Silent Prey

by John Sandford

  "All right. Back to the dork..."

  "He's not a dork. He's really a nice guy, and if he cracks this thing, he could go somewhere...."

  She'd talked, Lily had, about the Robin Hood case. She'd talked in bed. She'd talked about the intelligence guys who'd stumbled over it, she'd talked about Petty being assigned to it, she'd talked about computers.

  Not all at once. Not formally. But bits and pieces. Pillow talk. But Kennett got most of it. With what Copland overheard, and what Kennett got in bed, they must've known it all.

  Petty's image floated in her mind's eye, his hair slicked down, his red ears sticking out, running down the Brooklyn sidewalk with the paper overhead, so happy to see her....

  "I killed you," she said to his image, speaking aloud. Her voice was stark as a winter crow. "I killed you, Walt."

  CHAPTER

  31

  The river was black as ink, but thick, oily, roiled, as it pushed the last few miles toward the sea. A full moon had come up in the east, red, huge, shrouded by smog over the city. Lily waited until the elderly night guard and his dog were at the far end of the marina, then used her key at the member's gate.

  The docks were cluttered, as always, badly lit by widely spaced yellow bug lights. Out in the water, anchor lights shone off the masts of a half-dozen anchored boats. Here and there, lights showed at portholes, and a light breeze banged halyards against aluminum masts, a pleasant whipping tinkle like wind chimes. The smell of marijuana hovered around a small Capri daysailer and a man was giggling inside the tiny cabin. She walked out of the marijuana stink into the river smell, compounded of mud and decaying fish.

  "Lily." Kennett's voice came out of the dark as she approached the Lestrade. He was sitting behind the wheel, smoking a cigarette. "I was wondering if you'd come."

  "You know about Bekker?"

  "Yeah. And that I've been cut out of the loop."

  Lily stepped into the cockpit, sat down, staring at him. His face was flat, solemn; he was looking steadily back. "You're Robin Hood," she said.

  "Robin Hood, bullshit," he said wearily. He flicked the cigarette into the water.

  "I'm not wearing a wire," she said.

  "Stand up, turn around." She stood up and Kennett ran his hands down her, between her legs. "Gimme the purse."

  He opened the purse, clicked on an electric light that hung from the backstay, looked inside. After poking inside, he took the.45 out of its holder, dropped the magazine and shucked the shells out into the water. Then he jacked the slide, to eject the shell in the chamber. The chamber was empty, and he shook his head. "You oughta carry one under the hammer."

  "I'm not here to talk about guns," she said. "I'm here to talk about you being Robin Hood. About using me as a dummy to spy on O'Dell. About killing Walt Petty."

  "I didn't use you as a dummy," he said flatly. "I got with you because I liked you and I'm falling in love with you. You're beautiful and you're smart and you're a cop, and there aren't many women around I can talk to."

  "I don't doubt that you like me," she said, squaring off with him. "But that didn't keep you from running me. On the way up here, I was remembering when we'd lie down below there, in the berth, and you running those goddamn fantasies about what O'Dell did for sex. Do you remember that? You must've scripted those things, to get me talking about O'Dell. And before that, talking about Walt. When I think of the things I told you, because I felt secure. Because you were a lover and a brother cop. Jesus Christ, every time we got into bed, you were pumping me for information."

  "Christ, Lily... Lily, if you told me anything about O'Dell or Petty... it was by-product. I wasn't sleeping with you to get information. Jesus, Lily..."

  "Shut up," Lily said. She reached overhead and pulled the chain on the backstay light and they were plunged into the dark again. "I want to know some shit. We've got Jeese and Clemson, Davenport got them, and we know about Copland...."

  "I knew Davenport was dangerous," Kennett said quietly. "I really didn't underestimate him. I knew he was a really dangerous sonofabitch when he looked up Gauguin, about the necktie. And I couldn't help liking him."

  "Is that why your guys tried to beat him up, instead of just whacking him?"

  Kennett grinned: she could see his teeth. Not a happy smile, a rueful one. "Another mistake," he said. "You start feeling that everything in New York is more. That a small-town guy could never hold off a couple of real New York pros. So we were just gonna break a few ribs, maybe. Something that'd take him off the street for a month. They said he was quick as a pro fighter. They were pissed, said that if they'd been a half-inch slower, he'd of blown them up, he'd of had his.45 out...."

  "They were lucky," Lily said. "Why didn't you try again?"

  Kennett shrugged. "At that point, we figured it was either kill him or forget him. He didn't seem... close enough... to kill. And I don't know if the guys would've done it anyway. Petty was already hard to stomach. Davenport's message to O'Dell, the one Copland picked up. That was fake?"

  "Not completely. It was Davenport who found Bekker, all right. He was feeding the message to O'Dell to see if any hitters showed up. They did, but I was with O'Dell the whole time. He didn't make any calls. So I started thinking about it."

  "God damn it. I thought about skipping Bekker."

  "You should have."

  "Couldn't. Didn't know what he'd say about..." He stopped, remembering.

