Silent Prey

by John Sandford

  Her parents? Almost certainly.

  A hallway broke to the left out of the living room. He checked it, found a bathroom and two bedrooms. One bedroom was used as an office and for storage; a small wooden desk and two file cabinets were pushed against one wall, while most of the rest of the space was occupied by cardboard boxes, some open, some taped shut. The other bedroom had a queen-sized bed, unmade, with a sheet tangled by its foot, and two chests of drawers, one with a mirror. An oval braided rug lay underfoot, just at the side of the bed, and a pair of underpants lay in the middle of the rug. A thigh-high woven-bamboo basket with a lid half-hid behind one of the chests. He opened it. Soiled clothes: a hamper.

  He could see it. She sleeps in her underpants, sits up, still tired, yawns, gets out of beds, drops her pants for a shower, figures to toss them in the hamper when she gets back, forgets....

  He went back through the living room to the kitchen, which looked almost unused-a half-dozen water glasses sat in a drying rack in the sink, along with a couple of forks, but no dishes. A Weight Watchers lasagna package lay inside a wastebasket. A bottle of Tanqueray gin sat on the cupboard, two-thirds full. He looked in the refrigerator, found bottles of lime-flavored Perrier and Diet Pepsi, a six-pack of Coors, a bottle of reconstituted lime juice and four bottles of Schweppe's Diet Tonic Water. A sack of nectarines lay on top of the fruit drawer. He touched the stove-top. Dust. A freestanding microwave took up half the counter space. No dust. She didn't cook much.

  He did the kitchen first: women hide things in the kitchen or the bedroom. He found a set of dishes, inexpensive, functional. Rudimentary cooking equipment. A drawer full of paper, warranties for all the appliances and electronics in the place. He pulled the drawers out, looked under and behind them. Looked in tins: nothing, not even the flour and sugar that was supposed to be there.

  In the bedroom, he looked under the bed and found a rowing machine and dust bunnies the size of wolverines; and in the bedstand drawer, where he found a Colt Lawman with a two-inch barrel, chambered for.38 Specials. Swung out the cylinder: six loaded chambers. He snapped the cylinder back, replaced the weapon as he'd found it.

  Looked through the chest of drawers. Bundles of letters and postcards in the top drawer, with cheap jewelry and a sealed box of lubricated Trojans. He looked through the letters, hurrying.

  Dear Barb, Just back from New Hampshire, and you should have come! We had the best time!

  Dear Barb: Quick note. I'll be back the 23rd, if everything goes right. Tried to call, but couldn't get you, they said you were out, and I was afraid to wake you during the day. I really need to see you. I think about you all the time. I can't stop. Anyway, see you on the 23rd. Jack.

  The letter was in an envelope, and he checked the postmark: four years old. He made a mental note: Jack.

  Not much else. He pulled out the drawers. Ah. More paper. Polaroid photos. Barbara Fell, sitting on a man's lap, both holding up bottles of beer. They were naked. She was thin, with small breasts and dark nipples.

  He was as thin as she, but muscular, dark-haired, and looked at the camera with a practiced lack of self-consciousness. Another shot: the two of them sitting on what looked like a zebra-skin rug, both nude, their eyes red pinpoints. In the background, a mirror, with a brilliant flash reflecting back at the camera. The camera in the mirror was on a tripod, unattended. No third person. The expression on her face... Fear? Excitement? Trepidation?

  Another photo, the two of them clothed, standing outside what looked like a police station. A cop? He went back to his briefcase, got the Polaroid out, clipped on the close-up attachment, knelt, and duplicated the photos.

  There was nothing else in the bedroom. The bathroom was odorless, freshly scrubbed, but the vanity countertop was a jumble of lipsticks, shampoos, soap, deodorant, a box of something called YeastGard, panty shields, a pack of needles, tweezers, a huge box of Band-Aids and a bottle of sesame body oil. The medicine cabinet held a small selection of over-the-counter items: aspirin, Mycitracin, Nuprin.

