John Sandford - Prey 04 - Silent Prey

by Silent Prey

  Moving quickly, Bekker walked from behind the desk, looking straight ahead, out through the school doors into the street. A woman screamed from the auditorium. Bekker kept walking. The man who'd been working on the car hurried past him, heading toward the doors, a pistol in his hand.

  And then the night closed around him. Bekker was gone.

  CHAPTER

  18

  They wound up in the courtyard, a half-dozen senior police officers shouting at each other. Lights burned in every room of the building and uniformed cops crawled through it inch by inch, but the people in the courtyard knew the search was pointless.

  "Silly motherfucker... How many got out? How many?"

  "I was trying to save his ass. Where the fuck were your guys, huh? Where the fuck..." A square guy pushed a tall guy, and for a moment it looked like a fight; but then other cops got between them.

  "Jesus Christ, you gotta go out the back, the fuckin' TV is sweeping the streets...."

  "Who had the watch on the stairs? Where was..."

  "Shut up." Kennett had been sitting on a bench, talking to Lily and O'Dell. Now he shouldered through the ring of cops, his voice cutting through the babble like an icicle going through a sponge cake. "Shut the fuck up."

  He stood on the sidewalk, pale, two fingers hovering over his heart. He turned to one of the cops: "How many got out?"

  "Listen, it wasn't my..."

  "I don't give a shit whose fault it was," Kennett snarled. "We all fuckin' blew it. What I want to know is, how many got out?"

  "I don't know," the cop said. "Twenty or thirty. When everybody stampeded backstage, a bunch of people in the lobby and near the doors just went outside. Nobody was there to stop them. When I came back... most of them were gone."

  "There were only about fifty people in the auditorium," Kennett said. "So maybe half of them got out."

  "But that's not the thing," the cop said.

  "What's the thing?" Kennett asked. His voice was like a hangnail, sharp, ragged, painful.

  "The thing is, I looked into every one of those faces. Bekker wasn't there. I don't care if you hang me up by my nuts, you ain't gonna get me to say he was, 'cause he wasn't. He wasn't there."

  "He had to be somewhere," Carter snapped.

  "Nobody came across the stage. Nobody went out through the courtyard. There was only one other door, and that doesn't go anywhere, it just comes back to the lobby...."

  There was a long moment of silence, compounded of anger and fear. Heads would roll for this one. Heads would roll. A couple of cops glanced furtively at O'Dell and Lily, deep in private talk. After a moment, Huerta said, "He must've been here all the time. He must've hid out before we got here, saw that he couldn't get out, figured we'd sweep the place before we left, and nailed Frank to get his radio."

  Kennett was nodding. "That couldn't have been Frank who called...."

  "Sounded like Frank...."

  "So Bekker's got a deep voice, big fuckin' deal. We had people back there in five seconds, and Frank was gone. It took a while to mess him up like that."

  "Then why'd he call? Bekker? If he was already gone?" Kuhn asked.

  "To get us running back there," Lucas said. "Say he goes back there, nails Frank, takes the radio, goes off through the side door around the corner from the lobby, makes the call, then pushes through the door and goes right through the lobby and out."

  "Billy said nobody came through the door," Kuhn said.

  A young plainclothes cop with his hands in his pockets shook his head. "I swear to God, I don't see how anybody could've got through there. Lieutenant Carter told me to stay there, and even when Frank called, I stayed there. I saw everybody running..."

  "But your back was to the door?" Kennett asked.

  "Yeah, but I was right there," the young cop said. He could feel the goat horns being fitted for his head.

  Kennett turned to Lucas: "You're sure he didn't come past you?"

  "I don't see how. It's like this guy said..." Lucas pointed at the cop who looked at the faces. "I looked at every goddamn face coming through the door; he just wasn't there."

  "All right, so he was inside," Kennett said. "We assume he made the radio call as a diversion to get out...."

  "Or to hide," somebody said. "If he had a bolthole during the day..."

  "We'll find out," Kennett said, peering up at the brightly lighted windows. He glanced sideways at Lucas, who shook his head. Bekker was gone. "The other possibility is that he went out a window somewhere and made the radio call to pull the guys off the street...."

  "What if he had keys and was already outside, and was just taunting us?" one of the cops asked.

  They talked for twenty minutes before drifting away to specific assignments, or simply drifting away, afraid that their names and faces might become associated with the disaster. In the alcove outside the stage door, a crime-scene crew worked under heavy lights, picking up what they could. But there was no real question: it was Bekker. But Bekker, how?

  "Okay, now we're out of cop work: now we're down to politics," Kennett said to Lucas as they stood together in the courtyard.

  "You gonna hang?" Lucas asked.

  "I could," Kennett nodded. "I gotta start calling people, gotta get some spin on the thing, fuzz it up."

  "Gonna be tough, with you right here," Lucas said.

  "So what would you do?" Kennett asked.

  "Lie," Lucas said.

  Kennett was interested. "How?"

