Silent Prey

by John Sandford

  "We're police officers," Fell said. She lifted the flap of her purse, flashed the badge. "Are you Rose Arnold?"

  The woman's smile sagged into a frown. "Yeah. What'd you want?"

  "We're looking for a guy," Lucas said. "We thought you could help."

  "I ain't been here all that long...."

  Lucas dug in his pocket, took out his money clip, freed his driver's license and handed it to Arnold. "Barbara here"-he nodded at Fell-"is a New York cop. I'm not. I'm from Minneapolis. They brought me in to help look for this Bekker dude who's chopping people up."

  "Yeh?" Arnold was giving nothing away, watching him with her small wandering eyes like a pullet who suspects the axe.

  "Yeah. He killed my woman out there. Maybe you read about it. I'm gonna catch him and I'm gonna do him."

  Arnold nodded and asked, "So what's that got to do with me?"

  "We think he's getting stuff-drugs and medical equipment-from Bellevue. We know that you handle stuff out of Bellevue."

  "That's bullshit, I never touch nothing...."

  "You moved five hundred cases of white Hammermill Bond copy paper out of there two weeks ago, paid a dollar a case, and sold it to a computer supply place for three dollars a case," Fell said. "We could bust you if we wanted to, but we don't want to. We just want some help."

  She looked at them, quietly, a gleam of strong intelligence in her eyes. Calculating. Lucas had a quick vision of her jerking some crappy piece of hillbilly iron out of a drawer, something like a rusty Iver Johnson.32, and popping him in the chest. But nothing happened, except the sound of flies bumping against the front window.

  "Killed your woman?" she asked. She tipped her head, looking at him from the corner of her eyes.

  "Yeah," he said. "It's real personal."

  She mulled it over for another few seconds, then asked, "What do you want?"

  "I need the name of a guy who rips stuff out of there on a regular basis."

  "Will this come back on me?"

  "No way."

  She thought about it, then mumbled: "Lew Whitechurch."

  "Lew..."

  "Whitechurch," she said.

  "Who else?"

  "He's the only one, right out of Bellevue...."

  "Any chance he might be peddling pills, too?"

  "I think he might. I never touch them, but Lew... he's got a problem. He takes a little nose."

  "Thanks," Lucas said. He took a personal business card from his pocket, turned it over, wrote his hotel phone number on it. "Have you handled, or know anybody who has handled, a load of emergency-room monitoring equipment?"

  "No." Her voice was positive.

  "Ask around. If you find somebody, have them call me. It'll never get past us, I swear it on a Bible. I'm only in this because Bekker cut my woman's throat."

  "Cut her throat?" The fat woman touched her neck.

  "With a bread knife," Lucas said. He let the bitterness flow into his voice. "Listen: anybody dealing with Bekker is liable to find himself strapped to an operating table, eyelids cut off, getting his heart sliced out while he's still alive.... You read the papers."

  "Watch TV." She nodded.

  "Then you know."

  "Fuckin' lunatic, is what he is," Arnold said.

  "So ask around. Call me."

  Outside, Fell said, "You're a scary sonofabitch sometimes. You sorta used your friend..."

  "My friend's dead, she doesn't care," he said. And he shrugged. "But hillbillies understand that revenge shit."

  "What's the name?"

  "Lew Whitechurch. And she thinks he might deal pills."

  "Let's get him," Fell said. As they were flagging the cab, she said, "If I bust Bekker myself, I'll make detective first before I get out."

  "That'd be nice." A cab zigged through the traffic toward them.

  "More pension. I could probably afford a straight waitress job. I wouldn't have to dance topless," Fell said.

  "Aw," he said. "I was planning to come down for your first night."

  "Maybe we could work something out," she said, and climbed into the cab before he could think of a comeback.

  They caught Lewis Whitechurch pushing a tool cart through a basement hallway at Bellevue. His supervisor pointed him out, the hospital's assistant administrator hovering anxiously in the background. Kennett's people had been there earlier, had talked to two employees, she said, but not Whitechurch.

  "What?" Whitechurch said.

  Fell flashed her badge, while Lucas blocked the hall. "We need to talk to you, privately."

  Whitechurch shook his head. "I don't want to talk to anyone."

  "We can talk here or I can call a squad and we can go over to Midtown South."

  "Talk about what?" Whitechurch shot a glance at the supervisor.

  "Let's find a place," Lucas suggested.

  They found a place in the hospital workshop, sitting on battered office chairs, Whitechurch spinning himself in quarter-turns with the heel of one foot. "I honest to God don't know...."

  Five hundred cases of paper, they said.

  "I ain't gonna talk about nothing like that," he said, his Jersey accent as thick as mayonnaise. "You want to talk about this other guy, Bekker, I'd help you any way I can. But I don't know nothing about him, or any medical gear. I wouldn't touch that shit...." He caught himself. "Listen, I don't take nothing out of here, but if I did, I wouldn't take that stuff. I mean, people might die because of it."

