Eyes of Prey ld-3

by John Sandford

  Lucas was also standing, propped against a windowsill, arms crossed. "If Bekker kills another one and carves her eyes out, then what'll you do? The goddamned press'll be down here with pitchforks and torches."

  Daniel threw up his hands in exasperation. "Look, I know this actress woman and you…"

  "Doesn't have anything to do with it," Lucas said. His head still felt like a chunk of wood. Cassie did have something to do with it, of course. Revenge wouldn't be enough, but it would be something. "Druze may have killed her, but Bekker was behind it."

  "Have you talked to the lab people since you came in?"

  "No…"

  "They looked at that jacket in Druze's closet. There was blood on the back of it. You can't see it, because the fabric was black and the blood was soaked in. But it was there, and they've done some preliminary tests. The blood is the same type as Stephanie Bekker's…"

  Lucas nodded. "I think Druze killed Stephanie, all right…"

  "And George. We got a taxi routing from the airport to the Lost River Theater the night George was done."

  "What about Elizabeth Armistead? I'm not so sure about that one. I asked that night, or the next day, and everybody agreed Druze was at the theater most of the afternoon."

  Daniel jabbed a forefinger at Lucas: "But maybe not every minute. He could've been gone half an hour and that would have been enough. And the woman who saw the guy at Armistead's said he was in some kind of utility-man getup. That sounds like an actor to me-we've got Homicide guys over at the theater right now, going through their wardrobe."

  "What about the phone call?"

  "Come on, Lucas. That so-called phone call doesn't make sense no matter how you cut it. And the kid out in Maplewood is pretty sure that Druze is the guy who did the Romm woman." Daniel took a manila folder from his desk and handed it to Lucas. "They found these in Druze's apartment."

  Lucas opened the folder: inside were photographs of Stephanie Bekker and Elizabeth Armistead. The eyes had been cut out. "Where'd they get these?"

  "Druze's file cabinet. Stuffed in the back."

  "Bullshit," said Lucas, shaking his head. "I went through the file cabinet. These weren't there."

  "Maybe he carried them with him."

  "And puts them in the file cabinet before he goes upstairs to blow his brains out?" Lucas said. "Look, take this any way you want: as a continuing homicide investigation or just covering your political ass. We've got to stay with Bekker. We can tell the press that the case is cleared, but we've got to stay on him. We can start by exhuming these kids."

  "What do we say about that?" Daniel asked. "How do we explain…"

  "We don't say anything. Why should we say anything to anybody? If we can convince the parents to keep quiet…"

  Daniel walked around the quiet office, head down, rubbing his hands. Finally he nodded. "Damn, I'd hoped we'd finished with it."

  "We're not finished until Bekker falls. You saw the tapes with Sybil, for Christ's sake…"

  "And you heard what the lawyers said. A dying woman, maybe paranoid, loaded with drugs? C'mon. I believe her, Merriam believes her, Sloan does, so do you-but there's no way a judge is going to put that in front of a jury."

  "Dying declaration…"

  "Oh, bullshit, Lucas-she didn't make it while she was dying, for Christ's sake…"

  "You know what Cassie couldn't understand about the killings? The eyes. She said Druze would never do the eyes. You know what my friend Elle says about them? The shrink. She says he has to do the eyes. So if Bekker is nuts, and he kills somebody else… Jesus, can't you see it? He'll do the eyes again, and your balls will be hanging from a pole outside the City Hall door."

  Daniel pulled on his lip, sighed and nodded. "Go ahead. Talk to the kids' parents. If they say okay on an exhumation, do it. If they say no, come back here and we'll talk. I don't want to go for a court order."

  Lucas met Anderson in the hallway.

  "You've heard?" Anderson asked.

  "What?"

  "The lab guys say that Druze didn't have much in the way of nitrites on his hands. He may have had a handkerchief on the gun, but still…"

  "So what are they saying?"

  "Maybe he didn't kill himself. The M.E. says the whole scene is a little weird, the way he did it, the way he must have been standing when he pulled the trigger. Can't figure out how the gun got underneath him, either. The muzzle was three or four inches from his temple when he pulled the trigger, and with the shock of the bullet and the recoil, he should have gone one way and the gun another. Instead, it beat him to the floor."

