Eyes of Prey ld-3

by John Sandford

  Barlow stayed in the back of Lucas' mind all the way to the university campus. He dumped the car in a no-parking zone outside the hospital, stuck a police ID card in the window and went inside. Pediatric Oncology was on the sixth floor. A nurse took him down through a warren of small rooms, past a larger room with kids in terry-cloth robes, sitting in wheelchairs and watching television, into another set of hospital rooms. They found Merriam sitting on a bed, talking to a young girl.

  "Ah, Lieutenant Davenport," he said. He looked at the girl in the bed. "Lisa, this is Lieutenant Davenport. He's a police officer with the Minneapolis Police Department."

  "What's he doing here?" she asked, cutting straight to the heart of the matter. The girl was completely bald and had a very pale face and unnaturally rosy lips. The chemotherapy aside, Lucas thought, touched with a cold finger of fear, she looked a lot like his daughter would in ten years.

  "He's a friend of mine, stopping to chat," Merriam said. "I've got to go for a while, but I'll be back before they start setting up the procedure."

  "Okay," she said.

  Outside, in the hall, Lucas said, "I couldn't do this." And, "Do you have kids?"

  "Four," Merriam said. "I don't think about it."

  "So what happened?" Lucas asked. "You sounded a little tense."

  "The woman you called about. I went down to see her. She has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis…"

  "Lou Gehrig's disease…"

  "Right. She's almost completely incommunicado. Her brain works fine, but she can't move anything but her eyes. She'll be dead in a week or two. And Bekker is trying to kill her."

  "What?" Lucas grabbed Merriam by the arm.

  "This absolutely defeats me: a goddamn doctor," Merriam said, pulling away. "But you have to see for yourself. Come along."

  Lucas trailed behind him as they went down a flight of stairs.

  "I went down to find her this morning and stopped to ask at the nursing station," Merriam said over his shoulder. He pushed through a door at the bottom of the stairs. "The duty nurse had worked overnight, and was working an extra half-shift because somebody was sick. Anyway, I mentioned that I was there to see Sybil and asked if Dr. Bekker had been around. The nurse said-you'll have to take this with a grain of salt-she said she didn't see him but she'd felt him. Late last night. She said it occurred to her that dirty old Dr. Death was around, because she shivered, and she always shivers when she sees him."

  "She calls him 'Dr. Death'?"

  " 'Dirty old Dr. Death,' " Merriam said. "Not very flattering, is it? So then I went down to talk to Sybil. She's going by inches, but the nurses say she's got an inch or two left…"

  Merriam led him past the nurses' station and down the hall, past an exit door and three or four more rooms, then glanced inside a room and turned. Sybil lay flat on her back, unmoving except for her eyes. They went to Merriam, then to Lucas, and stayed with him. They were dark liquid pools, pleading.

  "Sybil can't talk, but she can communicate," Merriam said simply. "Sybil, this is Lieutenant Davenport of the Minneapolis Police Department. If you understand, say yes."

  Her eyes moved up and down, a nod, and stayed with Merriam.

  "And a no," Merriam prompted.

  They moved from side to side.

  "Has Dr. Bekker been coming here?" Merriam asked.

  Yes.

  "Are you afraid of him?"

  Yes.

  "Are you afraid for your life?"

  Yes.

  "Have you tried to communicate with your eye switch?"

  Yes.

  "Did Dr. Bekker interfere?"

  Yes.

  "Is Dr. Bekker trying to kill you?" Lucas asked.

  Her eyes shifted to him and said, Yes. Stopped, and then again, Yes, frantically.

  "Jesus Christ," said Lucas. He glanced at Merriam. "Has he been interested in your eyes? Said anything about…"

  Her eyes were flashing up and down again. Yes.

  "Jesus," he said again. He leaned across the bed toward the woman. "You hang on. We'll bring in a camera and an expert interrogator, and we're going to get you on videotape. We're going to slam this asshole in prison for so long he'll forget what the sun looks like. Okay?"

  Yes.

  "And excuse the 'asshole,' " Lucas said. "My language sometimes gets away from me."

  No, her eyes said, sliding from side to side.

  "No?"

