Eyes of Prey ld-3

by John Sandford

  "Motherfucker," he said, and pulled the door latch-handle. The other driver was faster. As Lucas pushed open the door, a tall blonde hopped out of the Nissan and walked through Lucas' headlights, a tight smile on her face. TV3. She'd been around for a couple of years and Lucas had seen her on the Crows case.

  "God damn it, Carly…"

  "Stuff it, Lucas," the woman said. "I know how you worked with Jennifer and a couple other people. I want on the list. What happened back there?"

  "Hey…"

  "Look, my fuckin' contract is up in two months, and we're talking, me and the station," she said. "I'm asking sixty and it's like, Maybe yes, maybe no, what've you done for us lately? I need something: you're it." She posed, ankles crossed, fist on her hip.

  "What's in it for me?" Lucas asked.

  "You want somebody inside Three? You got it."

  Lucas looked at her for a moment, then nodded. "I trust you just once," he said, holding up an index finger. "You burn me, you never come back."

  "Fine. And it's the same with me. You ever burn me, or even get close, and I'll deny everything and sue your ass," the blonde said. They were both in the street, face to face. A black Trans Am slowed as it passed around them, and the passenger window rolled down. A kid with carefully coiffed hair and a hammered forehead looked out and said, "What's happening?"

  "Cop," Lucas said. "Keep moving."

  "We're cool," the kid said, then pulled his head inside, and the car accelerated away.

  "So what happened?" Carly asked, glancing after the Trans Am, then turning back to Lucas.

  "You know about the Bekker killing?"

  "Sure."

  "This one's identical. A woman named Elizabeth Armistead with the Lost River Theater, she's an actress…"

  "Oh shit, I know her… I mean I've seen her. There's no doubt that it was the same guy?" The woman put a long red thumbnail in her mouth and bit it.

  "Not much…"

  "How was she killed?"

  "Clawhammer. Hit her on the back of the head, then smashed out her eyes, just like with Stephanie Bekker." The traffic light was running through its sequence again, and the woman's hair glowed green, then gold as the yellow came on.

  "Jesus Christ. What are the chances that the other stations'll have it by the morning shows?"

  "I told the people back there to put a lid on everything, pending a release from the chief," Lucas said. "You should have it exclusively, if some uniform hasn't leaked it already…"

  "Nobody's talking back there," she said. "Okay, Lucas, I appreciate it. Anything you need from the station, let me know. My ass is in your hands."

  "I wish," Lucas said with a grin. The blonde grinned back, and as the stoplight turned red, Lucas added, "There's not much more I can tell you about the murder."

  "I don't need more," she said as she turned back toward her car. "I mean, why fuck up a great story with a bunch of facts?"

  She left Lucas standing in the street, her car careening around in an illegal U-turn, simultaneously running the red light. Lucas laughed and got back in the Porsche. He had something going, for the first time in months. He was operating again.

  And he thought: A copycat? The idea didn't hold up; the murderer's technique with Armistead was too similar to the Bekker killing. There hadn't been enough information in the press to tell a copycat exactly what to do. The killings had to be the same guy. The guy in coveralls, the coveralls a way to get inside?

  He was edging toward a conclusion: They had another psycho on their hands. But if the guy was a psycho, why had he taken a weapon to Armistead's, but not to Bekker's? He'd killed Stephanie Bekker with a bottle he'd picked up in the kitchen. The Bekker scene made sense as a spur-of-the-moment killing by an intruder, a junkie who killed and got scared and ran. The Armistead scene did not. Yet both by the same guy.

  And neither woman was sexually assaulted. Sex, in some way, was usually involved in serial killings…

  If Bekker had hired the first killing done, was it possible that he'd set off a maniac?

  No. That's not how it worked.

  Lucas had worked two serial killers. In both cases, the media had speculated on the effect of publicity on the mind of the killer: Did talking about killers make more killers? Did violent movies or pornography desensitize men and make them able to kill? Lucas didn't think so. A serial killer was a human pressure-cooker, made by abuse, by history, by brain chemistry. You don't get pressure like that from something as peripheral as TV. A serial killer wasn't a firecracker to be lit by somebody else…

  Tangled. And interesting. Without realizing it, Lucas began whistling, almost silently, under his breath.

