Silent Prey ld-4

by John Sandford

  "Maybe," she said.

  "How'd you meet Kennett?" Lucas asked abruptly.

  "In the intraconference meetings."

  "As O'Dell's assistant?"

  "Yes."

  "Did O'Dell feed you to him?" Lucas asked.

  "Jesus, Lucas," she said.

  "Did he? I mean, he knows both of you. Could he have figured…"

  "I don't know. They don't like each other, you know." Lily stood and turned in place, like a dog trying to make a bed more comfortable. "You know, you've put this whole tissue together without a single goddamned fact…"

  "I've got one interesting, surprising, generally unknown fact," he said; and it was his turn to produce a wintry smile.

  "What?"

  "I know that O'Dell's trying to frame Kennett. I know that for sure. The question is, is he doing it because Kennett's guilty and it's the only way to get him? Or because he's looking for a scapegoat?"

  "Bullshit," she said, but he could see the shock in her eyes.

  "I found Red Reed in Charleston, South Carolina," he said. "He's a friend of O'Dell's, from Columbia…"

  And then he told her most of the rest of it, except for the curious thing Mrs. Logan had said, when they interviewed her in the apartment below Petty's.

  CHAPTER

  24

  Lily listened as Lucas called Fell, watched his face, watched him smiling, turning away, setting up a date. Lucas left, hurrying, and she stood at the window with her purse, watching him. He flagged a cab, and just before he got in, looked up and saw, pointed at her purse, waved.

  Then he was gone.

  She walked through the apartment, touching things, with the sense of something ending, with a sense of dread.

  Kennett? No. But O'Dell was unthinkable too. Could O'Dell have coldly executed his own man…

  Finally, she picked up the phone and punched in the number for Kennett's boat. He picked it up and said, "Lily."

  Pleased, she said, "How'd you know it was me?"

  "I think it might be love," he said. "Are you feeling lonely?"

  "You're reading my mind."

  "The river's beautiful tonight…"

  The river was quiet, smelling of mud and oil and salt. Halyard hardware tinkled against the aluminum masts. A late-night squall was rolling off the coast far to the northeast, and they could see the lightning in the sky far beyond the lights of Manhattan.

  As Lily and Kennett made love, she had a moment of absolute clarity, could hear the Crash Test Dummies' song "Superman" roll mournfully out of a nearby boat, muted by the ten thousand unidentifiable cheeps and knocks of the marina.

  Later, in the cockpit…

  "Jesus, I'm sitting here bullshitting and you're sitting there crying," Kennett said quietly. He reached across and thumbed a tear off her cheek. "What's all this about?"

  "I was just looking across the river, thinking how pretty it was, how good it feels. Then I thought about Walt, about how he'd never see it again."

  "Petty?"

  "Yeah. God damn it."

  "The guy has a strange hold on you, m'dear," Kennett said, trying to keep his voice light: an invitation to talk.

  "You know why?" she asked, taking up the invitation.

  "Why?"

  "Because we were so goddamn mean to him, that's why. Us girls, in school. Lucas got me thinking about it…"

  "It's hard to see you as mean," Kennett said.

  "I didn't think about it at the time. The thing about Walt was, he'd do anything for you. He was always so eager. And when we were in school-and even after that, on the force-we paid him back by laughing about the way he dressed, and the way he acted, and all those pens he used to carry around. We made him be a clown and he wasn't a clown; but whenever he tried to be serious, we wouldn't let him. We hurt him. That's what I was thinking about, the times I know we hurt him-girls, in high school-that hurt look on his face when he'd try to do something, try an approach and we'd laugh in his face. He never really understood… Oh, God."

  Suddenly, she was sobbing and Kennett patted her on the back, helplessly. "Jesus, Lily…"

  A moment later she said, her voice clearing, "You're a Catholic. Do you believe in visions? You know, like the Virgin Mary and all of that, talking to shepherds?"

  "I'd want to see it myself," Kennett said wryly.

  "The thing is, I keep seeing Petty…" She laughed, a short, sad laugh, and poked him. "No, no, no, I don't see him floating around my room, I see him in my mind…"

  "Whew."