  "I think she means, Don't apologize, 'cause he is an asshole," Merriam said from beside the bed. "That right, Sybil?"

  She was like a piece of modeling clay, unmoving, still, except for the liquid eyes:

  Yes, she said. Yes.

  "I'll have somebody here in a half-hour," Lucas said, when they were outside her door.

  "You'll have to talk to her husband, just to make sure the legalities are right," Merriam said. "I'll see the director about this."

  "Tell him the chief is going to call. And I'll have one of our lawyers talk to her husband. Can they get all the information from here at your desk?"

  "Sure. Anything you need."

  Lucas started away, then stopped and turned.

  "The kids you think he killed. Did he go after their eyes? I mean, was there anything unusual about their eyes?"

  "No, no. I was there for the postmortems, their eyes weren't involved."

  "Hmph." Lucas started away again, stopped again.

  "Don't let anyone close to her."

  "Don't worry. Nobody gets in there," Merriam said.

  Lucas called Daniel from a pay phone and explained.

  "Sonofabitch," Daniel crowed. "Then we got him."

  "I don't know," Lucas said. "But we got something. The lawyers will have to figure out if it'll hold up in court. And it doesn't tie him to these other things."

  "But we're moving," Daniel insisted. "I'll send a tape unit over there right now, and Sloan to talk to her."

  "Can we put a guy on her door?"

  "No problem. Around the clock. You think we should stick a surveillance team on him again?"

  Lucas considered, then said, "No. He'll be hyperaware of anything like that. We've got Druze going… Let's see what happens."

  "All right. What are you doing?"

  "I got a couple more ideas…"

  A male duck cruised a female across the college pond, as Elle Kruger and Lucas climbed the sidewalk toward the main buildings. Spring, but a cold wind was blowing. Well off to the west, over Minneapolis, they could see darker clouds, and the blurring underedges that said it was raining.

  "The eye fixation could have been created by some kind of traumatic incident, but that seems somewhat unlikely," Elle said. "It's more likely that he's always had a feeling of being watched, and this is his reaction…"

  "Then why weren't the kids cut up?"

  "Lucas, you're missing the obvious," the nun said. "No good for a gamer."

  "All right, tell me the obvious, Sister Mary Joseph, ma'am," he said.

  "Maybe he didn't kill the children."

  Lucas shook his head. "Thought of that. But Merriam gets these vibrations, and it fits with what he's doing with this Sybil, and the interest in the eyes fits with these other killings. Could be a coincidence, but I doubt it."

  "As I said, it is possible that he developed the fixation between killings."

  "But not likely."

  "No."

  They walked with their heads down, climbing the hill, and Lucas said, "Would it make any difference when he did the eyes? I mean, could he do them later?"

  Elle stopped and looked up at him. "Well. I don't know. This woman who died at the mall-her eyes weren't done until after death."

  "Neither were George's, the guy they dug up in Wisconsin. He probably wasn't done for twenty-four hours…"

  "That's your answer, then. He does it after death, but apparently it doesn't have to be right away. What are you thinking?"

  "Just that if a kid dies and there's going to be a postmortem, you might not want to do the eyes righ
t away. Especially if you had another shot, later."

  "Like at the funeral home?"

  "Sure. Anytime after the postmortem. He's a pathologist, he's right there with the bodies. He could do the eyes there, right in the hospital, or at the funeral home during a visitation. Who watches a dead body?"

  "Do they do anything with the eyes at funeral homes? Would anybody notice?" Elle was doubtful.

  "I don't know," Lucas said. "But I can find out."

  "What time is it?" she asked suddenly. "I've got a four-o'clock class."

  Lucas looked at his watch. "It's just four now."

  CHAPTER 26

  Bekker checked the time as he got out of the car: just four o'clock, right on schedule.

  The apartment building was a block away. He had the clipboard under his arm, and the flower box. The gun weighed heavily in one pocket; the tape was much lighter in the other. He walked with his head down against the drizzle.

  The rain had arrived just in time, and was a blessing, Bekker thought. The rain suit made perfect sense, and the hood would cover his entire head, with the exception of a narrow band from his eyebrows to his lips. He walked heavily: the PCP always did that, stiffened him up. But it made him strong, too. Focused him. He thought about it, then took the brass cigarette case from his pocket and popped another pill, just to be sure.

