Silent Prey ld-4

by John Sandford

  They talked for another half hour, but Rich had almost nothing that wasn't in the reports. Lily thanked him and let him go.

  "Waste of time," Lily said to Lucas.

  "Had to try. What do you know about him? Rich?"

  "Not much, really," she said.

  "Good detective?"

  "He's okay. Competent. Nothing spectacular."

  "Hmp." Lucas touched the sore cheek, head down, considering.

  "Why?"

  "Just wondering," he said, looking back up. "You ready to go?"

  "Want to walk? Down to the restaurant?"

  "How far?" Lucas asked.

  "Ten, fifteen minutes, taking it easy."

  "Are we gonna get shot, going out the door?"

  "No. O'Dell had a couple of people talk to the supers all along the block," Lily said. "They're looking for strange people wandering around their apartments."

  The street outside the apartment was clear, but before they went out through the lobby door, Lucas scanned the windows across the street.

  "Nervous?"

  "No. I'm trying to figure it," he said.

  She studied his face. "What?"

  "Nothing." He shook his head. Rich had seemed straight enough.

  "C'mon…"

  "Nothing, really…"

  "All right," Lily said, annoyed, still watching him.

  The Village was pretty, quiet, well-tended brick townhouses with flowers in window boxes, touches of wrought iron, the image wounded here and there by a curl of concertina, a touch of razor wire. And the people looked different, Lucas thought, from the people farther uptown; a deliberate touch of the Bohemian: sandals and canvas shorts, beards and waist-length hair, old-fashioned bikes and wooden necklaces.

  The Manhattan Caballero was buried in a street of red stone buildings, a small place, its name and logo painted on one window, a beer sign in the other.

  "They shot from up there, the third window in, second floor," Lily said, standing on the sidewalk outside the Caballero door, pointing across the street.

  "Couldn't miss with a laser sight," Lucas said, looking up at the window, then down at the sidewalk. "He must've been about right here, you see the chip marks."

  Caught by the geometry and technicalities of the killing, he'd paid no attention to her. Now he looked up and she had one hand on the restaurant window, as if for support, her face pale, waxen.

  "Jesus, I'm sorry…"

  "I'm okay," she said.

  "I thought you were gonna faint."

  "It's anger now," she said. "When I think about Walt, I want to kill somebody."

  "That bad?"

  "So bad I can't believe it. It's like I lost a kid."

  They flagged a cab to go to Petty's apartment. Crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, Lily asked, "Have you ever been here? Brooklyn Heights?"

  "No."

  "Great place for an apartment. I thought about it, I would've come, except, you know, once you live in the Village, you don't want to leave."

  "This looks okay…" Lucas said, peering out the window as they rolled off the end of the bridge. "The woman at Petty's apartment building…"

  "Logan."

  "She says somebody was in his apartment when he was already dead, and before the cops arrived?"

  "Yes. Absolutely. She remembers that she thought he'd come home and then gone out again. She was watching television, remembered the show, and what part of the show. We checked-he'd been dead for ten minutes."

  "Somebody was moving fast."

  "Very fast. Had to know the minute Walt went down. Had to be waiting for it. There's a question about how he got into Walt's apartment. Whoever it was must have had a key."

  "That's simple enough, if you're talking about an intelligence operation."

  "You should know," she said.

  Petty's apartment was in a brown brick building stuck on the side of a low hill, in a cul-de-sac, the area long faded but pleasant. Marcy Logan's door was the first one to the left, inside the tiny lobby.

  "Very late," Logan said, peering over the door chain at Lily's badge. She was an older woman, in her middle sixties, gray hair and matching eyes. "You said ten o'clock."

  "I'm sorry, but something else came up," Lily said. "We just need to talk for a minute."

  "Well, come in." Her tone was severe, but Lucas got the impression that Logan was happy for the company. "I'll have to warm up the coffee…"

  She had made cookies and coffee, the cookies laid out on a silver tray. She stuck a carafe of coffee in a microwave, fussed with cups and saucers.

  "Such a nice apartment," Lily said.

