Silent Prey ld-4

by John Sandford

  "Booth?" asked Lucas.

  "Sure," said the waitress. "One left, in the no-smoking area."

  Fell smiled ruefully at Lucas, and said, "We'll take it."

  They ate spaghetti and garlic bread around a bottle of rose, talking about Bekker. Lucas recounted the Minneapolis killings:

  "… started killing them to establish their alibis. They apparently picked out the woman at the shopping mall at random. She was killed to confuse things."

  "Like a bug. Stepped on," Fell said.

  "Yeah. I once dealt with a sexual psychopath who killed a series of women, and I could understand him, in a way. He was nuts. He was made nuts. If he'd had a choice, I'd bet that he'd have chosen not to be nuts. It was like, it wasn't his fault, his wires were bad. But with Bekker…"

  "Still nuts," Fell said. "They might look cold and rational, but to be that cold, you've got to be goofy. And look what he's doing now. If we take him alive, there's a good chance that he'll be sent to a mental hospital, instead of a prison."

  "I'd rather go to prison," Lucas said.

  "Me, too, but there are people who don't think that way. Like doctors."

  A heavyset man in work pants and a gray Charlie Chaplin mustache stepped across to the jukebox and stared into it. The waitress came by and said, "More wine?"

  Lucas looked at Fell and then up at the waitress and said, "Mmmm," and the waitress took the glasses.

  Behind her, the heavy man in work pants dropped a single quarter in the jukebox, carefully pressed two buttons, went back to his table and bent over the woman he had been sitting with. As she got up, the "Blue Skirt Waltz" began bubbling from the jukebox speakers.

  "Jesus. Blue Skirt. And it's Frankie Yankovich, too," Lucas said. "C'mon, let's dance."

  "You gotta be kidding…"

  "You don't want…?"

  "Of course I want," she said. "I just can't believe that you do."

  They began turning around the floor, Fell light and delicate, a good dancer, Lucas denser, unskilled. They turned around the heavy man and his partner, the two couples caught by the same rhythm, weaving around the dance floor. The waitress, who'd taken menus to another table, lingered to watch them dance.

  "One more time," the heavy man said to Lucas, in a heavy German accent, as the song ended. He bowed, gestured to the jukebox. Lucas dropped a quarter, punched "Blue Skirt," and they started again, turning around the tiny dance floor. Fell fit nicely just below his jaw, and her soft hair stroked his cheek. When the song ended, they both sighed and wandered back to the booth, holding hands.

  "Sooner or later, I'd like to spend some time in your shorts, as we say around the Ninth," Fell said across the table as she sat down. "But not tonight. I'm too fuckin' dirty and miserable and tired and I've got too many bad movies in my head."

  "Well," he said.

  "Well, what? You don't want to?"

  "I was thinking, well, I've got a shower."

  She cocked her head, looking at him steadily, unsmiling. "You think it'll wash away that woman rolling over this morning, with those eyes?" she asked somberly.

  After a moment, he said, "No. I guess not. But listen… you interest me. I think you knew that."

  "I didn't really," she said, almost shyly. "I've got no self-confidence."

  "Well." He laughed.

  "You keep saying that. Well."

  "Well. Have some more wine," he said.

  Halfway through the second bottle of wine, Fell made Lucas play it again and they turned around the room, close, her face tipped up this time, breathing against his neck, warm, steamy. He began to react and was relieved to get her back to the booth.

  She was drunk, laughing, and Lucas asked about the cop she used to date.

  "Ah, God," she said, staring up at the ceiling, where a large wooden fan slowly turned its endless circles. "He was so good-looking, and he was such a snake. He used to be like this Pope of Greenwich Village guy with these great suits and great shoes, and he hung out, you know? I mean, he was cool. His socks had clocks on them."

  "How cool can a Traffic guy be?" Lucas cracked.

  She frowned. "Were we talking about him? I don't…"

  "Sure, at your place," he said, thinking, As a matter of fact, you didn't, Lily did, Davenport, you asshole. "I remember, mm, important details…"

  "Why's that important?" she asked, but she knew, and she was flattered.

  "You're the fuckin' detective," Lucas said, grinning at her. "Have another drop of wine."

  "Trying to get me drunk?"

  "Maybe."

