Silent Prey

by John Sandford

  "Bekker took him off last night."

  "What?" Lucas stood up, trying to understand.

  "Shot him in a hallway. Cut his eyes," Kennett said.

  "The morgue guys said it's gotta be Bekker, 'cause it was done too well to be a copycat. And with you talking to him about Bekker, there's no way it's a coincidence. When they called me, a couple of hours ago now, I shipped Carter over to the hospital. Somebody there finally figured out that cops were talking to Whitechurch yesterday...."

  "Ah, Jesus," Lucas said. "Whitechurch was wrong, too. We knew it. We knew he was bullshitting us."

  "How'd you get onto him?"

  "A fence," Lucas said. "Down on the Lower East Side."

  "Smith?"

  "No, a small-timer, a woman named Arnold. We'll go back and talk to her, but I don't think she has any connection with Whitechurch except to handle occasional shipments from him. But why was Bekker talking to Whitechurch again? More equipment?"

  "Whitechurch was dealing dope," Kennett said.

  "Ah. For sure?"

  "Yeah, we got it from a couple of places. And I'd bet that's where the halothane is from."

  "Telephones?"

  "We sent a subpoena over, and the phone company's mopping up their computers right now. They'll run back all the calls that came into Whitechurch's apartment and his office phone, both, and where they came from, for the last two months."

  "That should do it," Lucas said. "Fell's got a beeper: if you find him, call us. I'd like to see the end of it."

  "Mmm. It doesn't feel that easy," Kennett said.

  "All right. Well: I'll get Fell and get back to the fence. Goddammit, why'd Whitechurch cover for him? That'd be something to figure out."

  Lucas called Fell and told her.

  "Did we mess it up?" she asked anxiously.

  "No. We barely touched the guy-there was no way to know. But Kennett's people are all over him now. Everybody who knew him. We've got to talk to what's-her-name, the fence."

  "Arnold. Rose."

  "Yeah... So what's your status? Are you ready?" Lucas asked.

  "Hey, I'm just sitting here on my bed, buck naked, half asleep."

  "Jesus, if you had a warm croissant and a cup of coffee, I'd come right over," Lucas said. The nude photo of Fell and the other cop popped up in his head.

  "Fuck you, Davenport," Fell said, laughing. "If you're ready, why don't you get a cab? I'll be out front by the time you get here."

  "You come get me," Lucas said. "I'm barely awake, and I gotta shave." He touched his raw cheek.

  "Be ready," she said.

  Fell, when she arrived, was wearing a black tailored cotton dress with small flowers-the kind of dress women wore in Moline, Illinois-black low heels and nylons.

  "Jesus, you look terrific," Lucas said, climbing into the cab behind her.

  She blushed and said, "We just gonna walk in on Arnold?"

  "You don't want to talk about how terrific you look?"

  "Hey, just shut the fuck up, okay, Davenport?" she said.

  "Anything you want..." Under his breath, he added, "Toots."

  "What? What'd you just say?"

  "Nothing," Lucas said innocently.

  She closed one eye and said, "You're walking on the edge, buddy."

  Arnold was scared. "He maybe got done because he talked to you," she said, sucking her heavy lips in and out.

  "No. He got done because he called this asshole Bekker, who he was protecting, and told him that we'd interviewed him," Lucas said. "Bekker knows me. He didn't want to take any chances."

  "So what do you want from me? I gave you everything."

  "How'd you get in touch with Whitechurch when you needed to?" Lucas asked.

  "I never needed to. When he had something good, he'd bring it over. Otherwise-shit, I don't handle hospital stuff. I handle shit you can sell, cheap. Suits. Neckties. Telephones. I wouldn't know what to do with no hospital stuff."

  Fell pointed a finger at her: "You took down Simpson-McCall, what, two months ago... ?"

  Arnold looked away. "No. I don't know nothing about that."

  Fell studied her for a moment, then looked at Lucas. "Brokerage moves to a new building, one of those over-the-weekend moves. Trucks coming and going all night with files, computers, telephones, furniture, putting it in. The only thing is, not all of the trucks were hired by the brokerage. Some assholes rented trucks, drove them up to the loading docks, and disappeared over the horizon.... One of them took off six hundred brand-new beige two-button phones. Somebody else got fifty Northgate IBM compatibles, still in the boxes."

  "Really?" said Arnold, faintly distressed. "Computers?"

  Fell nodded, and Lucas looked back at Arnold. "If you had to get to Whitechurch, what'd you do?"

  Arnold shrugged. "Call him at the hospital. Wasn't no big secret where he worked. Nights only, though."

  "Did he have a special number?"

  "I don't know, man, I never called him."

  "Did..."

  Fell's beeper went off. She took it out of her purse, glanced at the readout. "Where's the phone?" she asked Arnold. To Lucas, she said, "I bet they got him."

  "Over there, at the end of the counter, underneath..." Arnold said, pointing.

  As Fell punched the number into the telephone, Lucas went back to Arnold. "Did he work with anybody?"