  "The M.E. still working on him?"

  "Oh, yeah. They've got samples of everything. I don't know, it's getting curiouser."

  Lucas sat in his office, thinking it over, feeling the rats of depression galloping just below the surface of his mind. If he stopped concentrating, they'd be out. He forced his mind into it: Did Druze kill Cassie? Despite the questions, it seemed likely. In most murders, the most obvious answer is correct-and in any crime investigation, there are always anomalies. The gun shouldn't have beaten Druze's body to the floor, but maybe it did.

  One of the rats slipped out: If only Cassie had identified him a day earlier and Loverboy had called with a definite identification…

  Fuckin' Loverboy…

  Lucas frowned, picked up the phone and called Violent Crimes. Sloan was at home, they said, trying to get some sleep. Lucas called, got him out of bed.

  "Last night, when I was doped up. Did anybody call?"

  "No."

  "Hmph. What time did we identify Druze for television and release the news that it was part of the series…?"

  "This morning-I mean, they had Druze's name last night, midnight or so, but just the name. We didn't release the serial-killing business until this morning."

  "Huh. Okay, thanks." He let Sloan go, dialed TV3 and got Carly Bancroft. "This is Lucas. Did you make Druze's name on the news last night?"

  "No, we had it for the wake-up report," she said. "I could have used a little help…"

  "I was… out of shape," Lucas said. "What about the other channels? Did they have it?"

  "Not as far as I know. We picked up the news release on morning cop checks. Nobody was bitching about getting beat, and they would have, on something like this. When can you talk to us? You found them, right? What-"

  "I really can't talk," Lucas said. "I'll call you later."

  He hung up and sat in his chair, rubbing his temples. Loverboy hadn't called.

  Jennifer's car was in the driveway when he got home. He rolled past it slowly as the garage door went up, and parked and walked out of the garage as she got out of her car.

  "How are you?" she asked. She was wearing a black turtleneck under a cardigan, with gold loop earrings visible under her short-cropped blond hair.

  "What do you want?" His voice was so cold that she stepped back.

  "I wanted to see how you were…"

  "Did Elle put you up to this?" Jennifer had her back to the car door and he loomed over her. His hands were in fists, inside his jacket pockets.

  "She said you were in trouble."

  "I don't need your help. The last time I needed your help, I got my head pushed under," he said. He turned away, walked back into the garage.

  "Lucas…"

  His mind was moving like a freight train, all the facts and suppositions and memories and plans and possibilities flying like boxcars just behind his eyes, unsuppressible. Jennifer. Green eyes. Full lips. Sarah, a bundle, squealing when he tossed her in the air. Jennifer and Sarah together in the delivery room, up at the lake cabin, Jennifer skinny-dipping in the moonlight, Sarah starting to crawl…

  He was at a branch, he felt, when ten thousand things were possible, but he couldn't deal with that, with all the branches…

  "Just… go away," he said.

  He tried, but couldn't sleep. Too many suppositions. Finally, glancing at the clock, he called the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and aske
d how late the gift shop was open. He had just enough time.

  He hurried, trying not to think. Just keep moving. Don't worry about the guns. They sit there in the basement and they glow, and fuck 'em, let 'em glow.

  The gift shop was empty, except for a bored saleswoman who was dressed so well that Lucas guessed she was a volunteer.

  "Can I help you?" she asked.

  "Yeah. I'm interested in a dude named Odilon Redon. What've you got? Got any calendars?"

  Five minutes later he was back in the car, looking for a scrap of paper. He finally found a receipt from a tire store. He turned it over, flattened it against the Porsche owner's manual on his leg and started a new list.

  And later, afraid of the bed, he sat in the spare bedroom with a bottle of Canadian Club and stared at his charts.

  The Killer One chart was complete: Druze. A troll, powerful, squat, odd head, murdering Stephanie. No question about that anymore. If he was working with Bekker, must have killed George, because Bekker was with Lucas. Could have killed Cassie. Could have killed Armistead. Could have killed woman at the shopping center-but why? She was entirely out of the pattern. Not at home; not with the academic/art crowd… And where did the photos come from, with the missing eyes?

