Eyes of Prey

by John Sandford

  In another ten seconds he was on the sidewalk, thick, hunched, his coat collar up. He got to his car without seeing another soul. A minute after he left Stephanie Bekker, the car was moving . . . .

  Keep your head out of it.

  Druze did not allow himself to think. Everything was rehearsed, it was all very clean. Follow the script. Stay on schedule. Around the lake, out to France Avenue to Highway 12, back toward the loop to I-94, down 94 to St. Paul.

  Then he thought:

  He saw my face. And who the fuck was he? So round, so pink, so startled. Druze smacked the steering wheel once in frustration. How could this happen? Bekker so smart . . .

  There was no way for Druze to know who the lover was, but Bekker might know. He should have some ideas, at least. Druze glanced at the car clock: 10:40. Ten minutes before the first scheduled call.

  He took the next exit, stopped at a Super America store and picked up the plastic baggie of quarters he’d left on the floor of the car: he hadn’t wanted them to clink when he went into Bekker’s house. A public phone hung on an exterior wall, and Druze, his index finger in one ear to block the street noise, dialed another public phone, in San Francisco. A recording asked for quarters and Druze dropped them in. A second later, the phone rang on the West Coast. Bekker was there.

  “Yes?”

  Druze was supposed to say one of two words, “Yes” or “No,” and hang up. Instead he said, “There was a guy there.”

  “What?” He’d never heard Bekker surprised, before this night.

  “She was fuckin’ some guy,” Druze said. “I came in and did her and the guy came right down the stairs on top of me. He was wearing a towel.”

  “What?” More than surprised. He was stunned.

  “Wake up, for Christ’s fuckin’ sake. Stop saying ‘What?’ We got a problem.”

  “What about . . . the woman?” Recovering now. Mentioning no names.

  “She’s a big fuckin’ Yes. But the guy saw me. Just for a second. I was wearing the ski jacket and the hat, but with my face . . . I don’t know how much was showing . . . .”

  There was a long moment of silence; then Bekker said, “We can’t talk about it. I’ll call you tonight or tomorrow, depending on what happens. Are you sure about . . . the woman?”

  “Yeah, yeah, she’s a Yes.”

  “Then we’ve done that much,” Bekker said, with satisfaction. “Let me go think about the other.”

  And he was gone.

  Driving away from the store, Druze hummed, harshly, the few bars of the song: Ta-dum, Angelina, good-bye, Angelina . . . That wasn’t right, and the goddamned song would be going through his head forever until he got it. Ta-dum, Angelina. Maybe he could call a radio station and they’d play it or something. The melody was driving him nuts.

  He put the car on I-94, took it to Highway 280, to I-35W, to I-694, and began driving west, fast, too fast, enjoying the speed, running the loop around the cities. He did it, now and then, to cool out. He liked the wind whistling through a crack in the window, the oldie-goldies on the radio. Ta-dum . . .

  The blood-mask dried on the back of his jacket, invisible now. He never knew it was there.

  Stephanie Bekker’s lover heard the strange thumping as he toweled himself after his shower. The sound was unnatural, violent, arrhythmic, but it never crossed his mind that Stephanie had been attacked, was dying there on the kitchen floor. She might be moving something, one of her heavy antique chairs maybe, or perhaps she couldn’t get a jar open and was rapping the lid on a kitchen counter—he really didn’t know what he thought.

  He wrapped a towel around his waist and went to look. He walked straight into the nightmare: A man with a beast’s face, hovering over Stephanie, the broken bottle in his hand like a dagger, rimed with blood. Stephanie’s face . . . What had he told her, there in bed, an hour before? You’re a beautiful woman, he’d said, awkward at this, touching her lips with his fingertip, so beautiful . . . .

  He’d seen her on the floor and he’d turned and run. What else could he do? one part of his mind asked. The lower part, the lizard part that went back to the caves, said: Coward.

  He’d run up the stairs, flying with fear, reaching to slam the bedroom door behind him, to lock himself away from the horror, when he heard the troll slam out through the breezeway door. He snatched up the phone, punched numbers, a 9, a 1. But even as he punched the 1, his quick mind was turning. He stopped. Listened. No neighbors, no calls in the night. No sirens. Nothing. Looked at the phone, then finally set it back down. Maybe . . .