  "Thank you. They filmed Moonstruck just down the way, you know. Cher was right down by the Promenade, I saw her…"

  When the coffee was hot, Logan poked the tray of cookies in Lucas' face. Lucas tried one: oatmeal. He took another, with a cup of coffee.

  "It wasn't a woman," Logan said, positively, when Lily asked. "The footsteps were too heavy. I didn't see him, but it was a man."

  "You're sure?"

  "I hear people come and go all day," Logan said. "That's something I'd know. I thought it was Walter coming back-I wouldn't have thought that if it was a woman."

  "He went up, was there for a few minutes, then came right back down?" Lily asked.

  "That's right. Couldn't have been more than a half-hour, because my show was a half-hour, and he came after the show started and left before it ended."

  "You told the investigators that it occurred to you that it wasn't Petty," Lily said. "But not seriously enough that you actually looked. Why did you think it might not be him?"

  "Whoever it was, stopped in the lobby. Like he was looking at my apartment door or maybe listening for anybody inside. Then he went up. Walter was always very forthright. Walked right in, went right up. Especially on his Fridays. He'd always have two or three beers, and he couldn't hold it at all, and by the time he got here, he'd… you know: he had to go. You could hear the water running from the toilet, right after he went up. That night, though, whoever it was stopped inside. He did the same thing on the way back out. Stopped in the lobby. It gives me the shivers. Maybe he was thinking about rubbing out witnesses."

  "I don't think that's much of a threat," Lily said, smiling at the "rubbing out."

  "Why don't you say something, young man?" Logan asked Lucas, who was eating his sixth cookie. He couldn't seem to stop.

  "Too busy eating cookies," he said. "These things are great. You could make a fortune selling them."

  "Oh, that's nice," she said, smiling. "What happened to your face?"

  "I was mugged."

  "Isn't that just like New York? Even the cops…"

  "How do you know this guy went to Petty's apartment?" Lucas asked.

  "Well, I heard him come in, and then the elevator dinged, so he was going up. Then just a second later, I heard another ding, like it was coming from the kitchen. That's the second floor. If it goes to the third floor, I can barely hear it. If it goes to the fourth, I can't hear it at all."

  "Okay," Lucas said, nodding. "So you heard it ding on the second floor."

  "Yes. And the Lynns and Golds were already in and the Schumachers were at Fire Island that whole weekend. So it had to be Walter, and it was about the time he always came in. I didn't hear him flush, though. Then I heard the elevator ding on the second floor again, and it came down. Then whoever it was, I thought was looking at apartments again, because it was a minute before the outside door opened… I should have looked, but I was watching my show."

  "That's fine," said Lucas, nodding. "And it wasn't a visitor to one of the other apartments?"

  "No," Logan said, shaking her head. "When the cops got here and I found out what happened, I told them about somebody coming, and they talked to everybody up there. Nobody came in at that time, and nobody had any visitors."

  When they finished with Logan, they rode up in the elevator and Lily cut the seals off Petty's door. The apartment had been neatly kept but had been
pulled apart by investigators. The refrigerator had been unplugged, and the door stood open. Cupboard doors were open and paper was stacked everywhere. Lucas went to Petty's desk, which was set in a tiny alcove, and thumbed through financial records… No personal phone book.

  "No phone book."

  "The Homicide guys probably have it. I'll ask."

  Ten minutes later, Lily said, "This is like the interview with Rich. There isn't anything here."

  On the way out, Mrs. Logan met them in the hallway with a brown paper bag, which she handed to Lucas. "More cookies," she said.

  "Thanks," he said, and then, "When I finish them, I may come back for more."

  The old lady giggled, and Lucas and Lily went looking for a cab. • • • Cornell Reed. Cornell Reed had seen the killer, an old white guy, and recognized him as a cop.

  Lucas lay on the hotel bed and thought about it, sighed, rolled off the bed, found his pocket address book, and picked out Harmon Anderson's home phone number. As he dialed the number, he glanced at his watch. It would be midnight, Minneapolis time.

  Anderson was in bed.

