Eyes of Prey ld-3

by John Sandford

  Druid's Pursuit was something else, a role-playing game with a computer serving as game master. The game was becoming complex…

  Lucas stopped to change discs in the CD player, switching Tom Waits' Big Time for David Fanshawe's African Sanctus, then settled back into his chair. After a moment, he put the programming template down and stared at the wall behind the desk. He kept it blank on purpose, for staring at.

  Bekker was interesting. Lucas had felt the interest growing, watching it like a gardener watching a new plant, almost afraid to hope. He'd seen depression in other cops, but he'd always been skeptical. No more. The depression-an unfit word for what had happened to him-was so tangible that he imagined it as a dark beast, stalking him, off in the dark.

  Lucas sat in the night, staring at his patch of wall, and the sickly smell of Stephanie's funeral flowers came back, the quiet dampness of the private chapel, the drone of the minister,… all who loved this woman Stephanie…

  "Dammit." He was supposed to be concentrating on the game, but he couldn't. He stood and took a turn around the room, the Sanctus chants banging around in his head. A manila folder caught his eye. The case file, copied by Sloan and left on his desk. He picked it up, flipped through it. Endless detail. Nobody knew what might or might not be useful, so they got it all. He read through it and was about to dump it back on the desk, when a line of the lab narrative caught his eye.

  "Drain appeared to have been physically cleaned…"

  The bedroom and the adjoining bath had been wiped, apparently by Loverboy, to eliminate fingerprints. That demonstrated an unusual coolness. But the drain? That was something else again. Lucas looked for returns on Stephanie Bekker's bed but found nothing in the report. The lab report was signed by Robert Kjellstrom.

  Lucas dug in his desk and found the internal police directory, looked up Kjellstrom's phone number and called. Kjellstrom had to get out of bed to take the call.

  "There's nothing in the report on hair in the bed…"

  "That's 'cause there wasn't any," Kjellstrom said.

  "None?"

  "Nope. The sheets were clean. They looked like they'd just been washed."

  "The report said Stephanie Bekker had just had intercourse…"

  "Not on those sheets," Kjellstrom said. • • • Lucas finished with the file and looked at his watch: ten o'clock. He walked back to the bedroom, changed from tennis shirt, slacks and loafers to a flannel shirt, jeans and boots, pulled on a shoulder rig with his new Smith amp; Wesson double-action.45, and covered it with a fleece-lined Patagonia jacket.

  The day had been good, but the nights were still nasty, cutting with the last claws of winter. Even the bad people stayed inside. He rolled the Porsche out of the garage, waited in the driveway until the garage door was firmly down, then headed north on Mississippi River Boulevard. At Summit Avenue he considered his options and finally drove out to Cretin Avenue, north to I-94 and then east, past downtown St. Paul to the eastern rim of the city. Three St. Paul cop cars were parked outside a supermarket that had a restaurant in the back. Lucas locked the Porsche and went inside.

  "Jesus, look what the fuckin' cat drug in," said the oldest cop. He was in his late forties, burly, with a brush mustache going gray and gold-rimmed glasses. He sat in a booth with three other cops. Two more huddled over coffee cups in the next booth down.

  "I thought you guys could use some guidance, so I drove right over," Lucas said. A circular bar sat at the center of the restaurant floor, surrounded by swivel stools, with booths along the wall. Lucas took one of the stools and turned it to face the cops in the booth.

  "We appreciate your concern," said the cop with the mustache. Three of the four men in the booth were middle-aged and burly; the fourth was in his twenties, slender, and had tight blue eyes with prominent pink corners. The three older cops were drinking coffee. The younger one was eating French toast with sausage.

  "This guy a cop?" the youngest one asked, a fork poised halfway to his mouth with a chunk of sausage. He was staring at Lucas' jacket. "He's carrying…"

  "Thank you, Sherlock," an older cop said. He tipped his head at Lucas and said, "Lucas Davenport, he's a detective lieutenant with Minneapolis."

  "He drives a Porsche about sixty miles an hour down Cretin Avenue at rush hour," said another of the cops, grinning at Lucas over his coffee cup.

  "Bullshit. I observe all St. Paul traffic ordinances," Lucas said.

