John Sandford - Prey 04 - Silent Prey

by Silent Prey

  "I'll be at the bar," Copland said. He'd looked over the occupants of the restaurant, decided that none of them was a candidate for shooting.

  O'Dell led the way back: he was an actor, Lucas realized, rolling slowly down the restaurant like a German tank, nodding into some booths, pointedly ignoring others, the rolled copy of the Wall Street Journal whacking his leg.

  "Goddamn town," O'Dell said when he was seated at the booth. He dropped the papers on the seat by his leg. Lily sat opposite him, with Lucas. He peered at Lucas across the table and said, "You know what's happening out there, Davenport? People are stringing razor wire-you see it everywhere now. And broken glass on the tops of walls. Like some goddamned Third World city. New York. Like fuckin' Bangkok." He lowered his voice: "Like these cops, if they're out there. A death squad, like Brazil or Argentina."

  A balding waiter with a pickle face came to the table. He wore a neck-to-knees white apron that seemed too neatly blotched with mustard.

  "Usual," O'Dell grunted.

  Lily glanced at Lucas and said, "Two coffees, two Danish."

  The waiter nodded sourly and left.

  "You got a reputation as a shooter," O'Dell said.

  "I've shot some people," Lucas said. "So has Lily."

  "We don't want you to shoot anybody," O'Dell said.

  "I'm not an assassin."

  "I just wanted you to know," O'Dell said. He groped in his pocket and pulled out a strip of paper and unfolded it. The Times story. "You did a good job yesterday. Modest, you give credit to everyone, you stress how smart Bekker can be. Not bad. They bought it. Have you read the files? On this other thing?"

  "I'm starting tonight, at Lily's."

  "Any thoughts so far? From what you've seen?" O'Dell pressed.

  "I don't see Fell in it."

  "Oh?" O'Dell's eyebrows went up. "I can assure you that she is, somehow. Why would you think otherwise?"

  "She's just not right. How did you find her?"

  "Computer. We ran the dead guys against the cops who busted them. She came up several times. Repeatedly, in a couple of cases. Too many times for it to be a coincidence," O'Dell said.

  "Okay. I can see her nominating somebody. I just can't see her setting up a hit. She's not real devious."

  "Do you like her?" asked Lily.

  "Yeah."

  "Will that get in the way?" O'Dell asked.

  "No."

  O'Dell glanced at Lily and she said, "I don't think it will. Lucas fucks over both men and women impartially."

  "Hey, you know I get a little tired..." Lucas said irritably.

  "Fell looks like another Davenport kill," Lily said. She tried for humor, but there was an edge to it.

  "Hey, hey..." O'Dell said.

  "Look, Lily, you know goddamned well..." Lucas said.

  "Stop, stop, not in a restaurant," O'Dell said. "Jesus..."

  "Okay," said Lily. She and Lucas had locked up, and now she broke her eyes away.

  The waiter returned with a plate piled with French toast and a small tureen of hot maple syrup. A pat of butter floated on the syrup. He unloaded the French toast in front of O'Dell, and coffee cups in front of Lucas and Lily. O'Dell tucked a napkin into his collar and started on the toast.

  "There's something more going on here," O'Dell said, when the waiter had gone. "These three hits we're most worried about, the lawyer, the activist, and Petty himself-I believe these guys may be coming out. The shooters."

  "What?" Lucas glanced at Lily, who stared impassively at O'Dell.

  "That's my sense, my political sense," O'Dell said. He popped a dripping square of toast into his mouth, chewed, leaned back and watched Lucas with his small eyes. "They're deliberately letting us know that they're out there and that they aren't to be fooled with. The word is getting around. Has been for a couple of months. You hear this shit, `Robin Hood and his Merry Men,' or `Batman Strikes Again,' whenever some asshole is taken off. There are a lot of people who'd like the idea that they're out there. Doing what's necessary. Half the people in town would be cheering them on, if they knew."

  "And the other half would be in the streets, tearing the place apart," Lily said to Lucas. She turned her head to O'Dell. "There's the other thing, too, with Bekker."

  "What?" asked Lucas, looking between them.

  "We're told that this is real," she said. She fished in her purse, took out a folded square of paper and handed it to him. A Xerox copy of a letter, addressed to the editor of the New York Times.

  Lucas glanced down at the signature: Bekker. One word, an aristocratic conceit and scrawl.

  ... taken to task for what I consider absolutely essential experiments into the transcendental nature of Man, and accused of crimes; so be it. I will stand on my intellectual record, and though accused of crimes, as Galileo was, I will, like him, be vindicated by a future generation.

  Though accused of crimes, I am innocent, and I will have no truck with criminals. It is in that spirit that I write. On Friday night last, I witnessed an apparent gangland shooting....

  "Jesus Christ," Lucas said, looking at Lily. "Was this one of the killings you were talking about?"

  "Walt," she said.

  Lucas went back to the letter. Bekker had seen the two killers clearly.