  "Man, I bought telephones from him, four dollars apiece," Arnold said impatiently. "Boxes of pens and pencils. Notepads. Cartons of Xerox paper. Cleaning supplies. He once came in with two hundred bottles of ERA, you know, the laundry soap. I don't know where he got it, I didn't ask any questions. And that's all I know about him."

  "Yeah, this is Fell, you beeped?" Fell said into the phone. And then, voice hushed, "Jesus. What's the address. Huh? Okay." She hung up and looked at Lucas. "Bekker did another one, another woman. Ten minutes from here, walking."

  Lucas pointed a finger at Arnold: "Did you hear that? Think about Whitechurch. Anything you think of, call us. Anything."

  "Man, there's nothin'..."

  But Lucas and Fell were out the door.

  The body was in a dead-end alley off Prince. Uniforms blocked the mouth of the alley, kept back the curious. Fell and Lucas flashed their badges and went through. Kennett and two other plainclothesmen were there, staring into a window well. Kennett's hands, gripping the rail around the well, were white with tension.

  "Goddamn maniac," he said as Lucas and Fell walked up. The crime-scene techs had dropped a ladder into the well. Lucas looked over the railing and saw a small woman's body at the bottom of the well, nude, crumpled like a doll, the techs working over her.

  "No question it was Bekker?" Lucas asked.

  "No, but it's different. This doesn't look so scientific. She's pretty slashed up, like he... I don't know. It looks like he was having fun."

  "Eyes?"

  "Yeah, the eyes are cut and the doc says it looks like his work. The eyelids gone, very neat and surgical. The sonofabitch has a signature."

  "How long has she been down there?" Fell asked.

  "Not long. A few hours at the most. Probably went in before dawn, this morning."

  "Got an ID?" asked Lucas.

  "No." Kennett looked at Fell, who was lighting a Lucky. "Could I bum one, I..."

  "No." Fell shook her head, carefully not looking at him.

  "God damn it," Kennett said. He stuck one hand in his jacket pocket, put two fingers of the other between his shirt buttons, over his heart. He caught himself, pulled them out, looked at his hand and finally stuck it in the other jacket pocket. "Fuckin' do-gooders."

  "Anything on the Bellevue phones?" Lucas asked, watching the techs get ready to roll the woman's body.

  Kennett's forehead wrinkled. "Think about this, Davenport: We got a guy who deals drugs, but he gets no phone calls. I mean, like, almost none. He got six calls at his apartment last month. There was a phone in the maintenance office he could use, but he didn't, much. At least, that's what his supe
rvisor says."

  "Did he carry a beeper? Maybe a cellular?" Fell asked.

  "Not that we can find," said Kennett.

  "That's bullshit," Lucas said flatly. "He was dealing, right? We know that for sure?"

  "Yeah."

  "Then he's got a phone. We've just got to find it...."

  "Carter's guys are interviewing people over there right now, at Bellevue. Maybe you could listen in for a while?" Kennett said. He looked at Fell. "You're the only guys who've come up with anything."

  At the bottom of the window well, the crime-scene techs rolled the body. The woman's head flopped over, and her wide white eyes suddenly looked up at them.

  "Aw, shit," Fell gagged. She turned away, hunched over the alley cobblestones, and a stream of saliva poured from her mouth.

  "You okay?" Lucas asked, his hand on her back.

  "Yes," she said, straightening. "Sorry. That just caught me, the eyes..."

  Five minutes later, the body was out of the window well. The removal crew had wrapped it in a blanket, but Kennett ordered the wrapper peeled away. "I want to look," he said evenly. "I wish the fuck I could have gotten down there...."

  Kennett and Lucas squatted next to the collapsible gurney as the blanket was lifted. The woman's face was like marble, white, solid, her dying pain and fear still graven on her face. The gag was like the earlier ones, carved from hard rubber, held in place with a wire that had been twisted tight behind her ear.

  "Pliers," Kennett said absently.

  "Treats them like... lumber," Lucas said, groping for the right concept.

  "Or lab animals," Kennett said.

  "Sonofabitch." Lucas leaned to one side, almost toppled, caught himself with his hand, then knelt over the body until his face was only inches from the body's left ear. He looked up at one of the techs and said, "Roll her a little to the right, will you?" He took a pen from his shirt pocket and, to Kennett, said, "Look at this."

  Kennett knelt beside him and Fell squatted behind the two of them, the other detectives crowding in. Lucas used the pen to point at two oval marks on the dead woman's neck muscle.

  "Have you ever seen anything like that?" Lucas asked.

  Kennett shook his head. "Looks like a burn," he said. "Looks like a fuckin' snakebite."

  "Not exactly. It looks like a discharge wound from one of those electroshock self-defense gizmos, stun guns. The St. Paul cops carry them. I went over to see a demonstration. If you keep the discharge points on bare skin for more than a second or two, you can get this kind of injury."

  "That's why there's no fight," Fell said, looking at him.

  Lucas nodded. "He hits them with the shocker. When you get hit, you go down, like right now. Then he comes with the gas."

  "Couldn't be too many places around that sell those things," Kennett said.

