Eyes of Prey

by John Sandford

  “Yeah,” she said, nodding, “you do look kinda weird. We could work on it . . . .”

  “Maybe I could take banjo lessons or something . . . .”

  The phone rang while they ate, and Lucas stepped into the kitchen to pick it up.

  “This is Mikkelson,” said a deputy medical examiner. “Things are getting strange outside.”

  “What’d you find?” Lucas asked.

  “All kinds of shit. There was fresh blood and fresh fecal matter in George’s clothing when he went into that grave. It mixed with the mud before it started to congeal, so it hadn’t congealed yet when he went into the hole.”

  “Which means he wasn’t killed until last night . . .”

  “That’s what you’d think, but that’d be wrong,” the medical examiner said. “The holes in his eyes were filled with mud, too, but the holes were made after all the blood had pooled into his chest and arms, a long time after he was killed.”

  “That doesn’t compute,” Lucas said, confused.

  “Only one way,” the deputy M.E. said with evident relish.

  “They had to bury him and then dig him up to do the eyes. We’ve got some more tests going, but from the tissue evidence, I’d say that’s what they did.”

  “Why?”

  “Shit, Lucas, I’m a goddamned doctor, not a fuckin’ psychic. But that’s what happened. And there’s something else, too—some people from your lab brought me over a bunch of footprints from the Bekker house?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Not a match in the bunch. Not even close.”

  CHAPTER

  18

  “I need help,” Daniel said. “Political help. You know how the city council gets. They think the voters are stupid, they think the voters are gonna run them out of office if we don’t catch the guy today. They’re getting pissy.”

  “You got a couple of bad columns, too,” Lucas said. They were sitting in Daniel’s office, under the watchful eyes of Daniel’s political mug shots.

  “Yeah, well, what do you expect?” Daniel said. He looked in his cigar humidor, then slammed the lid. “Column-writing is the only job I know where sarcasm passes for intelligence . . . . God damn it, Davenport. I need something, and I don’t care what it is.”

  “Stick full-time surveillance on Bekker,” Lucas suggested.

  “All right,” Daniel said, grasping. “Why?”

  “To settle him, one way or another. Tag everybody he talks to, track everywhere he goes. If he’s involved, he hired a really strange-looking dude for the killing. We need somebody on the team with enough brains to break off Bekker, if he has to, and go after a likely-looking killer. And we ought to get a court order, tap his phones both at home and at work. We either clear him or we hang him.”

  “What do you think? Is he the guy?” Daniel asked with genuine curiosity.

  “I don’t know.” Lucas shrugged. “He’s the only thing we’ve got, but everything points somewhere else.”

  “All right, I’ll get the surveillance going,” Daniel said. “I can give that out to a couple of people, that we’ve got a guy being watched. That’ll cool some of the council fever. But it’d be nice if we got a little decent PR for a change.”

  “I was talking to a snitch a few nights ago, and he said a mutual acquaintance came into a bunch of TV sets—maybe a couple hundred of them, a boxcarload from over in St. Paul. Then I talked to another guy and he says Terry—this is Terry Meller, you remember him? No? He’s a longtime semi-bad dude—he says Terry is working out of a rental warehouse off Two-eighty. He says the TVs are stuffed in there, and probably a bunch of other shit. We could get the ERU and a warrant, call up the TV and the papers . . . .”

  “I could tell the ERU guys to armor up some of the reporters—we got some extra vests . . .” Daniel said, brightening. The Emergency Response Unit always got airtime. “Give them some good film.”

  “We won’t lose the Bekker story, but we’ll look good on this other thing,” Lucas said. “And there’ll be film . . . .”

  “Get a warrant,” Daniel said enthusiastically, poking a finger at him. “I’ll get the ERU started and some Intelligence guys over to look at the warehouse. Stop down at Intelligence when you leave and give them the location.”

  “I’ve got a new friend at TV3, by the way,” Lucas said. “She kind of owes me . . . .”

  “You feed her that break on George’s body?” Daniel asked, looking sideways at Lucas.

