Silent Prey

by John Sandford

  "I want to stay anyway," she said. "It's all we've got."

  All we've got,Lucas thought. Yeah. We find Bekker's supplier, the best damned lead all week, and Bekker kills him right under our noses. Some hotshot cops they were. There had to be another way to approach this situation, to find a way in....

  At Midtown South, Lucas could hear Kennett all the way out to the reception desk.

  "... know it's hot, but I don't give a shit," he was saying. "I don't want people around here reading the goddamn reports, I want everybody out on the street. I want the fuckin' junkies to know there's a war going on. Instead of coming in here, I want you out on the street with your people, rousting these assholes. Somebody knows where he's at...."

  Lucas leaned in the door. Seven or eight detectives were sitting uncomfortably around the conference room, while Kennett sat on a folding chair at the front, his fingers over his heart, an angry flush on his face. He looked over the cops to Lucas and snapped, "Tell me something good."

  "Did you talk to Carter?"

  "I'm supposed to call him back," Kennett said, looking at a phone slip. "What happened?"

  "An old lady maybe told us how Whitechurch got his calls."

  "Well, goddamn," somebody said.

  Lucas shook his head: "But it might not be good. He may have had doctor code names for his clients. When a buyer needed to call in, the switchboard-or somebody-would page the doctor. Whitechurch would pick up a phone and answer the page. There are thousands of doctors in there every day, thousands of phone calls. Hundreds of pages."

  "Sonofabitch," Kennett said. He ran his hand through his hair, and a swatch of it stood up straight, in a peak. "Carter's pushing it?"

  "Yeah. Six guys and Fell stayed to help."

  Kennett thought about it for a second, then exhaled in exasperation and asked, "Anything else?"

  "No. I'm still reading paper on him, but I think... Look, I had an idea on the way over. Entirely different direction. Carter's taking the phone angle, you got guys on everything else. I was thinking again about how hard Bekker is to find, about where he's getting his money, about all the things we don't know about him. So I was thinking, maybe I should talk to the guys who did know Bekker."

  "Like who?"

  "Like the guys who were in jail with him. Maybe I ought to go back to the Cities. I could run down the people who were in the next cells to his. Maybe he said something to somebody, or somebody gave him an idea of how to hole up...."

  "That's not bad," said Kennett, scratching his breastbone. "Kind of a long shot, though, and it takes you out of the action here." He thought about it some more. "I'll tell you what. Read paper for the rest of the day, think about the phones. Day after tomorrow's the lecture. If we've got nothing by then, let's talk about it.... You see the art?"

  "Art?"

  Kennett said, "Jim..."

  One of the detectives handed Lucas a brown envelope. Lucas opened it and found a sheath of eight-by-ten color photos. Whitechurch, dead in the hallway, flat on his back. Blood on the tile behind his head, and on the wall. A twenty-dollar bill half pinned under the body.

  "What's the money?" Lucas said.

  "They must have been hassling over the cash when Bekker shot him," said the cop named Jim. "One of the janitors heard the shots. Not being stupid, he hollered before he went to look. Then he kind of carefully stuck his head through a fire door and saw Whitechurch on the ground. The outside door was just closing. Bekker must've grabbed what he could and run for it."

  "He didn't take the eyelids," Lucas said. Except for the blood, Whitechurch might have been a sleeping drunk.

  "Nope. Just poked him in the eyes and grabbed the dope, if there was any. They got a print, by the way, off a bill. It was Bekker."

  "All right, let's get out there," Kennett said to the cops. There was an unhappy silence, all of them on their feet and moving through the door, shaking heads. "Hey. Everybody. Tell your people to put on the vests, huh? They're gonna be talking to some pissed-off people."

  Huerta, bumping past Kennett, stopped to pat him on the head, pushing his hair down.

  Kennett said, "What?" and Huerta, grinning, said, "Just knocking down your mohawk. With all that white hair stickin' up you looked like Steve Martin in The Jerk, except skinny and old."

  "Yeah, old, kiss my ass, Huerta," Kennett said, laughing, straightening his hair.

  Lucas, astonished, watched Huerta walk away, then looked back at Kennett.

  "What?" Kennett asked, puzzled, raking at his hair again.

  "Steve Martin?" Lucas asked.

  "Asshole," Kennett grumbled.

  "They're probably calling you the same thing, you putting them on the street like that," Lucas said. Switching the topic away from Steve Martin, covering, covering...

  "I know," Kennett said soberly, looking after the detectives. "Jesus, roustin' junkies in this heat... it's gonna stink and the junkies'll be pissed and the cops are gonna be pissed and somebody's gonna get hurt."

  "Not a hell of a lot of choice," Lucas said. "Keep pushing everywhere. With Whitechurch dead, Bekker's gotta find a new source."

  An hour later, Lucas lay on his bed at the Lakota and thought about what Huerta had said. That he looked like Steve Martin, with all that white hair...

  All right. You're on the street. There's been a killing. A car speeds by and inside is an old white guy. That's what Cornell Reed told Bobby Rich's snitch. An old white guy. How would you know he was old, when he was in a moving car? If he had white hair...

