yeah. Very heavy."

  When Lucas hung up, Cassie said, "I think…," but he waved her away and said, "Shhh… I've got to remember…" She followed him into the bedroom and he flopped onto the bed, lay back and closed his eyes. Remember. Not the words. The feel of the other man. The voice was deep, the words well paced, the sentences clear. When he was off script for a moment, he'd used the word "speculated." He watched TV3.

  And, Lucas thought, he looked like George. That's what he had speculated, Lucas was sure of it. Lucas had done the same thing: the phony identikit photo he was circulating was a simplified sketch of Philip George.

  What else? Loverboy had not gone to the funeral, because he wasn't sure whether George was there. He had done research on Lucas. He knew that Lucas had a daughter and did not live with her. After the Crows case, there'd been quite a bit of press attention to Lucas, to Jennifer and their daughter, so the research wouldn't have been difficult-he might, in fact, simply be operating on memory. But just in case, a check of the libraries again, the newspaper files? He'd talk to Anderson about it.

  Lueas opened his eyes. "Sorry, I just had to try to get it down…"

  "That's okay-that's how I remember lines," Cassie said.

  "He's a smart sonofabitch," Lucas said. He stood up, found his underpants on a chair and pulled them on. "I've got to make a few notes."

  She followed him down to the spare bedroom, looked at the charts hanging from the wall. "Wow. Mr. Brainstorm."

  "Pieces of the puzzle," he said. A sheet of paper, folded in quarters, was lying on the bed. As Cassie looked at the charts on the wall, he unfolded it. The photocopy of the cyclops painting. "The thing is, we know Bekker is goofy, but everything points in some other direction…"

  Cassie was still looking up at his charts, but somber now.

  "Do you do this for all your cases?" she asked.

  "The
big complicated ones, yes."

  "Have you ever had all the clues up there, posted, but not been able to figure them out until too late?"

  "I don't know-I've never thought about it. You hardly get all the information you need to make a case, unless it's simple open-and-shut: you catch a guy red-handed, or five witnesses see a guy kill his wife," Lucas said. "If it's more complicated than that… I don't know. I've sent people to prison who claimed to be innocent and still claim they're innocent. I'm ninety-nine percent sure they're not innocent, but… you can't always know for sure."

  "Wouldn't it freak you out if there was a key piece of information up there, you just didn't see it, and somebody got killed?"

  "Mmm. I don't know. You can't blame yourself because a psycho kills people. I'm not Albert fuckin' Einstein."

  "So what're you going to do next?" Cassie asked, still wide-eyed.

  Lucas tossed the folded Xerox of the cyclops back on the bed. "What any good cop would do at three in the morning. Go back to bed."

  Lucas set the alarm for seven. When it went off, he silenced it, slipped out of bed, leaving Cassie asleep, and went to the kitchen to phone Daniel. He caught the chief at breakfast and told him about the call from Stephanie's lover.

  "Sonofabitch," Daniel sputtered. "So you're right. But why'd they kill George?"

  "He said he didn't know. Actually, he said he'd speculated about it, but didn't want to talk about it. But I know what he was thinking: that he looks like George. And when you sort through all the implications of that, it points at Bekker," Lucas said, and explained.

  Daniel listened and agreed. "Now what? How do we get to the guy?"

  "We could maybe invent a crisis, put an ad in the paper, stake people out all over town, wire up my line, and when he calls-bam, we're tracing. We might get him."

  "Hmph. Maybe. I'll talk to some of the techs about it. But what happens if he calls from Minnetonka?"

  "I don't know. The thing is, he's smart," Lucas said. "If we fuck with him, he might just go back into the woodwork. I don't want to risk chasing him away. He can put the finger on a suspect, if we ever come up with one."

  "Okay. So let's keep this tight between us," Daniel said. "I'll order a tap on your line and we'll monitor calls. I'll talk with Sloan and Anderson and Shearson and see if we can come up with some kind of pressure that'll get to him to call back."

  "I could do that. I figure…"

  "No. I don't want you chasing Loverboy. I want you focused on the killer or the killers-Bekker and whoever he's working with."

  "There's not much there."

  "You just keep pushing. Keep moving around. I got all kinds of guys who can do the pony work. I want you on the killer before he does it again."

  CHAPTER 20

  Not knowing the nature of neighborhood friendships around Bekker, and afraid to ask, the surveillance team decided not to seek a listening post among Bekker's neighbors.

  Instead the team keyed on the intersections around the front and back of his house. From two parked cars, they could watch the front door directly, and both ends of the alley that ran behind his house. The cars were shuffled every hour or so, both to relieve the tedium and to lessen the possibility that Bekker might grow suspicious of one particular car.

  Even so, a jogger, a woman lawyer, spotted one of the surveillance cars within an hour of the beginning of the watch on Bekker and reported it to police. She was told that the car belonged to an undercover detective on a narcotics study, and was asked to keep it confidential. Later that same day she saw a second car and realized that Bekker was being watched. She thought about mentioning it to a neighbor but did not.

  The surveillance began in the evening. The next morning, four tired cops took Bekker to work. Four more monitored him in the hospital, but quickly understood that a perfect net would be impossible: the hospital was a warren of passageways, stairs, elevators and tunnels. They settled for containing him within the complex, with occasional eyeball checks of his location. While he was pinned, a narc stuck a transmitter under the rear bumper of his car.