  "Pardon me while I fart in disgust," said the speed-trap cop. "It must've been somebody else's Porsche I got a picture of on my radar about five-thirty Friday."

  Lucas grinned. "You must've startled me."

  "Right… You workin' or what?"

  "I'm looking for Poppy White," Lucas said.

  "Poppy?" The three older cops looked at each other, and one of them said, "I saw his car outside of Broobeck's last night and a couple of nights last week. Red Olds, last year's. If he's not there, Broobeck might know where he is."

  Lucas stayed to talk for a few minutes, then hopped off the stool. "Thanks for the word on Poppy," he said.

  "Hey, Davenport, if you're gonna shoot the sonofabitch, could you wait until after the shift change…?"

  A red Olds was parked under the neon bowling pin at Broobeck's. Lucas stepped inside, looked down toward the lanes. Only two were being used, by a group of young couples. Three people sat at the bar, but none of them was Poppy. The bartender wore a paper hat and chewed a toothpick. He nodded when Lucas walked up.

  "I'm looking for Poppy."

  "He's here somewhere, maybe back in the can."

  Lucas went to the men's restroom, stuck his head inside. He could see a pair of Wellington boots under one of the stall doors and called, "Poppy?"

  "Yeah?"

  "Lucas Davenport. I'll wait at the bar."

  "Get a booth."

  Lucas got a booth and a beer, and a minute later Poppy appeared, holding wet hands away from his chest.

  "You need some towels back there," he complained to the bartender. The man pushed him a stack of napkins. Poppy dried his hands, got a beer and came over to Lucas. He was too heavy, in his middle fifties, wearing jeans and a black T-shirt under a leather jacket. His iron-gray hair was cut in a Korean War flattop. A good man with a saw and a torch, he could chop a stolen Porsche into spare parts in an hour.

  "What's going on?" he asked, as he slid into the booth.

  "You need a starter motor?"

  "No. I'm looking for somebody with new money. Somebody who might of hit a woman over in Minneapolis the other day."

  Poppy shook his head. "I know what you're talkin' about and I ain't heard even a tinkle. The dopers are sweatin' it, because the papers are saying a doper done it and they figure somebody's got to fall."

  "But not a thing?"

  "Not a thing, man. If somebody got paid, it wasn't over on this side of town. You sure it was a white guy? I don't know about the coloreds anymore."

  He was looking for a white guy. That's the way it went: whites hired whites, blacks hired blacks. Equal-opportunity bigotry, even in murder. There were other reasons, too. In that neighborhood, a black guy would be noticed.

  He left Poppy at the bowling alley and headed west to Minneapolis, touched a gay bar on Hennepin Avenue, two more joints on Lake Street and finally, having learned nothing, woke up a fence who lived in the quiet suburban town of Wayzata.

  "I don't know, Davenport, maybe just a freak. He wastes the woman, splits for Utah, spends the money buyin' a ranch," the fence said. They sat on a glassed-in porch overlooking a pond with cattails. The lights from another house reflected off the surface of the water, and Lucas could make out the dark shapes of a raft of ducks as they bobbed shoulder to shoulder in the middle of the pond. The fence was uncomfortable on a couch, in his pajamas, smoking an unfiltered cigarette, his wife sitting beside him in a bathrobe. She had pink plastic curlers in her hair and looked worried. She'd offered Lucas a lime mineral water, cold, and he rolled the bottle between his hands as
they talked. "If I were you," the fence said, "I'd check with Orville Proud."

  "Orville? I thought he was in the joint, down in Arizona or someplace," Lucas said.

  "Got out." The fence picked a piece of tobacco off his tongue and flicked it away. "Anyway, he's been around for a week or so."

  "Is he setting up again?" He should have known. Proud had been in town for a week-he should have known.

  "Yeah, I think so. Same old deal. He's hurtin' for cash. And you know the kind of contacts he's got. Fuckin' biker gangs and the muscle guys, the Nazis, everybody. So I says, 'The word's out that it might have been a hit, the husband brought somebody in.' And he says, 'That ain't a good thing to be talking about, Frank.' So I stopped talking about it."

  "Huh. You know where he is?"