  CHAPTER 10

  The briefing room stank of cigarette smoke, nervous armpits and hot electronics. Twenty reporters crowded the front of the room, Lucas and a dozen more cops hung in the back. Carly Bancroft's early-morning report on the second murder had touched off a panic among the other stations. The press conference had started just after ten o'clock.

  "Any questions?" Frank Lester's forehead was beaded with sweat. Lester, the deputy chief for investigations, put down the prepared statement and looked unhappily around the room.

  "Lester in the lion's den," Sloan muttered to Lucas. He stuck a Camel in the corner of his mouth. "Got a light?"

  Lucas took a book of matches out of his pocket, struck one and held it for Sloan's cigarette. "If you were Loverboy, would you come in?"

  Sloan shook his head as he exhaled a lungful of blue smoke. "Fuck no. But then, I'm a cop. I know what treacherous assholes we are. I don't even know if I would've mentioned Loverboy in the thing…"

  "About Mrs. Bekker's… friend, have you done any voice analysis on the nine-one-one tapes?" a reporter asked Lester.

  "Well, we've got nothing to match them to…"

  "We hear you're calling him 'Loverboy.'…"

  "Not me, but I've heard that," Lester said grimly.

  "Could the killer be going for women in the arts?" a reporter called out. She worked for a radio station and carried a microphone that looked like a Ruger Government Model.22-caliber target pistol. The microphone was aimed at a point between Lester's eyes.

  "We don't know," he answered. "Mrs. Bekker would only be peripherally in the arts, I'd say. But it could be-there's no way to tell. Like I said, we're not even sure it's the same perpetrator."

  "But you said…"

  "It probably is…"

  From the front row, a newspaper reporter in a rumpled tan suit: "How many serial killers have we had now? In the last five years?"

  "One a year? I don't know."

  "One? There were at least six with the Crows."

  "I meant one series each year."

  "Is that how you count them?"

  "I don't know how you count them," Lester barked.

  "By series," a newspaper reporter called.

  "Bullshit." Television disagreed. "By the killers."

  From the back of the room, a radio reporter with a large tapedeck: "When do you expect him to hit again?"

  "How're we gonna know that?" Lester asked, a testy note creeping into his voice. "We told you what we knew."

  "You're supposed to be running the investigation," the reporter snapped back.

  "I am running the investigation, and if you'd ever worked in a market bigger than a phone booth, you'd know we can't always find these guys overnight in the big city…"

  There was a thread of laughter, and Sloan said dryly, "He's losing it."

  "What the f f f… What's that supposed to mean?" the reporter sputtered. The TV cameraman behind him was laughing. TV people ranked radio people, so laughing was all right.

  "What's 'fff' supposed to mean?" Lester asked. He turned away and pointed at a woman wearing glasses the size of compact discs. "You."

  "What precautions should women in the Twin Cities take?" She had an improbably smooth delivery, with great round O's, as though she were reading for a play.

  "Don't let anybody in your
house that you're not sure of," Lester said, struggling now. "Keep your windows locked…"

  "Who tipped Three, that's what I want to know," another reporter shouted from the back of the room. Carly Bancroft yawned, tried not very hard to suppress a grin, then deliberately scratched her ribs.

  When Daniel had scheduled the press conference, he'd expected the police reporters from the dailies and second-stringers from the television stations. With the Armistead killing, everything had changed. He'd passed the press conference to Lester, he said, in an attempt to diminish its importance. It hadn't worked: media trucks were double-parked in the street, providing direct feeds to the various stations. City Hall secretaries were gawking at the media stars, the media stars were checking their hairsprays, and the TV3 anchorman himself, tan, fit, with a touch of gray at the temples and a tie that matched his eyes, showed up to do some reaction shots against the conference. His station had the beat; he had nothing to do with it, but the glory was his, and his appearance gave weight to the proceedings.

  The conference started angry and got angrier. Lester hadn't wanted to do it, and every reporter but one had been beaten on it. By the end, the Channel Eight reporter was standing on a chair, shouting at Lester. When she stood on the chair, the cops around her sat down; she wore a very short black leather skirt.