  "If we catch the guy who's helping Bekker... that guy's going down as an accessory. Attica, and I'll tell you what, man: there'd be no fuckin' parole, not for somebody who helped this asshole...."

  "Jesus Christ, I'd tell you," Whitechurch said. He was sweating. "Listen, I know a couple of people who might know something about this...."

  "What do you think?" Fell asked.

  "He covered himself pretty well. I don't know. We got names, anyway. We'll come back to him. Let him stew...." Whitechurch had given them two more names. Both men were working.

  "Jakes is an orderly-he oughta be around," the assistant administrator said. She was getting into the hunt, falling into Fell's laconic speech pattern. "Williams-I'll have to look him up."

  They found Harvey Jakes moving sheets out of the laundry.

  "I don't know about this shit," he said. He was worried. "Listen, I don't know why you'd come looking to me. I never been up on anything, never took anything, where'd you get my name..."

  Williams was worse. Williams worked in the laundry, and was stupid. "Said what?"

  "Said you boosted stuff out of here and..."

  "Said what?"

  Lucas looked at him closely, then at Fell, and shook his head. "He's not faking."

  "What?" Williams looked slowly from one to the other, and they sent him back to his laundry.

  "We're into a black market-pretty casual, hard to pin down, picking up the occasional opportunity," Fell said as they ambled down the hall. Like the rest of New York, the Bellevue interior was mostly a patch, painted white with black trim. "Doesn't feel like a real tight ring. Whitechurch might be bigger, if he really organized a truck to haul that paper out of there. Jakes and Williams are small-time, if they're stealing anything at all."

  "That's about right," Lucas said. "Whitechurch might be something, though."

  "Want to go back on him?"

  "We should," he said, sticking his hands in his pockets. "But I fuckin' hurt...."

  "You keep poking at your cheek," she said. She reached out and touched the bruise, and her light hand didn't hurt at all. "So what are we doing?"

  "I'm going back to the hotel. I need a nap, I feel like shit," Lucas said.

  "We're stuck?"

  "Except for Whitechurch, I don't know where we go," Lucas said. "Let's think about it. I'll call you tomorrow."

  CHAPTER

  11

  At the Lakota, Lucas examined his swollen cheek in the mirror. The color of the bruise was deepening, a purple blotch that dominated the side of his fac
e, shiny in the middle, rougher toward the edges. He touched the abraded skin and winced. He'd been hit before, and knew what would happen: the abrasions would scab over while the skin around them turned yellow-green, and in a week, he'd look even worse; he'd look like Frankenstein. He shook his head at himself, tried a tentative grin, ate a half-dozen aspirin and slept for two hours. When he woke, the headache had faded, but his stomach was queasy. He gobbled four more aspirin, showered, brushed his teeth, fished an oversize Bienfang art pad from under the bed and got a wide-tipped Magic Marker from his briefcase. He wrote:

  Bekker.

  Needs money.

  Needs drugs.

  Lives Midtown w/friend?

  Has vehicle.

  Hasn't been seen. Disguise?

  Chemist skills.

  Medical skills.

  Contact at Bellevue.

  Night.

  He tacked the chart to a wall and lay on his bed, studying it. Bekker needed money if he was buying drugs, and he almost certainly would be. In the Hennepin County Jail he'd begged for them, for chemical relief.

  Therefore: he had to be talking to dealers, or at least one dealer. Could he be working for one? Not likely as a salesman: even the dumbest of the dumb would recognize him as a time bomb, if they knew who he was. But if he was working as a chemist-methedrine was simple to synthesize, with the right training and access to the raw materials. If he were running a crank line, that would explain where he'd get money, and drugs, and maybe even a place to stay.

  The car was another problem. He was dumping the bodies, obviously from a vehicle. How would he get access? How would he license it? Everything pointed to an accomplice....

  He stood, wandered into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. The abrasion was stiffening. He probed it with a fingernail, lifting a flake of skin, and blood trickled down his cheek. Damn. He knew better. He got a wad of toilet paper, held it to his cheek, and went back to the bed.

  He looked at the chart again, but his mind drifted away from Bekker, toward the other case. Why had they jumped him? And had they really gone after him, or was something else happening? They could have taken him with guns: they had him cold. If they hadn't wanted to kill him, they still could have gotten to him more quickly, with baseball bats. Why had they risked resistance? If he'd had a gun in his hand, he would have killed them....

  Why had Lily looked out the window when she did?

  But the major puzzle was more subtle. He wasn't getting anywhere, and Lily and O'Dell must see that. All he could do was look at paper, and listen to people talk. He had none of the insider information, the history, that could point him in the right direction. And yet... he was surrounded by people who might be involved: Fell, Kennett, O'Dell himself, even Lily. And not coincidentally.

  At eight-thirty he got up; he dressed, went out to the street, flagged a cab, and rode ten minutes to Lily's apartment. She was waiting.

  "You still look rough," she said as she opened the door. She touched his cheek. "Feels hot. Are you sure you want to do this? It's a lot of running around."

