Silent Prey ld-4

by John Sandford

  Bekker nodded, polite, not speaking, glanced at his watch. He'd been gone five minutes; he must have been an odd sight, a reader frozen, absolutely unmoving, unblinking, for five minutes or more.

  Better leave.Bekker walked to the counter, head down, and pushed the book across. He'd trained himself to speak as little as possible. Speech could give him away.

  "Sixteen-fifteen, with tax," the counterman said. He glanced at the book's cover. "Pretty rough stuff."

  Bekker nodded, pushed seventeen dollars across the counter, accepted the change.

  "Come back again," thumb-face called, as Bekker went out into the street. The bell above the door tinkled cheerily as he left.

  Bekker hurried home, saw his name on the front of a newspaper, and slowed. A picture, a familiar face. What?

  He picked up a half-brick that held the newspapers flat. Davenport? Christ, it was Davenport. He snatched up the paper, threw a dollar at the kiosk man and hurried away.

  "Want yer change?" The dealer leaned out of the kiosk.

  No. He had no time for change. Bekker scuttled down the street, his heels scratching and rapping, trying to read the paper in the dim ambient light. Finally, he stopped in the brilliantly lit doorway of an electronics store, the windows full of cameras, fax machines, tape recorders, calculators, disc players, portable telephones, miniature televisions and Japanese telescopes. He held the paper close to his nose. … controversial former detective from Minneapolis who is generally credited with solving Bekker's first series of murders and identifying Bekker as the killer. In a fight at the time of the arrest, Bekker's face was badly torn… … could have shot him," Davenport said, "but we were trying to take him alive. We knew he had an accomplice, and we believed that the accomplice was dead-but unless we took Bekker alive, we'd never know for sure…

  Liar. Looking up from the paper, Bekker wanted to scream it: Liar. Bekker touched his face, hidden beneath the layers of special cosmetic. Davenport had ripped it. Davenport had destroyed Beauty. Bekker froze, was gone…

  A bum came up, saw him in the doorway.

  "Hey," the bum said, blocking the sidewalk, and Bekker came back. The bum was not particularly large, but he looked as though he'd been hit often and wasn't afraid to be hit again. Bekker wasn't buying it.

  "Fuck off," he bawled, his teeth showing. The bum stepped aside, suddenly afraid, and Bekker went by like a draft of Arctic air. Cursing to himself, Bekker turned the corner, waited for a moment, then stepped back to see if the bum was coming after him. He wasn't. Bekker went on to the Lacey building, muttering, growling, crying. He let himself in the front door, hurried down the basement, dropped into his reading chair.

  Davenport in town.The fear gripped him for a moment and he flashed back to the trial, Davenport's testimony, the detective staring at him the whole time, challenging him… Bekker lived through the testimony, mind caught, tangled in the random sparking of his mind… And he came back, with a sigh.

  What? He had a package on his lap. He looked at it in puzzlement, dumped it. The book. He'd forgotten. Final Cuts: Torture Through the Ages. The book was filled with illustrations of racks and stakes, of gibbets and iron maidens. Bekker wasn't interested. Torture was for freaks and perverts and clowns. But near the end of it…

  Yes.A photo taken in the 1880s. A Chinese man, the caption said, had assassinated a prince, and had been condemned to the death of a thousand cuts. The executioners had been slicing him to pieces as the photo was taken.

  The dying man's face was radiant.

  This was what he'd sought in his own work, and here it was, in a century-old photo. This was the light, the luminance of death, pouring from the face of the Chinese man. It wasn't pain-pain was disfiguring: he knew that from his work. He'd been doing his own photography, but had never achieved anything like this. Perhaps it was the old black-and-white film, something special about it.

  Bekker sat and gnawed his thumb, Davenport forgotten, obliterated by the importance of this discovery. Where did the aura come from? The knowledge of death? Of the imminence of it? Was that why old people, at the edge, were often described as radiant? Because they knew the end was there, they could see it, and understood there was no eluding it? Was the knowledge of impending death a critical point? Could that be it? An intellectual function, somehow, or an emotional release, rather than an autonomic one?