  Killer Two: Did he exist? Was it Bekker? Some tracks at the site of the George killing suggested a second man. How would Druze have found George if Bekker hadn't fingered him? (Possibility: He'd watched Stephanie's funeral?) Why would he have driven George's Jeep to the airport? How could he have killed Armistead? Why the phone call-a coincidence, somebody trying to get in free?

  The answers were in the pattern, somewhere. Lucas could feel it but couldn't see it.

  He took the tire store receipt from his pocket. At the top he'd written "Loverboy."

  He looked at it, closed his eyes and let the circumstances flow through his mind.

  At six in the morning, he phoned Del. "I gotta come over and talk to you," he said. Del had an affinity for speed.

  "Jesus Christ, man, what're you doing up at six o'clock? You're worse'n me…"

  Lucas drove across town with the breaking dawn, another cool, overcast day. The drive-time radio programs had started, and he dialed past the jock talk to 'CCO, half listening as he put the car on I-94 toward Minneapolis.

  Del met him at the door in a pair of slightly yellowed jockey shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt that Clark Gable would have approved of. When Lucas told him what he wanted, Del shook his head and said, "Lucas, you'll kill yourself."

  "No. I just need to stay awake for a while," Lucas said. "I know what I'm doing."

  Del looked at him, nodded, went to the bedroom and came back with an orange plastic vial. "Ten hits. Heavy-duty. But don't try to stretch it too far."

  "Thanks, man…" Lucas said.

  A woman's voice came from the back. "Del…?"

  "In a minute," Del said. He smiled thinly at Lucas. "Cheryl. What can I tell you?"

  The speed brightened him up. He turned south, looking at the clock. Almost seven. Sloan would be up.

  "How're you feeling?" Sloan's wife asked as she opened the door.

  "Everybody wants to know," Lucas said, grinning at her. She was a short woman, slightly plump, motherly and sexy at the same time. Lucas liked her. "Is Sloan out of bed?"

  She turned her head. "Sloan? Lucas is here."

  "Out on the porch," Sloan called back.

  "Does Sloan have a first name?" Lucas asked as he went past the woman.

  "I don't know. I never asked," she said.

  Sloan was sitting on the sun porch, smoking a cigarette and eating a cherry Moon Pie. A Coke sat on a side table by his hand.

  "A real lumberjack breakfast," Lucas said.

  "Don't talk loud," Sloan said. "I'm not awake yet."

  "I need you to sweet-talk some people for me," Lucas said. Sloan was the best interrogator on the force. People told him things. "I've got the names and addresses…"

  "What for?" Sloan asked, taking the slip of paper.

  "Their kids died," Lucas said. "We want to dig them up. We want to do it today."

  CHAPTER 29

  Beauty danced and bled and danced and bled and danced until he fell down on his back, his arms thrown wide, his legs spread, a kind of crucifixion on the huge Oriental rug in the dining room. There were no dreams of eyes. There were no dreams of anything. There was nothing at all.

  The pain woke him.

  Daylight filtered past the blinds and his body trembled with cold, his muscles tight and shaking. He sat up and looked down, thought that somehow he'd gotten muddy, then realized that his chest was caked with dried blood. When he tried to stand, flakes of the blood broke away and fell on the carpet.

  Something had changed. He felt it. Something was different, but he didn't know what. Couldn't remember. He tried to find it, but his mind seemed confused and he could not. Could not find it. He went to the bathroom, turned on the water for the tub, watched it pour, the water swirling, and he began to sing just like Mrs. Wilson had taught them in the fifth grade:

  "Frere Jacques, Frere Jacques, dormez-vous, dormez-vous?…"

  In the tub, the blood dissolved, pink in the water, and Beauty bathed in it, patted it on his astonishing face, and sang every song that a fifth-grader knew…

  The mirror was steamed over when he got out of the tub. He was annoyed when this happened, because he could not look into his face, he had to open the bathroom door, had to wait until the cool air cleared it. He always tried to rub the steam away with a towel, but he could never quite clear the mirror…

  He opened the door and the cold air flooded around him, and the stimulation almost brought the memory back. Almost… The first streak of condensation ran down the mirror. Bekker picked up a towel and wiped. Ah. There he was…

  The face was far away, he thought, puzzled. He wasn't that far away. He was right here… He reached out and touched the glass, and the face came closer, and the horror began to grow.