  "About the guys he saw hit Walt. Jeese and Clemson. Thick and Thin."

  "No," Kennett said evenly. "It wasn't them."

  "Bullshit," she flared. "They fit."

  "No. It wasn't."

  "Who, then?"

  "I won't tell you, but Jeese and Clemson, no." He pulled at his lip. "Old Copland. A good guy. What happens to him?"

  "O'Dell will think of something.... How many of you are there? And how many people have you done?"

  Kennett shook his head. "There are... several. Some singles, some two-man teams. None of them knows the others, and I won't tell you who they are."

  "We can put Jeese and Clemson in Attica if we want-assault on a police officer with a firearm. And if O'Dell wants to fix it, I'm sure we can find a problem with Copland's pension. He'll spend his last twenty years sitting on a park bench. Or rolled in an army blanket on a sidewalk."

  "Don't fuckin' do that," Kennett whispered.

  "That's what happens when you lose," Lily said, her voice like ice.

  "We were doing right," Kennett said. "I'll call it off. Walk away, and I'll call it off. I'll quit the force, if you want."

  "What, so you can write for the Times ? You'd be a bigger danger there than where you are now," Lily said.

  "So what do you want from me?"

  "I want the goddamned names."

  Kennett shook his head. "No. Never happen. If I gave you the names, only two things could happen: a lot of good guys would get ripped off, or O'Dell would set up his own little force of stormtroopers. I'm not going to let any fat, puling, alcoholic fixer do that, I won't...." His voice grew cold as he said it. He bared his teeth and added, "I really like you. But the worst thing you do is, the worst thing about you, is that you associate with that... that... cunt O'Dell."

  "I'm the cunt," Lily said. "I'm the one you rolled for information."

  "Fuck you, then," Kennett said, and turned away. "You want to make something out of it, make it in court. I'll tear you up. Now take your ass off my boat."

  "I've got another question before I go."

  "What?"

  "Why Walt?"

  Kennett stared at her a moment, then dug in his shirt, found a pack of cigarettes, shook one out, lit it with a match. Tossed the match overboard: they heard it hit, the hiss hanging in the damp air.

  "Had to," he said. "Him and his fucking computers. When I started this, nobody really knew about computers and what they could do. They were like electric filing cabinets. Looking in a computer was like snooping through papers on somebody's desk. We didn't know that every ti
me we went into a file, we left tracks. Petty nailed us down. We had to have time to get into the machines, to fix things. We did that. The information's gone now." He looked downriver, at the Manhattan glittering along the river, the arcs of the bridges. "Listen, Lily. If you could take five hundred or a thousand people out of Manhattan, you could make it eighty percent safer. You could make it a paradise."

  "Not a thousand," she said. "Maybe ten thousand."

  "No. No, not really. A thousand would do it. We couldn't take down a thousand people, probably, but we could make a difference. Arvin Davies. You look at him? Was he one of the people..."

  "Yes."

  "We think... intelligence estimates... that he committed up to a hundred crimes, all sorts: assaults, burglaries, rapes, murder. He could have done a hundred more. Now he won't."

  "You can't make that decision."

  "Sure I can. And somebody has to," Kennett said, looking at her. "Your average junkie does fifty or a hundred burglaries for every time he gets caught, and for small burglaries, chances are he'll be right back out on the street. Plea-bargains out, or he'll do thirty days or six months or something. Not enough. If we let all the onetime passion killers out of prison and put all the junkies inside, Manhattan would be a garden spot. Even the ones we took off... Christ, we knocked down a thousand violent crimes a year, just the ones we took down."

  "How many were there?"

  He shook his head. "You don't need to know. But that's why."

  "That's why you shot Petty? So we'd have a garden spot?"

  Kennett turned away. "We didn't like doing that. But we had no choice.... O'Dell is trying to frame me, by the way. Supposedly had a witness who saw me when Waites was gunned down."

  "I know."

  His eyebrows went up. "You know?"

  "Davenport found the kid who supposedly saw you. Found him in Charleston and broke him down. He knows it was phony."

  Kennett smiled. "When he went to Minneapolis, he went to Charleston the next day. I thought it was weird that he took the day off-weird for a guy like Davenport."

  "How about the others? Waites was a loudmouth, but..."

  "They nurtured it, the festering. My God, look over there, look at that city, think what it could be...."

  She looked across the water at the twinkling lights, like the lights of the Milky Way, seen large. "And you sold it out. And used me like a fucking Kleenex."

  "Bullshit," he said. His face was getting red.

  "When Walt was killed, I came over here and cried on your shoulder, and you took care of all the arrangements and patted me on the head and took me down below and made love to me, comforting me. I can't believe I did it."

  "Yeah, well..."

  "Well, what?"

  "That's life." His teeth were clenched. "Now, go on, Lily, get the hell out of here."

  Lily stood, took a step toward the dock. Then another step, toward Kennett.

  "What..." Kennett began.

  She hit him, open-handed, hard: a slap that almost knocked him down. He took a step toward her, hand on his face, and caught her arm. "Lily, dammit!"