  Too excited to sit, he dropped the book and took a turn around the room. The matchbox was there, in his pocket; three pills. He gobbled them, then looked at the now empty box. Here was a crisis. He'd have to go back out. He'd been putting it off, but now…

  He glanced at his watch. Yes. Whitechurch would be working.

  He stopped in the bathroom, clumsily fished himself out of the pants, peed, flushed, rearranged himself, then went to the telephone. He knew the number by heart and punched it in. A woman's voice answered.

  "Dr. West, please," Bekker said.

  "Just a moment, please, I'll page."

  A moment later: "West." The voice was cool, New Jersey, and corroded. The voice of a fixer.

  "I need some angels," Bekker breathed; he used a breathy voice with Whitechurch.

  "Mmm, that's a problem. I'm short. I've got plenty of white, though, and I've got crosses. Almost none of the other," Whitechurch said. He sounded anxious. Bekker was an exceptional customer, white, careful, and paid in cash. A Connecticut schoolteacher maybe, peddling to the kids.

  "That's difficult," Bekker said. "How much of the white?"

  "I could give you three."

  "Three would be good. How many crosses?"

  "Thirty? I could do thirty."

  "Good. When? Must be soon."

  "Make it a half-hour."

  "Excellent, half an hour," Bekker breathed, and hung up.

  When he'd cleaned out the basement, he'd found a pile of discarded sports equipment-a couple of dried-out leather first baseman's mitts with spiderwebs in the pockets; a half-dozen bats, all badly marred, and one split; a deflated basketball; mold- and dirt-covered baseball shoes with rusted metal spikes; two pairs of sadly abused sneakers; and even a pair of shorts, a tank top and a jock. He'd thrown it all in a long box with a Frisbee, a croquet set and a couple of broken badminton racquets. He'd pushed the box into a dark corner. Anybody looking into it could see all the junk with a glance; nothing good; nothing you'd even want to touch.

  Bekker had sliced a C-shaped hatch in the bottom of the basketball and stashed his cash inside. Now he picked up the ball, took out three thousand dollars and carefully put the ball back.

  After a quick check in the mirror, he climbed the stairs to the ground floor and padded to the back. Just as he reached the back door, the old woman's voice floated down the stairs. "Alex…?"

  Bekker stopped, thought about it, then exhaled in exasperation and walked back across the darkened floor to the staircase. "Yes?"

  "I need the special pills." Her voice was shadowy, tentative.

  "I'll get them," Bekker said.

  He went back down to his apartment, found the brown bottle of morphine, shook two into his hand, and climbed back up the stairs, talking to himself. Images of the deathly radiance played through his mind, and, preoccupied, he nearly stumbled into Bridget Land. Land was standing at the base of the stairs that led up to Edith Lacey's apartment.

  "Ah," she said, "I was just leaving, Alex… You have Edie's medicine?"

  "Yes, yes…" Bekker kept his face turned away, head down, tried to brush past.

  "Are the pills illegal? Are they illegal drugs?" Land asked. She had squared herself up to him, her chin lifted, tight, catching his shirt sleeve as he passed her. She had smart, dark eyes that picked at him.

  Bekker, his voice straining, nodded and said, "I think so… I get them from a friend of hers. I'm afraid to ask what they are."

  "What are you…" Land began, but Bekker was climbing the stairs away from her. At the top of the stairs, he glanced back, and Land was turning away, toward the door.

&nbs
p; "Please don't tell," Bekker said. "She's in pain…"

  "Did you see Bridget?" Mrs. Lacey asked.

  "Yes, down below…" He got a glass of water and carried the pills to Mrs. Lacey. She gulped them greedily, hands trembling, smacking her lips in the water.

  "Bridget asked me if these were illegal drugs. I'm afraid she might call the police," Bekker said.

  Mrs. Lacey was horrified. "You mean…"

  "They are illegal," Bekker said. "You could never get these in a nursing home."

  "Oh no, oh no…" The old woman rocked, twisting her gnarled, knobby fingers.

  "You should call her. Give her time to get home, and talk to her," Bekker said.

