Eyes of Prey

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. That’s the whole point. Somebody at random. The goddamned shopping-mall parking lots are full of women. Go get one.”

  There was a moment of silence and then Druze said, “I’m really hanging out there, man.”

  “And so am I,” Bekker snapped. “If there is some kind of drawing of you—if Stephanie’s friend sent them something—and if this actress person sees it, then we’ve got serious trouble.”

  “Yeah, you’re right about that. She sees me every goddamned day and night of my life . . . .”

  “What’s her name again?” Bekker asked.

  “Cassie Lasch. But if we do her . . .”

  “I know. We couldn’t do it now, but later, next week . . . . If we can get the cops to go hounding off somewhere, maybe she could have an accident. Something unrelated. What floor is she on? High up?”

  “Six, I guess. And she did once try to commit suicide . . . .”

  “So maybe if she went out a window . . . I don’t know, Carlo. We’ll work something. But we’ve got to get the cops going somewhere else. Something not related to the theater or to the university or antiques . . .”

  “So . . . are you serious? A mall?” Druze sounded confused, uncertain.

  “Yeah. I am. Pick one out on the edge of town. Burnsville would be good. Maplewood. Roseville. You’re bright, figure out some way . . . . Pick somebody who looks like she’s on a big shopping trip. Get her at her car. Then dump the car with all the packages. Be sure you do the eyes. The thing is, we’ll want it to look like it’s totally random . . . . You know what? Maybe you could cruise the lots. See if you could get somebody with Iowa plates or something.”

  “I don’t know . . . . I gotta have time to think about it.”

  “If the lover’s out there, we don’t have time,” Bekker urged. “We’ve got to lead them away from us, at least until we can pinpoint the guy.”

  “Jesus, I wish . . .”

  “Hey. We had to get rid of them. We deserved to be rid of them. Now we just have to clean up a little bit. Okay?”

  Silence.

  “Okay?” Bekker demanded.

  “Okay, I guess. I gotta go . . . .”

  Druze was getting sticky: Bekker would have to move on him.

  On the way back to his office, Bekker stopped at a men’s room and urinated. He went to a sink and was washing his hands when a student came in, looked at him, then casually moved to a urinal. A heavy canvas bookbag hung from his shoulder.

  The student looked a little odd, Bekker thought. The jeans and cardigan were okay, the oxford-cloth shirt was all right . . . . He glanced at the student again as he went out.

  It was the shoes, he thought, pleased that he’d picked it out. The kid must have just gotten out of the army or something. You didn’t see students wearing that kind of black, shiny-toed, oxford anymore. Not since Vietnam, anyway.

  In the restroom, the student listened to Bekker’s heels hitting the concrete floor, moving away, then took the radio out of his bag. “I got him,” he said. “He was in the can. He’s on the basement level, on his way up the west stairs.”

  At the elevators, another student was waiting to go up, reading one of the free entertainment newspapers. He had shoes like the kid in the restroom. A new trend? A signal to buy oxford stock? On the other hand, neither of the kids looked exactly like fashion trend-setters . . . .

  Back to the office, or up to see the patient? Bekker glanced at his watch. He had time, and nobody coming to see him. A small thrill pulsed through him. Might as well do some serious work.

  Bekker rode up to Surgery, nodded to a nurse, and went into the men’s locker room, peeled his clothes off and dressed himself in a lavender scrub suit. Technically, he didn’t need a scrub suit; he wouldn’t be going into Surgery or Burns, where they were most useful. But he liked them. They were comfortable. And he liked them like surgeons liked them, for the aura . . . . When he was wearing a scrub suit, people always called him “Dr. Bekker,” which they sometimes forgot when he was in the Path area.

  With his face, and with the aura of the suit, sometimes he simply went down and relaxed in the cafeteria, let the public look at him . . . .

  Not today. When he was dressed, he pulled paper shoe-covers over his loafers, got his clipboard from the locker and headed up another flight of stairs, his heart pounding a bit. It had been a few days since he’d talked to Sybil. He really had to find more time.

  At the top of the stairs, he pushed through the fire door and walked down the hall to the nurses’ station.