  "Police-supply places, but I've seen them in gun magazines, too, mail order," Lucas said.

  Kennett stood and rubbed alley sand from his hands and tipped his head back, as though looking up to heaven. "Please, God, let me find a Midtown address on an order form."

  Lucas and Fell took a cab to Bellevue, windows open, the hot popcorn smell of the city roaring in as they dodged through traffic, and got trapped for five minutes in a narrow one-lane crosstown street. Fell's jaw was working with anger.

  "Thinking about Bekker?"

  "About the body... Jesus. I hope Robin Hood gets him," she said. "Bekker."

  "What? Robin Hood?" He looked at her curiously.

  "Nothing," she said, looking away.

  "No, c'mon, who's Robin Hood?"

  "Ah, it's bullshit," she said, digging in her purse for a cigarette. "Supposedly somebody is knocking off assholes."

  "You mean, a vigilante?"

  She grinned. "How else you gonna run this place?" she asked, gesturing out the window. "It's supposed to be cops, but I think it's just bullshit. Wishful thinking."

  "Huh."

  She lit the cigarette, coughed, and looked out the window.

  Whitechurch had been a maintenance foreman. A changing roll of a dozen people worked under his loose supervision, doing minor repairs all over the hospital on the three-to-eleven shift.

  "A great goddamn job if you're stealing stuff," Fell said as they joined Carter in an employees' lounge. Three detectives were interviewing hospital employees, with Carter supervising.

  "Or if you're dealing," said Carter. He looked at his list. "Next one is Jimmy Beale. Goddamn, I got little faith in this."

  "I know what you mean," Lucas said, watching the scared employees trooping through the lounge.

  Beale knew nothing. Neither did any of the rest. Fell burned through a pack of Luckys, left to get another, came back and leaned in the door.

  "God damn it, Mark... it's Mark?" Carter was saying. "God damn it, Mark, we're not getting anywhere and it's hard to believe that a guy could be stealing the place blind and nobody'd know about it. Or dealing dope, and nobody'd know...."

  Mark, tall, narrow, acned, nodded nervously, his Adam's apple working convulsively, sliding up and down his thin neck. "Man, you never seen the dude, you know? I mean, I'd come in and he'd say, Mark, g'wan up to 441D and put on a new doorknob and then see if there's a leak on the drinking fountain up on six, and that's what I'd do. He'd come by, but like, I never hung out with him or nothing."

  When he was gone, Lucas said, "Nobody knew. How many do you believe?"

  "Most of them," Carter said. "I don't think he was dealing here. And if you're stealing stuff, you don't talk about it. Somebody'll try to cut in-or somebody'll try to do the same thing, then feed you to the cops on plea bargain."

  "Somebody must've known," Fell objected. "That was the last of them?"

  "That was the last..." said Carter.

  A woman knocked on the edge of the door and stuck her face in. She had curly white hair and held her hands in front of her as though she were knitting.

  "Are you the police?" she asked timorously.

  "Yeah. C'mon in," Lucas said. He yawned and stretched. "What can we do for you?"

  She stepped inside the room and looked nervously around. "Some of the others were saying you were asking if Lew had a beeper or a walkie-talkie?"

  "Yes. Who are you?"

  "My name is Dotty, um, Bedrick, I work in housekeeping?" She made her sentences into questions. "Last week, Lew split out his pants, right down by housekeeping? There was some kind of pipe thing he was working on and he bent over and they went, split, right up the back?"

  "Uh-huh," Lucas said.

  "Anyway, I was right there? And everybody knows I sew, so he came in and asked if I could do anything? He slipped right out of his pants-he was wearing boxer shorts, of course-he slipped right out and I sewed them up. He was just wearing a T-shirt on top, and the boxer shorts, and I had his pants. There was nothing in there but his wallet and his keys and his pocket change. There wasn't any beeper or anything like that."

  "Hey. Thank you," Lucas said, nodding. "That was a problem for us."

  "Why did you have to know?" Bedrick asked. Lucas thought, Miss Marple.

  "We think that-I'm sure you've heard this from the others-we think he was dealing drugs. If he was, he needed access to a telephone."

  "Well, there was something odd about the man...."

  She wanted to be led: Lucas put his hands on his waist, pushing his sport coat back on both sides, like a cop on television, let a hip pop out and said, "Yeah?"

  She approved: "Sometimes when the calls came over the speakers for doctors, I've seen him look up at the speakers. And the next thing, he'd be calling in. I saw him do it two or three times. Like he was a doctor. "

  "Sonofagun," Carter said. "There'd be a call for a doctor?"

  "That's right."

  "Jesus," he said, turning to Lucas and Fell, dumbfounded. "That's it."

  "That's it?" chirped Bedrick.

  "That's it," Carter said. He smiled at the old lady and shook his head. "I never had a civilian do that before
."

  Fell decided to stay at Bellevue and work the lead. Lucas, shaking his head, decided to head back to Midtown South.

  "You don't think it'll be anything?" Fell asked.

  "It might be-but with Whitechurch dead, I don't know how you'd find out," he said.