  He pulled on his pants.

  He cracked the door, tense, waiting for attack. Nothing. Down the stairs, moving quietly in his bare feet. Nothing. Wary, moving slowly, into the kitchen. Stephanie sprawled there, on her back, beyond help: her face pulped, her whole head misshapen from the beating. Blood pooled on the tile around her; the killer had stepped in it, and he’d left tracks, one edge of a gym shoe and a heel, back toward the door.

  Stephanie Bekker’s lover reached down to touch her neck, to feel for a pulse, but at the last minute, repelled, he pulled his hand back. She was dead. He stood for a moment, swept by a premonition that the cops were on the sidewalk, were coming up the sidewalk, were reaching toward the front door . . . . They would find him here, standing over the body like the innocent man in a Perry Mason television show, point a finger at him, accuse him of murder.

  He turned his head toward the front door. Nothing. Not a sound.

  He went back up the stairs, his mind working furiously. Stephanie had sworn she’d told nobody about their affair. Her close friends were with the university, in the art world or in the neighborhood: confiding details of an affair in any of those places would set off a tidal wave of gossip. They both knew that and knew it would be ruinous.

  He would lose his position in a scandal. Stephanie, for her part, was deathly afraid of her husband: what he would do, she couldn’t begin to predict. The affair had been stupid, but neither had been able to resist it. His marriage was dying, hers was long dead.

  He choked, controlled it, choked again. He hadn’t wept since childhood, couldn’t weep now, but spasms of grief, anger and fear squeezed his chest. Control. He started dressing, was buttoning his shirt when his stomach rebelled, and he dashed to the bathroom and vomited. He knelt in front of the toilet for several minutes, dry heaves tearing at his stomach muscles until tears came to his eyes. Finally, the spasms subsiding, he stood up and finished dressing, except for his shoes. He must be quiet, he thought.

  He did a careful inventory: billfold, keys, handkerchief, coins. Necktie, jacket. Coat and gloves. He forced himself to sit on the bed and mentally retrace his steps through the house. What had he touched? The front doorknob. The table in the kitchen, the spoon and bowl he’d used to eat her cherry cobbler. The knobs on the bedroom and bathroom doors, the water faucets, the toilet seat . . .

  He got a pair of Stephanie’s cotton underpants from her bureau, went down the stairs again, started with the front door and worked methodically through the house. In the kitchen, he didn’t look at the body. He couldn’t look at it, but he was always aware of it at the edge of his vision, a leg, an arm . . . enough to step carefully around the blood.

  In the bedroom again, and the bathroom. As he was wiping the shower, he thought about the drain. Body hair. He listened again. Silence. Take the time. The drain was fastened down by a single brass screw. He removed it with a dime, wiped the drain as far as he could reach with toilet paper, then rinsed it with a direct flow of water. The paper he threw into the toilet, and flushed once, twice. Body hair: the bed. He went into the bedroom, another surge of despair shaking his body. He would forget something . . . . He pulled the sheets from the bed, threw them on the floor, found another set and spent five minutes putting them on the bed and rearranging the blankets and the coverlet. He wiped the nightstand and the headboard, stopped, looked around.

  Enough.

  He rolled the underpants in the dirty sheets,
put on his shoes and went downstairs, carrying the bundle of linen. He scanned the living room, the parlor and the kitchen one last time. His eyes skipped over Stephanie . . . .

  There was nothing more to do. He put on his coat and stuffed the bundle of sheets in the belly. He was already heavy, but the sheets made him gross: good. If anybody saw him . . .

  He walked out the front door, down the four concrete steps to the street and around the long block to his car. They’d been discreet, and their discretion might now save him. The night was cold, spitting snow, and he met nobody.

  He drove down off the hill, around the lake, out to Hennepin Avenue, and spotted a pay telephone. He stopped, pinched a quarter in the underpants and dialed 911. Feeling both furtive and foolish, he put the pants over the mouthpiece of the telephone before he spoke:

  “A woman’s been murdered . . .” he told the operator.