  Lucas grinned and shrugged. “Maybe something slipped out. But since we’re not going to kill the Bekker story, anyway, I want to tell her that I’m going off the reservation. I want to tell her I don’t think George is the lover, and I want to make it seem like there’s a little controversy between me and the department. Good guy, bad guy, the department being the bad guy. That’ll get us better play, and the other stations will come after it, and the papers . . .”

  They’d talked about the possibility that Loverboy was still alive, but Daniel was skeptical. “You really think he’s still out there?”

  Lucas’ forehead wrinkled. “Yeah. I know there are some problems with that—like, why was George killed and dumped if he wasn’t the lover? I can’t figure that out. I mean, he should have been her lover. They knew each other, they were the right age for each other . . . . I don’t know . . . . By the way, has Shearson got anything on this shrink he was looking at? Stephanie’s other friend?”

  “He thinks there’s something.”

  “He ain’t exactly the sharpest knife in the dishwasher . . . .”

  “Hey, he’s okay,” Daniel said mildly. “You don’t like him because he wears better suits than you do.”

  “Yeah, but with golf shirts . . .”

  “Look,” Daniel said. “We know that Bekker didn’t kill either George or his wife, not in person . . . .”

  “Yeah. And I was sure that he set me up as an alibi on George, but now . . . God damn it, this thing is getting on top of me. And Loverboy’s the key. If he’s still out there, I want to get to him. Maybe I can make some kind of appeal. Or drop a hint that I’m closing in on him, and that he’d be better off talking to me now—that if he doesn’t come in, we’ll find him anyway and pack him off to Stillwater on a charge of accessory to first-degree murder.”

  “I don’t know,” Daniel said. He rubbed his developing five-o’clock-shadow fuzz with the back of his fingers. “My inclination is not to do that.”

  “Your inclination?”

  “Yeah. That’s my inclination. But you’re an adult. Your ass is in your own hands,” Daniel said. Lucas nodded. Daniel was in politics. If Lucas went public and was wrong, Daniel had planted a little ambiguity around the decision process.

  “Okay,” Lucas said. “And you can tell the mayor we’re watching a guy and hustling after Loverboy . . . .”

  “He’s no dummy, the mayor,” Daniel said.

  “Yeah, I know, but all he wants is something to feed to the sharks, and that’s something.”

  “Good enough. I’ll get Anderson to pull some guys for a surveillance team and we’ll get on Bekker by tonight.”

  Lucas stopped at Intelligence, gave the duty officer the address of Terry Meller’s TV warehouse, went to his office and called Carly Bancroft, then talked to the department artist and got a quick sketch done. A half-hour later, he met Bancroft at a Dairy Queen in the Skyway.

  “I’ve got another piece of story for you,” he said, nibbling around the edge of his chocolate-dipped cone. “Some of it’s points for me—you’d owe me more—but some of it’s part of your paycheck. Call it a wash. But I want to get it on the air.”

  “Let’s hear it,” she said.

  “Everybody’s assuming that Philip George was Mrs. Bekker’s lover and the killer took him out to protect himself.”

  “Yeah, that’s what we’re saying,” she said.

  “I don’t think that’s right. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s wrong,” Lucas said. “I think the guy’s still out there. The Loverbo
y.”

  She took a lick of her vanilla softie and nodded. “That’s an okay story if we can put your name on it. What else?”

  “You’ve got to hint that I’m closing in on the guy—that I’m talking to people and that I’ve got an identikit picture I’m showing around. I’ll show it to somebody you can interview, and they’ll know they’re supposed to talk to you. They’ll describe the guy for you, but I’ll refuse to show you the picture.”

  “That’s all fine. What’s the payoff part?”

  “I want you to report it as though you got it from a third source. You must use my name, but you can’t quote me directly and you can’t say I’m the source of the story. You have to say that I’ve refused comment . . . .”

  “That’s lying,” she said.