  He had taken elaborate measures to make sure he hadn't been followed, driving through the looping streets of the lake district, waiting, doubling back, taking alleys. If he was being watched, they were doing it by satellite.

  Walt's Appliance faced Druze's apartment building from across the street. The sales level was a rectangular space, four times as deep as it was wide, with wooden floors that creaked when a customer walked among the ranks of white kitchen appliances. The washers, dryers, refrigerators and stoves carried brand names that sounded familiar at first, less familiar after some thought. Walt kept the lights off, unless a customer was on the floor; the interior was usually illuminated only by the weak light from the street, which filtered through the dusty windows with the fading advertising signs.

  Like his merchandise, Walt was nondescript. Too heavy. Not so much soft-spoken as noncommittal. A few strands of fading brown hair were combed sideways over a balding head, and plastic-framed glasses perched on the end of a button nose slowly withering with age, like an overripe raspberry. Walt had been a beatnik in the fifties, kept a copy of Howl in his desk drawer. Read it more now, rather than less.

  He was happy to cooperate with the police, Walt was: genuinely happy. He'd never used the loft anyway, except to store leftover samples of carpet and rolls of cracking vinyl, the remnants of a brief fling with the flooring business. He provided an inflatable mattress, an office chair, a collapsible TV tray and a stack of old Playboys. The watchers brought binoculars, a Kowa spotting scope, a video camera with a long lens, and a cellular telephone. They were happy, warm, out of the rain. Pizza could be delivered, and there was a bakery just down the street.

  Another team, not so lucky, watched the back entrance of the apartment building from a car.

  The watcher at Walt's sat in the chair, facing the street. The TV tray was at his side, on it a Coke in a paper cup. The spotting scope was on a tripod in front of him. The other cop lay on the mattress, reading a Playboy. The watcher saw Bekker lurching through the rain, looked at him through the scope, dismissed him, never even mentioned him to the cop on the mattress. He couldn't see Bekker's face because of the hat, but he could see the oblong lavender box under his arm, the kind used to deliver roses all over the metro area. You recognized them even if you'd never gotten flowers, or given them.

  Bekker checked the mailboxes, found her apartment number, used Druze's key to open the lobby door and took the elevator to the sixth floor. Her apartment was the last one on the hall. On impulse, thinking of the gun in his pocket, he stopped one door down the hall and knocked quietly. No response. He tried again. Nobody home.

  Good. He slipped a hand in his breast pocket, found the tab of PCP, popped it under his tongue. The taste bit into him. He was ready. He'd primed himself. His mind stood aside, ferocious, and waited for his body to work.

  His hand-nothing to do with his mind anymore, his mind was on its own pedestal-knocked on the door and lifted the box so it could be seen from the peephole. There were flowers in the box. If there was somebody with her, he could leave them, walk away. Druze? He'd still have to do Druze, but the package wouldn't be nearly as nice.

  Bekker stood outside Cassie's door, waiting for an answer.

  Four o'clock. Lucas left St. Anne's, heading west toward the rain. Maybe meet Cassie, he thought. Maybe time to catch her before the play. But yesterday she'd almost kicked him out. And then there were the questions about the handling of dead bodies… He knew a funeral director, down on the south side of town. He could ask about the eyes of the children, although the idea disturbed him.

  Old Catholic background, he thought. Killing people wasn't so bad, but you didn't want to mess with the dead. He grinned to himself, stopped at a traffic signal. Left, he could take the Ford bridge into south Minneapolis, go to the funeral home. Right, he could cut I-94 and be at Cassie's in ten minutes.

  The lights at right angles turned yellow, and Lucas took his foot off the brake, ready to let out the clutch. Still undecided. Left or right?

  "Flowers?" She was smiling, her face completely unaware as she took the box, showing no hint of apprehension. Bekker's body glanced up and down the hall, then drew the pistol and pointed it at her forehead.