  Fell put her wineglass on the table and poked a finger at him. "What the fuck are you doing, Davenport? Are you Internal Affairs?"

  "Jesus Christ-I told you, I'm not. Look, if you're really serious, my goddamn publisher's not far from here and my face is on the game boxes. There's a biography and everything, we could go over…"

  "Okay. But why are you pumping me?"

  "I'm not pumping you…"

  "Bullshit," she said. Her voice rose. "You're a goddamn trouser snake just like he was, and just like Kennett. I knew that as soon as you asked me to dance. I mean, I could feel myself melting. Now, what the fuck are you doing?"

  Lucas leaned forward and said, trying to quiet her, trying not to laugh, "I'm not…"

  "Jesus," she said, pulling back. She went back to the table and picked up her purse. "I'm really loaded."

  "Where're we going?"

  "Up to your room. I've changed my mind."

  "Barbara…" Lucas threw three twenties at the tabletop, and hurried after her. "You're a little drunk…"

  "Fuckin' trouser snake," Fell said as she led the way through the door.

  He woke in the half-lit room, a thin arrow of light from the bathroom falling across the bed. He was confused, a feeling of deja vu. Didn't Fell just call, didn't she say…? He stopped, feeling the weight. She'd fallen asleep cradled beneath his arm, head on his chest, her leg across his right. He tried to ease out from beneath her, and she woke and said, "Hmmm?"

  "Just trying to rearrange," he said, whispering, catching up with the night. She'd been almost timid. Not passive, but… wary.

  "Um…" She propped herself up, her small breast peeking at him over the top of the blanket. "What time is it?"

  Lucas found his travel clock, peered at it. "Ten minutes of three," he said.

  "Oh, God." She pushed herself up, her back to him, and the sheet fell off. She had a wonderful back, he decided, smooth, slender, but with nice muscles. He drew a finger down her spine and she arched away from him. "Oooo. Stop that," she said over her shoulder.

  "Come lay down," he said.

  "Time to go."

  "What?"

  She turned to look at him, but her eyes were in shadow and he couldn't see them. "I really…"

  "Bullshit. Come on and sleep with me."

  "I really need some sleep. "

  "So do I. Fuckin' Bekker."

  "Forget Bekker for a few hours," she said.

  "All right. But lay down."

  She dropped back on the bed, beside him. "You're not still with Rothenburg?"

  "No."

  "It's over?"

  "It's weird, is what it is," he said.

  "You're not saying the right thing," said Fell. She propped herself up again, and he drew three fingers across the soft skin on the bottom of her breast.

  "That's because Lily and I are seriously tangled up," Lucas said. "You know she's sleeping with Kennett."

  "I figured. The first time I saw them together, she was dropping him off at Midtown South, and she kissed him good-bye and I had to go inside and put a cool wet rag on my forehead. I mean, hot. But then I saw you two talking to each other, you and Rothenburg, and it looked like unfinished business."

  "Nah. But I was there when her marriage came apart and she helped kill off the last of my relationship with a woman I had a kid with. We were kind of… pivotal… for each other," Lucas said.

  "All right," Fell said.
r />   "Lily was driving?"

  "What?"

  "You said she dropped off Kennett."

  "Well, yeah, Kennett can't drive. That'd kill him, the Manhattan traffic would." She sat up again, half turned, and this time he could see her eyes. "Davenport, what the fuck are you up to?"

  "Jesus…" He laughed, and caught her around the waist, and she let him pull her down.

  "The one thing I want to know-if you're up to something, you're not screwing me to get it, are you?"

  "Barbara…" Lucas rolled his eyes.

  "All right. You'd lie to me anyway, so why do I ask?" Then she frowned and answered her own question: "I'll tell you why. Because I'm an idiot and I always ask. And the guys always lie to me. Jesus, I need a shrink. A shrink and a cigarette."

  "So smoke, I don't mind," Lucas said. "Just don't dribble ashes on my chest."

  "Really?" She scratched him on the breastbone.

  "I mean, it's killing you, slowly but surely, but if you need one…"

  "Thanks." She got out of bed-a wonderful back-found her purse, got her cigarettes, an ashtray and the TV remote. "I gotta get some nicotine into my bloodstream," she said. Ingenuously, genuinely, she added, "I didn't have a cigarette because I was afraid my mouth would taste like an ashtray."