  "Yes, yes, I'll call her…"

  "Her number's on the emergency pad, by the telephone," Bekker said.

  "Yes, yes…" She looked up at him, her thin skin papery and creased in the moody light.

  "Don't forget…"

  "No…" And then: "I can't find my glasses."

  He found them near the kitchen sink; handed them to her without a word. She bobbed her head in thanks and said, "My glasses, my glasses," and shuffled toward the TV. "Have you seen… No, you don't watch. I saw Arnold on the news."

  Arnold Schwarzenegger. She expected him any day to clean the crooks out of New York.

  "I've got to go."

  "Yes, yes…" She waved him away.

  "Call Bridget," Bekker said.

  "Yes…" From the side, her face glowed blue in the light from the television screen, like a black-light painting. Like the face of the dying Chinese…

  Ultraviolet.

  The idea came from nowhere, but with a force that stopped him at the head of the stairs. Could the illumination of the dying man be related to a shifted spectrum? A light phenomenon that occurred in infrared or ultraviolet, that occasionally strayed into visible light? Was that why some people glowed and others didn't? Was that how an old camera caught it, with the poor, wide-spectrum film of the nineteenth century? He'd seen both ultraviolet and infrared photography as a medical student. Ultraviolet could actually increase the resolution of a microscope, and highlight aspects of a specimen not visible in ordinary light. And infrared could pick up temperature variations, even from dark objects.

  But that was all he knew. Could he use his ordinary cameras? How to check?

  Excited, excited, the science pounded in his brain. He hurried down the stairs, remembering Bridget Land only at the last minute. He slowed, looked ahead apprehensively, but she was gone.

  He hurried out the back, got in the Volkswagen, drove it to the fence, hopped out, unlocked the fence, drove through, checked for intruders, climbed back out, locked the gate behind him. He was flapping, frantic, eager to get on his way, to sustain the insights of the evening.

  North across Prince, east across Broadway, keeping to the side streets, the buildings pressing against him, working his way north and east. There. First Avenue. And Bellevue, an aging pile of brick.

  Bekker looked at his watch. He was a minute or so early; no problem. He took it slowly, slowly… And there he was, walking toward the bus stop. Bekker leaned across the car and rolled the passenger-side window halfway down, pulled to the curb.

  Whitechurch saw him, looked once around, stepped to the window. "Three of the white, thirty crosses, all commercial. Two of the angels, good stuff…"

  "Only two?" Bekker felt the control slipping, fought to retain it. "Okay. But I'll be calling you in a couple of days."

  "I'll have more by then. How many could you handle?"

  "Thirty? Could you get me thirty? And thirty more of the crosses?"

  "Yeah, I think so," Whitechurch said. "My guy's bringing out a new line. Call me… and I'll need twenty-one hundred for tonight."

  Bekker nodded, peeled twenty-one one-hundred-dollar bills from the roll in his pocket and handed them to Whitechurch. Whitechurch knew Bekker carried a pistol; in fact, he had sold it to him. Bekker wasn't worried about a rip-off. Whitechurch stuffed the bills in his pocket and dropped a bag onto the front seat.

  "Come again," he said, and turned toward the hospital.

  Bekker rolled the window up and started back, the sack shoved under the seat; but he knew he wouldn't make it without a sample. He deserved a sample. He'd had a revolutionary idea this night, the recording of the human aura…

  He stopped at a traffic light, checked the streets, turned on the dome light and opened the bag. Three fat twists of coke and two small Zip-Loc bags. Thirty small commercial tabs in one, two larger tabs in the other. His hands shook as he kept watch and unrolled one of the twists. Just enough to get home.

  The coke jumped him and his head rolled backward with the force of it roaring through his brain like a freight train. After a moment, he started out again, slowly, everything preternaturally clear. If he could hold this… His hand groped for the PCP bag, found it; only two. But the coke had him, and he popped them both: the angels would hold the coke in place, build on it… He could see for miles now, through the dark. No problem. His mouth worked, fathering a wad of saliva, and he popped a hit of speed, crunched it in his teeth. Only one, just a sample, a treat…

  A red light. The light made him angry, and he cursed, drove through it. Another. Even more angry, but he held it this time, rolled to a stop. One more pinch of the white: sure. He deserved one more. One more hit…

  He hadn't taken an experimental subject in more than a week. Instead, he'd huddled in the basement, typing his papers. He had a backlog now, data that had to be collated, rationalized. But tonight, with the angels in his blood… And Davenport in town, looking for him.