  "Let go of me," she said. She tried to pull away, but he held on, and for a moment, they struggled together, his face getting redder; then suddenly, he pinched his shoulders and let his hand drop away.

  He turned, seeming to crouch, then went to his knees. "Oh, Jesus," he gasped. "Lily... in my bag, down below..."

  His pills. His pills were in the bag. She started to turn toward the cabin.

  A spasm hit him and he went flat in the cockpit, his face straining, the tendons standing out in his neck. "Lily..."

  She stopped. Looked at the cabin and then back at him. And then carefully, as if in slow motion, she climbed out of the boat, stood on the dock a second, looked at the city and then back down at Kennett. His face was chalky, his mouth open, straining, his eyes large and staring. His hand scrabbled along the deck, as though he were trying to get hold of it. "Lily..."

  "Say hello to Bekker," she said.

  CHAPTER

  32

  O'Dell sat in his semidarkened office, an air of satisfaction about him, like a bullfrog who'd snapped up a particularly tasty fly. "I really don't give a fuck what you think," he told Lucas.

  "Which makes me want to come across the desk and slap the shit out of you," Lucas snarled.

  "The New York jails aren't pretty," O'Dell said, mildly. "I could guarantee you a tour...."

  Lucas shook his head. "Nah. You wouldn't do that. I spent too much time with Red Reed. We had witnesses. So I slap the shit out of you, you put me in jail, and I tell the papers about Reed, and tell them that you hid a key witness in the murder of a well-known black politician. You'd be right in there with me."

  O'Dell seemed to think about it for a minute, then sighed and half closed his heavy-lidded eyes. "All right. But look, if you're gonna slap the shit out of me, why don't we get it over with? I need some sleep."

  They sat quietly for a minute, then Lucas said, "You know I won't. But you owe me, God damn it. You got me whacked by Kennett's hoods. What I want to know is, how much was set up? Did you know it was Kennett? Is Lily in it? How about Fell? And who else?"

  "Lily's okay-she never had anything to do with it. And Lily says you believe Fell was an alarm. I don't know if I believe it, but I can see the possibility...."

  "Kennett?"

  "Yeah, I knew about Kennett and a couple more-and frankly, you and Lily should have known that," O'Dell said. "Petty's investigation wasn't a TV show. He didn't sneak off and do all the work and keep all of his conclusions to himself. He came up and sat here every day and told me what he thought. We had Kennett and a couple more people spotted-not Copland, unfortunately. We didn't know that Kennett had his own computer people. We figured we could go into the system anytime, print out our evidence. Then Petty got killed and his printouts were lifted. When I went back into the system, the files had been trashed. All I had were a few names and no way to push."

  "So you set us up."

  O'Dell smiled, still pleased with himself. "Yes. Lily had talked about you. Said you were smart. And I saw one of your simulations. So I put Kennett on Bekker, and you on Kennett, and brought Fell to work with you, and had Lily running you on the side. With all that pressure, something had to blow. Anyway, I had nothing to lose."

  Lucas thought about it, stood, stretched, yawned, wandered to O'Dell's window, pulled back the heavy plush drapes and looked out at the twinkling city. "This goddamn place is one big patch, you know? Have I given you my rap on how the place is one big patch?"

  "Yeah."

  "And I was another one."

  "Yeah."

  Lucas stretched again, then wandered across the room toward the door. "Nice game," he said.

  O'Dell looked at him, then laughed, low and long, genuinely delighted. "It was, wasn't it?"

  Lucas sat behind a round, simulated-wood table the size of a manhole cover, in a plastic bar full of plastic pictures of old airplanes. Through the clear Plexiglas walls, he could watch the people streaming out toward the departure gates. He glanced at his watch: three twenty-seven in the afternoon, more or less. With a Rolex, he'd discovered, more or less had to be good enough. He sipped at his Budweiser, not interested, just holding his seat.

  Fell showed up at three-thirty, thin, bird-gawky, tough. And maybe angry or something else. She stopped near the end of a long queue for the security gates, looked both ways, and spotted the bar. She paused again at the door, and Lucas raised a hand. She saw him and threaded her way through the tables. When she saw his suitcase by his leg, she looked from the case to Lucas and said, "So I was a three-night stand, or whatever it was."

  "Not exactly," Lucas said. "Sit down."

  She didn't sit down. Instead she said, "I thought we might go someplace for a while." Tears rimmed her eyes.

  "Sit down," Lucas said.

  "You fuck," she said, but she sat down, dropping heavily into the chair across from him, hands dangling dis
piritedly between her legs. "You said we..."

  "I thought about asking you to come down to the Islands with me," Lucas said. "I even called out to Kennedy, out to United, to find out what islands we could go to."

  She looked down at the tabletop. "Tell me," she said.

  "Well, I... couldn't." He dug in his pocket and tossed a red matchbook on the table in front of her. The matchbook had a horsehead on it. She picked it up and put it in her purse.

  "So you were in the restaurant where Walter Petty got killed," he said. "You told me you weren't."