  "Jesus, Lucas, what's going on?"

  "I'm in New York…"

  "I know, I heard. I wish I was there…" Lucas heard him turn away from the phone and say to someone in the background, "Lucas." Then to Lucas, he said, "My wife's here, she says hello."

  "Look, I'm sorry I woke you up…"

  "No, no…"

  "And I don't want to cause you any problems, but would you be available to do a little computer work? I'd pay you a consultant's fee."

  "Ah, fuck that, what do you need?"

  "I'm in a snakepit, man. Could you find out what airlines fly out of New York, all the big airports, including Newark, and check from the beginning of the month, see if there's a ticket for a Cornell Reed? Or any first name Cornell, if you can do that? Or Red Reed? I don't think it'd be overseas, except maybe the Caribbean. Check domestic first, like Atlanta, L.A. or Chicago. I need to know where he went and I need to know who paid for the ticket, if we can find that out."

  "Could take a couple of days."

  "Get back to me-and I'm serious about a fee, man. A few bucks."

  "We can work that out…"

  "Get back to me, man."

  When he hung up, Lucas dropped back on the bed, thinking back to the interview with Rich. Rich didn't know why he'd been picked for Petty's team. Neither did Lily. His only qualification seemed to be that he'd later get a call from a burglar he knew, producing the only lead in the case. Good luck of a rare and peculiar variety.

  Rich said that Cornell Reed was heavy into the crack. If that was right, Reed shouldn't be flying out of town. If he had enough cash to fly, he'd buy dope with the cash and take the bus. Or hitchhike. Or just not go. With enough crack, you didn't have to go anywhere… He certainly wouldn't take several hundred dollars out to La Guardia and push it across the ticket counter.

  On the other hand, a doper doesn't take a cab to the bus depot, not when the A train would have him there quicker and leave him enough change for a rock or two. La Guardia was another story. There was no easy way to get there, except by cab…

  So maybe he was flying. And maybe he was flying on an unrefundable ticket. And that sounded like a ticket issued by a government.

  Or a police department.

  And then there was Mrs. Logan's story.

  That was very interesting; interesting and disturbing. Had Lily not understood it? Or had she hoped that Lucas hadn't?

  CHAPTER

  12

  Thirty hits of speed, two days; Bekker hadn't slept forever. He was carried along on the chemicals like a leaf in a river, the flow of time and thought rolling about him. And he was avoiding the woman with the eyes, the woman watching him. She terrified him: but the chemicals had defeated her after two days, and she was losing her grip.

  But other things were happening.

  Late in the afternoon of the second day, the bugs came. He could feel them, lines of them, inching through his veins. All of his veins, but in particular, a vein on the forearm; he could feel them, little bumps, rattling along, doing their filthy work. Eating him.

  Eating the blood cells. He could remember, as a child, kicking open ant nests and seeing the ants running for cover, their mealy white eggs in their jaws. And this was the image that came to him: ants running, but with blood cells caught in their pincers. Thousands of them, running through his veins. If he could let them out…

  A voice in his head: No no no, hallucination, no no no…

  He stood up, his knees and feet aching. He'd walked for miles in the basement, back and forth, back and forth. How far? A few errant brain cells wandered away and did the calculation… say five thousand round trips, twenty feet each way… thirty-seven point eight seven eight miles. Thirty-seven point eight seven eight seven eight seven eight seven eight seven…

  He was snared in the eight-seven loop, captivated by the sheer infinity of it, a loop that would last longer than the sun, would last longer than the universe, would go on for… what?

  He shook himself out of the loop, felt the bugs raging through his veins, took his forearm to the bathroom, turned on the light, looked for bumps, where the bugs scuttled along…

  A voice: formication…

  He pushed it away. Had to let them out, squeeze them out somehow. He walked into the operating theater, went to the instruments pan, found a scalpel, let them out…

  He began to walk, the bugs draining away, began to pace again-what was that smell? So clean and coppery, like the sea. Blood?

