Silent Prey ld-4

by John Sandford

  "So," she said, coming back to Lucas. "Do you really freeze your ass off in Minnesota? Or is that just…"

  Small talk, bar talk. A second drink. Lucas waiting for a break, waiting…

  Getting it. A slender man walked in, touched a woman on the cheek, got a quick peck in return. He was blond, carefully dressed, and after a moment, looked at the back of Fell's head, said something to the woman he'd touched, then looked carefully at Lucas.

  "There's a guy," Lucas said, leaning across the table, talking in a low voice. "And I think he's looking at you. By the bar…"

  She turned her head and lit up. "Mica," she called. To Lucas she said, "He used to be my hairdresser. He's, like, moved downtown." She slid out of the booth, walked up to the bar. "When did you get back…?"

  "I thought that was you…" Mica said.

  Mica had been to Europe; he started a story. Lucas sipped the beer, lifted his feet to the opposite seat, caught Fell's purse between his ankles, pulled it in. Fumbled with it, out of sight, watching. The waitress glanced his way, lifted her eyebrows. He shook his head. If she came over, if Mica's story ended too soon, if Fell hurried back to get a cigarette…

  There. Keys. He'd been waiting all day for a shot at them…

  He glanced at the key ring in his hand, six keys. Three good candidates. He had a flat plastic box in his pocket that had once held push pins. He'd dumped the pins and filled both the bottom and the lid with a thin layer of modeling clay. He pressed the first key in the clay, turned it, pressed again. Then the second key. The third key he did in the lid; if he made the impressions too close together, the clay tended to distort… He glanced into the box. Good, clean impressions, six of them.

  Fell was still talking. He slipped the keys back into her purse, gripped it with his ankles, lifted it back to her seat…

  Pulse pounding like an amateur shoplifter's.

  Jesus.

  Got them.

  CHAPTER

  7

  Lily called the next morning, "Got them," she said. "We're going to breakfast…"

  Lucas called Fell, catching her just before she left her apartment.

  "O'Dell called," he said. "He wants me to have breakfast with him. I probably won't make it down until ten o'clock or so."

  "All right. I'll run the guy Lonnie told us about, the guy with the Cadillac in Atlantic City. It won't be much…"

  "Unless the guy's into medical supplies. Maybe the syringes weren't his only item."

  "Yeah…" She knew that was bullshit, and Lucas grinned at the telephone.

  "Hey, we're driving nails. I'll buy you lunch later on."

  The Lakota Hotel was old, but well-kept for New York. It was close to the publishing company that produced Lucas' board games, convenient to restaurants, and had beds that his feet didn't hang off of. From this particular room, he had a view over the roof below into the windows of a glass-sided office building. Not wonderful, but not bad, either. He had two nightstands, a writing table, a chest of drawers, a window seat, a color television with a working remote, and a closet with a light that came on automatically when he opened it.

  He went to the closet, pulled out a briefcase and opened it on the bed. Inside was a monocular, a cassette recorder with a phone clip, and a Polaroid Spectra camera with a half-dozen rolls of film. Excellent. He closed the briefcase, made a quick trip to the bathroom, and rode back down to the street. A bellhop, loitering in the phone-booth-sized lobby, said, "Cab, Mr. Davenport?"

  "No. I've got a car coming," he said. Outside, he hurried down the street to a breakfast bar, got a pint of orange juice in a wax carton, and went back outside.

  After leaving Fell the night before, he'd gone to Lily's apartment and given her the key impressions. Lily knew an intelligence officer who could get them made overnight, discreetly.

  "Old friend?" Lucas asked.

  "Go home, Lucas," she'd said, pushing him out the door.

  And now she called his name again: a black town car slid to the curb, a cluster of antennas sticking out of the trunk lid, and when the back window slid down, he saw her face. "Lucas…"

  O'Dell's driver was a broad man with a Korean War crew cut, his hair the color of rolled steel. A hatchet nose split basalt eyes, and his lips were dry and thick; a Gila monster's. Lucas got in the passenger seat.

  "Avery's?" the driver asked. The front seat was separated from the back by an electric window, which had been run down.

