Eyes of Prey

by John Sandford

  Cassie caught Lucas’ interest and stepped close behind him and whispered, “Carlo Druze, one of the actors. This is one of his routines.”

  Druze began to sing, a phony black accent, minstrel-show style, in a shaky baritone, “Way down upon the Swanee River, far, far away . . .”

  “We’re doing a thing called Whiteface, it’s like a racial-satire thing . . . .” She was whispering, but Druze apparently heard. He took down the balls in a swift, coordinated sweep.

  “I’ve got an audience?” he called, looking up at the booth.

  Lucas applauded and Cassie yelled, “Just us, Cassie and a cop.”

  “Ah . . .” Was he startled? Lucas wasn’t sure. Was there something wrong with his face?

  “That was really good, Carlo,” Cassie said.

  Druze took a bow.

  “If only Miz Cassie wuz runnin’ d’show,” he said, going back to the accent.

  “We’ll get out of your hair,” Cassie said, leading Lucas out of the booth and down the steps toward the exit light.

  In the hall on the way back to the lobby, Lucas asked, “Was what’s-his-name here last night?”

  “Carlo? Yeah. Most of the time, anyway. He was working on the set. He’s the best carpenter in the company. And he does great voices. He can sound like anybody.”

  “Okay.”

  “He’s a tough guy,” she added. “Hard. Like his face.”

  “But he was here?”

  “Well, nobody was taking names. But yeah. Around.”

  “Okay.” Lucas followed her down the hall, watching her back and shoulders in the dim light. She looked delicate, like most slender redheads, but there was nothing fragile about her, he realized. “You’re a lifter, right?” he said.

  “Yeah, some,” she said, half turning. “I don’t compete or anything. Do you lift?”

  “No. I’ve got some weights in my basement and I’ve got a routine I do in the morning. Nothing serious.”

  “Gotta stay in shape,” Cassie said, slapping her stomach. They stepped into the lobby, and Cassie stopped suddenly and caught Lucas’ arm: “Oh, no,” she groaned.

  “What?”

  “Deep shit,” she said.

  A man stood over the garbage on the rug. He was dressed all in black, from his knee boots to his beret, and his shoulder-length auburn hair was tied in a stubby ponytail. His hands were planted on his hips, and one foot was tapping in anger. Cassie hurried toward him and he looked up when he heard her coming.

  “Cassie,” he said. He had a goatee, and his teeth were a brilliant white against the beard. “Did you do this? One of the ticket women said you were looking through the garbage . . . .”

  “Uh . . .”

  “I did it,” Lucas said, his voice curt. Cassie flashed him a grateful look. “Police business. I was looking for information involving the Armistead killing last night.”

  “Well, are you going to clean it up?” the man asked, nudging a wet ball of paper with the toe of a boot.

  “Who are you?” Lucas asked, stepping closer.

  “Uh, this is Davis Westfall,” Cassie said from behind him. She still sounded nervous. “He is . . . was . . . the co-artistic director with Elizabeth. Davis, this is Lieutenant Davenport of the Minneapolis police. I was showing him around.”

  “She’s been a help,” Lucas said to Westfall, nodding at Cassie. “Mr. Westfall . . . Miss Armistead’s death would put you in sole charge of this theater, would it not? I mean, in one sense, you’d be a . . . beneficiary?”

  “Why . . . that would be up to the board,” Westfall sputtered. He glanced at Cassie for support, and she nodded. “But we’re a nonsexist theater, so I imagine they’ll appoint another female to take Elizabeth’s place.”

  “Hmp,” Lucas said. He studied Westfall for another moment, skepticism on his face. “No major disagreements on management?” he asked, keeping Westfall pinned.

  “No. Not at all,” Westfall said. Now he was nervous.

  “But you’ll be around?”

  “Well, yes . . .”

  “Good. And don’t move this garbage right away. Our crime lab might want to look at it. If they’re not here by . . .”—Lucas glanced at his watch—“six o’clock, you can have somebody pick it up.”

  “Anything we can do . . .” Westfall said, thoroughly deflated.

  Lucas nodded and turned to leave. “I’ll show him to the door,” Cassie said. “I’ll make sure it’s locked.”

  “Thank you,” Lucas said formally.

