Eyes of Prey ld-3

by John Sandford

  There was a moment of silence, and then she nodded. "Yes."

  "Tell me."

  "He… used to hit me. With his hands. Open hands, but it hurt. And he choked me once. That time, I thought I might die. But he stopped… He'd go into rages. He seemed unstoppable, but he always… stopped."

  "What about sexual practices? Anything unusual, bondage, like that?"

  "No, no. The thing is, there almost wasn't any sex." She looked up at Lucas to see if he believed her.

  "He's impotent?" Lucas asked.

  "He wasn't impotent," she said. She glanced at Del, who nodded, encouraging her. "I mean, sometimes we did, and sometimes we didn't, but he didn't seem driven so much by sex as…"

  "What?"

  Clark's fear of them had slipped into the background and she seemed to be searching for the right phrase, interested despite herself. "He needs to control things. He'd make me do… you know, oral sex and so on. Not because it turned him on, I don't think, but because he liked to make me do it. It was the control he liked, not the sex."

  "Did he ever use drugs while you were around?"

  "No… well, he maybe smoked a little marijuana. You know, though, I think he might have used steroids. He has a very good body…" She dropped her eyelashes. "But he had very small testicles."

  "Small?"

  "Very small… almost like marbles," she said. "You know, he lifts weights, and weightlifters sometimes use steroids. Testicles can shrink with prolonged use of steroids, so I asked him, and he got angry… That was the time he choked me."

  "Did you ever see him dance?" Lucas asked.

  "Dance? His dance?" Clark pulled back. "You've been watching him…"

  "So you've seen it," Lucas said. Del was frowning at him, confused.

  "One time, he beat me up," Clark said in a rush, bouncing on the couch. "Not bad, I mean, nothing showed, but I was hurting, and crying, and all of a sudden he started to giggle and jump up and down. I couldn't believe… it was like a dance. It was a dance, a jig…"

  "Jesus Christ," Del blurted. "A jig?"

  Lucas nodded. "I've seen it. It's gotta be dope. You should talk to your people, see if he's buying on the street."

  Del looked at Clark and asked, "Why'd you go along with him?"

  She looked up at him and said, "Because he's beautiful."

  "Beautiful?"

  "He's beautiful. I'd never had a beautiful man." She looked between them, looking for understanding. After a moment, Del nodded.

  They left her ten minutes later.

  "She knows something else," Lucas said. "She didn't tell us something, and she thinks it might be important."

  "Yeah. But there's no way to tell how important it is." Del scratched his head, looking back at the apartment house door. "And if we squeeze, she'll either crack like Humpty-fuckin'-Dumpty or call a lawyer…"

  "Which is worse…"

  "Yeah."

  They were walking along the sidewalk to the car. "Where's your wife?" Lucas asked suddenly. "I heard she split."

  "Yeah. More'n a year ago."

  "You gettin' laid?"

  "Only by Lady Fingers," Del said, with a dry chuckle. "Look at me, man, I'm a fuckin' wreck. I'm stoned half the time and I'm walkin' around with a gun in my armpit. Who'd go out with me? Other'n maybe a couple of hookers?"

  "Yeah." Lucas looked at the other man. "You know what? She kind of liked you. Clark did. Talking about bikes and all. I mean, she's a rider and you're… like you are."

  Del shook his head. "Man, I can do better'n her."

  "You haven't been," Lucas pointed out. "And doing better won't tell us what she knows."

  "I'd say twelve or thirteen of them are straight-out nutcases, and we didn't want to bother you," the dispatcher said, handing Lucas a stack of call slips. "I've marked those. Six of them wouldn't identify themselves at all. You can judge for yourself, but they're a waste of time… There are a half-dozen you ought to get back to. People who knew the Bekkers or Armistead and say they might have a piece of information for you. None of them thought their information was particularly urgent."

  "All right. Thanks."

  "That last one, she said it was personal."

  Lucas looked at it. Cassie Lasch.

  He thought about not calling. An easy way out, if you didn't call for long enough. He went home and ate a microwave dinner, aware of the telephone out on the edge of his vision. He lasted an hour before he picked it up.

  "You didn't call," Cassie said.