  And then there was Mrs. Logan, and what she'd said, in the apartment beneath Petty's....

  Kennett fit. He was a longtime intelligence operative. He was high up, with good access to inside information. He was tough but apparently well liked; he had charisma. He had white hair.

  Kennett was sleeping with Lily. How did that cut across it? How did she wind up in the sack with a guy who might be a suspect? And the biggest question: with several hundred possible suspects, how did Kennett wind up in Lucas' lap, available for daily inspection?

  O'Dell was one answer. Lily was another. Or both together.

  He lay on the bed with the Magic Marker and his art pad, trying to put together a list. Finally he came up with:

  1. Cornell Reed.

  CHAPTER

  15

  Lucas was flat on his back, half asleep, when Fell called. The room was semidark; he'd turned out all the lights but the one in the bathroom, and then half closed the door.

  "I'm downstairs," she said. "If you're awake, let's get something to eat."

  "Anything at Bellevue?" Lucas asked.

  "I'll tell you about it."

  "Ten minutes," he said.

  He was fifteen minutes. He shaved, going easy over the bruises, brushed his teeth and took a quick shower, put on a fresh shirt, dabbed on after-shave. When he got down to the lobby, Fell looked him over and said, "Great. You make me feel like a rag."

  "You look fine," he said, but she didn't. She looked worn, dirty around the eyes. The dress that had been crisp that morning hung slackly from her shoulders. "There's an Italian place a couple of blocks down that's friendly."

  "Good. I couldn't handle anything complicated." As they were going out the door, she said, "I'm sorry about ditching you and going with Kennett, but this case really could mean a lot for me. And Mrs. Bedrick, she was mine... ours... and I wanted to be there to get the credit."

  Lucas nodded and said, "No problem." On the sidewalk, he added, "You don't sound happy."

  "I'm not. Bellevue's a rat's nest. They have a dial-in paging system, so now we're trying to figure out if we can match up the calls. And we're looking for people who might have been paging doctors who shouldn't have, that somebody else might have noticed. There are about two thousand suspects."

  "Can you thin them out?"

  "Maybe. We're trying extortion. Kennett worked out a routine with an assistant D.A. Everybody we talk to, we tell them the same thing: if we find out who Whitechurch's phon
e contact is before she comes forward, we'll charge her as an accomplice in the Bekker murders. If she comes forward and cooperates, we'll give her immunity on Bekker. And she can bring a lawyer and refuse to cooperate on anything else.... So there's a chance. If we can scare her enough."

  "How do you know it's a her? "

  Fell grinned up at him: "That's Kennett. He said, `Have you ever heard a male voice on a hospital intercom?' We all thought about it, and decided, Not very often. If a male voice kept calling out the names of nonexistent doctors-that's what we think she was doing, whoever she is, calling out code names-he'd be noticed. So we're pretty sure it's a her."

  "What if it's just the switchboard?"

  "Then we're fucked... although Carter thinks it probably isn't. A switchboard might start recognizing names and voices...."

  The Whetstone had an old-fashioned knife-grinding wheel in the window, a dozen tables in front, a few booths in back. Between the booths was a wooden floor, worn smooth and soft by a century of sliding feet. A couple turned slowly in the middle of it, dancing to a slow, sleepy jazz tune from an aging jukebox.

  "Booth?" asked Lucas.

  "Sure," said the waitress. "One left, in the no-smoking area."

  Fell smiled ruefully at Lucas, and said, "We'll take it."

  They ate spaghetti and garlic bread around a bottle of ros‚, talking about Bekker. Lucas recounted the Minneapolis killings:

  "... started killing them to establish their alibis. They apparently picked out the woman at the shopping mall at random. She was killed to confuse things."

  "Like a bug. Stepped on," Fell said.

  "Yeah. I once dealt with a sexual psychopath who killed a series of women, and I could understand him, in a way. He was nuts. He was made nuts. If he'd had a choice, I'd bet that he'd have chosen not to be nuts. It was like, it wasn't his fault, his wires were bad. But with Bekker..."

  "Still nuts," Fell said. "They might look cold and rational, but to be that cold, you've got to be goofy. And look what he's doing now. If we take him alive, there's a good chance that he'll be sent to a mental hospital, instead of a prison."

  "I'd rather go to prison," Lucas said.

  "Me, too, but there are people who don't think that way. Like doctors."

  A heavyset man in work pants and a gray Charlie Chaplin mustache stepped across to the jukebox and stared into it. The waitress came by and said, "More wine?"

  Lucas looked at Fell and then up at the waitress and said, "Mmmm," and the waitress took the glasses.

  Behind her, the heavy man in work pants dropped a single quarter in the jukebox, carefully pressed two buttons, went back to his table and bent over the woman he had been sitting with. As she got up, the "Blue Skirt Waltz" began bubbling from the jukebox speakers.

  "Jesus. Blue Skirt. And it's Frankie Yankovich, too," Lucas said. "C'mon, let's dance."

