“She’s fine,” Lucas said.
“Jesus, that must have been something.” The woman sat up, a quick muscular motion, done without effort. Now her eyes were jade green, and he noticed that one of her front teeth was just slightly crooked. “Are you going after this guy? The killer?”
“I’m helping,” Lucas said.
“I hope you get him and I hope you kill the sonofabitch,” the woman said, her teeth bared and her eyes opening wide. She had high cheekbones and a slightly bony nose, the craggy variety of Celt.
“I’d like to get him,” Lucas said. “When was the last time anybody saw Armistead . . . Elizabeth?”
“This afternoon. There was a rehearsal until about three o’clock,” the woman said. She stroked the side of her cheek with her fingertips as she remembered, staring sightlessly at the bedspread. “After that, she went home. One of the ticket ladies tried to call her an hour or so before the play was supposed to start, but there wasn’t any answer. That’s the last I know.”
“Why’d they call? Was she already late?”
“No, somebody wanted in on a freebee, and she’d have to approve it. But she didn’t answer.”
“Bucky and Karl are down at the theater, talking to people,” Swanson said.
“Did you check Bekker?” Lucas asked.
“No. I will tomorrow, after we’ve got this nailed down. I’ll have him do a minute-by-minute recount of where he was tonight.”
“Isn’t Bekker the name of that woman who was killed?” asked the woman on the bed, looking between them.
“Her husband,” Lucas said shortly. “What’s your name, anyway?”
“Lasch . . . Cassie.”
“You’re an actress?”
She nodded. “Yeah.”
“Full-time?”
“I get the smaller parts,” she said ruefully, shaking out her red hair. It was kinky and bounced around her shoulders. “But I work full-time.”
“Was Armistead dating anyone?” Swanson asked.
“Not really . . . What does Bekker have to do with this? Is he a suspect?” She was focusing on Lucas.
“Sure. You always check the husband when a wife gets murdered,” Lucas said.
“So you don’t really think he did this?”
“He was in San Francisco when his wife was killed,” Lucas said. “This one is so much like it, it almost has to be the same guy.”
“Oh.” She was disappointed and bit her lower lip. She wanted the killer, Lucas realized, and if she had her way about it, she would have him dead.
“If you think of anything, give me a call,” Lucas said. Their eyes locked up for a second, a quick two-way assessment. He handed her a business card and she said, “I will.” Lucas turned away, glanced back once to see her looking after him and drifted out toward the living room.
The cop with the hammer was talking to a uniform, who had a middle-aged woman in tow. The woman, wearing a pink quilted housecoat and white sneakers, was edging toward the archway that opened into the living room. The cop blocked her with a hip and asked, “So what’d he look like?”
“Like I said, he looked like a plumber. He was carrying a toolbox or something, and I says to Ray, that’s my husband, Ray Ellis, Mr. and Mrs., ‘Uh-oh,’ I says, ‘it looks like that Armistead woman’s got troubles with her plumbing, I hope it’s not the main again.’ They dug up the main here in this street, the city has, twice since we been here, and we only got here in ’seventy-one, you’d think they’d be able to get that right . . .” She took another crab step toward the arch, trying to get a look.
“You didn’t like Ms. Armistead?” Lucas asked, coming up to them.
The woman took a half-step back, losing ground. A flash of irritation crossed her face as she realized it. “Why’d you think that?” she asked. A defensive whine crept into her voice. She’d heard this kind of question asked on L.A. Law, usually just before somebody got it in the neck.
“You called her ‘that Armistead woman.’ . . .”
“Well, she said she was an actress and I said to Ray . . .”
“Your husband . . .”
“Yeah, I said, ‘Ray, she don’t look like no actress to me.’ I mean, I know what an actress looks like, right? And she didn’t look like no actress, in fact, I’d say she was plain. I said to Ray, ‘She says she’s an actress, I wonder what she’s really involved in.’ ” She squinted slyly.
“You think she might be involved with something else?” asked the cop with the hammer.