  "I'm working. Give me a little time."

  "How much time does it take to call? Where do you live?"

  "St. Paul."

  "Why don't I come over?" she asked.

  "Ah…" Lucas felt himself freeze for a moment, an impulse to push her away. He was looking at the kitchen table, piled with newspapers and unopened mail, books, some read, some not, a couple of unopened cereal boxes, a stack of unwashed bowls…

  He wasn't doing anything. He was barely alive.

  "You know where Mississippi River Boulevard is?"

  CHAPTER 13

  Cassie was muscular and intense, and fought him, wrestling across the bed. When they were done, she lay facedown on the extra pillow, while he lay faceup, sweat evaporating from his chest, chilling him.

  "Jesus," he said after a while. "That was all right. I was a little worried."

  Her head turned. "About what?"

  "It's been a while."

  She propped herself up on one elbow. "Ah. A little depression?"

  "I guess," he said, curiously ready to talk about it. He'd never talked about problems with Jennifer. "I had all the symptoms."

  She crawled over him, reaching, switched on the bedside lamp. He winced and turned away from it.

  "Look here," she said, showing her wrists to him. There were two whiter lines on the inside of each, parallel, transverse. Scars to be read as clearly as needle tracks.

  "What's this shit?" he said. He took her wrists in his hands and stroked the scars with his thumbs.

  "What do they look like?"

  "Like you cut your wrists," he said.

  She nodded. "You win the golden weenie. Fake suicide attempt-that's what the shrinks say. Depression."

  "The scars don't look so fake," he said.

  "I didn't think so, either," she said, pulling her wrists away. "Are there any cigarettes around here?"

  "No. I didn't know you smoked."

  "I don't, except after sex," she said.

  "Those were pretty heavy cuts. Tell me…"

  She sat up and pulled her knees under her chin, looking down at him. "This was five years ago. I was never in much danger. A lot of blood, and I had to go to counseling for a few months."

  "What's fake about that?" Lucas asked, rolling up on an elbow.

  "What the shrinks say is, I was living with this guy and he had a gun, and I knew where it was. And our apartment was on the seventh floor, I could have jumped. And I knew the guy was coming home pretty soon. So they say I really wanted to live and this was just an attempt to draw attention to my condition."

  "But the cuts…"

  "Yeah. The shrinks are full of shit. They can tell you how to talk to someone else, how to deal with personal problems, but they don't know what happens inside your head, unless it's happened to them. I could have jumped out the window. I could have shot myself. But that's not what I thought of. I had this, like…"

  "Fixation."

  "Yeah. Exactly," she said, smiling at him. "See, you know. The theater's got a whole oral literature about killing yourself and knives are the way to do it. I fucked it up, did it all wrong-I should have cut myself lengthwise, or at the elbow, but I didn't know that. I could have used little pieces of glass, you get a better cut that way, but I didn't know that, either."

  Lucas shuddered. "Glass. I saw that once. You don't want to cut yourself with glass."

  "I'll keep that in mind," she said wryly.

  "So you cut yourself…?"

  "Yep.
I just hacked and sat there and bled and cried until my friend came home. They didn't even give me a transfusion at the hospital," Cassie said. "Good thing, too. This was back when there was AIDS in the blood supply. Though who'd ever know, with me fuckin' actors, and all."

  "Jesus, that makes me feel good…" He looked down at himself.

  "Maybe you oughta run dip it in Lysol…" she said.

  "Don't have any Lysol-I got some Oven-Off," he said, and laughed. She grinned and patted his leg. "So what were you going to do? Your guns?"

  He looked at her for a minute and then nodded. "Yeah. I've got a gun safe down in the basement. It was like they were glowing down there, the guns. Glowing with some kind of gravity, or magnetism, or something. I could feel them wherever I was, pulling me down there. It didn't make any difference if I was on the other side of Minneapolis, I could feel them. I carry a gun, but I never thought about using it. It was the guns in the safe, pulling me down."

  "You ever go down? Just to look, or handle them? Stick one in your ear?"

  "Nope. I would of felt stupid," Lucas said.