  This wasn't Beauty. This was…

  Bekker screamed, stumbled back, unable to tear his eyes from the mirror.

  A troll looked back. A troll with a patchwork face, the wide eyes staring, measuring him. And it all came back, the apartment, the gun, and Druze going down like a burst balloon.

  "No!" Bekker screamed at the mirror. He grabbed the hair on both sides of his head, pulled at it, welcoming the pain, trying to rip the troll from his consciousness.

  But the eyes, cool, cruel, floated in the mirror, watching… Bekker ran into the hallway: another of her mirrors, mirrors everywhere, all with eyes. He stumbled, fell, crawled down the hall, scampering, naked, his knees burning from the carpet, down to his bedroom like a weasel, groping in panic for the brass cigarette case.

  The eyes were everywhere, in the shiny surfaces of the antique bedstand, in the window glass, on the surface of the water in a whiskey tumbler… Waiting. No place for Beauty. He gobbled three bloodred caps of Nembutal 100 mg pentobarbital and the green eggs, the Luminal 30 mg phenobarbital, three of them, four, six. And then the purple eggs, the Xanax 1 mg alprazolam. Too much? He didn't know, couldn't remember. Maybe not enough. He took an assortment of eggs with him, squinting through half-closed eyes, avoiding the shiny surfaces, and whimpering, he crawled into his closet, behind the shirttails and the pantlegs, with the shoes and the odors of darkness.

  The Nembutal would be on him first; there was a mild rush as they came on, a Beauty rush. Bekker didn't want that. He wanted the calming effect, the sedation; even as he thought it, the rush dwindled and the sedation came on. The Luminal would be next, in an hour or so, smoothing him out for the day, until he could make plans to get at Druze. The Xanax would calm him…

  Another voice spoke in his mind, far away, barely rational: Druze. Find Druze.

  Bekker looked into his hand, half cupped around the pills. He would find Druze if the medicine held out.

  Lucas waited.

  The second house was on a slight rise above the street, a g
reening lawn, neat, flower beds still raw with the spring. A Ford Taurus station wagon was parked in the driveway, the husband's car. He'd arrived just a minute after Sloan and Lucas. Lucas waited in the car while Sloan went inside.

  The speed was beginning to bite. Lucas felt sharp and hard, like the edge of a pane of glass; and also brittle. He sat listening to Chris Rea on the tape player, singing about Daytona, his hand beating out the rhythm…

  Sloan came straight out the door and across the lawn, the paper in his hand.

  "We're clear," he said. "The woman was okay, but I thought her husband was going to freak out."

  "As long as we got it," Lucas said.

  The machinery of exhumation was fussily efficient. A small front-loader took off the top five feet of dirt and piled it on a sheet of canvas. Two of the cemetery's gravediggers took off the last foot with shovels, dropped hooks onto the coffin and pulled it out, a corroding bronze tooth.

  Lucas and Sloan followed the M.E.'s van back downtown and, as the coffin was unloaded, walked inside to talk to the medical examiner.

  When they found Louis Nett, he was pulling a gown over his street clothes. "Have you heard about the other one?" Lucas asked. The second child had been buried in the suburban town of Coon Rapids.

  "It's on the way," Nett said. "If you guys want to hang around, I can give you a read in the next couple of minutes… depending on the condition of the body, of course."

  "What do you think?" Sloan asked.

  "Well, she was done by the Saloman Brothers. They're pretty careful, and she hasn't been down that long. I think there's a good chance, as long as the coffin is still tight. If it leaked, you know…" He shrugged. "All bets are off."

  "We'll wait," Lucas said.

  "You can come watch…" Nett offered.

  "No, no," Lucas said.

  "Well, if you don't mind… I think I might," Sloan said. "I've never seen one of these."

  The medical examiner's office looked like the city clerk's office, or the county auditor's, or any place except one that dealt with the scientific dismemberment of the dead. Secretaries sat in front of smudged computer screens, each desk marked with idiosyncratic keepsakes: china frogs, pink-butted babies, tiny angels with their hands held in prayer, Xeroxed directives from the higher-ups, Xeroxed cartoons from the lower-downs.