“If you ask me . . . Say, is that the murder weapon?” The woman’s eyes widened as she realized that the cop was holding a hammer wrapped in a plastic bag.
“Before you get to that,” Lucas interrupted impatiently, “the man you saw at the door . . . why’d he look like a plumber?”
“ ’Cause of the way he was dressed,” she said, unable to tear her eyes away from the hammer until the cop dropped it to his side. She looked up at Lucas again. “I couldn’t see him real good, but he was wearing one of those coveralls, dark-like, and a hat with a bill on it. Like plumbers wear.”
“You didn’t see his face?”
“Nope. When I saw him, he was on her porch, with his back to me. I saw his back, saw he had a hat.”
“Did you see a truck?”
She frowned. “No, now that you mention it. I don’t know where he come from, but there weren’t no cars on the street, just Miz Armistead’s Omni, which I always notice because Ray had one almost like it, when he was married to his first wife, silver, except it was a Plymouth Horizon.”
“Did you see him leave?”
“Nope. I was washing up the dishes.”
“All right. Thanks,” Lucas said. Nothing. She’d probably seen the killer, but it wouldn’t help. Unless . . .
“One more question. Did the guy have plumber’s tools or any kind of tools, anything you could see . . . or did he just feel like a plumber?”
“Well . . .” She didn’t understand the question. “He just looked like a plumber. You see him on the sidewalk, you say, ‘There goes a plumber.’ ”
So he might have been a plumber. Or he might have been an actor . . . .
Lucas stepped away, to the arch into the living room. One of the lab cops was videotaping the body and the living room, his lights bleaching out Armistead’s already paper-white face. Lucas watched for a moment, then walked outside. The uniform had stretched crime-scene tape around the house and its hedge, and a half-dozen TV cameras were parked just off the curb. He heard his name ripple among the reporters, and the floodlights started flicking on as he walked down the porch steps to the street.
“Davenport . . .” The reporters moved in like sharks, but Lucas shook his head.
“I can’t talk about it, guys,” he said, waving them away.
“Tell us why you’re here,” a woman called. She was older for a television reporter, probably in her early forties, about to fall off the edge of the media world. “Gambling, dope? What?”
“Hey, Katie, I really want to leave it to the Homicide people . . . .”
“Anything to do with those guys selling guns . . . ?”
Lucas grinned, shook his head and pushed through to his car. If he stayed to talk, somebody would remember that he was working on the Bekker case and would add it up.
As he drove away, he tried to add it up himself. If the first murder was hired by Bekker, what did the second one mean? There had to be a connection—the techniques were identical—but it was hard to believe that Bekker could be involved. Swanson and the other investigators had been leaning on him: if he had some relationship with this woman, past or present, he’d hardly risk killing her. Not unless he was stupid as well as crazy. And nobody said he was stupid.
Lucas stopped for a red light, one foot on the clutch, the other on the gas pedal, idly revving the engine. The first killing had the earmarks of an accidental encounter. A doper goes into a house in a rich neighborhood, looking for anything he can convert to crack. He unexp
ectedly bumps into the woman, kills her in a frenzy, runs. If it hadn’t been for Bekker’s reputation with his relatives, if Sloan hadn’t made the call to Bekker’s former Army commanding officer, the killing might already have been written off as dope-related . . . .
But this second killing looked as though it were planned: the hammer, newly bought and then left behind. Nothing missing from the house. Not like a doper. A doper would have grabbed something. Nothing missing from Bekker’s house, either . . .
Lucas shook his head, realizing the red light had turned green, then yellow. He was about to pop the clutch to run the yellow, when a black Nissan Maxima, coming up fast from behind, slid a fender in front of him and stopped. Lucas jabbed the Porsche’s brake pedal, and the car bucked and died.
“Motherfucker,” he said, and pulled the door latch-handle. The other driver was faster. As Lucas pushed open the door, a tall blonde hopped out of the Nissan and walked through Lucas’ headlights, a tight smile on her face. TV3. She’d been around for a couple of years and Lucas had seen her on the Crows case.
