Silent Prey

by John Sandford

  Rich's tongue slid over his lower lip, his hands gripping the arms of the chair. After a minute, he relaxed. "I don't see how he can hurt me," he said.

  "He can't," Lily said. "He's mostly going to listen, maybe ask a couple of questions. Why don't you just tell me what you told Walt? If either of us has questions, we'll break in."

  Rich thought about it for another moment, looked into the dark, trying to penetrate it, then nodded. "Okay," he said.

  He'd been at home when he got a call from an ex-burglar he'd busted a couple of times, a man named Lowell Jackson. Jackson was trying to go straight, as a sign painter, and was doing okay.

  "He said an acquaintance of his had called, a kid named Cornell, nicknamed Red. Cornell had said he'd seen Fred Waites go down and that it wasn't no gang-bangers-that one of the guys in the car was an old white guy and Cornell thought he was a cop. Jackson gave me an address."

  Old white guy?

  "Did you go after Cornell?" asked Lily.

  "Yeah. Couldn't find him. So I went and talked to Jackson."

  "What he say?"

  "He said right after he talked to me, that same day, he saw Cornell at this playground on 118th-this is all in my report...."

  "Go ahead," Lily said.

  "Cornell came down to a playground on 118th and said he was going home. Getting out of town. Nobody knew where he went. His last name is Reed. Cornell Reed. He's got a sheet. He's a doper, into crack. But he used to be some kind of college kid. Not a regular asshole."

  "How old is he?" Lily asked.

  "Middle twenties, like that."

  "New York guy?"

  "No. Supposedly he came from down south somewhere, Atlanta maybe. Been here a few years, though-Jackson said he didn't talk about where he came from. There was something... wrong. He just wouldn't talk about it. Used to cry about it, though, when he was drunk."

  "How many times was he busted?"

  "Half-dozen, nothing big. Theft, shoplifting, minor possession. We looked for background on him, NCIC, but there's nothing-his first busts were here in New York, addresses up in Harlem."

  "And he's gone."

  "Nowhere to be found. We checked Atlanta, but they don't know him."

  "Dead?"

  Rich frowned. "Don't think so. When he took off from the playground, he had some new shoes and a big nylon suitcase. That's what the guys at the playground say. He came up to 118th to say good-bye, they were sitting around. Then he jumped a cab and that's the last they saw of him."

  "You wrote a report on all of this?"

  "Yeah. And we're still looking for him. To tell you the truth, he's about the only thing we ever got on the case."

  "What were you doing for Petty?" Lucas asked.

  "Just looking at guys, mostly," Rich said. "Made me a little nervous, tell you the truth. I tried to get off it. I don't like looking at our own people."

  "How'd you get assigned to the case?" Lucas asked.

  "I don't know. Someone downtown, I guess," Rich said, his forehead wrinkling as he thought about it. "My lieutenant just said to report down to City Hall for a special assignment. He didn't know what was going on either."

  "All right," said Lucas. Then, "How did Cornell know the white guy was old?"

  "Don't know; if I find him, I'll ask him. Maybe just because he knows him from somewhere..."

  They talked for another half hour, but Rich had almost nothing that wasn't in the reports. Lily thanked him and let him go.

  "Waste of time," Lily said to Lucas.

  "Had to try. What do you know about him? Rich?"

  "Not much, really," she said.

  "Good detective?"

  "He's okay. Competent. Nothing spectacular."

  "Hmp." Lucas touched the sore cheek, head down, considering.

  "Why?"

  "Just wondering," he said, looking back up. "You ready to go?"

  "Want to walk? Down to the restaurant?"

  "How far?" Lucas asked.

  "Ten, fifteen minutes, taking it easy."

  "Are we gonna get shot, going out the door?"

  "No. O'Dell had a couple of people talk to the supers all along the block," Lily said. "They're looking for strange people wandering around their apartments."

  The street outside the apartment was clear, but before they went out through the lobby door, Lucas scanned the windows across the street.

  "Nervous?"

  "No. I'm trying to figure it," he said.

  She studied his face. "What?"

  "Nothing." He shook his head. Rich had seemed straight enough.

  "C'mon..."

  "Nothing, really..."

  "All right," Lily said, annoyed, still watching him.

  The Village was pretty, quiet, well-tended brick townhouses with flowers in window boxes, touches of wrought iron, the image wounded here and there by a curl of concertina, a touch of razor wire. And the people looked different, Lucas thought, from the people farther uptown; a deliberate touch of the Bohemian: sandals and canvas shorts, beards and waist-length hair, old-fashioned bikes and wooden necklaces.

  The Manhattan Caballero was buried in a street of red stone buildings, a small place, its name and logo painted on one window, a beer sign in the other.

  "They shot from up there, the third window in, second floor," Lily said, standing on the sidewalk outside the Caballero door, pointing across the street.