  "Blame Frank. Unlock the back door," Lucas said, nodding to the opposite side of the courtyard. "Tell them that Bekker hid in the building during the day and that he must've stolen keys from somewhere. That when he came out and got down here, cutting through the courtyard, using his keys-where we only had one man, because we'd secured the place ahead of time-he ran head-on into Frank. There was a fight, but Bekker's a PCP freak and he killed Frank and escaped back out the other side of the building. If anybody gets blamed, the blame goes on Frank. But nobody'll say anything, because Frank's dead. You could even do a little off-the-record action. Tell them that Frank fucked up, but we can't say it publicly. He was a good guy and now he's dead...."

  "Hmph." Kennett pulled at his lip. "What about the radio call?"

  "Somebody's already suggested that he was taunting us: go with that," Lucas suggested. "That he was already outside. That fits Bekker's character, as far as the media's concerned."

  "Do you think... ?"

  "No, I think he suckered us."

  "So do I." Kennett stared at his feet for a moment, then glanced at Lily and O'Dell. "The story might not hold up for long."

  "If we get him before it breaks, nobody'll care."

  Kennett nodded. "I better go talk to O'Dell. We'll need a ferocious off-the-record media massage."

  "You think he'll help?"

  Kennett permitted himself a very thin grin. "He was here too," Kennett said. "They'd just pulled up outside..."

  Kennett started toward Lily and O'Dell, then stopped and turned, hands in his pockets, no longer grinning. "Get your ass back to Minneapolis. Find something for us, God damn it."

  CHAPTER

  19

  Lucas sat alone in the worst row of seats on the plane, in tourist class behind the bulkhead, no good place to put his feet except in the aisle. The stewardess was watching him before they crossed Niagara Falls.

  "Are you all right?" she asked finally, touching his shoulder. He'd dropped the seat all the way back, tense, his eyes closed, like a patient waiting for a root canal.

  "Are the wheels off the ground?" he grated.

  "Uh-oh," she said, fighting a smile. "How about a scotch? Double scotch?"

  "Doesn't work," Lucas said. "Unless you've got about nine phenobarbitals to put in it."

  "Sorry," she said. Her face was professionally straight, but she was amused. "It's only two more hours...."

  "Wonderful..."

  He could see it so clearly in his mind's eye: ripped chunks of aluminum skin and pie
ces of engine nacelle scattered around a Canadian cornfield, heads and arms and fingers like bits of trash, fires guttering just out of sight, putting out gouts of oily black smoke; women in stretch pants wandering through the wreckage, picking up money. A Raggedy Ann doll, cut in half, smiling senselessly; all images from movies, he thought. He'd never actually seen a plane crash, but you had to be a complete idiot not to be able to imagine it.

  He sat and sweated, sat and sweated, until the stewardess came back and said, "Almost there."

  "How long?" he croaked.

  "Less than an hour..."

  "Sweet bleedin' Jesus..." He'd been praying that it was only a minute or two; he'd been sure of it.

  The plane came in over the grid of orange sodium-vapor lights and blue mercury lights, banking, Lucas holding on to the seat. The window was filled with the streaming cars, the black holes of the lakes stretching down from just west of the Minneapolis Loop. He looked at the floor. Jumped when the wheels came down. Made the mistake of glancing across the empty seat next to him and out the window, and saw the ground coming and closed his eyes again, braced for the impact.

  The landing was routine. The bored pilot said the usual good-byes, the voice of a Tennessee hay-shaker, which he undoubtedly was, not qualified to fly a '52 Chevy much less a jetliner....

  Lucas stunk with fear, he thought as he bolted from the plane, carrying his overnight bag. My God, that ride was the worst. He'd read that La Guardia was overcrowded, that in a plane you could get cut in half in an instant, right on the ground. And he'd have to do it again in a day or two.

  He caught a cab, gave directions, collapsed in the backseat. The driver took his time, loafing along the river, north past the Ford plant. Lucas' house had a light in the window. The timer.

  "Nice to get home, huh?" the cabdriver asked, making a notation in a trip log.

  "You don't know how good," Lucas said. He thrust a ten at the driver and hopped out. A couple strolled by on the river walk, across the street.

  "Hey, Lucas," the man called.

  "Hey, Rick, Stephanie." Neighbors: he could see her blond hair, his chrome-rimmed glasses

  "You left your backyard sprinkler on. We turned it off and put the hose behind the garage."

  "Thanks..."

  He picked up the mail inside the door, sorted out the ads and catalogs and dumped them in a wastebasket, showered to get the fear-stink off his body and fell into bed. In thirty seconds, he was gone.

  "Lucas?" Quentin Daniel stuck his head out of his office. He had dark circles under his eyes and he'd lost weight. He'd been the Minneapolis chief of police for two terms, but that wasn't what was eating him. Innocent people had died because of Quentin Daniel: Daniel was a criminal, but nobody knew except Daniel and Lucas. Lucas had resolved it in his mind, had forgiven him. Daniel never could.... "C'mon in. What happened to your face?"