  "I don't want none of this coming back," the fence said. "Orville's a little strange…"

  "Won't be coming back," Lucas assured him.

  The fence looked at his watch. "Try room two twenty-one at the Loin. There's a game."

  "Any guns?"

  "You know Orville…"

  "Yeah, unfortunately. All right, Frank, I owe you."

  " 'Preciate it. You still got that cabin up north?"

  "Yeah…"

  "I got some good deals coming on twenty-five horse Evinrudes."

  "Don't push your luck," Lucas said.

  "Hey, Lieutenant…" Frank grinned, reaching for charm, and his teeth were not quite green.

  The Loin was the Richard Coeur de Lion Lounge amp; Motel on the strip across from Minneapolis-St. Paul International. The place started straight, lost money for a few years, then was picked up by a more creative management out of Miami Beach. After that, it was called either the Dick or the Loin, but Loin won out. As a nickname, it was felt by the people who decided such things, "Loin" had more class. The better gamblers, slicker coke peddlers, prettier whores and less discriminating Viking football players populated the bar and, most nights, the rooms in the attached motel.

  The bar was done in red velvet and dark wood with oval mirrors. There were two stuffed red foxes in the foyer, mounted on chunks of driftwood, on either side of a bad reproduction of The Blue Boy. Upstairs, the rooms had water beds and pornographic movies on cable, no extra charge.

  Lucas walked through the lobby, nodded at the woman behind the desk, who smiled, almost as though she remembered checking him in, and walked up the steps to the single hallway that ran the length of the motel. Room 221 was the last one on the left. He stood outside the door for a moment, listening, then took his.45 out of the shoulder rig and stuck it under his belt in the small of his back. He knocked on the door and stepped back across the hall, where he could be seen through the peephole. The peephole got dark for a moment; then a voice said, "Who is it?"

  "Lucas Davenport wants to see Orville."

  "No Orville here."

  "Tell him…"

  The eye left the peephole and a minute passed. Then the peephole got dark again and another voice said, "You alone?"

  "Yeah. No problem."

  Orville Proud opened the door and looked down the hall.

  "No problem?" he asked.

  "I need to talk," Lucas said, looking past Orville. Room 221 was a suite without beds. Seven men sat frozen around an octagonal table, their eyes like birds' eyes, picking him up; cards on the table but no chips, ashtrays and bottles of mineral water on the table and the floor by their feet. Behind them, a short man in a hip-length leather coat sat on the heat register. He had a thin pointed beard under delicate gold-rimmed eyeglasses. He looked like Lenin, and he knew it. Ralph Nathan. Lucas put his hand on his hip, six inches from the butt of the.45.

  "You're gonna get your fuckin' ass killed someday," Orville said flatly. He stepped into the hall and pulled the door shut behind him. "What do you want?"

  "I need to know if there's been any talk about a hit on a woman in Minneapolis. Got herself beat to death, some people think her husband might have hired it. There's a lot of heat coming down."

  Orville shook his head, frowning. He didn't need any heat. "A couple of people mentioned it, but I ain't heard a thing. I mean, I think I would've heard. I been scratching around for cash, trying to get back into business, and I been calling everybody I know. There's not a fuckin' thing, man."

  "Nobody got rich, nobody bought a car…?"

  Proud shook his head. "Not a fuckin' thing. Terry Meller come into a whole load of Panasonic color TVs, fell off the train in St. Paul, but that's about it."

  "You're sure?"

  "Man, I spent the last three weeks running all over the metro, talking to everybody. That's all I've been doing. There's nothing out there."

  "All right," Lucas said, discouraged. "How was Arizona?"

  Proud shook his head. "New Mexico. You don't wanna do any time in New Mexico, man. That place is like… primitive."

  "Sorry to hear it…"

  "Yeah, sure…"

  "You check in with me, okay? You got my number?"

  Proud nodded, dug in his pocket and came up with a business card printed with a nine-digit number, broken into groups of three, two and four digits, like a Social Security number. He handed the card to Lucas. "Call the last seven numbers, backward. That's my beeper. You want to see me again, phone ahead, huh? Don't come knocking on the fucking door."

