John Sandford - Prey 04 - Silent Prey

by Silent Prey

  "I've got two cold beers," Lucas said. He stuck his head in the refrigerator. "And I'm willing to split a deli roast beef sandwich, heavy on the salad, no mayonnaise."

  "Just a minute," Lily said, waving him off. He shut the refrigerator door and leaned against it as she took a small brown spiral notebook from her purse. She did a series of quick calculations, her lips moving. "Airline food can't be much," she said, more to herself than Lucas.

  "Not much," he agreed.

  "Is it light beer?"

  "No... but hell, it's a celebration."

  "Right." She was very serious, noting the calories in the brown notebook. Lucas tried not to laugh.

  "You're trying not to laugh," she said, looking up suddenly, catching him at it. She was wearing gold hoop earrings, and when she tipped her head to the side, the gold stroked her olive skin with a butterfly's touch.

  "And succeeding," he said. He tried to grin, but his breathing had gone wrong; the dangling earring was hypnotic, like something out of a magician's show.

  "Christ, I hate people with fast metabolisms," she said. She went back to the notebook, unaware of his breathing problems. Maybe.

  "That's all bullshit, the fast-metabolism excuse," Lucas said. "I read it in the Times. "

  "Another sign of decline, the Times printing obvious bullshit," Lily said. She stuffed the notebook back in her purse, put the purse aside and crossed her legs, clasping her hands on her knees. "Okay, a beer and half a sandwich."

  They ate at the breakfast bar, facing each other, making small talk, checking each other. Lucas was off the police force and missed the action. Lily had moved up, off the street, and was doing political work with a deputy commissioner. Lily asked, "How's Jennifer? And Sarah?"

  Lucas shook his head, finishing the sandwich. "Jen and I-we're all done. We tried, and it didn't work. Too much bad history. We're still friends. She's seeing a guy from the station. They'll probably get married."

  "He's okay?"

  "Yeah, I guess," Lucas said.

  But he was unconsciously shaking his head as he said it.

  Lily considered the tone: "So you think he's an asshole?"

  "Hell... No. Not really." Lucas, finished with his half of the sandwich, stepped over to the sink, squirted Ivory Liquid into the palm of one hand, turned on the water and washed off the traces of the sandwich's olive oil. His hands were large and square, boxer's hands. "And he likes Sarah and he's got a kid of his own, about seven months older than Sarah. They get along...."

  "Like a family..." Lily said. Lucas turned away and shook the water off his hands and she quickly said, "Sorry."

  "Yeah, well, what the fuck," Lucas said. He went back to the refrigerator, took out another bottle of Leinenkugel's and twisted the top off. "Actually, I've been feeling pretty good. Ending it. I'm making some money and I've been out on the road, looking at the world. I was at Little Bighorn a couple of weeks ago. Freaked me out. You can stand by Custer's stone and see the whole fucking fight...."

  "Yeah?"

  He was marking time, waiting for her to tell him why she'd come to the Cities. But she was better at waiting than he was, and finally he asked, "What're you here for?"

  She licked a chip of roast beef from the corner of her mouth, her long tongue catching it expertly. Then: "I want you to come to New York."

  "For Bekker?" he asked skeptically. "Bullshit. You guys can handle Bekker. And if I was a New York cop, I'd get pissed off if somebody came in from the outside. A small-town guy."

  She was nodding. "Yeah, we can handle Bekker. We've got guys saying all kinds of things: that we'll have him in a week, in ten days.... It's been six weeks, Lucas. We'll get him, but the politics are getting ugly."

  "Still..."

  "We want you to jawbone the media. You're good at that, talking to reporters. We want to tell them that we're doing everything we can, that we're even importing the guy who caught him the first time. We want to emphasize that we're pulling out all the stops. Our guys'll understand that, they'll appreciate it-they'll know we're trying to take the heat off."

  "That's it? A public-relations trick?" He grimaced, began to shake his head. He didn't want to talk to reporters. He wanted to get somebody by the throat....

  "No, no. You'll work the case, all right," she said. She finished the sandwich and held her hands out, fingers spread, looking for a napkin, and he handed her a paper towel. "Right down on the street with the rest of them. And high priority, too. I do value your abilities."

  Lucas caught something in her voice. "But?"

  "But... all of that aside, there's something else."

  He laughed. "A third layer? A Lily Rothenburg layer? What're you doing?"

  "The thing is, we've got serious trouble. Even bigger than Bekker, if you can imagine it." She hesitated, searching his eyes, intent, then balled up the paper napkin and did a sitting jump shot into a wastebasket before continuing. "This can't come out anywhere."

  Irritated, he wordlessly backhanded the comment away, like a bothersome gnat. She nodded, slipped off the stool, took a quick turn around the kitchen, picked up an enamel coffee cup, turned it in her hands, put it down.

  "We're looking at thirteen murders," she said finally. "Not Bekker's. Someone else's. These are all... hits. Maybe. Of the thirteen-those are the ones we're sure of, we think there are more, as many as forty-ten were out-and-out assholes. Two of them were pretty big: a wholesaler for the Cali cartel and an up-and-coming Mafia guy. The other eight were miscellaneous small-timers."