“God damn it, Carly . . .”
“Stuff it, Lucas,” the woman said. “I know how you worked with Jennifer and a couple other people. I want on the list. What happened back there?”
“Hey . . .”
“Look, my fuckin’ contract is up in two months, and we’re talking, me and the station,” she said. “I’m asking sixty and it’s like, Maybe yes, maybe no, what’ve you done for us lately? I need something: you’re it.” She posed, ankles crossed, fist on her hip.
“What’s in it for me?” Lucas asked.
“You want somebody inside Three? You got it.”
Lucas looked at her for a moment, then nodded. “I trust you just once,” he said, holding up an index finger. “You burn me, you never come back.”
“Fine. And it’s the same with me. You ever burn me, or even get close, and I’ll deny everything and sue your ass,” the blonde said. They were both in the street, face to face. A black Trans Am slowed as it passed around them, and the passenger window rolled down. A kid with carefully coiffed hair and a hammered forehead looked out and said, “What’s happening?”
“Cop,” Lucas said. “Keep moving.”
“We’re cool,” the kid said, then pulled his head inside, and the car accelerated away.
“So what happened?” Carly asked, glancing after the Trans Am, then turning back to Lucas.
“You know about the Bekker killing?”
“Sure.”
“This one’s identical. A woman named Elizabeth Armistead with the Lost River Theater, she’s an actress . . . .”
“Oh shit, I know her . . . . I mean I’ve seen her. There’s no doubt that it was the same guy?” The woman put a long red thumbnail in her mouth and bit it.
“Not much . . .”
“How was she killed?”
“Clawhammer. Hit her on the back of the head, then smashed out her eyes, just like with Stephanie Bekker.” The traffic light was running through its sequence again, and the woman’s hair glowed green, then gold as the yellow came on.
“Jesus Christ. What are the chances that the other stations’ll have it by the morning shows?”
“I told the people back there to put a lid on everything, pending a release from the chief,” Lucas said. “You should have it exclusively, if some uniform hasn’t leaked it already . . . .”
“Nobody’s talking back there,” she said. “Okay, Lucas, I appreciate it. Anything you need from the station, let me know. My ass is in your hands.”
“I wish,” Lucas said with a grin. The blonde grinned back, and as the stoplight turned red, Lucas added, “There’s not much more I can tell you about the murder.”
“I don’t need more,” she said as she turned back toward her car. “I mean, why fuck up a great story with a bunch of facts?”
She left Lucas standing in the street, her car careening around in an illegal U-turn, simultaneously running the red light. Lucas laughed and got back in the Porsche. He had something going, for the first time in months. He was operating again.
And he thought: A copycat? The idea didn’t hold up; the murderer’s technique with Armistead was too similar to the Bekker killing. There hadn’t been enough information in the press to tell a copycat exactly what to do. The killings had to be the same guy. The guy in coveralls, the coveralls a way to get inside?
He was edging toward a conclusion: They had another psycho on their hands. But if the guy was a psycho, why had he taken a weapon to Armistead’s, but not to Bekker’s? He’d killed Stephanie Bekker with a bottle he’d picked up in the kitchen. The Bekker scene made sense as a spur-of-the-moment killing by an intruder, a junkie who killed and got scared and ran. The Armistead scene did not. Yet both by the same guy.
And neither woman was sexually assaulted. Sex, in some way, was usually involved in serial killings . . . .
If Bekker had hired the first killing done, was it possible that he’d set off a maniac?
No. That’s not how it worked.
Lucas had worked two serial killers. In both cases, the media had speculated on the effect of publicity on the mind of the killer: Did talking about killers make more killers? Did violent movies or pornography desensitize men and make them able to kill? Lucas didn’t think so. A serial killer was a human pressure-cooker, made by abuse, by history, by brain chemistry. You don’t get pressure like that from something as peripheral as TV. A serial killer wasn’t a firecracker to be lit by somebody else . . . .
Tangled. And interesting. Without realizing it, Lucas began whistling, almost silently, under his breath.