  "But the thing is, it's so clear. Walt running down the street, and his hair plastered down and his ears sticking out… Jesus Christ. Walt was the only guy who ever loved me and didn't want anything from me. No sex, no kids, no favors, just me being there and he was happy."

  Kennett found nothing to say, and they sat there, their feet up, watching the dark river. After a while, Lily began to cry again.

  CHAPTER

  25

  Lucas called Fell from Lily's, apologizing for the late hour.

  "I was going down to the tavern," she said. "Why don't you meet me…"

  He flagged a cab, Lily watching from her window, smiling down at him. He waved, and she lifted her purse in her left hand, slipped her right inside the gun tote. Remember the last time?

  At the tavern, Lucas pulled a twenty out of his Muskies Inc. money clip and tipped the driver two dollars for the eight-dollar ride. Fell was in the back booth, a beer on the table with a bowl of peanuts. She was reading a free newspaper.

  "Hey," he said, slipping into the booth.

  "Hi. Any developments at Rothenburg's?"

  "No…"

  "Good," she said.

  Lucas shook his head. "Jesus." And then: "I gotta get a beer." He waved at a waitress, pointed at Fell's glass and gave her a victory/two sign. While they waited, a swarthy man in a light-blue sport coat and khaki slacks, a glass of dark beer in his hand, wandered up to the table and said to Fell in a bad imitation Bogart, "Howdy, shweet-heart. Sheen your name in the public prints."

  "Hey, Tommy. Sit down." Fell patted the seat beside her, then pointed her trigger finger at Lucas. "That's Lucas Davenport, who's a cop."

  "I know who he is," Kantor said, dropping into the booth. "But somehow I got left off the invitation list for the Welcome to New York interviews."

  "And Lucas," Fell continued, "this is Tommy Kantor, who's a columnist for the Village Voice…"

  They talked about the case for a while, and Kantor attracted the attention of a free-lance magazine writer and his girlfriend. They pulled up a chair and ordered a pitcher of beer. Then a TV producer stopped by and began talking to Fell.

  "You'd make a good piece," she told Fell.

  "I'd certainly agree with that," Lucas said, straight-faced.

  "Fuckin' Davenport…" Fell said.

  They got back to Fell's apartment at two o'clock, spent ten soapy minutes in the shower, dropped into her bed.

  "That was fun, talking to those people," Lucas said. "As long as your friend Kantor doesn't get us in trouble."

  "He takes care of sources," Fell said. "It'll be okay. I'm surprised you get along so well with media people…"

  "I like them, mostly," he said. "Some are a little stupid and half of them would kill for two dollars, but the good ones I like."

  "You like this?" she asked.

  "Ooo, I think I do," he said. Then: "I'm sure of it."

  He came out of the shower the next morning, rubbing his hair dry with a terry-cloth towel, and heard Fell's voice from the living room. She came down the hall to the bedroom as he was pulling on his underwear. She was still naked and stood on her tiptoes to kiss him.

  "I just talked to Carter. Not a thing, nada."

  "All right. Did you bring those files?"

  "In the front room, on the floor," she said.

  "I'd like to sit around and read for a while, then maybe go back and change clothes. I don't know, I'd like to be there when they get him…"

&nbs
p; "Bullshit. You'd give your left nut to get him yourself. So would I."

  "You'd give my left nut?" he asked, appalled.

  "Well… you want a bagel with chive cream cheese and some juice?"

  "Yeah, as a matter of fact."

  They read the files and talked, and sometime after one o'clock Lucas chased her back into the bedroom, and they didn't make it back out until two.

  "I'm going back to the hotel to change," he said, pulling on his jacket. "Why don't we get together at Midtown. Like four-thirty, for the daily roundup."

  "All right…"

  He looked at the floor by his feet, at a Xerox copy of the crime-scene photograph of Whitechurch, dead in the hospital. The few pitiful twenties stuck out from under his body like a comment on greed.

  "Change oxen in midstream and you'll come to a bad end," he said.

  "What?"

  "An old English proverb my mom used to tell me," Lucas said.

  "Bullshit," she said.

  "You're calling my mom a liar?"

  "Get out of here, Davenport. See you at four-thirty."