  “Right. Lying,” Lucas agreed. “You have to indicate that you got the story from a secret source in the department, but definitely not me. Suggest that there’s an interdepartmental difference of opinion and I’ve been ordered to keep my mouth shut. And then you’ve got to do a little background on me, say that Davenport has secret sources that not even other cops know about.”

  “I don’t understand what all this means,” she said, a tiny wrinkle appearing between her eyes. “I’d like to know where I’m going, in case I’m going off a cliff.”

  Lucas finished the chocolate part of the cone, took two licks of the vanilla ice cream, reached back and dumped the cone in a wastebasket. “I do think the guy’s out there. I want him to feel threatened, but I don’t want to be the threatening guy. I want him to come to me,” Lucas said.

  She nodded. “All right. We can play it like you said.”

  “And not a bad story,” Lucas said.

  “Speaking of which”—she glanced at her watch—“I’ve got to run.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “Some big bust going down somewhere—I don’t know exactly what it is, but I’m going in with the ERU.”

  “Sounds good,” Lucas said.

  “Sounds like bullshit, but I get to be in the movies,” she said. “Film at ten.”

  Elle Kruger’s lips moved silently as she walked slowly along the sidewalk, down the hill past the college duck pond, head bowed. Her hands counted through the large black beads of the rosary hanging down her side. Lucas, who’d missed her at her office, followed fifty feet behind, idly checking out the coeds—most were sweet and blonde and large, as though punched from a German Catholic cookie cutter—waiting until Elle had worked her way through the last decade.

  When she’d finished, she released the beads, straightened up and lengthened her step, continuing her stroll around the pond. Lucas hurried after her, and she turned and spotted him coming when he was still fifty feet away.

  “How long have you been back there?” she asked, smiling.

  “Five minutes. The secretary said you’d be down here . . . .”

  “Has something happened?”

  “No, not really. I’m puzzled, trying to hack my way through what’s happening with this Bekker case.”

  “A strange case, and getting stranger, if the papers can be trusted,” she said, but with an upward inflection, making the statement into a question.

  “Yeah. Maybe.” He was reluctant to commit himself. “Tell me this: We’ve got this guy who kills two women, completely destroys their eyes. Then he kills another guy, takes him out and buries him in Wisconsin, and he’s spotted purely by chance—some neighbors see his car lights and think he might be a burglar. Turns out he probably buried the body the night before, and he came back for the sole purpose of hacking out the eyes . . . .”

  “ . . . Doesn’t want to be watched by the dead,” Elle said crisply.

  “I was wondering if it might be something like that,” Lucas said. “But I was also wondering—would it necessarily have to be sincere? If there was some kind of manipulation going on, could he be doing it for some other reason?”

  “Like what?”

  “Publicity? Or a deliberate effort to tie the murders together?”

  She shrugged. “I suppose he could, but then why go back and hack the eyes out of a man whose body you’re trying to hide, and don’t expect to be found?”

  “Yeah, there’s that,” Lucas said, discouraged. He thrust his hands into his jacket pockets.

  “So it’s probably real, and it has implications,” she said, looking up at him.

  “Like what?”

  “He hacked the eyes out of all three people he’s killed—at least, all three that we know about. And he did it instantly: he killed the first one, Bekker, and did her eyes at the same time. How did he know that the first one would watch him after she was dead? It would suggest . . .”

  “That he’s killed before and was watched.” Lucas slapped his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Damn it. I missed that.”

  “He’s a very dangerous man, Lucas,” Elle said. “In the psychological literature, we’d refer to him as a fruitcake.”

  Restless, Lucas drove to the Lost River. The door was locked, but he could see a woman inside, painting. He rapped on the glass door, and when she saw him, he held up his badge case.

  “Cassie around?” he asked when she opened the door.

  “There’s a rehearsal going on,” the woman said. “They’re all out on the stage.”

  Lucas walked through the hall to the theater. The lights were up and people were walking or standing around the stage or the low pit in front of it. Two or three more were sitting in the seats, watching and talking. Half of the whites were in blackface, with wide white-greasepainted lips, while two blacks were in whiteface. Cassie saw him and raised a tentative hand, said something to the artistic director, and they both walked over.