  "Couldn't miss with a laser sight," Lucas said, looking up at the window, then down at the sidewalk. "He must've been about right here, you see the chip marks."

  Caught by the geometry and technicalities of the killing, he'd paid no attention to her. Now he looked up and she had one hand on the restaurant window, as if for support, her face pale, waxen.

  "Jesus, I'm sorry...."

  "I'm okay," she said.

  "I thought you were gonna faint."

  "It's anger now," she said. "When I think about Walt, I want to kill somebody."

  "That bad?"

  "So bad I can't believe it. It's like I lost a kid."

  They flagged a cab to go to Petty's apartment. Crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, Lily asked, "Have you ever been here? Brooklyn Heights?"

  "No."

  "Great place for an apartment. I thought about it, I would've come, except, you know, once you live in the Village, you don't want to leave."

  "This looks okay..." Lucas said, peering out the window as they rolled off the end of the bridge. "The woman at Petty's apartment building..."

  "Logan."

  "She says somebody was in his apartment when he was already dead, and before the cops arrived?"

  "Yes. Absolutely. She remembers that she thought he'd come home and then gone out again. She was watching television, remembered the show, and what part of the show. We checked-he'd been dead for ten minutes."

  "Somebody was moving fast."

  "Very fast. Had to know the minute Walt went down. Had to be waiting for it. There's a question about how he got into Walt's apartment. Whoever it was must have had a key."

  "That's simple enough, if you're talking about an intelligence operation."

  "You should know," she said.

  Petty's apartment was in a brown brick building stuck on the side of a low hill, in a cul-de-sac, the area long faded but pleasant. Marcy Logan's door was the first one to the left, inside the tiny lobby.

  "Very late," Logan said, peering over the door chain at Lily's badge. She was an older woman, in her middle sixties, gray hair and matching eyes. "You said ten o'clock."

  "I'm sorry, but something else came up," Lily said. "We just need to talk for a minute."

  "Well, come in." Her tone was severe, but Lucas got the impression that Logan was happy for the company. "I'll have to warm up the coffee...."

  She had made cookies and coffee, the cookies laid out on a silver tray. She stuck a carafe of coffee in a microwave, fussed with cups and saucers.

  "Such a nice apartment," Lily said.

  "Thank you. They filmed Moo
nstruck just down the way, you know. Cher was right down by the Promenade, I saw her..."

  When the coffee was hot, Logan poked the tray of cookies in Lucas' face. Lucas tried one: oatmeal. He took another, with a cup of coffee.

  "It wasn't a woman," Logan said, positively, when Lily asked. "The footsteps were too heavy. I didn't see him, but it was a man."

  "You're sure?"

  "I hear people come and go all day," Logan said. "That's something I'd know. I thought it was Walter coming back-I wouldn't have thought that if it was a woman."

  "He went up, was there for a few minutes, then came right back down?" Lily asked.

  "That's right. Couldn't have been more than a half-hour, because my show was a half-hour, and he came after the show started and left before it ended."

  "You told the investigators that it occurred to you that it wasn't Petty," Lily said. "But not seriously enough that you actually looked. Why did you think it might not be him?"

  "Whoever it was, stopped in the lobby. Like he was looking at my apartment door or maybe listening for anybody inside. Then he went up. Walter was always very forthright. Walked right in, went right up. Especially on his Fridays. He'd always have two or three beers, and he couldn't hold it at all, and by the time he got here, he'd... you know: he had to go. You could hear the water running from the toilet, right after he went up. That night, though, whoever it was stopped inside. He did the same thing on the way back out. Stopped in the lobby. It gives me the shivers. Maybe he was thinking about rubbing out witnesses."

  "I don't think that's much of a threat," Lily said, smiling at the "rubbing out."

  "Why don't you say something, young man?" Logan asked Lucas, who was eating his sixth cookie. He couldn't seem to stop.

  "Too busy eating cookies," he said. "These things are great. You could make a fortune selling them."

  "Oh, that's nice," she said, smiling. "What happened to your face?"

  "I was mugged."

  "Isn't that just like New York? Even the cops..."

  "How do you know this guy went to Petty's apartment?" Lucas asked.

  "Well, I heard him come in, and then the elevator dinged, so he was going up. Then just a second later, I heard another ding, like it was coming from the kitchen. That's the second floor. If it goes to the third floor, I can barely hear it. If it goes to the fourth, I can't hear it at all."

  "Okay," Lucas said, nodding. "So you heard it ding on the second floor."

  "Yes. And the Lynns and Golds were already in and the Schumachers were at Fire Island that whole weekend. So it had to be Walter, and it was about the time he always came in. I didn't hear him flush, though. Then I heard the elevator ding on the second floor again, and it came down. Then whoever it was, I thought was looking at apartments again, because it was a minute before the outside door opened.... I should have looked, but I was watching my show."