  At the front door, Cassie whispered, “Thanks. Davis can be an asshole. I’m at the bottom of the heap here.”

  “No problem,” Lucas said, grinning. “And I appreciate the tip on the guest list. It really could turn into something.”

  “You gonna ask me out?” she asked.

  She’d surprised him again. “Mmm. Maybe,” he said, smiling. “But why . . .”

  “Well, if you’re going to, don’t wait too goddamned long, okay? I can’t stand the suspense.”

  Lucas laughed. “All right,” he said. As he stepped out on the sidewalk, the door clicked shut behind him. He took another step away, toward the car, when he heard a rapping on the door glass. He turned around and Cassie lifted the front of her T-shirt, just for an instant, just a flash.

  Long enough: She looked very nice, he thought. Very nice, pink and pale . . .

  And she was gone.

  CHAPTER

  11

  Bekker walked in circles on the Heriz carpet, orbiting the Rococo revival sofa, watching cuts from the press conference on the noon news. He’d heard shorter cuts on his car radio on the way to the hospital, and had gone back home to see it on television. Most of the press conference was nonsense: the police had nothing at all. But the appeal to Stephanie’s lover could be dangerous.

  “We believe the man who called nine-one-one is telling the truth. We believe that he is innocent of the murder of Mrs. Bekker, especially in light of this second murder,” the cop, Lester, was saying into the microphones. He was sweating under the lights, patting his forehead with a folded white handkerchief. “After discussions with the county attorney, we have agreed that should Mrs. Bekker’s friend come forward, Hennepin County would be willing to discuss a guarantee of immunity from prosecution in return for testimony, provided that he was not involved in the crime . . . .”

  Lester went on, but Bekker wasn’t listening anymore. He paced, gnawing on a thumbnail, spitting the pieces onto the carpet.

  The police were all over the neighborhood. They weren’t hiding. They were, in fact, deliberately provocative. Stephanie’s idiot cop cousin, the doper, had been going door to door around the neighborhood, soliciting information. That angered him, but his anger was for another time. He had other problems now.

  “Loverboy,” they called him on TV. Who was it? Who was the lover? It had to be somebody in their circle. Somebody with easy access to Stephanie. He had exhausted himself, tearing at the problem.

  Fuckin’ Druze, he thought. Couldn’t find the face. The face had to be there, somewhere, in the photographs. Stephanie took photographs of everybody, could never leave anybody alone, always had that fuckin’ camera in somebody’s face, taking snapshots. She had boxes, cartons, baskets full of photos, all those beefy blond Scandinavian males . . . .

  Could Druze be wrong? It was possible, but, Bekker admitted to himself uncomfortably, he probably wasn’t. He didn’t seem unsure of himself. He didn’t equivocate. He’d looked at the photos, studied them and said no.

  “Bitch,” Bekker said aloud to Stephanie’s house. “Who were you fucking?”

  He looked back at the television, at Lester yammering at the cameras. Anger surged in him: it was unfair, they had twenty men, a hundred, and he had only himself and Druze. And Druze couldn’t really look, because if he was seen first . . .

  “Bitch,” he said again, and gripped by the anger, he pounded out of the parlor, up the stairs, into the bedroom. The cigarette case was with his keys and
a pile of change, and he snapped it open, popped two amphetamines and a sliver of windowpane, and closed his eyes, waiting for Beauty.

  There. The bed moved for him, melted, the closet opened like a mouth, a cave, a warm place to huddle. His clothes: they gripped him, and he fought the panic. He had felt it before, the shirt tightening around his throat, the sleeves gripping his arms like sandpaper, tightening . . . . He fought the panic and stripped off the constricting shirt, slipped out of his pants and underwear, and threw them out into the room. The closet called, and he dropped to his knees and crawled inside. Warm and safe, with the musty smell of the shoes . . . comfortable.

  He sat for a minute, for five minutes, letting the speed run through his veins and the acid through his brain. Fire, he thought. He needed fire. The realization came on him suddenly and he bolted from the cave, still on his hands and knees, suddenly afraid. He crawled to the dresser and reached over it, groping, found the book of matches and scuttled back to the closet, his eyes cranked wide, not handsome now, something else . . . . In the semi-dark of the closet, he struck a match and stared into the flame . . . .