CHAPTER
10
The briefing room stank of cigarette smoke, nervous armpits and hot electronics. Twenty reporters crowded the front of the room, Lucas and a dozen more cops hung in the back. Carly Bancroft’s early-morning report on the second murder had touched off a panic among the other stations. The press conference had started just after ten o’clock.
“Any questions?” Frank Lester’s forehead was beaded with sweat. Lester, the deputy chief for investigations, put down the prepared statement and looked unhappily around the room.
“Lester in the lion’s den,” Sloan muttered to Lucas. He stuck a Camel in the corner of his mouth. “Got a light?”
Lucas took a book of matches out of his pocket, struck one and held it for Sloan’s cigarette. “If you were Loverboy, would you come in?”
Sloan shook his head as he exhaled a lungful of blue smoke. “Fuck no. But then, I’m a cop. I know what treacherous assholes we are. I don’t even know if I would’ve mentioned Loverboy in the thing . . . .”
“About Mrs. Bekker’s . . . friend, have you done any voice analysis on the nine-one-one tapes?” a reporter asked Lester.
“Well, we’ve got nothing to match them to . . . .”
“We hear you’re calling him ‘Loverboy.’ . . .”
“Not me, but I’ve heard that,” Lester said grimly.
“Could the killer be going for women in the arts?” a reporter called out. She worked for a radio station and carried a microphone that looked like a Ruger Government Model .22-caliber target pistol. The microphone was aimed at a point between Lester’s eyes.
“We don’t know,” he answered. “Mrs. Bekker would only be peripherally in the arts, I’d say. But it could be—there’s no way to tell. Like I said, we’re not even sure it’s the same perpetrator.”
“But you said . . .”
“It probably is . . . .”
From the front row, a newspaper reporter in a rumpled tan suit: “How many serial killers have we had now? In the last five years?”
“One a year? I don’t know.”
“One? There were at least six with the Crows.”
“I meant one series each year.”
“Is that how you count them?”
“I don’t know how you count them,” Lester barked.
“By series,” a newspaper reporter called.
“Bullshit.” Television disagreed. “By the killers.”
From the back of the room, a radio reporter with a large tapedeck: “When do you expect him to hit again?”
“How’re we gonna know that?” Lester asked, a testy note creeping into his voice. “We told you what we knew.”
“You’re supposed to be running the investigation,” the reporter snapped back.
“I am running the investigation, and if you’d ever worked in a market bigger than a phone booth, you’d know we can’t always find these guys overnight in the big city . . . .”
There was a thread of laughter, and Sloan said dryly, “He’s losing it.”
“What the f f f . . . What’s that supposed to mean?” the reporter sputtered. The TV cameraman behind him was laughing. TV people ranked radio people, so laughing was all right.
“What’s ‘fff’ supposed to mean?” Lester asked. He turned away and pointed at a woman wearing glasses the size of compact discs. “You.”
“What precautions should women in the Twin Cities take?” She had an improbably smooth delivery, with great round O’s, as though she were reading for a play.
“Don’t let anybody in your house that you’re not sure of,” Lester said, struggling now. “Keep your windows locked . . . .”
“Who tipped Three, that’s what I want to know,” another reporter shouted from the back of the room. Carly Bancroft yawned, tried not very hard to suppress a grin, then deliberately scratched her ribs.
When Daniel had scheduled the press conference, he’d expected the police reporters from the dailies and second-stringers from the television stations. With the Armistead killing, everything had changed. He’d passed the press conference to Lester, he said, in an attempt to diminish its importance. It hadn’t worked: media trucks were double-parked in the street, providing direct feeds to the various stations. City Hall secretaries were gawking at the media stars, the media stars were checking their hairsprays, and the TV3 anchorman himself, tan, fit, with a touch of gray at the temples and a tie that matched his eyes, showed up to do some reaction shots against the conference. His station had the beat; he had nothing to do with it, but the glory was his, and his appearance gave weight to the proceedings.