  "Inside," he snapped, as her eyes widened. "Keep your mouth shut, or I swear to Christ I'll blow your fuckin' brains out," Bekker's body said, his mind applauding. Bekker's body shoved her back with the left hand, holding the pistol with the right. She clutched the box in both hands, her mouth opening, and as she stepped back, he thought for an instant that she was about to scream. "Shut up," he snarled. Saliva bubbled at his lips. "Shut the fuck up."

  He was inside then, pulling the door closed behind himself, the gun no more than a foot from her forehead. "Back up, sit on the couch."

  She dropped the box and he noticed the muscles in her arms. He wouldn't want to fight her. She backed up until her legs touched the couch, and she half stumbled and sat down. "Don't hurt me," she stuttered. Her face was pale as paper.

  "I won't, if you pay attention," Bekker's body said. His mind still floated, directing traffic. "I just need a place to hide for an hour or so."

  "You're not with Carlo?" Cassie asked, shrinking back into the couch.

  The question caught him, but the drug covered for him. His body was disassociated now, worked by his mind like a puppet on strings, his hands numb. "Who?"

  "You're not with Carlo?"

  "I'm not with anybody, I'm just trying to hide until the cops get off the street," Bekker said. His body was stiff as marble, betraying nothing, but his mind was working feverishly: They knew about Carlo. Christ, were they watching him? They must be. Bekker gestured with the tip of the barrel. "Lie down on the floor. On your stomach. Put your hands behind you."

  "Don't hurt me," she said again. She slipped off the couch onto her knees, her eyes large. She was getting old, Bekker's mind thought: she had tiny wrinkles around her eyes and on her forehead.

  "I'm not going to hurt you," his body said woodenly. He'd thought about this, what to say. He wanted her reassured, he wanted her to go along. "I'm going to tape your hands behind you. If I were going to hurt you, if I were going to rape you, I wouldn't do that… I wouldn't put your hands under you…"

  She wanted to trust him. She turned, looking over her shoulder, and lay down. "Please…"

  "The gun will be pointing at your head," he said. "I tried your neighbor first, but she wasn't home-so I know I could get away with a shot, if I had to… I don't want to risk it, but I will if you try to fight. Do you understand what I'm saying?"

  "Yes."

  "Then put your face down on the floor, straight down, an
d cross your hands. I'll be taping with one hand. The gun's still pointing at you."

  She did it: the marvelous power of the gun. She rolled, her hands behind her, and he awkwardly turned a wrap of the two-inch plastic packaging tape around her wrists, then another, then a third.

  "Don't move," he said. He didn't say it viciously, but his tongue was thick, slurring the words. That was more frightening than if he'd been screaming at her… He did her ankles, more quickly now that her hands weren't a threat, but still staying clear of a possible kick. When they were tight, he slipped the gun in his coat pocket and went back to her hands, added more tape, tighter now.

  "You're hurting me," she said.

  He grunted. No point in talking anymore. He had her. He walked around the couch, put one knee across her back to hold her flat, and slapped a palm-sized strip of tape across her mouth. She fought it, but he held her by the hair and wrapped more tape, tangling her hair across her face, plastering it to the sides of her head.

  "That should do it," his body said, more to his mind than to her. The bottom part of her face had been encapsulated, leaving her nose and eyes uncovered. He put the tape in his pocket, grabbed her under the arms and dragged her to the bedroom. When she started struggling, he backhanded her across the nose, hard. "Don't do that."

  In the bedroom he laid her facedown on the bed and taped her feet to the endboard. He wrapped another length around her neck, once, twice, and led it to the headboard.

  "I'm going in the front room to watch television, see if the cops have figured me out," he said. "I want you quiet as a mouse; you're not hurt yet, but you will be if you cause me any trouble."

  He closed the bedroom door and turned on the television. Now the tricky part.

  Cassie tried to fold her body against the tape. If she could get enough pressure, she might pull free… If she could get up on her feet, even hobble, there were scissors in the bureau, and she might be able to cut the tape. And if her hands were free, she could push the bureau in front of the door and hold him off-throw something through the window, if necessary, scream for help…

  But when she tried to fold herself, the tape around her neck threatened to strangle her. She pulled as long as she dared, then released the tension. The tape on her mouth kept her from gasping for the needed air and she strained to get it through her nose, her vision going red for a moment. No good.