  "Okay. And I'll give you some free advice, Orville," Lucas said as he stepped away. "Get rid of Ralph. Ralph's a head case and he's looking for somebody to kill. Get yourself a baseball bat or something. If you stay with Ralph, you'll go to Stillwater with him on a murder rap. I guarantee it."

  "I hear you," Proud said, but he didn't.

  Back in the parking lot, Lucas leaned against the car, thinking it over. They were at a dead end.

  Daniel'd have to go for the TV.

  CHAPTER 6

  Beauty danced.

  A jig, to music that played only in his brain.

  He hopped from one foot to another, his penis bobbing like the head of a blind waxen cave worm, his arms, crooked at the elbow, flapping like chicken wings. He laughed with the pleasure of it, the feel of Persian wool carpet under the bare soles of his feet, the sight of himself in the freestanding mirrors.

  He danced and he twirled and he hopped and he laughed…

  He felt a wetness on his chest and looked down. A crimson rain was falling on his chest. He touched his nose. His fingers came away sticky, red. Blood. Running across his lips, dripping from his chin, trickling down across his pale, hairless chest to the thatch of hair at his crotch. The music drained from his brain.

  "Blood," he moaned. "You're bleeding…"

  His heart pounding, Bekker got on his knees, groped under the desk and pulled out his briefcase. Knowing that the police would be in his house, he had thought it prudent to move his medications to his office. He'd not yet returned them to the medicine chest. He fumbled at the tiny combination lock on the case and got it open. Dozens of medical vials were jammed inside, amber plastic with white caps and taped-on labels, mostly prescription, a few over-the-counter dietary supplements. He pawed through them, still dripping blood.

  Amobarbital. Dextroamphetamine. Loxapine. Secobarbital. Ethotoin. Chlordiazepoxide. Amiloride. No, no, no, no… He should have a color-coding system, he thought; but once he had them back on the shelves, it would be easier. He could put the uppers on top, the downers at the bottom, the smoothers on the second shelf, the vitamins and supplements under that… Haloperidol. Diazepam. Chlorpromazine. No. Where was it? Where? He was sure… Ah. Here. Vitamin K. How many? No problem with vitamin K, better safe than sorry. He tossed five caps in his mouth, grimaced and swallowed.

  Better. The bleeding was slowing anyway, but the extra K couldn't hurt. He pulled a wad of tissues from a Kleenex box on his desk, pressed it to his nose. He'd bled before. There was no pain, and the bleeding would soon stop. But, he thought, only two this time and I'm bleeding. He'd taken them, why had he taken them, the methamphetamines? There was a reason… />
  He looked at the corner of his desk, at the brass cigarette case, the lid popped open, an invitation. Three black-coated methamphetamine tablets nestled in one quadrant of the box, sharing space with the phenobarbitals, the butalbitals and the criminals of the crew, all in a single, separate cell: the one remaining pale blue tab of acid, the four white innocuous-looking hits of phencyclidine and the three innocent Contac capsules.

  Only three methamphetamines? But he usually kept seven in the box. Could he have taken four by mistake? He couldn't remember, but he felt up, wired, he'd danced for… how long? A long time, he thought. Maybe he'd better…

  He did a phenobarbital to level himself out. And it wouldn't hurt the bleeding, either. Maybe… He did one more, then carried the cigarette case, the emergency kit, back to the briefcase, the mother ship, and carefully refilled it.

  Still bleeding? Bekker took the Kleenex away from his face. The blood looked black against the blue tissue, but the flow had stopped. He stood and stepped carefully around the clothes he'd strewn on the floor when the amphetamines came on him. Why had he eaten them? Must think.

  His study was neat, with wooden in boxes and out boxes on the antique desk, an IBM electric on an antique corner table, a wall of shelves filled with books, journals, magazines. On the wall next to the door was a photograph of himself, standing next to an E-type Jaguar. Not his, unfortunately, but a beautiful car. A silver frame around the photograph.

  Stephanie smiled from a matching frame, on the other side of the door. She was wearing jodhpurs, why was she…? Hard to think. Must. Stephanie? The lover. Who was the lover?

  That was the critical question. He'd thought the amphetamines might help him with that… If they had, he couldn't remember.