  He looked down at himself. Blood was running from his arm. Not heavily, now slowing, but his hand and forearm looked as though they had been flayed. Where he'd been pacing, blood splattered the floor, an oval line marking his pattern, as though someone had been swinging a decapitated chicken.

  The voice: stereotypy.

  What? He stared at the arm and a bug zipped down the vein. Like Charlie Victor on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, like Charlie Victor at the Hotel Oscar, Charlie Hotel India Mike November Lima Tango Romeo…

  Another loop-where had that come from? 'Nam? He shook himself out. The bugs were waiting, in all their ranks.

  Medication. He went to his medicine table, found a half-dozen pills. That was all. He popped one, then another. And a third.

  He picked up the phone, struggled with himself, put it back down. No telephone from here, not to a dealer. Cops bugged dealers, bugged… He looked down at his arm, at the sticky blood…

  Calmed himself. Washed. Dressed. Put a bandage on the cut on his forearm. Cut? How did that…

  He lost the thought and fixed himself in the mirror, preparing for his public, the need always there, looking over his shoulder. The need brought up the street personality. Changed his voice. Changed his manner. When he finished dressing, he went out to the corner, to a pay phone.

  "Yes?" Woman's voice.

  "May I speak to Dr. West?"

  Whitechurch was there a second later. "Jesus Christ, we gotta talk. Like now. The cops have been here and they're looking for your buddy-or whoever you sold that shit to, the monitoring gear."

  "What?"

  "The guy you sold it to," Whitechurch said insistently. "He's this fruitcake killer, Bekker. Jesus Christ, the cops were all over me."

  "New York cops?"

  "Yeah, some cooze and this mean-looking asshole from Minneapolis."

  "Are they on your phone?"

  "This is not my phone. Don't worry about that. Just worry about the dude who bought that shit…"

  "I can handle that," Bekker squeaked. The effort hurt. "But I need some product."

  "Jesus Christ…"

  "A lot of it."

  "How much?"

  "How much do you have?"

  There was a moment's silence, then Whitechurch said, "You're not with this Bekker dude, are you?"

  "It wasn't Bekker. I sold it to a high school kid out on Staten Island. He's using it for his science project."


  That clicked with Whitechurch: Schoolteacher…

  Whitechurch had decided to take a vacation to Miami, could use the extra cash. "I could get you two hundred of the crosses, thirty of the angels and ten of the white, if you can handle it."

  "I can handle it."

  "Twenty minutes?"

  "No… I've got to come over…" Let him think Bekker lived on Staten Island. "I need a couple of hours."

  "Two hours? All right. Two hours. See you at nine. Usual place."

  Bekker left the Volkswagen in a staff parking ramp off First Avenue; the ramp was open to the public from six until midnight. He nodded to the guard in the booth and rolled all the way up to the top floor. He'd watched Whitechurch before. He believed in taking care and knew that drug dealers routinely sold friends and customers to the cops. He'd learned a lot in jail; another side of life.

  Whitechurch insisted on punctuality. "That way, I only have the stuff on me, on the street, for a minute. Safer that way, you know?"

  Usually, Whitechurch would be walking out of the hospital, or down the sidewalk toward a bus bench, when Bekker came by. Once Bekker, arriving early, had watched him from the ramp. Whitechurch had come out, walked down the sidewalk toward the bus bench, had waited for two or three minutes, then had gone back inside, using the same door he'd used on the way out. Bekker had called to apologize, and made the pickup a few minutes later.

  Bekker walked down to the first floor, past the pay booth, and down the street to an alleylike passage to the emergency room. Night was settling in, the streetlights coming on. He was early, slowed down. Several people around. Not good. He turned down the alley to the emergency room, walked up to the door that Whitechurch usually came through. Pulled on the handle. Locked. Glanced at his watch. Still two minutes early. Whitechurch should be coming, just any moment…

  He'd done an angel before he came, part of his emergency stash. Strong stuff; it freed his power…

  The derringer was in his hand.

  The door opened and Whitechurch stepped out, and jumped, startled, when he saw Bekker.

  "What…"

  "We've got to talk," Bekker whispered. "There's more to this than I thought…"