  "I thought you'd decided not to sleep with me, and changed your mind."

  She shook her head. "Dummy," she said. She lit the cigarette and pointed the remote control at the TV, popped it on, thumbed through the channels until she got to the weather. "Hot and more hot," she said, after a minute.

  "It's like Los Angeles, 'cept more humid," Lucas said.

  "Shoulda been here last year…"

  They talked and she smoked, finished the cigarette, and then lit up another and went around the room and stole all his hotel matches. "I never have enough matches. I always steal them," she said. "When I'm working I've got two rules: pee whenever you can, and steal matches. No. Three rules…"

  "Never eat at a place called Mom's?"

  "No, but that's a good one," she said. "Nope: it's never sleep with a goddamn cop. Cops are so goddamn treacherous…"

  CHAPTER

  16

  Sunday morning.

  Sunlight poured like milk through the venetian blinds. Fell woke at nine o'clock, stirred, then half-sat, looking down at Lucas' dark head on the pillow. After a moment, she got up and stumbled around, picking up clothes. Lucas opened an eye and said, "Have I mentioned your ass?"

  "Several times, and I appreciate all of them," she said. She offered a smile, but weakly. "My head… that goddamn cheap wine."

  "That wine wasn't cheap." Lucas sat up, still sleepy, dropped his feet to the floor, rubbed the back of his neck. "I'll call Kennett, see if we can figure something out."

  She nodded, still groggy. "I gotta go home to change clothes, then back to Bellevue. There'll be people around we wouldn't see during the week."

  Lucas said, "This is really important to you, isn't it?"

  "It's the biggest case I've ever been on," she said. "God, I'd love to get him. I mean, me, personally."

  "You won't get him at Bellevue," Lucas said. "Even if you find Whitechurch's helper, and she talks, I wouldn't be surprised if Bekker's using a pay phone. Then where are you?"

  "So if we find the phone, we can stake it out. Or maybe he uses one on the block where he lives, we can look at the apartments."

  "Mmm."

  "Maybe we'll get him tomorrow night, at the speech."

  "Maybe… C'mon. I'll make sure you get clean in the shower."

  "That's something I've always needed," she said. "Help in the shower."

  "Well, you said your head feels weird. What you need is a hot shower and a neck massage. Really. I say this in a spirit of fraternity and sorority."

  "Good, I don't think I could handle another sexual impulse," Fell said. But the shower took them back to the bed, and that took them back to the shower, and Fell was leaning against the wall, Lucas standing between her legs, drying her back with a rough terry-cloth towel, when Anderson called from Minneapolis.

  "Cornell Reed. United to Atlanta out of La Guardia, transfer to Southeast to Charleston. No return. Paid for by the City of New York."

  "No shit… Charleston?"

  "Charleston."

  "I owe you some bucks, Harmon," Lucas said. "I'll get back to you."

  "No problem…"

  Lucas hung up, turning it over in his head.

  "What's Charleston?" Fell asked from the bathroom doorway.

  "It's both a dance and a city… Sorry, that was a personal call. I was trying to get through to my kid's mother. She's gone to Charleston with the Probe Team."

  "Oh." Fell tossed the towel back into the bathroom. "You're still pretty tight with her?"

  "No. We're done. Completely. But Sarah's my kid. I call her."

  Fell shrugged and grinned. "Just checking the oil level," she said. "Are you going to call Kennett?"

  "Yeah."

  They ate a quick breakfast in the hotel coffee shop, then Lucas put Fell in a cab back to her apartment. He called Kennett from his room and got switched from Midtown South to a second phone. Kennett picked it up on the first ring.

  "If we don't get him tomorrow, at the speech, I'm heading back to the Twin Cities, see what I can find," Lucas said.

  "Good. I think we've got all the routine stuff pinned down here," Kennett said. "Lily's here, and we were about to call you. We're thinking about a boat ride."

  "Where's here?" Lucas asked.

  "Her place."

  "So come and get me," Lucas said.

  After talking to Kennett, Lucas sat with his hand on the phone, thinking about it, then picked it up again, dialed the operator, and got the area code for Charleston. He had no idea how big the city was, but had the impression that it was fairly small. If they knew assholes in Charleston the way they knew them in the Twin Cities…

  The information service got him the phone number for the Charleston police headquarters, and two minutes later, he had the weekend duty officer on the line.