  He gave Stephanie’s name and address. With the operator pleading with him to stay on the line, he hung up, carefully wiped the receiver and walked back to his car. No. Sneaked back to his car, he thought. Like a rat. They would never believe, he thought. Never. He put his head on the steering wheel. Closed his eyes. Despite himself, his mind was calculating.

  The killer had seen him. And the killer hadn’t looked like a junkie or a small-time rip-off artist killing on impulse. He’d looked strong, well fed, purposeful. The killer could be coming after him . . . .

  He’d have to give more information to the investigators, he decided, or they’d focus on him, her lover. He’d have to point them at the killer. They’d know that Stephanie had had intercourse, the county pathologists would be able to tell that . . . .

  God, had she washed? Of course she had, but how well? Would there be enough semen for a DNA-type?

  No help for that. But he could give the police information they’d need to track the killer. Print out a statement, Xerox it through several generations, with different darkness settings, to obscure any peculiarities of the printer . . .

  Stephanie’s face came out of nowhere.

  At one moment, he was planning. The next, she was there, her eyes closed, her head turned away, asleep. He was seized with the thought that he could go back, find her standing in the doorway, find that it had all been a nightmare . . . .

  He began to choke again, his chest heaving.

  And Stephanie’s lover thought, as he sat in the car: Bekker? Had he done this? He started the car.

  Bekker.

  It wasn’t quite human, the thing that pulled itself across the kitchen floor. Not quite human—eyes gone, brain damaged, bleeding—but it was alive and it had a purpose: the telephone. There was no attacker, there was no lover, there was no time. There was only pain, the tile and, somewhere, the telephone.

  The thing on the floor pulled itself to the wall where the telephone was, reached, reached . . . and failed. The thing was dying when the paramedics came, when the glass in the window broke and the firemen came through the door.

  The thing called Stephanie Bekker heard the words “Jesus Christ,” and then it was gone forever, leaving a single bloody handprint six inches below the Princess phone.

  CHAPTER

  2

  Del was a tall man, knobby, ungainly. He put his legs up on the booth seat and his jeans rode above his high-topped brown leather shoes, showing the leather laces running between the hooks. The shoes were cracked and caked with mud. Shoes you’d see on a sharecropper, Lucas thought.

  Lucas drained the last of his Diet Coke and looked over his shoulder toward the door. Nothing.

  “Fucker’s late,” Del said. His face flicked yellow, then red, with the Budweiser sign in the window.

  “He’s coming.” Lucas caught the eye of the bartender, pointed at his Coke can. The barkeep nodded and dug into the cooler. He was a fat man, with a mustard-stained apron wrapped around his ample belly, and he waddled when he brought the Diet Coke.

  “Buck,” he grunted. Lucas handed him a dollar bill. The bartender looked at them carefully, thought about asking a question, decided against it and went back behind the bar.

  They weren’t so much out of place as oddly assorted, Lucas decided. Del was wearing jeans, a prison-gray sweatshirt with the neckband torn out, a jean jacket, a paisley headband made out of a necktie, and the sharecropper’s shoes. He hadn’t shaved in a week and his eyes looked like North Country peat bogs.

  Lucas wore a leather bomber jacket over a cashmere sweater, and khaki slacks and cowboy boots. His dark hair was uncombed and fell forward over a square, hard face, pale with the departing winter. The pallor almost hid the white scar that slashed across his eyebrow and cheek; it became visible only when he clenched his jaw. When he did, it puckered, a groove, whiter on white.

  Their booth was next to a window. The window had been covered with a silver film, so the people inside could see out but the people outside couldn’t see in. Flower boxes sat under the windows, alternating with radiator cabinets. The boxes were filled with plastic petunias thrust into what looked like Kitty Litter. Del was chewing Dentyne, a new stick every few minutes. When he finished a stick, he lobbed the well-chewed wad into a window box. After an hour, a dozen tiny pink wads of gum were scattered like spring buds among the phony flowers.

  “He’s coming,” Lucas said again. But he wasn’t sure. “He’ll be here.”