  She threw back her head and laughed, but not a happy laugh; an acknowledgment. "I think a lot of suicides are avoided because you'd feel stupid. Or because of the way you'd look afterwards. Like hanging…" She gripped herself around the throat and squeezed, crossing her eyes and sticking her tongue out.

  "Jesus," he said, laughing again.

  She turned serious. "Did you think about it because everything was too painful, or what?"

  "No. I just couldn't handle what was going on in my head, this, this storm. I couldn't sleep: I'd have these crazy fucking episodes where nine million thoughts would go pounding through my head, and I couldn't stop them. Crazy shit. You know, like the names of people in my senior class, or all the guys on the hockey squad, and all kinds of bizarre shit, and you get crazy because you forget a couple of them."

  "That's pretty common," Cassie said, nodding.

  "But basically, I thought about the guns because it didn't seem to make any difference whether I lived or died. It was like, Heads I live, tails I die-and if you keep flipping, it'll come up tails, sooner or later."

  Cassie nodded. "There was a guy I knew in New York, he used to play Russian roulette with a revolver. About once a year he'd spin that thing, that…"

  "Cylinder."

  "Yeah. Then he'd put the barrel in his mouth and pull the trigger. Right around Christmastime. Said it kept him straight for a whole 'nother year."

  "What happened to him?" Lucas asked.

  "I don't know. He wasn't that good a friend. He was still alive the last time I was in New York. I could never figure out if he was lucky or unlucky."

  "Huh."

  She stretched out again, her hands behind her head, and they lay beside each other in comfortable silence for a minute. "Did you have the voice in the back of your head, watching you go through all this shit?" she asked finally.

  "Yeah. The watcher. It was like having my own critic back there. My own journalist."

  She giggled. "I never thought of it that way, but that's it. Like, the major part of me was hacking away with a bread knife-"

  "Ah, fuck, a bread knife?"

  "Yeah, the kind with the serrated blade?"

  "Ah, Jesus…"

  "Good brand, too, Solingen…"

  "God, Cassie…"

  "Anyway, the big part was hacking away, and this little voice was back there reporting on it, like CNN or something. Kind of skeptical, too."

  "Jesus." He reached out and stroked her, from navel to breasts, and back down across her groin to the inside of her knee.

  "Pretty gross, huh? Anyway, I'm glad you're getting better."

  "I'm not really sure I am…"

  "Oh, you are." She patted the bed. "You're here. When you're really depressed, your sex life jumps in a car and leaves for Chicago. I was in this group, as part of the therapy, and every one of the men said so. It wasn't that they couldn't-they just couldn't stand the thought of the complications. Sex is the first thing to go. When it comes back, you're definitely getting better."

  The phone rang at eleven o'clock. Lucas woke clear-eyed, rested, already rolling toward the edge of the bed before he was aware of the weight on the other side. He'd slept, and dreamed, and had almost forgotten…

  Cassie was lying facedown again, bare as the day she was born, the sheet covering her hips. Her hair had parted on either side of her head, and the light slanting through the venetian blinds played across the sensuous turn of her vertebrae, starting at the nape of her neck, trailing down almost to her just hidden tailbone. He reached down, still aware of the phone, now ringing the fourth time, or fifth, and gently slid the sheet even farther down, onto her legs…

  She reached down with one hand and pulled it back up. "Go answer the phone," she grumped, not moving her head.

  He grinned and headed for the kitchen, and picked the phone up on the sixth ring. Dispatch. "I've got a call holding from Michael Bekker," the woman said. "Put it through?"

  "Yes."

  There was a click, a pause, and then Bekker said, "Hello?"

  "Yeah, this is Davenport."

  "Yes, Lucas. Will you be free tonight, late?" Bekker's voice was low, friendly, carefully modulated. "I've got classes, then a dinner, but I've found something in my wife's papers that I thought was interesting. I'd like to show it to you…"

  "Can you tell me on the phone?"

  "Mmm, why don't you come over? Somebody'll have to anyway, and I'd prefer it be you. That other policeman… he's a bit thick."

  Swanson. Not thick at all, although any number of Stillwater inmates had made the mistake of thinking so… "All right. What time?"

  "Tennish?"

  "I'll see you then."