  "Got mugged, more or less... I need some help," Lucas said briefly, settling into the visitor's chair. "You know I'm working in New York."

  "Yeah, they called me. I told them you were Mr. Wunnerful."

  "I need to find the guys who were in the jail cells next to Bekker-or anybody he talked to while he was in there."

  "Sounds like you're scraping the bottom of the bucket," Daniel said, playing with a humidor on his desk.

  "That's why I'm here," Lucas said. "The cocksucker's dug in, and we can't get him out."

  "All right." Daniel picked up his phone, punched a number. "Is Sloan there? Get him down to my office, will you? Thanks."

  There was a moment of awkward silence, then Lucas said, "You look like shit."

  "I feel like shit," Daniel said. He turned the humidor around, squared it with the edge of the desk.

  "Your wife... ?"

  "Gone. Thought it'd be a lift, seeing her go, but it wasn't. I'd get up every morning and look down at her and wish she was gone, and now I get up and look at the bed and there's a hole in it."

  "Want her back?"

  "No. But I want something, and I can't have it. I'll tell you one thing, between you and me and the wall-I'm getting out of here. Two months and I hit a crick in the retirement scale. Maybe go up north, get a place on a lake. I've got the bucks."

  There was a knock on the door, and Daniel's secretary stuck her head in and said, "Sloan..."

  Lucas stood up. "I do wish you luck," he said. "I'm serious."

  "Thanks, but I'm cursed," Daniel said.

  Sloan was lounging in the outer office, a cotton sport coat over a tennis shirt, chinos, walking shoes. He saw Lucas and a grin spread across his thin face.

  "Are you back?" he asked, sticking out his hand.

  Lucas, laughing: "Just for the day. I gotta find some assholes and I need somebody with a badge."

  "You're working in the Big Apple...."

  "Yeah. I'll tell you about it, but we gotta go talk to the sheriff."

  Three names, a deputy sheriff said. He'd looked at the records, checked with the other guards. They all agreed.

  Bekker had been next to Clyde Payton, who was now at Stillwater, doing twenty-four months on a drugstore burglary, third offense. A doper.

  "Motherfucker's gonna come out and kill people," the deputy said. "He thought Bekker was like some rock idol, or something. You could see Payton thinking: Killing people. Far out."

  Tommy Krey, car theft, had been on the other side. He was still out on bail; Krey's attorney was dragging his feet on the trial. "The car owner's gonna move to California, I hear. Tommy's lawyer's looking for a plea," the deputy said.

  Burrell Thomas had been across the aisle, and pled to simple assault, paid a fine. He was gone.

  "I know Tommy, but I don't know the other two," Lucas said. Out of touch.

  "Payton's from St. Paul, Rice Street. Basically a doper, sells real estate when he's straight," Sloan said. "I don't know Thomas either."

  "Burrell's a head case," the deputy said. "They call him Rayon. Y'all know Becky Ann, the cardplayer with the huge hooters, see her down on Lake sometimes?"

  "Sure." Lucas nodded.

  "She was going with this super-tall black dude...."

  "Manny," said Sloan, and Lucas added, "Manfred Johnson."

  "Yeah, that's him-he's a friend of Burrell's. Like from high school and maybe even when they were kids..."

  "How's New York?" Sloan asked. They were in Sloan's unmarked car, poking into the south side of Minneapolis.

  "Hot. Like Alabama."

  "Mmm. I never been there. I mean New York. I understand it's a dump."

  "It's different," Lucas said, watching the beat-up houses slide by. Kids on bikes, rolling through the summer. They'd called Krey's attorney, a guy who worked out of a neighborhood storefront. He could have Krey there in a half-hour, he said.

  "How different? I mean, like, Fort Apache?"

  "Nah, not that," Lucas said. "The main thing is, there's an infinite number of assholes. You never know where the shit is coming from. You can't get an edge on anything. You can't know about the place. Here, if somebody hijacks a goddamn Best Buy truck and takes off fifty Sonys, we got an idea where they're going. Out there... Shit, you could make a list of suspects longer than your dick, and that'd only be the guys that you personally know might handle it. And then there are probably a hundred times that many guys that you don't know. I mean, a list longer than my dick."

  "We're talking long lists here," Sloan said.

  "It's strange," said Lucas. "It's like being up at the top of the IDS Building and looking out a window where you can't see the ground. You get disoriented and you feel like you're falling."

  "How 'bout that Bekker, though?" Sloan said enthusiastically. "He's a fuckin' star, and we knew him back when."

  Tommy Krey was sitting on a wooden chair in his attorney's office. His attorney wore a yellow-brown double-knit suit and a heavily waxed hairdo the precise shade of the suit. He shook hands with Sloan and Lucas; his hands were damp, and Lucas smothered a grin when he saw Sloan surreptitiously wipe his
hand on his pant leg.

  "What can Tommy do for yuz?" the lawyer asked, folding his hands on his desk, trying to look bright and businesslike. Krey looked half bored, skeptical, picked his teeth.

  "He can tell us what he and Michael Bekker talked about in jail," Lucas said.