  The discovery of George's body was a sensation and a shock. Bekker watched, aghast, a TV3 tape of khaki-clad deputies marching through the brambles near the lakeside cabin, horsing out a litter. The body was covered with a pristine white sheet, wrapped like a chrysalis. A blonde newscaster, with a face as stylistically and cosmetically appropriate for the scene as a Japanese player's is for Noh, intoned a dirgelike report, with the gray skies hanging theatrically in the background.

  Bekker, not a watcher of television, found a newspaper TV guide and marked the newscasts. The other stations were on the story, although none had TV3's film.

  The next evening, fearing more bad news, he was nonplussed to find himself watching a seemingly interminable story about the recovery of a boxcar full of television sets from a warehouse someplace in Minneapolis. Television sets? He began to relax, switching channels, found television sets everywhere, and television reporters in flak jackets…

  If anything important had happened, surely he wouldn't be seeing television sets…

  He nearly missed it. He was switching through the channels when he found the blonde again, back in the studio and out of her flak jacket. She delivered another body blow: Davenport, she said, did not believe that Philip George was Stephanie's lover, believed that the lover was still at large, and was circulating an identikit picture of the man. Davenport, she said, was a genius.

  "What?" Bekker blurted, staring at the television, as though it could answer him. Could Davenport be right? Had they missed with George? He needed to think. Nothing ephemeral. Needed something to reach him, something to focus. He opened the brass case, studied it. Yes. He lifted it to his face and his tongue flicked out, picking up the capsule the way a frog picks up a fly. Focus.

  The flight was not a good one. Not terrifying, like the snake, but not good. He could manage it, though, steering between the shadows where Davenport hid. Goddamned Davenport, this case should be done, he should be free…

  Bekker came back, the taste of blood on his lips. Blood. He looked down, found blood on his chest again, stirred himself. He'd been away again… What had happened? What? Ah… yes. The lover. What to do? To settle, of course.

  He staggered to his feet and wandered toward the stairs. To the bathroom, to wash. He went away, came back a few minutes later, his hand on the banister leading up the stairs, his eyes dry from staring. He blinked once. Druze had been uncharacteristically moody on the trip to Wisconsin, the trip to cut George's eyes. Hadn't really understood the necessity of it. Was he pulling away? No. But Druze had changed… didn't have moods.

  Need to involve him again. Bekker's eyes strayed to the phone. Just one call? No. Not from here. He must not.

  He went away once more while he groomed himself and dressed, but he could not remember the content of the trip-if there was any content-when he returned. He finished dressing, took the car out, drove to the hospital. Inside the building, he took the stairs down, hurrying, not thinking.

  The quickness of Bekker's move confused the surveillance team. One of the narcs was behind him by ten seconds, walked straight down the hall past the elevators and the staircase door, which were in an alcove. And Bekker was gone. Perhaps the elevator had been waiting, ready to go? The narc hurried back outside and told the team leader, who had a cellular telephone and punched Bekker's office number into it.

  "Can I speak to Dr. Bekker?" The team leader looked like a mail clerk, short hair, harried, gone to a little weight.

  "I'm sorry, Dr. Bekker hasn't come in yet."

  "I'm downstairs and I thought I saw him just a minute ago."

  "I sit right here by the door, and he's not in."

  "We've lost him," the narc told the rest of the team. "He's got to be in the building. Spread out. Find him."

  Bekker hurried down the steps to the tunnel that led to the next building. He stopped at a candy machine, got a Nut Goodie, then hurried on through the tunnel to
a pay telephone.

  Druze was not at his apartment. Bekker hesitated, then called information and got the number for the Lost River Theater. A woman answered and, after Bekker asked for Druze, dropped the telephone and went away. Not knowing whether she was looking for Druze or simply had been exasperated by the request, Bekker stood waiting, for two minutes, then three, and finally, Druze: "Hello?"

  "You heard?" Bekker asked.

  "Are you at a safe phone?" Druze's voice was low, almost a whisper.

  "Yes. I've been very careful." Bekker looked down the empty hallway.

  "I heard that they found the body and that this cop, Davenport, doesn't think George was the lover… And it's not a game they're playing. He's got some good reason to think so."

  "How do you know that?"

  "Because he's been seeing one of the actresses here, Cassie Lasch. She was the one who found Armistead, and she and Davenport struck up some kind of relationship."

  "You mentioned her. She lives in your building…"

  "Yeah, that's the one," Druze said. His words were tumbling over each other. "Cassie was telling us this morning that the lover's still out there. I think Davenport's talking to him, but doesn't know exactly who he is. And something else. The cops have supposedly got some kind of picture of me. Not a police drawing, it's something else."

  "Jesus, can that be right?" Bekker rubbed his forehead furiously. This was getting complicated.

  "Somebody asked Cassie why we wouldn't have seen it on television, if that's true," Druze said. "She said she hadn't seen the picture, but she knew about it and that there was something weird about it. And she was positive about the lover, by the way. She was being mysterious, but I think she knows. I think they're sleeping together, she's getting pillow talk…"

  "Damn." Bekker gnawed on a fingernail. "You know what we've got to do? We talked about doing a number three before George came along? I think we've got to do it. We've got to do somebody that doesn't make any sense for either one of us. Somebody completely off the wall."