  Safe. With the fire. His anger grew and darkened. Bitch. Her face flashed, and melted. Pain flared in his hand, and suddenly he was in darkness. Match gone. He struck another one. Bitch. A bed popped up, not their bed, and strange wallpaper, with fleur-de-lis, where was that? The hotel in New York. With the acid singing through him, Bekker saw himself come out of the bathroom, naked, holding a towel, Stephanie on the phone . . . . Pain in his hand again. Darkness. He dropped the match, struck a third. Bitch. Step into the bathroom to shower; when I come out, she’s already on the phone, calling her paint stripper or someone . . . .

  His mind stretched and snapped, stretched and snapped, cooled, chilled. Pain. Darkness. Another match. He wiped spittle from his chin, staring at the guttering flame. Pain. Darkness. He crawled out of the closet, the first rush going now, leaving him with the power of ice, of a glacier . . . .

  And the answer was there, in the acid flash to New York. He stood up, his mind chilled, precise. Pain in his hand. “Am I stupid?”

  Bekker walked out of the bedroom, still nude but unaware of it, down to the study, where he settled behind the big oak desk. He opened a deep drawer and took out a gray plastic box. The tape on the front said “Bills: Paid, Current.”

  “New York, January . . .” He dumped the box on the desk and combed through the stack of paper, receipts and stubs of paid bills. After a minute he said, “Here . . .”

  The phone bill. He hadn’t called anyone, but there were six calls on the bill, New York to Minneapolis, four of them to a university extension. He didn’t know the number . . . .

  Mind like ice. Riding the speed, now. He punched the number into the desk phone. A moment later, a woman answered. “Professor George’s office, can I help you?”

  Bekker dropped the phone back on the hook, heat flushing the ice from his head. “Philip George,” he crowed. “Philip George . . .”

  There was work to do, but the drugs had him again and he sat for half an hour, rocking in the chair behind the big desk. Time was nothing in the grip of the acid . . . .

  Pain. He looked at his hand. A huge blister bubbled from the tip of his index finger. The ball of his thumb was raw, a patch of burned skin. How had he burned himself? Had there been a fire?

  He went to the kitchen, pierced the blister with a needle, smeared both the finger and the thumb with a disinfectant and covered the burns with Band-Aids. A mystery . . . And Philip George.

  Bekker pawed through the library, searching for the book. No. No. Where? Must be in the junk, must be in the keepsakes, where could she . . . Ah. Here: Faculty and Staff, University of Minnesota.

  His own face flashed up at him as he flipped through the pages, then the face of Philip George. Bland. Slightly stupid, somewhat officious, he thought. Large. Blond. Fleshy. How could she? The pain bit into his hand, and confused, he looked at his finger again. How . . . ?

  • • •

  “Carlo?”

  “God damn, I thought . . .” Druze was shocked.

  “I’m sorry, but this is an absolute emergency . . .”

  “Have you seen the television?” Druze asked.

  “Yes. And nobody has even begun to look at you. Yet. That’s why I’m calling. I found our man.”

  “Who?” Druze blurted.

  “A law professor named Philip George. We’ve got to move—you’ve seen the television.”

  “Yes, yes, where are you?” Druze asked impatiently. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m a block down the street, in the VGA supermarket,” Bekker said. He was using a convenience phone at the news-rack, and a woman customer was heading toward him with a shopping list in her hand. She’d want the phone. “I’ve checked and I’ve checked and there’s nobody with me. I guarantee it. But I’m going out the back and down the alley. I’ll be at your place sixty seconds after I hang up here. Buzz me in . . . .”

  “Man, if anybody sees you . . .”

  “I know, but I’m wearing a hat and a jacket and sunglasses, and I’ll make sure the lobby’s empty before I come in. If you’re ready for my buzz . . . I’ll come up the stairs. Have the door open.”

  “All right. If you’re sure . . .”

  “I’m sure, but I need you to say yes, he’s the one.”

  Bekker hung up and looked around. Was he being watched? He wasn’t sure, but he didn’t think so. The woman customer was using the phone now, paying no attention to him. An elderly man was going through the check-out with a can of coffee, and the only other people in sight were store employees.