  Thursday night, an off-and-on hard spring rain, and the bar was bigger than its clientele. Three hookers, two black, one white, huddled together on barstools, drinking beer and sharing a copy of Mirabella. They’d all been wearing shiny vinyl raincoats in lipstick colors and had folded them down on the barstools to sit on them. Hookers were never far from their coats.

  A white woman sat at the end of the bar by herself. She had frizzy blond hair, watery green eyes and a long thin mouth that was always about to tremble. Her shoulders were hunched, ready for a beating. Another hooker: she was pounding down the gin with Teutonic efficiency.

  The male customers paid no attention to the hookers. Of the men, two shitkickers in camouflage hats, one with a folding-knife sheath on his belt, played shuffleboard bowling. Two more, both looking as if they might be from the neighborhood, talked to the bartender. A fifth man, older, sat by himself in front of a bowl of peanuts, nursing a lifelong rage and a glass of rye. He’d nip from the glass, eat a peanut and mutter his anger down into his overcoat. A half-dozen more men and a single woman sat in a puddle of rickety chairs, burn-scarred tables and cigarette smoke at the back of the bar, watching the NBA playoffs on satellite TV.

  “Haven’t seen much crack on TV lately,” Lucas said, groping for conversation. Del had been leading up to something all night but hadn’t spit it out yet.

  “Media used it up,” said Del. “They be rootin’ for a new drug now. Supposed to be ice, coming in from the West Coast.”

  Lucas shook his head. “Fuckin’ ice,” he said.

  He caught his own reflection in the window glass. Not too bad, he thought. You couldn’t see the gray thatch in the black hair, you couldn’t see the dark rings under his eyes, the lines beginning to groove his cheeks at the corners of his mouth. Maybe he ought to get a chunk of this glass and use it to shave in.

  “If we wait much longer, she’s gonna need a cash transfusion,” Del said, eyeing the drunk hooker. Lucas had staked her with a twenty and she was down to a pile of quarters and pennies.

  “He’ll be here,” Lucas insisted. “Motherfucker dreams about his rep.”

  “Randy ain’t bright enough to dream,” Del said.

  “Gotta be soon,” Lucas said. “He won’t let her sit there forever.”

  The hooker was bait. Del had found her working a bar in South St. Paul two days earlier and had dragged her ass back to Minneapolis on an old possession warrant. Lucas had put the word on the street that she was talking about Randy to beat a cocaine charge. Randy had shredded the face of one of Lucas’ snitches. The hooker had seen him do it.

  “You still writing poems?” Del asked
after a while.

  “Kind of gave it up,” Lucas said.

  Del shook his head. “Shouldn’t of done that.”

  Lucas looked at the plastic flowers in the window box and said sadly, “I’m getting too old. You gotta be young or naive to write poetry.”

  “You’re three or four years younger’n I am,” Del said, picking up the thought.

  “Neither one of us is a fuckin’ walk in the park,” Lucas said. He tried to make it sound funny, but it didn’t.

  “Got that right,” Del said somberly. The narc had always been gaunt. He liked speed a little too much and sometimes got his nose in the coke. That came with the job: narcs never got out clean. But Del . . . the bags under his eyes were his most prominent feature, his hair was stiff, dirty. Like a mortally ill cat, he couldn’t take care of himself anymore. “Too many assholes. I’m gettin’ as bad as them.”

  “How many times we had this conversation?” Lucas asked.

  “ ’Bout a hundred,” Del said. He opened his mouth to go on, but they were interrupted by a sudden noisy cheer from the back and a male voice shouting, “You see that nigger fly?” One of the black hookers at the bar looked up, eyes narrowing, but she went back to her magazine without saying anything.

  Del lifted a hand to the bartender. “Couple beers,” he called. “Couple Leinies?”

  The bartender nodded, and Lucas said, “You don’t think Randy’s coming?”

  “Gettin’ late,” Del said. “And if I drink any more of this Coke, I’ll need a bladder transplant.”

  The beers came, and Del said, “You heard about that killing last night? The woman up on the hill? Beat to death in her kitchen?”

  Lucas nodded. This was what Del had been leading up to. “Yeah. Saw it on the news. And I heard some stuff around the office . . . .”