  He headed for the office.

  She was meticulous about her accounts, and everything seemed about right: she had one bank account, a safety-deposit box, and an account with Fidelity Investments, which turned out to be an IRA.

  And where was her book? He shuffled through the desk drawers. She must have a personal phone book. She probably carried an annual one with her, but she should have some sort of book she kept at home, that she wouldn't be changing every year. He frowned. Nothing in the desk. He walked out to the front room and looked around the telephone. Nothing there. The phone had a long cord, and he walked over to the pile of magazines on the television table, stirred through them. The book was there, and he flipped it open. Names. Dozens of them. He got the Polaroid and began shooting. When he finished, he'd used all but two shots.

  Enough. He looked around, checked the lights and backtracked out of the apartment. The guard was staring stoically at a blank marble wall when Lucas left, and never looked up. The guard's job was to keep people out, not keep people in.

  Kennett and another detective were looking at paper, while a third cop talked on a telephone.

  "Barbara's down the hall," Kennett said, looking up when Lucas walked in. "We got you an empty office so you can have a little peace...."

  "Thanks," Lucas said.

  Fell was sorting through a stack of manila files. He stopped in the doorway, watched her for a moment. She was focused, intent. Attractive. The nude photos popped up in his mind's eye: she looked smaller in the photos, more vulnerable, less vivid. She began paging through a file. After a moment, she felt him in the door, looked up, startled: "Jesus, I didn't hear you," she said.

  He stepped inside, walked around the table. Picked up a file: "Robert Garber, 7/12." "Is this everything?"

  "Yeah. I've been reading through it. A zillion details," she said. She brushed a lock of hair out of her eyes. "The problem is, we don't need any of it. We know who Bekker is and what he looks like, and he admits in these crazy medical papers that he did the killings. All we have to do is find him; we don't need all the usual shit."

  "There must be something...."

  "I'll be goddamned if I can see it," Fell said. "The other guys made a list, like the stuff you were talking about at the meeting this morning. He needs an income. He needs a place to hide. He needs a vehicle. He needs to change his face. So they've put out the publicity to employers: watch who you're paying. They've contacted all the hotels and flophouses and anyplace else he might stay. They're talking with the taxi companies, thinking maybe he's moving around in the cab-that would explain how he gases them, using the backseat as a gas chamber. They've gone to all the stores that sell cover-up makeup for people who are disfigured, and every place that sells theatrical makeup. The narcotics guys are talking to dealers, and we're chasing fences. What else is there?"

  "I don't know, but it's not enough," Lucas said. He flipped his hand at the stack of paper. "Let's look at the victims first...."

  They spent an hour at it. Bekker had killed six people in Manhattan, their bodies found scattered around Midtown, the Village, SoHo and Little Italy. Working on the theory he wouldn't take them far, he was probably south of Central Park, north of the financial district. The zip codes on the envelopes he'd mailed to the medical journals suggested the same thing: three papers, three different zips: 10002, 10003 and 10013.

  "He uses halothane?"

  "That's what they assume," Fell said, nodding. "They found traces in three people when they were doing the blood chemistry. And that supposedly accounts for the lack of any sign of a struggle. The stuff is quick. Like one-two-three-gone."

  "Where did he get it?"

  "Don't know yet-we've run all the hospitals in Manhattan, northern Jersey, Connecticut. Nothing yet, but you know, nobody tracks exact amounts of the stuff. You could transfer some from one tank to another. If the tank wasn't gone, how could you tell?"

  "Nnn. Okay. But how does he get close enough to whip it
on them?" Lucas got up and went out into the hallway, came back with a cone-shaped throwaway water cup. "Stand up."

  She stood up. "What?"

  He thrust the cup at her face. "If I come at you like this, from the front, I can't get the leverage."

  Fell stepped back and the cup came free.

