Del headed for the bedroom. Lucas pushed past the bewildered woman, right behind him.
Cassie.
Her face was turned away. He knew, but he thought Maybe she’s . . . But the blood was all over the bed, and when he stumbled up to it, and saw her eyes . . . and the huge red gash under her chin, cutting through layers of tape . . . and Druze on the floor beside her, blood everywhere . . .
Somebody moaned, a long, horrible, low-pitched sound, and he realized that it was coming from his own throat, and he reached out and touched her . . . .
“Cassie . . .” He screamed it, and Del pivoted, grabbed him by the jacket and pushed him away like a linebacker working a blocking sled. Del himself screamed, “No, no, no . . .”
The manager, hands clenched in front of her, looked through the bedroom door and then staggered backward, still looking, her mouth hanging open. She ran to the doorway and began retching, and screaming, and retching again, and the stink of vomit overlay the smell of the butchery inside the bedroom . . . .
Lucas strained against his friend, and Del said, “Stay the fuck out, Lucas, stay the fuck out, we need to process, Lucas she’s dead, Lucas she’s dead . . . .” He pushed Lucas into a chair and picked up the phone.
“We got another one. We need everything you got, apartment six-forty-two. We got two of them, yeah, it’s Druze . . . .”
He looked at Lucas, who was back on his feet, ready to go after him. But Lucas walked away from the bedroom and did something that frightened Del more than any effort to look at Cassie: he stood staring at a wall from a distance of no more than a foot, expressionless, unmoving, his eyes open.
“Lucas?” No answer. “Davenport, for Christ’s sakes . . .”
“You want to go to the hospital?” Sloan asked.
“What for?” Del had pulled him off the wall, stuffed him into the elevator, guided him to the lobby and held him there.
“Get some dope.”
“No.”
“You’re totally fucked, man. You can’t be like this,” Sloan said. He was driving the Porsche, while Lucas slumped beside him in the passenger seat.
“Just get me home,” Lucas said. The storm was back in his head, the storm he’d feared. Cassie’s face. The things he could have done, might have done, that she might have done. Going around, thousands of options, millions of intricate possibilities, all leading to life or to death . . . Sybil’s face popped into his head.
“We saved the life of a woman who’s gonna die in a week . . .” he moaned.
“But we maybe got Bekker, the lawyers are looking at the tapes right now.”
“Fuck me,” Lucas said, dropping his chin on his chest. He had to cry, but he couldn’t.
And then he said, “I went to a funeral home. If I’d come here . . .”
And then he said, “Every fuckin’ woman I see gets hurt. I’m a goddamned curse on their heads . . . .”
And then he said, “I could’ve saved her . . . .”
“I gotta make a call,” Sloan said suddenly, taking the car into a convenience-store parking lot. “Just take a minute.”
Sloan called Elle Kruger, looking back over his shoulder at Lucas in the passenger seat of the Porsche. All he could see was the top of Lucas’ head. The nun’s phone was answered by a woman at a switchboard; Sloan explained that he was calling on a police emergency. The woman said she’d try to find Elle, and began switching. A moment later, she came back on to say that the nun was at dinner, and a friend would get her. She told Sloan to hold on.
“Lucas?” Elle asked when she picked up the phone.
“No, this is his friend Sloan. Lucas has a problem . . . .”
When Sloan returned to the car, Lucas’ eyes were closed, and he was breathing slowly, as though he were sleeping. “You okay?” Sloan asked.
“That fuckin’ Loverboy. If he’d come in, he could’ve looked at the picture of Druze the minute I found it, and we could’ve busted him. But we had to go through this newspaper-ad bullshit . . . .”
“Let it go,” Sloan said. “Nothing we can do about it now.”
• • •
Elle was waiting at Lucas’ house with another nun and a small black car.
“How are you?” she asked.
He shook his head, looking down at the driveway. Meeting her eyes would be impossible, too complicated.
“I’ll call my friend, get a sedative for you.”
“I’ve got this stuff going around in my head . . .” he said. And the guns: he could feel the guns in the basement. Not heavy, not like last winter, but they were back.
“Let me call my friend.” Elle took his arm, then his hand, and led him toward the door like a child, while Sloan and the other nun followed behind.
Lucas woke the next morning exhausted.
The sedatives had beaten him into a dreamless sleep. The storm in his head had dissipated, but he could feel it just over the horizon of consciousness. He slid tentatively out of bed, stood up, swayed, opened the bedroom door and almost fell over the couch. Sloan had pushed it up against the door and was struggling to get up.