  "Yeah," he said, nodding. "Rich is set for nine?"

  "Yes. He's nervous, but he's coming."

  "I don't want him to see me," Lucas said.

  "Okay. You can sit in the kitchen with the lights out, talk to him down the hall."

  "Fine." Lucas, hands in his pockets, wandered down toward the kitchen.

  "Anything new on Bekker?" she asked, trailing behind.

  "No. I was thinking, though, he must be out only at night." Lucas perched on a tall oak stool and leaned on the breakfast bar. A handicraft ceramic bowl full of apples sat on the bar, and he picked one of them up and turned it in his fingers. "Even with stage makeup, his face would be too noticeable in daylight."

  "So?"

  "Would it be possible to make random stops of single men driving inexpensive cars, after midnight, Midtown?"

  "Jesus, Lucas. The chance of picking him up that way would be nil-and we'd probably get three cops shot by freaks in the meantime."

  "I'm trying to figure out ways to press him," Lucas said. He dropped the apple back in the bowl.

  "Do we really want to chase him out of here? He'd just go somewhere else, start again...."

  "I don't know if he can. Somehow, I don't know how, he's got a unique situation here. He can hide, somehow," Lucas said. "If he travels, he loses that-I mean, look, right now Bekker's one of the most famous people in the country. He can't go to motels or gas stations, he can't take any kind of public transportation. He can't really ride in a car without a lot of tension-if he gets pulled over by a cop, he's done. And he needs his dope, he needs his money. If we pushed him out, if he tried to run, he'd be finished."

  She thought about it, then nodded. "I suppose we could do something. I wouldn't want to make a lot of stops, but we could announce that we are, and ask for cooperation from the public. Maybe make a couple of stops for the TV crews..."

  "That'd be good."

  "I'll talk to Kennett tomorrow," she said. She perched on a stool opposite from him, crossed her legs and wrapped her hands around the top knee.

  "How'd he get on this case? Kennett?" Lucas asked.

  "O'Dell pulled some strings. Kennett's one of the best we've got on this kind of thing, organizing and running it."

  "He and O'Dell don't like each other."

  "No. No, they don't. I don't know why O'Dell pulled him, exactly, but I can tell you one thing: he wouldn't have done it unless he thought Kennett would find Bekker. Back in Minneapolis, you can control the bureaucratic fallout, because the department's small and everybody knows everybody else. But here... We've got to find Bekker, or heads'll start rolling. People are pissed off."

  Lucas nodded, thought about it for a second, and said, "Kennett's an intelligence guy: are you sure he's not involved with Robin Hood?"

  Lily looked down at her hands. "In my heart, I'm sure. I couldn't prove it, though. Whoever's running this thing must have a fair amount of charisma, to hold it together, and good organizational skills... and certain political opinions. Kennett fits."

  "But... ?"

  "He has too much sense," Lily said. "He's a believer in, what? Goodness, maybe. That's what I feel about him, anyway. We talk about things."

  "Okay."

  "That's not exactly proof," Lily said. She was tight, unhappy with the question, chewing at it.

  "I wasn't asking for proof, I was asking for an opinion," Lucas said. "What about O'Dell? He seems to be running everything. He runs you, he runs Kennett. He's running me, or thinks he is. He picked Fell out of the hat...."

  "I don't know, I just don't know. Even the way he picked Fell, it seems more like magic than anything. We may be on a complete wild-goose chase." She was about to go on, but chimes sounded from the door. She hopped off her stool and walked down the hall and pushed her intercom button. A man's voice said, "Bobby Rich, Lieutenant."

  "I'll buzz you in," Lily said. To Lucas, she said, "Get the lights."

  Lucas turned off the lights and sat on the floor, legs crossed. Sitting in the dark, he watched Lily as she waited by the door, a tall woman, less heavy than she once was, with a long, aristocratic neck. Charisma. Good organizational skills. Certain political opinions.

  "How did you talk O'Dell into bringing me here?" he asked abruptly. "Was he reluctant? How hard did you have to press?"

  "Bringing you here was more his idea than mine," Lily said. "I'd told him about you and he said you sounded perfect."

  Rich knocked on the door as Lucas thought, Really?

  Rich was a tall black man, balding, athletic, hair cropped so closely that his head looked shaven. He wore a green athletic jacket with tan sleeves, and blue jeans. He said, "Hello," and edged inside the apartment. Lily pointed him at a chair where Lucas could see his face, and then said, "There's another guy in the apartment, in the kitchen."

  "What?" Rich, just settling on the chair, half rose and looked down the hall.

  "Don't get up,
" Lily snapped. She pointed him back into the chair.

  "What's going on here?" Rich asked, still peering toward the kitchen.

  "We have a guy who's getting close to Robin Hood. Maybe. He doesn't want you to see his face. He doesn't know who to trust.... If you don't want to talk about it, with him back there, we can cut it off right here. You can go back into the bedroom while he leaves. Then it'll be just you and me... but I wanted you to know."