  He’d taken a quick trip around the store once before he picked up the phone. There was an exit sign by the dairy case . . . .

  He got a pushcart and started to the back of the store, checking the other customers. But you couldn’t tell, could you? At the dairy case, he waited until he was alone, then left the cart and walked straight out a swinging door under the exit sign. He found himself in a storage area that stank of rotting produce, looking at a pair of swinging metal doors. He pushed through them to a loading dock, walked briskly along the dock and down the stairs at the far end, watching the door behind him.

  Nobody came through, nobody looked through. Five seconds later he was in the alley that ran along the back of the store. He hurried down the length of the block, around the corner, another hundred feet and into the outer lobby of Druze’s apartment building. He pushed the button on Druze’s mailbox, got an instant answering buzz, pulled open the inner door and was inside. Elevator straight ahead, stairs through the door to the right. He took the stairs two at a time, checked the hallway and hustled down to Druze’s apartment. The door was open and he pushed through.

  “God damn, Mike . . .” Druze’s face was normally as unreadable as a pumpkin. Now he looked stressed, uncharacteristic vertical lines creasing the patchwork skin of his forehead. He was wearing a tired cotton sweater the color of oatmeal, and pants with pleats. His hands were in his pockets.

  “Is this him?” Bekker thrust the photo of Philip George at Druze.

  Druze looked at it, carried it to a light, looked closer, his lower lip thrust out. “Huh.”

  “It must be him,” Bekker said. “He fits: he’s blond, he’s heavy—he’s even heavier in real life than he is in that picture. That photo must be four or five years old. And he wasn’t in any of the other photos. And Stephanie was calling him secretly from New York.”

  Druze finally nodded. “It could be. It looks like him. But the guy at the house, I just saw him like that.” Druze snapped his fingers.

  “It must be him,” Bekker said eagerly.

  “Yeah. Yeah, I think it is. Give him a couple of more years . . . Yeah.”

  “God damn, Carlo,” Bekker crowed, his beautiful face absolutely radiant. He caught Druze around the neck with the crook of his elbow and squeezed him down, a jocklike hug, and Druze felt the pleasure of approval flush through his stomach. Dru
ze had never had a friend . . . . “God damn, we beat the police.”

  “So now what?” Druze asked. He felt himself smiling: What an odd feeling, a real smile.

  Bekker let him go. “I’ve got to get out of here and think. I’ll figure something out. Tonight, after your show, come up to my office. Even if they’re watching me, they won’t be inside the building. Call me before you leave and I’ll come down and let you in at that side door by the ramp. If you look like you’re unlocking the door, they’d never suspect . . .”

  Philip George.

  Bekker worried the problem all the way back to the hospital. They had to get to George quickly. He stopped at the secretary’s desk in the departmental office.

  “Lucy, do you have a class schedule?”

  “I think . . .” The secretary pulled open a filing cabinet and dug through it, and finally produced a yellow pamphlet. She handed it to him. “Could you bring it back, it’s the only one . . . .”

  “Sure,” he said distractedly, flipping through the schedule. Pain flared in his hand, and he stopped and looked at it more carefully. He should bandage it . . . .

  “Lucy?” He went back to the secretary’s desk. “Do we have any big Band-Aids around here? I’ve burned my thumb . . . .”

  “I think . . .” The secretary dug through her desk, found a box of bandages. “Let me see . . . . Oh my God, Dr. Bekker, how did you do this . . . ?”

  He let her bandage it, then walked down the corridor to his office, unlocked it and settled behind his desk. Law school, George . . . he glanced at his watch. One-thirty. George: Basic Torts, MWF 1:10-3:00.

  He would be in class. Bekker picked up the phone, called the law school office and twittered at the woman who answered: “Phil George? In class? I see,” he said, putting disappointment in his voice. “This is a friend of his over at Hamline, I’m just leaving town, terrible rush, we were supposed to meet one of these nights, and I’m trying to get my schedule together . . . . Do you know if he has classes or night meetings the rest of the week? . . . No, I can’t really wait, I’ve got a seminar starting right now, and it runs late, then I’ve got a plane. Tried to call Phil’s wife, nobody home . . . Yes, I’ll hold . . . .”