  "Number eleven?"

  "A lawyer," Lily said. "A criminal defense lawyer who represented a lot of big dopers. He was good. He put a lot of people back on the street that shouldn't have been there. But most people thought he was straight."

  "Hard to be straight, with that job," Lucas said.

  "But we think he was. The investigation hasn't turned up anything that'd change our mind. We've been combing his bank records, along with the IRS and the state tax people. There's not a goddamned thing. In fact, there wouldn't have been any point in his being crooked: he was pulling in so much money he didn't need any more. Three million bucks was a slow year."

  "Okay. Who was twelve?"

  "Number twelve was a professional black... spokesman," she said. "A community leader, a loudmouth, a rabble-rouser, whatever you want to call him. But he wasn't a crook. He was a neighborhood politician trying to climb the pole. He was shot in a drive-by, supposedly a couple of gang-bangers. But it was very slick for gang-bangers, good weapons, a stolen car."

  "Thirteen?"

  "Thirteen was a cop."

  "Crooked?"

  "Straight. He was investigating the possibility that we've got a rogue group inside the police department, inside intelligence, systematically killing people."

  There was a moment of silence as Lucas digested it. "Sonofabitch," he said finally. "They've killed thirteen people for sure, and maybe forty?"

  "The cop who was killed-his name was Walter Petty-claimed there were twelve, for sure. He's the thirteenth. We think. He said there could be thirty or forty more."

  "Jesus Christ." Lucas pulled at his lip, turned away from her, blankly staring at the microwave. Forty? "You should've picked it up...."

  "Not necessarily," Lily said, shaking her head. The short hair whipped around her ears, like a television advertisement, and he caught a smile and suppressed it. This was business, she said. "For one thing, they were killed over a long time. Five years, anyway. And most of them died like you'd have expected, knowing their records. Except more efficiently. That's what you notice when you decide you've got a pattern: the efficiency of it. Bang, bang, they're dead. Never any cops close by-once or twice, they were actually decoyed out. There are never any good witnesses. The getaways are preplanned. No collateral damage, no mushrooms getting knocked down."

  "So you've got a pattern of small-time assholes killed by big-time shooters," Lucas said.

  "Right. Like this one guy, I met him myself, years ago,
when I was just coming off patrol. Arvin Davies." She lifted her eyes to the ceiling and wet her lips, remembering the file. "He was forty-two when he was killed. He was a doper, a drunk. A brawler. He had twenty priors going back to age twelve, and he'd been picked up for one thing or another maybe twenty more times. All small stuff. Street muggings, burglaries, car thefts, rip-offs, possession. He'd get his nose clogged up with angel dust and beat his victims. He killed one five or six years ago, but we could never prove it. He spent twenty years inside, all short time. The last time he got out, he did a couple of muggings and then somebody put him on a wall. Shot him twice in the heart and once in the head. The head shot came when he was already down, a coup de grace. The shooter walked away," she said, hopping back up on the breakfast-bar stool across from him.

  "A pro," Lucas said.

  "Yeah. And there just wasn't any reason a pro would go after Arvin Davies. He was small-time, chickenshit. But whoever killed him took a real asshole off the streets for good. Maybe forty or fifty nasty crimes a year."

  "All the miscellaneous hits are like that?"

  "Yup. I mean the techniques are different, but they're all cold, efficient, researched."

  Lucas nodded, studying her. "All very enlightening-but where do I come in?"

  She looked straight into him, fixing him. "A couple of guys in intelligence spotted the pattern. They got nervous about it. All of the victims, or whatever you'd call them, were heavy in intelligence files. Like the files had been used to choose them. Once they made the report, a secret working group of six ranking officers was set up to monitor it. Petty was eventually brought in to do the dog work."

  Lucas interrupted. "He was a shoofly, or whatever you guys call them?"

  She shook her head. "He was a crime-scene guy for most of his career, and later on a computer specialist. He was officially a detective second. In this case, he was reporting to the working group under the direct supervision of my boss, John O'Dell. John chairs the working group."

  "So there was no past internal-affairs work that might have left a grudge," Lucas said.

  "No. And just before he was shot, there was an odd break on the case...." Lily put a hand on top of her head as if she were patting herself, a gesture of thought. "The black guy who was killed, the loudmouth, was named Waites. The file is still open, we still have people digging into it. As a matter of routine, Walt got all the reports coming out of the active cases. He found a report that said a supposed witness to the Waites killing had recognized one of the shooters as a cop. The witness was named Cornell, last name probably Reed. The trouble is, when Walt went looking for him, Cornell Reed had disappeared. Maybe left town. But Walt found him, somehow. He tried to get in touch with us that afternoon, he came by the offices, and when he couldn't, he left a note on voice mail. He said he knew where Reed went."

  "Where?"

  "We don't know. And Walt was killed that night."

  "Jesus-somebody got the voice mail?"

  "Unlikely; it's coded," Lily said. "And the shooting was too well set up. They'd planned it ahead of time. If finding the witness had anything to do with it, it was just the trigger that made them go ahead with the shooting."