  Lucas hung up and padded back to the bedroom. The bed was empty, and water was running in the bathroom. Cassie was bent over the sink, using his toothbrush. He winced, then reached out and touched her bottom.

  "Hi," she said through a mouthful of bubbles, looking into the mirror over the sink. "Done in a minute. Breath like a dinosaur. And I gotta pee."

  "I'll run down to the other bathroom," he said. He went down the hall, looked back to make sure she wasn't following, opened a drawer, took out a new toothbrush, peeled the package, removed the brush and hastily stuffed the packaging back in the drawer. He was smiling when he looked at himself in the mirror.

  Back in the bedroom, he found the sheets and blankets in a pile on the floor, while she lounged in the middle of the bed.

  "Hop in," she said, patting the mattress beside her. "We're right on time for a nooner and we're not even up yet. Ain't it great?"

  After Cassie left, in a cab, he spent the rest of the day fooling around, unable to focus much on the case, making call-backs, driving around town, checking the net. He walked past Bekker's house again, and spoke to a neighbor who was raking the winter gunk from his lawn. Stephanie had once had a cocker spaniel, the neighbor said, and when Bekker had had to walk it in the winter, he'd take it up to the corner and then "kick the shit out of it. I saw him out the window, he did it several times." The neighbor's wife, who had been splitting iris bulbs, turned and said, "Be fair, tell him about the shoes."

  "Shoes?"

  "Well, yeah, the dog had bad kidneys, I guess, and he used to sneak up to Bekker's closet and pee in his shoes."

  Lucas and the neighbor started laughing at the same time.

  In the evening, an hour before Cassie went on at the Lost River, she and Lucas walked down the block for a cup of coffee. They sat across from each other in a diner booth, and Cassie said, "Ultimately, you're not flaky enough for me. But it'd be nice if we could keep it together for a couple of months."

  Lucas nodded. "That'd be nice."

  At five after ten, he walked up the steps to Bekker's. Lights blazed from several of the ground-floor windows, and Lucas resisted the temptation to go window-peeking again. Instead he rang the bell, and Bekker came to the door, wrapped i
n a burgundy dressing gown.

  "Is that your Porsche?" he asked in surprise, looking past Lucas to the street.

  "Yeah. I have a little money of my own," Lucas said.

  "I see." Bekker was genuinely impressed. He knew the price of a Porsche. "Well, come along."

  Lucas followed him into the study. Bekker seemed skittish, nervous. He would try something, Lucas decided.

  "Scotch?"

  "Sure."

  "I've got a nice one. I used to drink Chivas, but a couple of months ago Stephanie…"-he paused on the name, as if calling up her face-"Stephanie bought me a bottle of Glenfiddich, a single malt… I won't be going back to the other."

  Lucas couldn't tell one scotch from another. Bekker dropped ice cubes into a glass, poured two fingers of liquor over them and handed the glass to Lucas. He looked at his watch, and Lucas thought it odd that he would be wearing a watch with a dressing gown. "So what'd you find?" Lucas asked.

  "A couple of things," Bekker said. He settled behind the desk, leaned back with the scotch and crossed his legs. They flashed from the folds of the dressing gown like a woman's legs from an evening dress. Deliberately, Lucas thought. He thinks I might be gay, and he's trying to seduce me. He took a sip of the scotch. "A couple of things," Bekker repeated. "Like these."

  He picked up a stack of colored cardboard slips, bound together with a rubber band, and tossed them across the desk. Lucas picked them up. They were tickets to shows at the Lost River. He thumbed through: eight of them, in three different colors.

  "Notice anything peculiar about them, Lucas?" Bekker asked. Using his first name again.

  "They're from the Lost River, of course…" Lucas rolled the rubber band off and looked at the tickets individually. "All for matinees… and there are eight tickets for three different shows. All punched, all different shows."

  Bekker mimed applause, then held up his glass to Lucas, as if toasting him. "I knew you were intelligent. Don't you find you can always tell? Anyway, the second woman who was killed worked for the Lost River, correct? I went to a couple of evening performances with Stephanie, but I had no idea she was going in the afternoons. So I began to wonder: Could her lover…?"

  "I see," Lucas said. A connection. And it seemed to let Bekker out.