  "That's fine," said Lucas, nodding. "And it wasn't a visitor to one of the other apartments?"

  "No," Logan said, shaking her head. "When the cops got here and I found out what happened, I told them about somebody coming, and they talked to everybody up there. Nobody came in at that time, and nobody had any visitors."

  When they finished with Logan, they rode up in the elevator and Lily cut the seals off Petty's door. The apartment had been neatly kept but had been pulled apart by investigators. The refrigerator had been unplugged, and the door stood open. Cupboard doors were open and paper was stacked everywhere. Lucas went to Petty's desk, which was set in a tiny alcove, and thumbed through financial records.... No personal phone book.

  "No phone book."

  "The Homicide guys probably have it. I'll ask."

  Ten minutes later, Lily said, "This is like the interview with Rich. There isn't anything here."

  On the way out, Mrs. Logan met them in the hallway with a brown paper bag, which she handed to Lucas. "More cookies," she said.

  "Thanks," he said, and then, "When I finish them, I may come back for more."

  The old lady giggled, and Lucas and Lily went looking for a cab.

  Cornell Reed. Cornell Reed had seen the killer, an old white guy, and recognized him as a cop.

  Lucas lay on the hotel bed and thought about it, sighed, rolled off the bed, found his pocket address book, and picked out Harmon Anderson's home phone number. As he dialed the number, he glanced at his watch. It would be midnight, Minneapolis time.

  Anderson was in bed.

  "Jesus, Lucas, what's going on?"

  "I'm in New York...."

  "I know, I heard. I wish I was there...." Lucas heard him turn away from the phone and say to someone in the background, "Lucas." Then to Lucas, he said, "My wife's here, she says hello."

  "Look, I'm sorry I woke you up..."

  "No, no..."

  "And I don't want to cause you any problems, but would you be available to do a little computer work? I'd pay you a consultant's fee."

  "Ah, fuck that, what do you need?"

  "I'm in a snakepit, man. Could you find out what airlines fly out of New York, all the big airports, including Newark, and check from the beginning of the month, see if there's a ticket for a Cornell Reed? Or any first name Cornell, if you can do that? Or Red Reed? I don't think it'd be overseas, except maybe the Caribbean. Check domestic first, like Atlanta, L.A. or Chicago. I need to know where he went and I need to know who paid for the ticket, if we can find that out."

  "Could take a couple of days."

  "Get back to me-and I'm serious about a fee, man. A few bucks."

  "We can work that out...."

  "Get back to me, man."

  When he hung up, Lucas dropped back on the bed, thinking back to the interview with Rich. Rich didn't know why he'd been picked for Petty's team. Neither did Lily. His only qualification seemed to be that he'd later get a call from a burglar he knew, producing the only lead in the case. Good luck of a rare and peculiar variety.

  Rich said that Cornell Reed was heavy into the crack. If that was right, Reed shouldn't be flying out of town. If he had enough cash to fly, he'd buy dope with the cash and take the bus. Or hitchhike. Or just not go. With enough crack, you didn't have to go anywhere.... He certainly wouldn't take several hundred dollars out to La Guardia and push it across the ticket counter.

  On the other hand, a doper doesn't take a cab to the bus depot, not when the A train would have him there quicker and leave him enough change for a rock or two. La Guardia was another story. There was no easy way to get there, except by cab....

  So maybe he was flying. And maybe he was flying on an unrefundable ticket. And that sounded like a ticket issued by a government.

  Or a police department.

  And then there was Mrs. Logan's story.

  That was very interesting; interesting and disturbing. Had Lily not understood it? Or had she hoped that Lucas hadn't?

  CHAPTER

  12

  Thirty hits of speed, two days; Bekker hadn't slept forever. He was carried along on the chemicals like a leaf in a river, the flow of time and thought rolling about him. And he was avoiding the woman with the eyes, the woman watching him. She terrified him: but the chemicals had defeated her after two days, and she was losing her grip.

  But other things were happening.

  Late in the afternoon of the second day, the bugs came. He could feel them, lines of them, inching through his veins. All of his veins, but in particular, a vein on the forearm; he could feel them, little bumps, rattling along, doing their filthy work. Eating him.

  Eating the blood cells. He could remember, as a child, kicking open ant nests and seeing the ants running for cover, their mealy white eggs in their jaws. And this was the image that came to him: ants running, but with blood cells caught in their pincers. Thousands of them, running through his veins. If he could let them out...

  A voice in his head: No no no, hallucination, no no no...

  He stood up, his knees and feet aching. He'd walked for miles in the basement, back and f
orth, back and forth. How far? A few errant brain cells wandered away and did the calculation... say five thousand round trips, twenty feet each way... thirty-seven point eight seven eight miles. Thirty-seven point eight seven eight seven eight seven eight seven eight seven...