  "Huh. How about Petty's records? Notes?"

  "Nothing in his office, but he wasn't keeping anything there, anyway, because of the sensitivity," she said. "He was working out of his apartment, mostly. And that's another thing: somebody got to his apartment before we did. All of his computer disks were gone, and the internal drive-hard drive, is that it?-had been wiped somehow. I don't know how you do it, but there was nothing recoverable."

  "Another computer freak?"

  "Not necessarily. Whatever they did wasn't fancy. A couple of short commands apparently took care of it. Something like a reformat with a write-over? Does that make sense?"

  "Yeah, yeah. Petty must've talked to somebody. It's hard to believe he'd get a break and coincidentally be hit that same night.... Who'd he tell about the witness?" Lucas asked.

  "We don't know," Lily said. "We do know he came up to our office, after hours, looking for us. O'Dell and I spend a lot of time in a car, going around, putting out political brush fires. We were talking to some people in one of the projects that night. Walt didn't try the car-our driver was waiting in it, and nobody called. The thing is, when Walt came up to the office, he might've bumped into somebody from the working group, there in the hallway. He really wouldn't talk to anybody else, not on this topic."

  "So he accidentally bumps into another member of the working group and that guy leaks?"

  Lily frowned. "Well... the shooting was too quick for a careless leak. Whoever tipped the rogue group did it directly. A phone call. In other words, whoever leaked knows the killers. Maybe he even runs them."

  "Sonofabitch. But if you know it's one of the six working-group guys..."

  Lily shook her head and smiled. "Nothing's ever that easy. For one thing, every one of those six reports to somebody, and they did. And every one of the six has assistants, and some of the assistants know what the working group is doing."

  "Doesn't sound very secret," Lucas said.

  "Maybe fifteen people know details, and twenty-five know about the problem," Lily said. "That's pretty secret for the department... but you see where that leaves us. If one of the working group tipped the killers, he's in a position to know everything. So we're paralyzed. The working group appointed a new lead investigator, an unassigned captain, but he's not doing anything. He's just there to cover our asses, in case something leaks. You know, so we can say we've got an active case under investigation by a ranking officer."

  "And you want me to look into it," Lucas said.

  Lily nodded. "My boss and I talked it over. We need the work done off the books. Nobody will know but the two of us. It's the only way. And because of Bekker, you're a perfect fit. The goddamn media's going nuts about Bekker, of course, the TV and the Post and News, Doctor Death and all that. You can't get in a cab without hearing a radio talk show about him. So we bring you in, the guy who caught him last time. A consultant. But while you're looking, we're going to put you close to a couple of people Walt was looking at."

  "Huh." Lucas sat and thought for a long moment, then he looked up. "This guy who got shot," he said. "You called him Walt, like... he wasn't just another guy. Is there something I should know?"

  She looked at his face, but not into his eyes: her eyes seemed suddenly blank, as though she were seeing another face. "Walt was my oldest friend," she said.

  And she told him about the dream....

  The dream had started the night Petty was killed; it began not with a vision, but with an odor, the smell of ozone, as if electrical circuits were burning somewhere. Then she saw herself, through a haze, but with increasing clarity, seated on a simple marble bench, the kind found in cemeteries, with Petty's bleeding, shattered body stretched across her lap. Apiet…. She did nothing at all, but simply sat there, looking into his face. In the dream, the point-of-view closed on the face, like a camera creeping forward, and at the last moment, focused not on an image of Christ-like peace, but on a face that had been shredded by high-velocity slugs, at yellow molars slick with drying blood....

  A ludicrous image, but one that came, night after night.

  But that wasn't the way it had been, the night Petty was killed.

  Petty's seventy-one-year-old mother had called, confused, incoherent. Her only child had been killed, she said, her voice an ancient moan. Walt was dead, dead... Lily could see the old woman in her mind's eye, the narrow gray face bent over the black telephone, body shaking, twitching, the withered hand with the handkerchief, the doilies on the TV behind her, the Sacred Heart on the wall. Lily could even smell it, cabbage and bread dough....

  The old woman said that Lily had to go to Bellevue to identify Walter. Was there a cop there, Lily asked? Yes, right here, and Father Gomez. And the mayor was coming.

  Lily spoke to the cop. Take care of Gloria Petty, she said, the wife o
f a cop, the mother of a cop. The last one alive in this family. Then, trembling with fear and grief, she'd gone to Bellevue.

  No piet… at Bellevue.

  Just a body, waxlike, dead, sprawled on a blood-soaked gurney, raw from the pickup. The body was wrapped in layers of plastic, like beef being moved. She noted professionally that one of the slugs had ripped off Petty's cheek, exposing his molars; a preview of Petty as a naked skull, a reminder of Petty's naive, happy smile. The smile that flashed every time he saw her, delighted with her presence.

  She recalled a day from their Brooklyn childhood, when the two of them were seven or eight. Late fall, blue skies, crisp weather, a hint of Halloween. There were maple trees on the block, turning red. She'd been sick and had been kept home from school, but her mother let her out in the afternoon to sit on the stoop.