  "Yeah," O'Dell said. He was reading the Times editorial page. A pristine copy of the Wall Street Journal lay between his right leg and Lily's left. As he looked over the paper, he asked Lucas, "Did you eat yet?"

  "A carton of orange juice."

  "We'll get you something solid," O'Dell said. He'd not stopped reading the paper, and the question and comment were perfunctory. After a moment, he muttered, "Morons."

  Lily said to the driver, "This is Lucas Davenport next to you, Aaron-Lucas, that's Aaron Copland driving."

  "Not the fuckin' piano player, either," Copland said. His eyes went to Lucas. "How are ya?"

  "Nice to meet you," Lucas said.

  At Avery's, Copland got out first and held the door for O'Dell. Copland had a wide, solid gut, but the easy moves of an athlete. He wore a pistol clipped to his belt, just to the left of his navel, and though his golf shirt covered it, he made no particular attempt to conceal it.

  A heavy automatic, Lucas thought. Most of the New York cops he'd seen were carrying ancient.38 Specials, revolvers that looked as though they'd been issued at the turn of the century. Copland, whatever else he might be, was living in the present. He never looked directly at Lucas or Lily or O'Dell as they were getting out of the car, but around them, into the corners and doorways and window wells.

  In the closest doorway was a solid oak door with a narrow window at eye height, and below that, a gleaming brass plaque that said AVERY' S. Behind the door was a restaurant full of politicians: they had places like this in Minneapolis and St. Paul, but Lucas had never seen one in New York. It was twenty feet wide, a hundred feet deep, with a long dark mahogany bar to the right side of the entrance. Overhead, wooden racks held hundreds of baseball bats, lying side by side, all of them autographed. A dozen flat Plexiglas cases marched down the left-hand wall opposite the bar, like stations of the cross, and each case held a half-dozen more bats, autographed. Lucas knew most of the names-Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Maris, Mays, Snider, Mantle. Others, like Nick Etten, Bill Terry, George Stirnweiss, Monte Irvin, rang only faint bells in his memory. At the end of the bar, a double row of booths extended to the back of the restaurant; almost all of the booths were occupied.

  "I'll be at the bar," Copland said. He'd looked over the occupants of the restaurant, decided that none of them was a candidate for shooting.

  O'Dell led the way back: he was an actor, Lucas realized, rolling slowly down the restaurant like a German tank, nodding into some booths, pointedly ignoring others, the rolled copy of the Wall Street Journal whacking his leg.

  "Goddamn town," O'Dell said when he was seated at the booth. He dropped the papers on the seat by his leg. Lily sat opposite him, with Lucas. He peered at Lucas across the table and said, "You know what's happening out there, Davenport? People are stringing razor wire-you see it everywhere now. And broken glass on the tops of walls. Like some goddamned Third World city. New York. Like fuckin' Bangkok." He lowered his voice: "Like these cops, if they're out there. A death squad, like Brazil or Argentina."

  A balding waiter with a pickle face came to the table. He wore a neck-to-knees white apron that seemed too neatly blotched with mustard.

  "Usual," O'Dell grunted.

  Lily glanced at Lucas and said, "Two coffees, two Danish."

  The waiter nodded sourly and left.

  "You got a reputation as a shooter," O'Dell said.

  "I've shot some people," Lucas said. "So has Lily."

  "We don't want you to shoot anybody," O'Dell said.

  "I'm not an assassin."


  "I just wanted you to know," O'Dell said. He groped in his pocket and pulled out a strip of paper and unfolded it. The Times story. "You did a good job yesterday. Modest, you give credit to everyone, you stress how smart Bekker can be. Not bad. They bought it. Have you read the files? On this other thing?"

  "I'm starting tonight, at Lily's."

  "Any thoughts so far? From what you've seen?" O'Dell pressed.

  "I don't see Fell in it."

  "Oh?" O'Dell's eyebrows went up. "I can assure you that she is, somehow. Why would you think otherwise?"

  "She's just not right. How did you find her?"

  "Computer. We ran the dead guys against the cops who busted them. She came up several times. Repeatedly, in a couple of cases. Too many times for it to be a coincidence," O'Dell said.

  "Okay. I can see her nominating somebody. I just can't see her setting up a hit. She's not real devious."