“Lucas . . .” Sloan, in a T-shirt and suit pants, with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders, looked tired and scared.
“What the fuck are you doing, Sloan?”
Sloan shrugged. “We thought it might be a good idea, in case you sleepwalked . . . .”
“In case I started looking for my guns?”
“Something like that,” Sloan admitted, looking up at him. “You look like shit. How do you feel?”
“Like shit,” Lucas said. “I gotta get some dead kids dug up.”
The blood seemed to drain from Sloan’s face, and Lucas smiled despite himself, smiled as a widow might smile the day before her husband is buried. “Don’t worry about it. I’m not nuts. Let me tell you about Bekker . . . .”
CHAPTER
28
Daniel prowled around his office with his hands in his pockets. He’d pulled the shades but hadn’t turned on the lights, and the office was almost dark.
“Homicide is satisfied,” he said. “You know I don’t clear murder cases on the basis of politics—and there’s every indication that we got him. You got him. Bekker is something else.”
Lucas was also standing, propped against a windowsill, arms crossed. “If Bekker kills another one and carves her eyes out, then what’ll you do? The goddamned press’ll be down here with pitchforks and torches.”
Daniel threw up his hands in exasperation. “Look, I know this actress woman and you . . .”
“Doesn’t have anything to do with it,” Lucas said. His head still felt like a chunk of wood. Cassie did have something to do with it, of course. Revenge wouldn’t be enough, but it would be something. “Druze may have killed her, but Bekker was behind it.”
“Have you talked to the lab people since you came in?”
“No . . .”
“They looked at that jacket in Druze’s closet. There was blood on the back of it. You can’t see it, because the fabric was black and the blood was soaked in. But it was there, and they’ve done some preliminary tests. The blood is the same type as Stephanie Bekker’s . . . .”
Lucas nodded. “I think Druze killed Stephanie, all right . . . .”
“And George. We got a taxi routing from the airport to the Lost River Theater the night George was done.”
“What about Elizabeth Armistead? I’m not so sure about that one. I asked that night, or the next day, and everybody agreed Druze was at the theater most of the afternoon.”
Daniel jabbed a forefinger at Lucas: “But maybe not every minute. He could’ve been gone half an hour and that would have been enough. And the woman who saw the guy at Armistead’s said he was in some kind of utility-man getup. That sounds like an actor to me—we’ve got Homicide guys over at the theater right now, going through their wardrobe.”
“What about the phone call?”
“Come on, Lucas. That so-called phone call doesn’t make sense
no matter how you cut it. And the kid out in Maplewood is pretty sure that Druze is the guy who did the Romm woman.” Daniel took a manila folder from his desk and handed it to Lucas. “They found these in Druze’s apartment.”
Lucas opened the folder: inside were photographs of Stephanie Bekker and Elizabeth Armistead. The eyes had been cut out. “Where’d they get these?”
“Druze’s file cabinet. Stuffed in the back.”
“Bullshit,” said Lucas, shaking his head. “I went through the file cabinet. These weren’t there.”
“Maybe he carried them with him.”
“And puts them in the file cabinet before he goes upstairs to blow his brains out?” Lucas said. “Look, take this any way you want: as a continuing homicide investigation or just covering your political ass. We’ve got to stay with Bekker. We can tell the press that the case is cleared, but we’ve got to stay on him. We can start by exhuming these kids.”
“What do we say about that?” Daniel asked. “How do we explain . . .”
“We don’t say anything. Why should we say anything to anybody? If we can convince the parents to keep quiet . . .”
Daniel walked around the quiet office, head down, rubbing his hands. Finally he nodded. “Damn, I’d hoped we’d finished with it.”
“We’re not finished until Bekker falls. You saw the tapes with Sybil, for Christ’s sake . . . .”
“And you heard what the lawyers said. A dying woman, maybe paranoid, loaded with drugs? C’mon. I believe her, Merriam believes her, Sloan does, so do you—but there’s no way a judge is going to put that in front of a jury.”
“Dying declaration . . .”
“Oh, bullshit, Lucas—she didn’t make it while she was dying, for Christ’s sake . . . .”
“You know what Cassie couldn’t understand about the killings? The eyes. She said Druze would never do the eyes. You know what my friend Elle says about them? The shrink. She says he has to do the eyes. So if Bekker is nuts, and he kills somebody else . . . Jesus, can’t you see it? He’ll do the eyes again, and your balls will be hanging from a pole outside the City Hall door.”
Daniel pulled on his lip, sighed and nodded. “Go ahead. Talk to the kids’ parents. If they say okay on an exhumation, do it. If they say no, come back here and we’ll talk. I don’t want to go for a court order.”