  In taking the other subjects, he worked out a system: hit them with the stun gun, use the anesthetic. And more important, he'd begun looking for safe hunting grounds. Bellevue was one. There were women around Bellevue all the time, day and night, small enough to handle, healthy, good subjects. And the parking ramp there was virtually open… But Bellevue wasn't for tonight, not after he'd just come from there.

  In fact, he shouldn't even think of taking one tonight. He hadn't planned it, hadn't done the reconnaissance that provided his margin of safety. But with the angels in his blood, anything was possible.

  A picture popped into his head. Another parking ramp, not Bellevue. A ramp attached to a city government building of some kind.

  Parking ramps were good, because they were easy to hide in, people came and went at all hours, many of them were alone. Transportation was easily at hand…

  And this one was particularly good: each level of the parking ramp had an entrance into the government building, the doors guarded by combination lockpad. A person entering the ramp in a car would not necessarily walk out past the attendants in the ticket booth. So Bekker could go in, and wait…

  The ramp itself had a single elevator that would take patrons to the street. In his mind's eye, he could see himself in the elevator with the selected subject, getting off at the same floor, hitting her with the stun gun as they came out of the elevator, using the gas, hiding her body between a couple of cars, then simply driving around to make the pickup… Simple.

  And the ramp was close by, on the edge of Chinatown…

  The rational Bekker, trapped in the back of his mind, warned him: no no no no…

  But Gumball-Bekker cranked the wheel around and headed south, the PCP angels burning in his blood.

  Chinatown.

  There were people in the street, more than Bekker would have thought likely. He ignored them, the PCP-cocaine cocktail gripping his mind, focusing it: he drove straight into the parking garage, hunched over the wheel, got his ticket, and started around the sequence of up-slanting ramps. Each floor was lit, but he saw no cameras. The sequence had him now, his heart beating like a hammer, his face hot…

  He went all the way to the top, parked, opened the cocaine twist, cupped some in his hand, snorted it, licked up the remnant.

  And went away…

  When he came back, he climbed out of the car, takin
g his collection bag from the backseat. A stairwell wrapped around the elevator shaft and he took the stairs down, quietly, the stairs darker than the main ramp area. Bekker was on his toes, his collecting bag around his shoulder, hand on the stun gun…

  At the second floor, he stopped, checked the anesthetic tank and mask. Okay. He rehearsed the sequence in his mind: get behind her, hit her with the stun gun, cover her mouth against screams, ride her down, get the gas. He stepped out of the stairwell, glanced into the tiny elevator lobby. Excellent.

  Back to the stairwell.

  He waited.

  And waited.

  Twenty minutes, tension rising. Fished in his pocket, did another cross, chewing it, relishing the bite. He heard a steel door close somewhere overhead, echoing through the ramp, and a few minutes later, a car went down. Then silence again. Five more minutes, ten.

  A car came in, stopped on the second floor, high heels on concrete… Bekker tensed, his hand going quickly to the tank, flicking the switch once on the stun gun.

  Then… nothing. The sound of high heels receding. The woman, whoever it was, was walking down the ramp to get out, rather than entering the stairwell or going to the elevator.

  Damn. It wasn't working. He glanced at his watch: another ten minutes. No more… His mind flashed back to the Twin Cities, to an actress. He'd fooled her by dressing as a gas company employee looking for leaks, had killed her with a hammer. He remembered the impact and the flush… Bekker went away.

  And came back, sometime later, with the telltale sigh. At the sound of feet below, and a woman's voice.

  The elevator doors opening, one floor below…

  He picked up his bag, hurried around, went into the lobby, pushed the up button: the Bekker at the back of his mind saying no no no no, the foreground Bekker hot with anticipation…