  "You gotta be kidding...."

  "You don't want... ?"

  "Of course I want," she said. "I just can't believe that you do."

  They began turning around the floor, Fell light and delicate, a good dancer, Lucas denser, unskilled. They turned around the heavy man and his partner, the two couples caught by the same rhythm, weaving around the dance floor. The waitress, who'd taken menus to another table, lingered to watch them dance.

  "One more time," the heavy man said to Lucas, in a heavy German accent, as the song ended. He bowed, gestured to the jukebox. Lucas dropped a quarter, punched "Blue Skirt," and they started again, turning around the tiny dance floor. Fell fit nicely just below his jaw, and her soft hair stroked his cheek. When the song ended, they both sighed and wandered back to the booth, holding hands.

  "Sooner or later, I'd like to spend some time in your shorts, as we say around the Ninth," Fell said across the table as she sat down. "But not tonight. I'm too fuckin' dirty and miserable and tired and I've got too many bad movies in my head."

  "Well," he said.

  "Well, what? You don't want to?"

  "I was thinking, well, I've got a shower."

  She cocked her head, looking at him steadily, unsmiling. "You think it'll wash away that woman rolling over this morning, with those eyes?" she asked somberly.

  After a moment, he said, "No. I guess not. But listen... you interest me. I think you knew that."

  "I didn't really," she said, almost shyly. "I've got no self-confidence."

  "Well." He laughed.

  "You keep saying that. Well."

  "Well. Have some more wine," he said.

  Halfway through the second bottle of wine, Fell made Lucas play it again and they turned around the room, close, her face tipped up this time, breathing against his neck, warm, steamy. He began to react and was relieved to get her back to the booth.

  She was drunk, laughing, and Lucas asked about the cop she used to date.

  "Ah, God," she said, staring up at the ceiling, where a large wooden fan slowly turned its endless circles. "He was so good-looking, and he was such a snake. He used to be like this Pope of Greenwich Village guy with these great suits and great shoes, and he hung out, you know? I mean, he was cool. His socks had clocks on them."

  "How cool can a Traffic guy be?" Lucas cracked.

  She frowned. "Were we talking about him? I don't..."

  "Sure, at your place," he said, thinking, As a matter of fact, you didn't, Lily did, Davenport, you asshole. "I remember, mm, important details...."

  "Why's that important?" she asked, but she knew, and she was flattered.

  "You're the fuckin' detective," Lucas said, grinning at her. "Have another drop of wine."

  "Trying to get me drunk?"

  "Maybe."

  Fell put her wineglass on the table and poked a finger at him. "What the fuck are you doing, Davenport? Are you Internal Affairs?"

  "Jesus Christ-I told you, I'm not. Look, if you're really serious, my goddamn publisher's not far from here and my face is on the game boxes. There's a biography and everything, we could go over..."

  "Okay. But why are you pumping me?"

  "I'm not pumping you...."

  "Bullshit," she said. Her voice rose. "You're a goddamn trouser snake just like he was, and just like Kennett. I knew that as soon as you asked me to dance. I mean, I could feel myself melting. Now, what the fuck are you doing?"

  Lucas leaned forward and said, trying to quiet her, trying not to laugh, "I'm not..."

  "Jesus," she said, pulling back. She went back to the table and picked up her purse. "I'm really loaded."

  "Where're we going?"

  "Up to your room. I've changed my mind."

  "Barbara..." Lucas threw three twenties at the tabletop, and hurried after her. "You're a little drunk..."

  "Fuckin' trouser snake," Fell said as she led the way through the door.

  He woke in the half-lit room, a thin arrow of light from the bathroom falling across the bed. He was confused, a feeling of d‚j… vu. Didn't Fell just call, didn't she say... ? He stopped, feeling the weight. She'd fallen asleep cradled beneath his arm, head on his chest, her leg across his right. He tried to ease out from beneath her, and she woke and said, "Hmmm?"

  "Just trying to rearrange," he said, whispering, catching up with the night. She'd been almost timid. Not passive, but... wary.

  "Um..." She propped herself up, her small breast peeking at him over the top of the blanket. "What time is it?"

  Lucas found his travel clock, peered at it. "Ten minutes of three," he said.

  "Oh, God." She pushed herself up, her back to him, and the sheet fell off. She had a wonderful back, he decided, smooth, slender, but with nice muscles. He drew a finger down her spine and she arched away from him. "Oooo. Stop that," she said over her shoulder.

  "Come lay down," he said.

  "Time to go."

  "What?"

  She turned to look at him, but her eyes were in shadow and he couldn't see them. "I really..."

  "Bullshit. Come on and sleep with me."

  "I really need some
sleep. "

  "So do I. Fuckin' Bekker."

  "Forget Bekker for a few hours," she said.

  "All right. But lay down."

  She dropped back on the bed, beside him. "You're not still with Rothenburg?"

  "No."

  "It's over?"

  "It's weird, is what it is," he said.

  "You're not saying the right thing," said Fell. She propped herself up again, and he drew three fingers across the soft skin on the bottom of her breast.