  "Even if they got some gas, they could get far enough back to scream," he said.

  "We don't know that they didn't scream," said Fell.

  "Nobody heard anything."

  She nodded. "So if he hits them on the street, he must come up from the back."

  "Yeah. He grabs them, pulls them in, claps it over their mouth..." He turned her around, clapped the cup over her mouth, his elbow in her spine, his hand hooked over her shoulder. "One, two, three... Gone."

  "Do it again," she said.

  He did it again, but this time, she grabbed his wrist and twisted. The paper cup crumbled and her mouth was open. "Scream," she said. He let go and she said, "That doesn't work too well, either."

  "This woman... Ellen Foen." Lucas picked up the file, flipped it open. "Statements from her friends say she was very cautious. She'd had some trouble with street people-they hang out in the alley behind the place she worked, going through the dumpsters. She could look out through the glass port in the door while it was still locked, and she always checked before she went out. So if Bekker was there, she must have seen him."

  "It was late."

  "Nine o'clock. Not quite dark."

  "Maybe he was dressed okay. He's not a real big guy-maybe she just wasn't worried."

  "But with his face?"

  "Makeup. Or... I don't know. It makes more sense to me that he's driving a cab. She gets in, he's got one of the security windows between himself and the backseat. He's got it sealed up somehow, and when she shuts the door, he turns on the gas. She passes out. I mean, I just can't see a woman, somebody supposedly cautious, letting a guy get that close to her. And even if he comes up from behind, she'd fight it. You're a hell of a lot bigger than Bekker, but you'd have a hard time holding a mask over my mouth, even from behind."

  "Maybe that's why he picks small people, women," Lucas suggested.

  "Even so, you just twist away. Even if he gets you, there'd be bruises-but the M.E. hasn't found any bruises. It's gotta be a cab, or something like it."

  "But why did Foen take a cab? She was running across the street to get Cokes for everybody. Her boyfriend was supposed to pick her up at nine-thirty, when she got off."

  "Maybe... fuck, I don't know."

  "And look at Cortese. Cortese walks out of this club and across Sixth Avenue, down Fifty-ninth Street toward the Plaza. His friends saw him go in at the Sixth Avenue end. He apparently never arrived at the other end, because there was a phone message for him at the Plaza from nine o'clock on, and he never got it. So he gets picked up on Fifty-ninth between Fifth and Sixth. What happened in there? Why would he flag a cab? He only had to go a few hundred feet."

  She shrugged. "I don't know. And it's dark in there, so maybe he got jumped. But you gotta be careful when you start looking for logic, man...."

  "I know, I know...."

  "It could be anything. Maybe Cortese left his friends because he was looking for a little action."

  Lucas shook his head. "He sounds awful straight."

  "So does Garber... I don't know."

  "Keep reading," said Lucas.

  She was watching him, he thought. Odd glances, wary. "Is there something wrong?" he asked finally.

  After a moment, she asked, "Are you really here working on Bekker?"

  "Well..." He spread his arms to the stack of paper on the table. "Yeah. Why?"

  "Oh, the more I think about it, the odder it seems. We'll catch him, you know."

  "Sure, I know," Lucas said. "I'm mostly here for the publicity thing. Take some heat off."

  "That doesn't seem quite right either," Fell said. She studied him. "I don't know about you. You hang out with O'Dell. You're not Internal Affairs?"

  "What?" He pulled back, surprised. "Jesus, Barbara. No. I'm not Internal Affairs."

  "You're sure?"

  "Hey. You know what happened to me in Minneapolis?"

  "You supposedly beat up somebody. A kid."

  "A pimp. He'd cut up a woman with a church key, one of my snitches. Everybody on the street knew about it and I had to do something. So I did. He turned out to be a juvenile-I guess I knew that-and I got hammered by Internal Affairs. There was nothing particularly fair about it. I was just doing what I had to do, and everybody knew it. I got fucked because fucking me was safer than not fucking me. But I'm not Internal Affairs. You can check, easy enough."