  "Do you like her?" asked Lily.

  "Yeah."

  "Will that get in the way?" O'Dell asked.

  "No."

  O'Dell glanced at Lily and she said, "I don't think it will. Lucas fucks over both men and women impartially."

  "Hey, you know I get a little tired…" Lucas said irritably.

  "Fell looks like another Davenport kill," Lily said. She tried for humor, but there was an edge to it.

  "Hey, hey…" O'Dell said.

  "Look, Lily, you know goddamned well…" Lucas said.

  "Stop, stop, not in a restaurant," O'Dell said. "Jesus…"

  "Okay," said Lily. She and Lucas had locked up, and now she broke her eyes away.

  The waiter returned with a plate piled with French toast and a small tureen of hot maple syrup. A pat of butter floated on the syrup. He unloaded the French toast in front of O'Dell, and coffee cups in front of Lucas and Lily. O'Dell tucked a napkin into his collar and started on the toast.

  "There's something more going on here," O'Dell said, when the waiter had gone. "These three hits we're most worried about, the lawyer, the activist, and Petty himself-I believe these guys may be coming out. The shooters."

  "What?" Lucas glanced at Lily, who stared impassively at O'Dell.

  "That's my sense, my political sense," O'Dell said. He popped a dripping square of toast into his mouth, chewed, leaned back and watched Lucas with his small eyes. "They're deliberately letting us know that they're out there and that they aren't to be fooled with. The word is getting around. Has been for a couple of months. You hear this shit, 'Robin Hood and his Merry Men,' or 'Batman Strikes Again,' whenever some asshole is taken off. There are a lot of people who'd like the idea that they're out there. Doing what's necessary. Half the people in town would be cheering them on, if they knew."

  "And the other half would be in the streets, tearing the place apart," Lily said to Lucas. She turned her head to O'Dell. "There's the other thing, too, with Bekker."

  "What?" asked Lucas, looking between them.

  "We're told that this is real," she said. She fished in her purse, took out a folded square of paper and handed it to him. A Xerox copy of a letter, addressed to the editor of the New York Times.

  Lucas glanced down at the signature: Bekker. One word, an aristocratic conceit and scrawl. … taken to task for what I consider absolutely essential experiments into the transcendental nature of Man, and accused of crimes; so be it. I will stand on my intellectual record, and though accused of crimes, as Galileo was, I will, like him, be vindicated by a future generation.

  Though accused of crimes, I am innocent, and I will have no truck with criminals. It is in that spirit that I write. On Friday night last, I witnessed an apparent gangland shooting…

  "Jesus Christ," Lucas said, looking at Lily. "Was this one of the killings you were talking about?"

  "Walt," she said.

  Lucas went back to the letter. Bekker had seen the two killers clearly. … would describe him as white, thick, square-faced with a gray, well-trimmed mustache extending the full length of his upper lip, weighing two hundred and twenty pounds, six feet, two inches tall, sixty-one years old. As a trained forensic pathologist, I would wager that I am not wrong by more than five pounds either way, or by more than an inch in height, or two years in age.

  The description of the other one, the one I have called Thin, I will hold to myself, for my own reasons…

  "This never ran in the paper?" Lucas asked, looking at O'Dell.

  "No. They've agreed to hold it at our request, but they've reserved the right to print it if it seems relevant."

  "Do you have any idea who it is? This Thick guy?"

  He shook his head: "One of four or five hundred cops-if it's a cop at all."

  "You could probably narrow it more than that," Lucas said.

  "Not without going public," Lily said. "If we started checking out five hundred cops… Christ, the papers would be all over us. But the main thing is, you see…"

  Lucas picked up her thought: "Bekker can identify two cop killers and he's willing to do it…"

  "And for that reason, we think these guys'll make a run at Bekker."

  "To shut him up."

  "Among other things."

  "If they are coming out, they're more likely to go for Bekker," O'Dell said. "They might have to go for him anyway, if they think he can identify two of them. But there's more than that: Killing Bekker would be one way to make their point, that some people have to be killed. Bekker's a nightmare. Who can object to killing him? He's made to order for them, if they can find him."