  "I guess you gotta get what you can get," Sloan said, laughing. Lester had fled, and Sloan, Lucas and Harmon Anderson walked together down the hall toward Homicide.

  "Department full of fuckin' perverts," Anderson said, adding, "You could see the crack of her ass, if you sat just right."

  "Jesus Christ, Harmon, I think that's sexual abuse in the third degree," Lucas said, laughing with Sloan.

  "You know why they've got such great voices, the TV people?" Anderson asked, going off in a new direction. "Because they reverberate in the space where most people have brains…"

  Swanson came slouching down the hall toward them, heavyset, glittering gold-rimmed glasses. "Did I miss it?"

  "You missed it," Sloan confirmed. "Anderson got his first look at a woman's ass in twenty years."

  "How about Bekker?" Lucas asked.

  "Not a thing. We got his ass in here first thing, asked him if he wanted a lawyer, he said no. He said he'd ask if he needed one. So we said, What'd you do? He said he spent the late afternoon working at home, and the evening watching television. We asked what he was watching, and he told us. He was, like, watching CNBC in the afternoon, some kind of stock market shows, and then the news… He went out around nine o'clock to get a bite to eat. We got that confirmed…"

  "How about phone calls?"

  "He talked to one guy on the phone, a guy from the hospital, but that was late, way after the killing."

  "Who called who?" Lucas asked. The four detectives circled around each other as Swanson talked.

  "The other guy called in…" Swanson said.

  "Could have a VCR, tape the shows," Anderson suggested.

  "He does have a VCR," Swanson said. "I don't know about taping the shows. Anyway, we got his statement, and shit, there was nothing to say. He didn't know Armistead, doesn't even know if he'd ever seen her on the stage… He was just… There wasn't anything there. We sent him home."

  "You believe him?" Lucas asked.

  Swanson's forehead furrowed. "I don't know. When you're leaning on a guy, like we been leaning on Bekker, scouting around his neighborhood, calling his neighbors, all that… and something happened that could clear him, you'd think he'd be peeing all over himself in a rush to prove he didn't do it. He wasn't like that. He was cool. Answered all the questions like he was reading off of file cards."

  "Keep up the pressure," Anderson said.

  Swanson shook his head. "That ain't gonna work with this guy. I'm starting to think-he's an asshole, but he could be innocent."

  They were still talking about it when Jennifer Carey turned the corner.

  "Lucas…" Her voice was feminine, clear, professional.

  Lucas turned in instant recognition. Sloan, Anderson and Swanson turned with him, then moved away down the corridor, furtively watching, as Lucas walked toward her.

  "Daniel said you'd be talking afterwards," Jennifer said. She was slender and blonde, with a few thirties wrinkles on a well-kept face. She wore a pink silk blouse with a gray suit, and almost stopped his heart. She and Lucas had a two-year-old daughter but had never married. They'd been estranged ever since their daughter had been wounded.

  "Yeah. Didn't see you at the conference."

  "I just got here. Where will you be talking? Down at the conference room?" She was all business, brisk, impersonal. There would be more to it than that, Lucas knew.

  "Nah. I'll just be around… How are you?"

  "I'm working with a new unit," she said, ignoring the question. "Could we get you outside, on the steps?"

  "Sure. How've you been?" he persisted.

  She shrugged and turned away, heading for the steps. "About the same. Are you coming over Saturday afternoon?"

  "I… don't think so," he said, tagging along, hands in his pockets.

  "Fine."

  "When are we going to talk?"

  "I don't know," she said over her shoulder.

  "Soon?"

  "I don't think so," she threw back. "Not soon."

  "Hey, wait a minute," he said. He reached forward, hooked her arm and spun her around.

  "Let the fuck go of me," she said, jerking her arm away, angry.

  Lucas had always worried that women feared him: that he was too rough, even when he didn't mean to be. But her tone cut. He put a hand against her chest and shoved, and she went back against the wall of the corridor, her head snapping back. "Shut up…" he snarled.