  “Dr. Bekker,” a nurse said, looking up. “You’re earlier than usual.”

  “Had a little extra time.” He put on a smile. “Any changes?”

  “No, not since you were last here,” the nurse said, not managing a smile. “Changes” was Bekker’s euphemism for “death.” It had taken her a few of his visits to catch on.

  “Well, I think I’ll wander down,” Bekker said. “Anywhere I shouldn’t go?”

  “Room seven-twelve, we have a radiation treatment there—we’re keeping that clean.”

  “I’ll stay away,” Bekker promised. He left her at the desk, plowing through the endless paperwork that seemed to afflict nurses. He stopped at two rooms, for show, before heading to Sybil’s.

  “Sybil? Are you awake?” Her eyes were closed as he stepped into the room, and they didn’t open, but he could see that a drip tube leading to her arm was working. “Sybil?”

  Still her eyes didn’t open. He glanced down the hallway, then stepped up to her bed, leaned forward, placed his fingertips on her forehead, pulled up an eyelid with his thumb and murmured, “Come out, come out, wherever you are . . . .”

  The television behind him was tuned to TV3, a game show that apparently involved some kind of leapfrog. He didn’t notice; Sybil had opened her eyes and was looking frantically around the room.

  “No, no. There isn’t any help, dear,” Bekker crooned. “No help anywhere.”

  • • •

  Bekker spent an hour at the hospital. He was picked up by the surveillance team as he left through the lobby.

  “He’s got a funny look on his face,” the narc said into her purse. “He’s coming right at me.” She watched Bekker go down the sidewalk, past the bench where she was reading a car issue of Consumer Reports.

  “What’s funny?” the crew chief asked, as the net closed around Bekker again.

  “I don’t know,” the narc said. “He looked like he just got laid or something.”

  “A look you know well,” said a cop named Louis, normally in uniform, but pulled for this job.

  “Shut up,” the crew chief said. “Stay on his ass and don’t spook him. We’re doing good.”

  Halfway across the campus, Bekker did a little jig. He did it quickly, almost unconsciously, but not quite—he caught himself and looked around guiltily before moving on.

  “What the fuck was that all about?” the narc asked.

  “Potty-mouth,” said Louis.

  “Shut up,” said the crew chief. “And I don’t know. We oughta get some video on this guy, you know? I woulda liked to have some video on that.”

  The crew took him home, where another crew picked up the watch. Louis, who liked wisecracks, went back to police headquarters, where he bumped into the police reporter for Channel Eight.

  “What’s happening, Louis?” the reporter asked. “Workin’ on anything good?”

  Louis chewed a lot of gum and tipped his head, a wiseguy. “Got a thing going here and there,” he said. “Hell of a story, if I could only tell ya.”

  “You look like you been on surveillance,” the reporter suggested. “All dressed up like a human being.”

  “Did I say surveillance?” Louis grinned. He liked reporters. He’d been quoted several times at crime scenes.

  The reporter frowned. “Hey, are you working that Bekker thing?”

  Louis’ smile faded. “I got no comment. Like, really.”
>
  “I won’t fuck you, Louis,” the reporter said. “But there’s a hell of a leak around here somewhere, and TV3 is kicking ass.”

  Louis liked reporters . . . .

  CHAPTER

  21

  Anderson tossed two manila file folders on Lucas’ desk.

  “Surveillance report, and summary interviews from the theater people and Armistead’s friends,” he said.

  “Anything in them?” Lucas asked. He was leaning back in his chair, his feet on a desk drawer. A boom box on the floor was playing “Radar Love.”

  “Not much,” Anderson said, with a flash of his yellow teeth. He was the department’s computer junkie. He dressed like a hillbilly and had once been a ferocious street cop. “Bekker mostly hung around the university, his office, the hospital . . . .”

  “All right, I’ll take a look,” Lucas said, yawning. “If we don’t break something soon . . .”

  “I’m hearing about it from Daniel,” Anderson said, nodding. “That goddamned warehouse raid saved our asses, but there’s nothing going on today.”

  “How many TV sets did we get?”