  He took the elevator to the lobby, nodded at a guard who knew a one-night stand when he saw one, spotted a cab pulling up to the curb to drop a passenger, stopped and slapped his coat pocket where his wallet was.

  "Dammit," he said.

  "Hub?" The guard looked up from his desk.

  "Sorry. Not you… I forgot something upstairs."

  He went back up, knocked on the door. Fell, wrapped in a robe, let him in. "You got twenty bucks you can loan me?" he asked. "I got like two dollars left after last night. All the traveler's checks are at the hotel."

  "Oh, jeez…" She went to her purse, opened it, took out a billfold. "I've got six bucks," she announced. Then she brightened and dug further. "And a cash card. There's a machine down the block. I'll trust you with my code and change it when you skip on me."

  He looked at the cash card, looked down past it to the floor, at the Xerox of Whitechurch, the twenties under his body. The money, the money. Bekker.

  "Get dressed," Lucas snapped. "Hurry the fuck up."

  Three twenty-dollar bills had been found around and under Whitechurch's body. They drew the money from the evidence locker, under the watchful eye of the custodian.

  "Consecutive?" Fell whispered. She was excited, barely controlled.

  Lucas scanned the numbers, rearranged the bills on the countertop. "Two of them," he said. He took the numbers down on a notepad. "Let's go talk to the feds."

  Terrell Scopes of the Federal Reserve had a procedure for everything, including the dispensing of information about serial numbers. "I can't just have people come in here…" He waved, a wave that seemed to suggest that they didn't quite meet a standard. Lucas was rumpled. Fell's hair was beginning to go haywire, standing around her head in a halo.

  "If we take several hours to get the data and Bekker cuts the heart out of somebody, your picture'll be on the front page of the New York Times right along with his," Fell snarled, leaning across his desk.

  Scopes, naturally pale, went a shade paler. "Just a minute," he said. "I'll have to make some inquiries."

  After a while he came back and said, "Citibank…"

  Citibank was more cooperative, but the process was a long one. "The money came out of a machine on Prince, all right, but exactly when, or where it went, that'll take a while to figure out," said a round-faced banker named Alice Buonocare.

  "We need it in a hurry," said Lucas.

  "We're running it as fast as we can," Buonocare said cheerfully. "There's a lot of subtraction to do-we have to go back to a known number and then start working through the returns, and there's a lot of stuff we have to do by hand. We're not set up for this kind of sorting… and there are something like twenty thousand items…"

  "How about the pictures?"

  "They're not really very good," Buonocare confessed. "If all you know is that he's got blond hair, there are probably a thousand blondes on the tape… It'd be easier to do the numbers, then confirm with the pictures."

  "All right," Lucas said. "How long?"

  "I don't know: an hour, or maybe two. Of course, that's almost quitting time."

  "Hey…" Lucas, ready to get angry.

  "Just kidding," Buonocare said, winking at Fell.

  Three hours. A mistake was found halfway through the first run, a question of which numbers went where, and another machine on Houston Street.

  "All right," one of the computer operators said at six o'clock. "Give us another twenty minutes and we'll have it down to one person. If you want to look right now, I can give you a group of eight or ten and it's ninety percent that he's in that group."

  "How about the photos?"

  "We'll get the tape up now."

  "Let's see the ten accounts," Buonocare said.

  The programmer's fingers danced across the keyboard and an account came up on the green screen. Then another, and another and more. Ten altogether, six men, four women. Two accounts, one man, one woman, showed non-Manhattan addresses, and they eliminated them.

  "Can we get account activity on the other eight? For the last two months?" Buonocare asked over the shoulder of the computer operator.

  "No problemo," he said. He rattled through some keys, and the first account came up.

  "Looks routine…" Buonocare said after a minute. "Get the next one."

  "Better find it in a hurry," Fell said. "I'm about to pee my pants."

  Edith Lacey's account was the fifth one they looked at. "Oh-oh," Buonocare said. To the computer operator: "Get the rest of this up, go back as far as you can."

  "No problemo…"

  When the full account came up, Buonocare reached past the computer operator and pressed a series of keys, then paged down through an extensive account listing. After a moment, she ran it back to the top and turned to Lucas and Fell.