  "You fuck…" He thought she was going to swing, and stepped back, then realized that she was frightened and that her hand, coming up, was meant to block a punch. Her wrist looked thin and delicate, and he put up his hands, palms out.

  "Just listen," he said, his voice dragging out in a hoarse near-whisper. "I'm tired of this shit. More than tired. I can't stand it anymore. In the past couple of days, I went through to the other side. So I'm telling you: I'm ready to quit. I'm ready to get out. You've been jerking me around for months and I can't deal with it and I won't deal with it. I'm not gone yet, but if you ever want to talk, you better decide soon, because I'll tell you what: You wait much longer and I ain't gonna be there to talk to."

  She shook her head, tears starting, but they were tears of anger, and he turned and walked down the corridor. A TV3 producer stepped out into the hallway and looked down toward Jennifer, still flattened against the wall, looked into Lucas' face as he went by, then looked back at Jennifer and said, "Jen, you okay? Jen? What happened?"

  As he went out on the steps to meet the cameras, Lucas heard Jennifer answer, "Nothing happened."

  All five stations did quick interviews, Lucas standing on the City Hall steps for four of them, suppressing his anger with Jennifer, aware as he talked that it was slowly leaking away, leaving behind a cold hollowness. He did the fifth interview on the street, leaning against his Porsche. When the camera was done, Lucas stepped around the hood of the Porsche to get into the car, looking carefully for Jennifer, half hoping she'd be there, not believing she would be. She wasn't. Instead, a Star Tribune reporter came after him, a dark-haired, overweight man with a beard who always carried a pocketful of sliced carrots wrapped in waxed paper.

  "Tell me something," the reporter said. He waggled a carrot slice at Lucas, in a friendly way. "Between you and me-background, not for attribution, whatever. Are you looking forward to hunting this guy?"

  Lucas thought for a second, glanced at the last television reporter, who was out of earshot, and nodded. "Yeah. I am. There's not been much going on."

  "After busting the Crows, the other stuff must seem small-time…" The reporter gobbled the carrot stick in two quick bites.

  "Nah," Lucas said. "But this is… interesting. People are dying."
r />   "Will you get him?"

  Lucas nodded. "I don't know. But we'd be better off if we could get to Stephanie Bekker's lover. He knows things he doesn't know he knows…"

  "Wait a minute," the reporter said, slipping a slender notebook out of the breast pocket of his sport coat. "Can I attribute this last part? Can we go back on the record just for that?"

  "Okay. But just that bit: Mrs. Bekker's friend-quote me as calling him a friend-has actually seen the guy. He might think he's told us about her, calling nine-one-one, sending the note, but he hasn't. A good interview team would find things in his memory that he has no idea are there. And I'm not talking about giving him the third degree, either. If I could get him ten minutes on the telephone, or if Sloan could… I think we'd have a hundred-percent-better chance of breaking this thing in a hurry."

  The reporter was scribbling notes. "So you want him to come in."

  "We want anything we can get from him," Lucas said. He unlocked the Porsche's door and opened it. "Off the record again?"

  "Sure."

  "Loverboy's our only handle, that's how bad we need him. There's something wrong with this case, and without his help, I don't know how we'll find out what it is."

  His anger with Jennifer came back as he drove across town, replaying the scene in the hall. She knew about scenes, knew about drama, knew psychology. She didn't have to be the one who asked him for an interview. She was jerking him around, and it was working. The optimism, the lift of the last few days, was gone. He accelerated out the Sixth Street exit onto I-94. Go home and go to bed, he thought. Think it over. But his eye caught the sign for the Riverside exit, and without good reason, he took it, then turned left at the top of the ramp and headed down toward the West Bank theater district.

  Cassie Lasch was sitting on the floor of the ticket lobby of the Lost River Theater. She was wearing jeans and a pink T-shirt and was digging through a gray plastic garbage bag. Lucas pushed through the revolving door into the lobby, and, as she looked up at him, he stopped short.

  "The actress," Lucas said. He paused, his eyes still adjusting to the dim light. "Lasch. Cathy."

  "Cassie. How are you, Davenport? Want to help? I'm looking for a clue."