  “One hundred and forty-four: twelve dozen. Hell of a haul. Also thirty Hitachi VCRs, six Sunbeam bathroom scales, about thirty cases of Kleenex man-size bathroom tissues, some water-soaked, and one box of Lifestyles Stimula vibra-ribbed rubbers, which Terry said were for personal use only. Wonder if they work?”

  “What?”

  “Vibra-ribbed rubbers . . .”

  “I don’t know. I use Goodyear Eagle all-weathers myself.”

  Anderson left, and Lucas picked up the surveillance folder and flipped through it. Bekker had done a jig: Lucas spotted it immediately and thought back to the night he’d met Bekker and the frenzied dance he’d seen through the window. What was he doing in the hospital? Might be worthwhile checking again . . .

  The folders yielded nothing else. Lucas tossed them aside, yawned again, feeling pleasantly sleepy. Cassie was a little rough, a little muscular in her lovemaking. Interesting.

  And different. He watched her, comparing her with Jennifer, finding the differences. Jennifer had a tough veneer, developed over years as a reporter. Lucas had the same shell. So did most social workers.

  “When you see too much shit in one lifetime, you’ve got to find a way to deal with it,” Jennifer had said once. “Reporters and cops develop the shell as a defense. If you can laugh at a crazy rapist, you know, ‘the B.O. Fucker’ and all those cute names you cops develop, well, then you don’t have to take it so seriously.”

  “Yeah, right, pass the joint,” Lucas had said.

  “See? That’s exactly what I’m talking about . . . .”

  Cassie had no shell. Everything that happened to her, she felt. Psychiatry, she thought, was normal. Most people were screwed up, but it helped to talk about it, even if you had to pay somebody to listen.

  Occasionally, when he’d been with Jennifer, Lucas had had a feeling that they both yearned to talk, to let it out, but couldn’t. Talking would have made them too vulnerable and, each of them knowing the other, the vulnerability would have been used . . . .

  “Hey, you get beat up. People use you, you get played for a sucker,” Cassie had said, when he told her about that. “Big fuckin’ deal. Everybody gets beat up.”

  And Lucas had once again found himself trying to dissect his episode of depression: “I’ve fooled around with a lot of women, ever since I was a teenager. I slowed down a lot after I started dating Jen—slipped up a couple of times, bad, but we were making it until . . . you know. But the thing is, when she walked . . . I just stopped. Fell off the cliff. The real pit was last fall, around Thanksgiving, I’d just gotten back from seeing this woman in New York and she’d pretty much called off our relationship. I thought I was crazy. Not crazy crazy, like in the movies. Crazy where you don’t get out of bed for two days. You don’t pay the mortgage, because you can’t get yourself to write a check.”

  “I once didn’t pay my taxes for that reason. I had the money, but I couldn’t deal with the government,” Cassie had said, not laughing.

  “I was down there for three or four months, and when I started feeling like I was moving again, I was afraid of looking at a woman. Any woman. I was afraid that things wouldn’t work out, and I’d go back in the pit. I’d rather be celibate than go back in the pit. I’d rather do anything than go back in there . . . .”

  “You had it bad,” Cassie had said simply. “That’s when you need somebody with really big boobs so you can curl up and put your head between them and suck on your thumb.”

  Lucas had started laughing, trying to get his head between Cassie’s breasts. One thing led to another . . . .

  Daniel walked into Lucas’ office and shut the door. “We got a problem.”

  “What?”

  Daniel ran a hand through his thinning hair, his face caught between anger and confusion. “Tell me the truth: Have you been feeding stuff to Channel Eight?”

  “No. I’ve been working a woman from TV3 . . . .”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know about that. Nothing going to Eight?”

  “No. Honest to God,” Lucas said. “What happened?”

  Daniel dropped into the visitor’s chair. “I got a call from Jon Ayres over at Channel Eight. He says he has a source who tells them that we’ve got a suspect under surveillance and we’re about to make a bust. I denied it. They said they had it pretty solid. I still denied it and told them that false stories could damage our investigation. The guy got huffy, we passed some more bullshit, and he said he’d think about it . . . .”