  "Look at this: she started with a balance of $100,000 six weeks ago, and then started pulling out the max on her bankcard, five hundred a day, just about every day for a while. Even now, it's three or four times a week."

  "That could be him," Lucas said, nodding, excited. "Let's get a picture up. You've got a name and address?"

  "Edith Lacey…"

  "In SoHo. That's good, that's right," Fell said, tapping the screen.

  "How about the video…?"

  "Let's get the reference numbers on those withdrawals…" Buonocare said. She wrote the number on a scratch pad and they carried it to the storage. The right cassette was already in the machine, and Buonocare ran it through, looking at the numbers…

  "Here," she said.

  The screen showed a blonde, her face down.

  "Can't tell," Fell said. "I swear to God, I'm gonna pee in my pants."

  "Let's try another withdrawal in that sequence," Buonocare said.

  She ran the tape, stopped, started, searched. Found another blonde.

  "Motherfucker," Lucas said, looking at the screen. "Nice to see you again, Mike."

  "That's him?" Fell asked, peering at the screen. "He's so pretty."

  "That's him," Lucas said.

  Bekker was smiling at the lens, his blond hair pulled demurely away from his forehead.

  CHAPTER

  26

  Bekker awoke at noon. He wandered about the apartment, went to the bathroom, and stared at himself. Pretty. Pretty blonde. Too late for pretty blonde.

  He cried, sitting on the edge of the tub, but he had to do it. He shaved his head. Hacked his fine silken hair to stubble with a pair of orange-handled scissors from Mrs. Lacey's sewing box, lathered it with shampoo, scraped off the stubble with a safety razor. Cut himself twice, the blood pink in the lather…

  Sigh.

  He found himself in front of the mirror, dried soap around his ears, hair. Gone. The tears came again, in a rush. His head was far too small, and sickly white, like a marble. Where was Beauty?

  He examined himself with the eye of an overseer, the Simon Legree of inspection
s. Bald. Pale. No good. Even in the Village, the scalp pallor would attract the eye, and the facial makeup would be obvious.

  The scars-the scars would give him away. He touched his face, felt the furrowed, marbled flesh. A new role, that's what he needed. He'd thought to cut his hair, shift back to a male role, but that wouldn't work. Besides, women were allowed a greater latitude of disguise. He'd go back to the wigs he'd worn before his own hair grew out.

  Bekker strode through the apartment, headed for the stairs, stopped to touch the cloud of spiders that hung over his desk in the outer apartment. So fine, so pretty…

  Go. Get the wig, get dressed-he hadn't bothered to dress. Clothes seemed inconvenient and restrictive. He marched now, directed by the PCP, upright and dignified, then he was suddenly aware of his penis, bobbling along like an inconveniently large and flaccid nose, doing a color commentary on his dignity. Bekker pressed his penis to his thigh, but the rhythm of the march was broken…

  A new gumball dropped. From when? The fifties? A comedian on The Ed Sullivan Show? Yes. A small man looking into a cigar box, talking to a voice inside… Okay? Okay. Was that the line? Yes.

  Bekker, passing the kitchen, swerved, went in. Opened the refrigerator and peeked inside: Have a Coke, Mr. Bekker. Thank you. I will. Okay? Okay. He slammed the refrigerator door like the comedian and howled with laughter. Okay? Okay.

  Really funny… He howled…

  Coke in hand, he staggered back to the television, turned to CNN, and watched for a few minutes. He'd been on one of the news shows in the morning, with the pictures of the Carson woman; they'd ridiculed him, said the halos from Carson had been finger-press points on the photo paper. What did that mean? Was that methodology? He had a hard time remembering anymore…

  He watched, hoping to see the report again, but they'd cut him out of the news cycle.

  He went downstairs, naked and barefoot, stepped carefully through the shambles of the first-floor shop, and down into the basement. Found the dark wig, with the pixie cut. Carried it back up, to the bathroom, put it on. It was warm on his head, like a fur piece, and scratchy. But it looked good. He'd have to do something about his eyebrows, shade them, and his lashes. Maybe something to tone his face…