  "This is getting complicated," Lucas said. "I worry about Lily. She's close to this thing, funneling stuff around. What happens if they come after her?"

  "They won't," O'Dell said confidently. "Two dead cops would be unacceptable…"

  "I'd think one dead cop would be unacceptable."

  "One dead cop can be finessed. Denied. Two is a pattern," O'Dell said.

  "Besides, I'm not exactly a pushover," Lily said, patting the purse where she kept her.45.

  "That'll get your ass killed," Lucas said, anger in his voice. They locked up again. "Anyone's a pushover when the shooters are using a fuckin' machine gun from ambush. You're good, but you ain't bulletproof."

  "All right, all right…" She rolled her eyes away.

  "And there's always Copland," O'Dell said. "When Lily's outside working, she's usually with me in the car. Copland's more than a driver. He's tough as a nail and he knows how to use his gun. I'll have him take her home at night."

  "Okay." Lucas looked at Lily again, just for a second, then shifted back to O'Dell. "How'd you get onto Fell? Exactly?"

  "Exactly." O'Dell mopped up a river of syrup with a crust of the toast, looked at it for a minute, then popped it in his mouth and chewed, his small eyes nearly closing with the pleasure of it. He swallowed, opened his eyes. Like a frog, Lucas thought. "This is it, exactly. Once or twice a semester I go up to Columbia and lecture on Real Politics, for a friend of mine. Professor. This goes way back. So a few years ago-hell, what am I saying, it was fifteen years ago-he introduced me to a graduate student who was using computerized statistical techniques to analyze voting patterns. Fascinating stuff. I wound up taking classes in statistics, and a couple in computers. I don't look like it"-he spread his arms, as if to display his entire corpulent body-"but I'm a computer jock. When these guys in intelligence found what they thought was a problem, I sorted the killings. There was a pattern. No mistake about it. I called in Petty, who specialized in computer searches and relational work. We turned up almost two hundred possibles. For one reason or another, we eliminated a lot of them and got it down to maybe forty. And twelve of those, we were just about sure of. I think Lily told you that…"

  "Yeah. Forty. That's a pretty unbelievable number."

  O'Dell shrugged. "Some of the killings are probably just what they seem to be-thugs getting killed on the street by other thugs. But not all of them. And I'm sure we missed some. So balancing everything out, I think forty, fifty aren't bad numbers."


  "How does Fell fit in?" Lucas asked.

  "Petty ran the bad guys against cops who'd know them-a lot of complicated name sorts here, but I've got total access."

  "And Fell's name came up…"

  "Way too much."

  "I hate statistics," Lucas said. "The newspapers were always fuckin' with them back in Minneapolis, drawing stupid conclusions from bad data."

  "That's a problem, the data," O'Dell agreed. "We'd certainly never get Fell in court, based on my numbers."

  "Mmmph." Lucas looked at Lily and then O'Dell. "I need some heavy time to dig through this…"

  "Don't," said O'Dell. He pointed a fork at Lucas' nose. "Your first priority is to find Bekker and to provide a diversion for the media. We need a little air. You've got to do that for real. If this gang is out there, these killers, they won't be easily fooled. Bringing you to New York was supposed to be like bringing in a psychic from Boise: to keep the Boises in the newsroom happy. Everybody's buying it so far. They've got to keep buying it. This other thing has to be way, way in the background."

  "What happens if we catch Bekker too soon?" Lucas asked. "Before we identify these guys?"

  Lily shrugged. "Then you go home and we find some other way to do it."

  "Mmm."

  "So. We're in a position where we're hopin' a goddamn psycho holds out for another few weeks and maybe butchers somebody else's kid, so we can run down our own guys," O'Dell mumbled, half talking to himself, staring into the half-eaten sludge pile of toast and syrup. He turned to Lily. "We're really fucked, you know that, Lily? We're really and truly fucked."

  "Hey, this is New York," Lucas said.

  O'Dell slogged through the rest of the French toast, filling in background on Petty's computer search for the killers.

  "Is there any possibility that he turned up something unexpected with the computer?" Lucas asked.

  "Not really. Things don't work that way-with a computer, you grind things out, you inch forward. You don't get a printout that says 'Joe Blow Did It.' I think something must have happened with this witness."