  ... would describe him as white, thick, square-faced with a gray, well-trimmed mustache extending the full length of his upper lip, weighing two hundred and twenty pounds, six feet, two inches tall, sixty-one years old. As a trained forensic pathologist, I would wager that I am not wrong by more than five pounds either way, or by more than an inch in height, or two years in age.

  The description of the other one, the one I have called Thin, I will hold to myself, for my own reasons....

  "This never ran in the paper?" Lucas asked, looking at O'Dell.

  "No. They've agreed to hold it at our request, but they've reserved the right to print it if it seems relevant."

  "Do you have any idea who it is? This Thick guy?"

  He shook his head: "One of four or five hundred cops-if it's a cop at all."

  "You could probably narrow it more than that," Lucas said.

  "Not without going public," Lily said. "If we started checking out five hundred cops... Christ, the papers would be all over us. But the main thing is, you see..."

  Lucas picked up her thought: "Bekker can identify two cop killers and he's willing to do it...."

  "And for that reason, we think these guys'll make a run at Bekker."

  "To shut him up."

  "Among other things."

  "If they are coming out, they're more likely to go for Bekker," O'Dell said. "They might have to go for him anyway, if they think he can identify two of them. But there's more than that: Killing Bekker would be one way to make their point, that some people have to be killed. Bekker's a nightmare. Who can object to killing him? He's made to order for them, if they can find him."

  "This is getting complicated," Lucas said. "I worry about Lily. She's close to this thing, funneling stuff around. What happens if they come after her?"

  "They won't," O'Dell said confidently. "Two dead cops would be unacceptable...."

  "I'd think one dead cop would be unacceptable."

  "One dead cop can be finessed. Denied. Two is a pattern," O'Dell said.

  "Besides, I'm not exactly a pushover," Lily said, patting the purse where she kept her.45.

  "That'll get your ass killed," Lucas said, anger in his voice. They locked up again. "Anyone's a pushover when the shooters are using a fuckin' machine gun from ambush. You're good, but you ain't bulletproof."

  "All right, all right..." She rolled her eyes away.

  "And there's always Copland," O'Dell said. "When Lily's outside working, she's usually with me in the car. Copland's more than a driver. He's tough as a nail and he knows how to use his gun. I'll have him take her home at night."

  "Okay." Lucas looked at Lily again, just for a second, then shifted back to O'Dell. "How'd you get onto Fell? Exactly?"
>
  "Exactly." O'Dell mopped up a river of syrup with a crust of the toast, looked at it for a minute, then popped it in his mouth and chewed, his small eyes nearly closing with the pleasure of it. He swallowed, opened his eyes. Like a frog, Lucas thought. "This is it, exactly. Once or twice a semester I go up to Columbia and lecture on Real Politics, for a friend of mine. Professor. This goes way back. So a few years ago-hell, what am I saying, it was fifteen years ago-he introduced me to a graduate student who was using computerized statistical techniques to analyze voting patterns. Fascinating stuff. I wound up taking classes in statistics, and a couple in computers. I don't look like it"-he spread his arms, as if to display his entire corpulent body-"but I'm a computer jock. When these guys in intelligence found what they thought was a problem, I sorted the killings. There was a pattern. No mistake about it. I called in Petty, who specialized in computer searches and relational work. We turned up almost two hundred possibles. For one reason or another, we eliminated a lot of them and got it down to maybe forty. And twelve of those, we were just about sure of. I think Lily told you that..."

  "Yeah. Forty. That's a pretty unbelievable number."

  O'Dell shrugged. "Some of the killings are probably just what they seem to be-thugs getting killed on the street by other thugs. But not all of them. And I'm sure we missed some. So balancing everything out, I think forty, fifty aren't bad numbers."

  "How does Fell fit in?" Lucas asked.

  "Petty ran the bad guys against cops who'd know them-a lot of complicated name sorts here, but I've got total access."

  "And Fell's name came up...."

  "Way too much."

  "I hate statistics," Lucas said. "The newspapers were always fuckin' with them back in Minneapolis, drawing stupid conclusions from bad data."

  "That's a problem, the data," O'Dell agreed. "We'd certainly never get Fell in court, based on my numbers."

  "Mmmph." Lucas looked at Lily and then O'Dell. "I need some heavy time to dig through this...."

  "Don't," said O'Dell. He pointed a fork at Lucas' nose. "Your first priority is to find Bekker and to provide a diversion for the media. We need a little air. You've got to do that for real. If this gang is out there, these killers, they won't be easily fooled. Bringing you to New York was supposed to be like bringing in a psychic from Boise: to keep the Boises in the newsroom happy. Everybody's buying it so far. They've got to keep buying it. This other thing has to be way, way in the background."

  "What happens if we catch Bekker too soon?" Lucas asked. "Before we identify these guys?"

  Lily shrugged. "Then you go home and we find some other way to do it."

  "Mmm."

  "So. We're in a position where we're hopin' a goddamn psycho holds out for another few weeks and maybe butchers somebody else's kid, so we can run down our own guys," O'Dell mumbled, half talking to himself, staring into the half-eaten sludge pile of toast and syrup. He turned to Lily. "We're really fucked, you know that, Lily? We're really and truly fucked."