  "My name is Lucas Davenport. I'm a cop working out of Midtown South in Manhattan. I'm looking for a guy down your way, and I was wondering about the prospects of finding him."

  "What's the problem?" A dry southern drawl, closer to Texan than the mush-mouth of South Carolina.

  "He saw a guy get shot. He didn't do it, just saw it. I need to talk to him."

  "What's his name?"

  "Cornell Reed, nickname Red. About twenty-two, twenty-three…"

  "Black guy." It was barely a question.

  "Yeah."

  "And you're from Midtown South."

  "Yeah."

  "Hang on…"

  Lucas was put on hold, waited for a minute, then two. Always like this with cops. Always. Then a couple of clicks, and the line was live again. "I got Darius Pike on the line, he's one of our detectives… Darius, go ahead…"

  "Yeah?" Pike's voice was deep, cool. Children were laughing in the background. Lucas identified himself again.

  "Am I getting you at home? I'm sorry about that…"

  " 'S okay. You're looking for Red Reed?"

  "Yeah. He supposedly witnessed a killing up here, and I'm pretty hot to talk to him."

  "He came back to town a month ago, the sorry-ass fool. You need to bust him?"

  "No, just talk."

  "Want to come down, or on the phone?"

  "Face-to-face, if I can."

  "Give me a call a day ahead. I can put my hands on him about any time." • • • Now he had to make a decision: Minneapolis, Charleston. Two different cases, two different leads. Which first? He thought about it. He wouldn't be able to get down to Charleston and back in time. The New School trap was the next night; if they didn't get Bekker, then the trip to Minneapolis was critical. Bekker was killing people, after all. Charleston might shed some light on Robin Hood, and Robin Hood was killing people, too-but those were mostly bad people, weren't they? He shook his
head wryly. It wasn't supposed to matter, was it? But it did.

  Lucas made one more call, to Northwest Airlines, and got a seat to Minneapolis-St. Paul, then a triple play, Minneapolis-St. Paul to Charleston to New York. There, that was all he could do for now. It all hinged on tomorrow night.

  When Lily called from the front desk, he'd changed to jeans and blue T-shirt. He went down, found her waiting, eyes tired but relaxed. She was wearing jeans and a horizontally-striped French fisherman's shirt that might have cost two hundred dollars on Fifth Avenue, and an aqua-colored billed hat.

  "You look like a model," he said.

  "Maybe I oughta call Cruising World. "

  "Yeah, you look kinda gay," he said.

  "That's a sailboat magazine, you dope," she said, taking a mock swipe at him.

  Kennett was waiting in the passenger seat of a double-parked Mazda Navaho, wearing comfortable old khakis and a SoHo Surplus T-shirt.

  "Nice truck," Lucas said to Lily as he crawled in back.

  "Kennett's. Four-wheel drive must help testosterone production," Lily said, walking around to the driver's side and climbing in. "You've got one, don't you?"

  "Not like this: this is sort of a Manhattan four-wheel drive," he said, tongue in cheek. To Kennett he said, "I didn't think you could drive."

  "Got it before the last attack," Kennett said. "I think the price is what brought the attack on. And don't give me any shit about Manhattan four-by-fours, this is a fuckin' workhorse…"

  "Yeah, yeah…"

  They left Manhattan through the Lincoln Tunnel, emerging in Jersey, took a right and then followed a bewildering zigzag path back to the waterfront. The marina was a modest affair, filling a dent in the riverbank, a few dozen boats separated from a parking lot by a ten-foot chain-link fence topped with razor wire. Most of the boats were in concrete slips, halyards clinking softly against the aluminum masts like a forest of one-note wind chimes; a few more boats were anchored just offshore.

  "Look at this guy, putting up his 'chute," Kennett said, climbing down from the truck. Lucas squeezed out behind him as Lily climbed out of the driver's seat. Kennett pointed out toward the river, where two sailboats were tacking side-by-side down the Hudson, running in front of a steady northwest breeze, their sails tight with the wind. A man was standing on the foredeck of one of them, freeing a garish crimson-and-yellow sail. It filled like a parachute, and the boat leapt ahead.