  “That means they’re going to use it,” Lucas said urgently. “You’ve got to call the station manager.”

  “Too late,” Daniel said. He pointed at the wall clock. Twelve-fifteen. “It was the lead story on the noon news.”

  “Sonofabitch,” Lucas groaned.

  “I know, I know . . . .”

  Del stopped by late in the day. “We hit it off and now I can’t shut her up about Bekker. She’s insisting that I investigate him. The problem is, she doesn’t know much.”

  “Like nothing?”

  “She thinks he might be on some kind of speed. He gets weird. And here’s something: He does have a thing about eyes.”

  “He does?” Lucas leaned forward. This was something. “What?”

  “Remember how she told us that he liked to humiliate her? Force her to do blow jobs and so on? When she was doing them, he’d always make her hold her head so he could look in her eyes. Used to say something about the eyes being the hallway to the soul, or something like that . . .”

  “ ‘These lovely lamps, these windows of the soul . . .’ ” Lucas quoted.

  “Who said that?”

  “Can’t remember. I once took a poetry course at Metro State, I remember it from that.”

  “Well, he’s apparently got a thing for them. He still scares her, when she sees him around the hospital.”

  “Does she have any idea what he’s doing now?”

  “No. Want me to ask?”

  “Yeah. You’ll be seeing her again, huh?”

  “Sure, if you want me to pump her some more,” Del said.

  “I wasn’t thinking about that,” Lucas said. “I was thinking . . . you look pretty good.”

  Bekker learned about the police surveillance from Druze. He half expected a call, to warn of a third killing, and every few hours he checked the answering machine.

  “TV report on Channel Eight says the cops are doing surveillance on a suspect,” Druze said without identifying himself. “I’ve been watching and I don’t think it’s me.” And he was gone.

  What? Bekker couldn’t focus, and played it again.

  “TV report on Channel Eight . . .”

  Surveillance? Bekker reset the tape, his mind working furiously. If they were watching Druze and had seen him make this call, would they be able to trace it? He thought not, yet he wasn’t sure. But it was unlikely that they would be watching Druze??
?how would they get to him? The alleged picture? Perhaps.

  It was more likely that he was the one being watched, if it wasn’t just some kind of TV fantasy. The image of the student in the men’s room came to him, and the second one at the library . . . .

  Not military shoes, he said to himself. Cop shoes . . .

  CHAPTER

  22

  The weather patterns were seesawing across the state, Canadian cold and Gulf heat. Druze felt as if he was breathing water. Thunderstorms prowled western Minnesota; TV weathermen said they’d be into the metro area before nine o’clock. From the interstate, Druze could see lightning to the north and west. The storm was too far away for the thunder to be heard.

  Maplewood Mall was the northeastern shopping anchor for St. Paul, out in the suburbs. Low crime, high affluence. Boys in letter jackets, teenage girls trying out their new slinks.

  Druze cruised the parking lot, watching the shoppers. He wanted a woman leaving the mall. Forties, so she’d fit the profile. If he could get her at the right place, he wouldn’t have to move her. Do it right in the parking lot, leave her there. The quicker she was found, the quicker the cops would be turned.

  He stopped at a cross-drive and a woman walked in front of his headlights; she wore a cardigan, slacks and high heels, held a purse with both hands, a determined look on her face. A little too old, Druze thought, and not in the right place.

  He parked, got out and sauntered toward the mall. A bronze rent-a-cop car rolled slowly through the lot, and Druze headed inside. He’d worked on his face with Cover Mark cosmetics and wore a felt hat with a snap brim, so he wouldn’t be particularly noticeable from a range of more than a few feet. Not unless they saw the nose. He pulled the hat farther down on his forehead.

  Druze was worried. In the beginning, when he and Bekker had worked through the plan, it had seemed simple. Bekker would take Armistead, and Druze would take Stephanie Bekker. Both he and Bekker would get what they wanted—Bekker his freedom, Druze his security. Both would have solid alibis. If the pressure on Bekker got too great, Druze could take a third. No problem. But then the lover came along . . . .