  "Hey, this is New York," Lucas said.

  O'Dell slogged through the rest of the French toast, filling in background on Petty's computer search for the killers.

  "Is there any possibility that he turned up something unexpected with the computer?" Lucas asked.

  "Not really. Things don't work that way-with a computer, you grind things out, you inch forward. You don't get a printout that says `Joe Blow Did It.' I think something must have happened with this witness."

  When they left the restaurant, O'Dell walked ahead, again nodding into some booths, pointedly ignoring others. Lily grabbed Lucas' sleeve and held him back a step.

  "Here." She handed him three keys on a ring.

  "That was quick," Lucas said.

  "This is New York," she said.

  Lucas took a cab from Avery's to Fell's apartment building. The cabdriver was a small man with a white beard, and as soon as Lucas settled in the backseat, he asked, "See Mis‚rables ?"

  "What?"

  "Let me tell you, you're missing something," the driver said. He smelled like a raw onion and was soaked with sweat. "Where're you going? Okay-listen, you gotta see Mis‚rables, I mean why d'ya come to New York if you ain't gonna see a show, you know what I mean? Look at the crazy motherfucker over there, you should excuse the language, you think they should let a jerk like that on the streets? Jesus Christ, where'd he learn to drive?" The driver stuck his head out the window, leaning on the horn. "Hey, buddy, where'd you learn to drive, huh? Iowa? Huh? Hey, buddy." Back inside, he said, "I tell you, if the mayor wasn't black..."

  Lucas called Fell at the office from a pay phone mounted on the outside wall of a parking garage. The garage paint, covered with indecipherable graffiti, was peeling off, to reveal another layer of graffiti. "Barb? Lucas. I gotta run back to my place, just for a minute. Are we still on for lunch?"

  "Sure."

  "Great. See you in a few minutes," Lucas said. He hung up and looked across the street at Fell's apartment building. A thousand apartments, he thought. Maybe more. Ranks of identical balconies, each with a couple of plants, most with bicycles. Yuppie-cycles, the mountain bikes, in case the riders encountered an off-trail situation in Central Park. Some of them, as high as he could see, were chained to the balcony railings.

  The lobby of her building was a glass cage surrounding a guard. At the back were two ranks of stainless-steel mailboxes. The guard, in an ill-fitting gray uniform, was stupidly watchful.

  "Where's the sales office?" Lucas asked. A light flickered in the guard's eyes. This situation was specifically covered in his orders. "Second floor, sir, take a right."

  "Thanks." Apartment security; it was wonderful, if you had it. Lucas walked back to the elevators, punched two. The second floor had several offices, all down to the right. Lucas ignored them, took a left. Found the stairs, walked up a floor, went back to the elevators and punched sixteen.

  The telephone call assured him that Fell was still at Midtown; he didn't have to worry that she'd slipped back home for a snack or to pay bills, or whatever. She lived alone, she'd said. He'd gotten her apartment and home phone numbers from an office roster sheet.

  He rode up alone, got out in an empty corridor, took a left, got lost, retraced his steps past the elevators. Her door was green; the others were blue, a tomato-red and beige. Other than that, they were identical. He knocked. No answer. Looked around, knocked again. No answer. He tried a key, hit it the first time, popped the door. The silence inside seemed laced with tension.

  Gotta move, move, move...

  The apartment smelled lightly, inoffensively, of tobacco. The living room had a sliding glass door that led out to the balcony; the doors were covered by off-white curtains, half-drawn. She had a view of a similar building, but if he looked sideways, across the street, Lucas could see another rank of buildings across a gap. The gap was probably the Hudson, with Jersey on the other side.

  The apartment was neat, but not compulsively so. Most of the furniture was good, purchased as matched sets. Two green overstuffed La-Z-Boy chairs faced a big color television. A low table sat between the chairs, stacked with magazines. Elle, Vogue, Guns & Ammo. More magazines lay on the table, and under it he found a pile of novels. Beside the television was a cabinet with a CD player, a tuner, a tape deck and a VCR. A second table held more magazines, four remote controls, an oversize brandy snifter full of matchbooks-Windows on the World, the Russian Tea Room, the Oak Room, The Four Seasons. They were pristine, and looked as though they'd come from a souvenir packet. Other matchbooks were more worn, half-used-several from the bar they'd visited the night before, one with a crown, one with a chess knight, one with an artist's palette. An ashtray held four cigarette butts.

  On the walls around the television were photo portraits: a woman standing on a pier with two older people who might have been her parents, and another picture of the same woman in a wedding veil; a square-shouldered young man on a hillside with a collie and a.22, and another of the young man,
grown older, dressed in an army uniform, standing under a sign that said, "I know I'm going to heaven, because I served my time in Hell: Korea, 1952." Something wrong with the young man... Lucas looked closer. His upper lip was twisted slightly, as though he'd had a harelip surgically repaired.