  "No, no."

  She went back to her papers, and Lucas to his, but a minute later he said, "Jesus, Internal Affairs."

  "I'm sorry."

  "Well..."

  They took a break, walked two blocks down, bumping hips, and got a booth in a Slice-o'-Pie pizza joint, with gallon-sized paper cups of Diet Pepsi. She liked him: Lucas knew it and let the talk drift toward the personal. He told her about his onetime long-distance relationship with Lily; about the ambiguity now. About his kid.

  "I wouldn't mind having a kid," Fell said. "My fuckin' biological alarm clock is banging like Big Ben."

  "How old are you?" he asked.

  "Thirty-six."

  "Any fatherhood prospects on the horizon?"

  "Not at the moment," she said. "All I meet are cops and crooks, and I don't want a cop or a crook."

  "Hard to meet people?"

  "Meeting them isn't the problem. The problem is, the guys I like, don't like me. Eventually. Like five years ago, I was going out with this lawyer dude. Not a big-time lawyer, just a guy. Divorced. Long hair, did a lot of pro bono. And pretty hip. You know."

  "Yeah. Exactly. Nice neckties."

  "Yeah. He was looking around to get remarried. I mighta. But then one day I was out decoying and this big asshole comes onto me really hard, gets me on a wall, whacks me-he's getting off on whacking me. And I go down and I've got this little hideout piece on my leg, this.25 auto, and he's just bending over to pick me up and I stick the piece in his teeth and his eyes get about the size of dishpans and I back him off, he's saying, `Hold it, hold it...' "

  "Where's your backup?"

  "They're just running up. They put the guy on the wall and one of them says, `Jesus, Fell, you're gonna have a mouse bigger'n Mickey'-the asshole'd whacked me right under the eye, right on the eye-socket bone, you know?" She rubbed her eye socket, and Lucas nodded. "Hurt like hell. And I say, `Yeah?' And they got the guy leaning on the wall with his legs apart, and I say, `Say good-bye to your nuts, shitbag,' and I punted the sonofabitch so hard his balls had to take a train back from Ohio."

  "Yeah?" Lucas laughed. Cop stories were the best stories, and Fell looked positively merry.

  "So I tell this story to my lawyer friend and he freaks out. And he's not worried about my eye," she said wryly.

  "He's worried about the guy on the wall?"

  "No, no. He knew that happened. He didn't mind if somebody did it, he just didn't want me to do it. And I think what really bothered him was my quote: `Say good-bye to your nuts, shitbag.' I shouldn't have told him that. It really bothered him. I think he wanted to join a country club somewhere, and he could see me sitting out on the flagstone terrace with a mint julep or some fuckin' thing, telling the other country club ladies this, `Say good-bye to your nuts, shitbag.' "

  Lucas shrugged. "You ever tried a cop?"

  "Yeah, yeah." She nodded, with a small smile, eyes unfocusing. "A trouser snake. We were hot for a while, but... You want a little peace and quiet when you're home. He wanted to go out cruising for dopers."

  Lucas took a bite out of a slice of pepperoni, chewed a minute and then said, "A couple of years ago, Lily and I were involved. This is between you and me?"

  "Sure." The curiosity was wide on her face, unhidden.

  "We were getting intense, this was
back in Minneapolis, her marriage was falling apart," Lucas said. "Then this Indian dude shot her right in the chest. Goddamn near killed her."

  "I know about that."

  "I freaked out. Man. So then we saw each other a few times, but I'm afraid to fly, and she was busy...."

  "Yeah, yeah..."

  "Then last year..."

  "The actress," Fell said. "The one that Bekker killed."

  "I'm like a curse," Lucas said, staring past Fell's head, eyes and voice gone dark. "If I'd been a little smarter, a little quicker... Shit."