  “Just looking around, if that’s okay,” Lucas said. “Would it bother you if I watch?”

  “Not much to see,” the artistic director said, his greasepainted lips turning down. “You’re welcome to stay, but it’s mostly people talking.”

  “We’ll be another hour or so . . .” Cassie said. Her green eyes were like lamps peering through the dark paint.

  “How about some French food? I mean, later, if you’re not doing anything.”

  “Sounds great.” She stepped away and said, “About an hour.”

  Lucas walked halfway up the rising bank of seats and settled in to watch. Whiteface was a brutal but cheerful attack on latter-day segregation. A dozen set pieces were combined with rewritten nineteenth-century show tunes. There were frequent halts to argue, to change lines, to choreograph body positions. Twisting through the set pieces, the troupe kept up a running vaudeville: juggling, tap and rap dancing, joking, banjo-playing.

  One manic set involved the two black actors as professional golfers, trying to sneak through a segregated southern country club. Cassie, in a play within a play, took the part of a white southern college belle in blackface, trying to sort out her relationship with a black radical in whiteface.

  In a darker piece, a burly man in a wide snap-brimmed felt hat robbed white passersby in a park. Although he was obviously in blackface, none of the victims, when they were talking to the cops, could ever get beyond the blackness, even though they knew . . .

  When that segment was over, there was a brief, sharp argument about whether it violated the pace and feel of the rest of the show. The two black actors, who were used as arbiters of taste, split on the question. One, who seemed more involved in the technical aspects of playmaking, thought it should go; the other, more interested in the social impact, insisted that it stay.

  The artistic director turned and looked up into the seats.

  “What do the police think?” he called.

  “I think it’s pretty strong,” Lucas said. “It’s not like the rest of the stuff, but it adds something.”

  “Good. Let’s leave it, at least for now,” the director said.

  When they were done, Lucas sat with Cassie and a half-dozen other actors while they cleaned the paint off their faces. The man who
played the mugger was not among them. On the way out, Lucas saw him on the stage, working on a dance he did late in the show.

  “Carlo,” Cassie said. “He works at it.”

  They ate and went to Lucas’ house. Cassie flopped on the living room couch.

  “You know what the worst part of being poor is? You have to work all the time. You’re rich, you can take six weeks to veg out. That’s what I need: about six weeks of daytime TV.”

  “Better’n watching the news, anyway,” Lucas said. He lifted her legs, sat down on the couch and dropped them in his lap. “At least with the soaps, you know you’re getting bullshit.”

  “Hmph. Well, we could get really philosophical about the media and have an intelligent conversation, or we could go fool around,” Cassie said. “What’d you want to do?”

  “Guess,” Lucas said.

  Later in the evening, Del called. “Sorry about the other day . . .”

  “ ’S okay,” Lucas said. “What’s happening?”

  “I’ve been out with Cheryl twice and she’s starting to talk,” he said. “I keep telling her I don’t want to hear it, and she keeps talking.”

  “Told you,” Lucas said.

  “Asshole,” said Del. “I actually kind of like her . . . . Anyway, she thinks Bekker might be on some kind of drug. Speed or coke or something. She said he’d sometimes act nuts, he’d be fuckin’ her and he’d go a little crazy, start raving, spitting . . . .”

  “Sex freak?”

  “Well, not exactly. The sex, I guess, was pretty conventional, it’s just that he’d kind of lose control. He’d come after her with this really ferocious rush, and then afterwards, it was almost like she was a piece of furniture. Didn’t want to hear her talk, didn’t want to cuddle up. Usually he’d bring something to read, until he got it up again, and then he’d start freaking out all over.”

  “Hmph. That’s not exactly the worst thing I’ve ever heard . . . .”

  “Well, I’m gonna see her again tomorrow.”

  “Is there any way we can let Bekker know you’re seeing her?”