Lucas met Anderson in the hallway.
“You’ve heard?” Anderson asked.
“What?”
“The lab guys say that Druze didn’t have much in the way of nitrites on his hands. He may have had a handkerchief on the gun, but still . . .”
“So what are they saying?”
“Maybe he didn’t kill himself. The M.E. says the whole scene is a little weird, the way he did it, the way he must have been standing when he pulled the trigger. Can’t figure out how the gun got underneath him, either. The muzzle was three or four inches from his temple when he pulled the trigger, and with the shock of the bullet and the recoil, he should have gone one way and the gun another. Instead, it beat him to the floor.”
“The M.E. still working on him?”
“Oh, yeah. They’ve got samples of everything. I don’t know, it’s getting curiouser.”
Lucas sat in his office, thinking it over, feeling the rats of depression galloping just below the surface of his mind. If he stopped concentrating, they’d be out. He forced his mind into it: Did Druze kill Cassie? Despite the questions, it seemed likely. In most murders, the most obvious answer is correct—and in any crime investigation, there are always anomalies. The gun shouldn’t have beaten Druze’s body to the floor, but maybe it did.
One of the rats slipped out: If only Cassie had identified him a day earlier and Loverboy had called with a definite identification . . .
Fuckin’ Loverboy . . .
Lucas frowned, picked up the phone and called Violent Crimes. Sloan was at home, they said, trying to get some sleep. Lucas called, got him out of bed.
“Last night, when I was doped up. Did anybody call?”
“No.”
“Hmph. What time did we identify Druze for television and release the news that it was part of the series . . . ?”
“This morning—I mean, they had Druze’s name last night, midnight or so, but just the name. We didn’t release the serial-killing business until this morning.”
“Huh. Okay, thanks.” He let Sloan go, dialed TV3 and got Carly Bancroft. “This is Lucas. Did you make Druze’s name on the news last night?”
“No, we had it for the wake-up report,” she said. “I could have used a little help . . . .”
“I was . . . out of shape,” Lucas said. “What about the other channels? Did they have it?”
“Not as far as I know. We picked up the news release on morning cop checks. Nobody was bitching about getting beat, and they would have, on something like this. When can you talk to us? You found them, right? What—”
“I really can’t talk,” Lucas said. “I’ll call you later.”
He hung up and sat in his chair, rubbing his temples. Loverboy hadn’t called.
Jennifer’s car was in the driveway when he got home. He rolled past it slowly as the garage door went up, and parked and walked out of the garage as she got out of her car.
“How are you?” she asked. She was wearing a black turtleneck under a cardigan, with gold loop earrings visible under her short-cropped blond hair.
“What do you want?” His voice was so cold that she stepped back.
“I wanted to see how you were . . . .”
“Did Elle put you up to this?” Jennifer had her back to the car door and he loomed over her. His hands were in fists, inside his jacket pockets.
“She said you were in trouble.”
“I don’t need your help. The last time I needed your help, I got my head pushed under,” he said. He turned away, walked back into the garage.
“Lucas . . .”
His mind was moving like a freight train, all the facts and suppositions and memories and plans and possibilities flying like boxcars just behind his eyes, unsuppressible. Jennifer. Green eyes. Full lips. Sarah, a bundle, squealing when he tossed her in the air. Jennifer and Sarah together in the delivery room, up at the lake cabin, Jennifer skinny-dipping in the moonlight, Sarah starting to crawl . . .
He was at a branch, he felt, when ten thousand things were possible, but he couldn’t deal with that, with all the branches . . . .
“Just . . . go away,” he said.
He tried, but couldn’t sleep. Too many suppositions. Finally, glancing at the clock, he called the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and asked how late the gift shop was open. He had just enough time.
He hurried, trying not to think. Just keep moving. Don’t worry about the guns. They sit there in the basement and they glow, and fuck ’em, let ’em glow.
The gift shop was empty, except for a bored saleswoman who was dressed so well that Lucas guessed she was a volunteer.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“Yeah. I’m interested in a dude named Odilon Redon. What’ve you got? Got any calendars?”
Five minutes later he was back in the car, looking for a scrap of paper. He finally found a receipt from a tire store. He turned it over, flattened it against the Porsche owner’s manual on his leg and started a new list.
And later, afraid of the bed, he sat in the spare bedroom with a bottle of Canadian Club and stared at his charts.
The Killer One chart was complete: Druze. A troll, powerful, squat, odd head, murdering Stephanie. No question about that anymore. If he was working with Bekker, must have killed George, because Bekker was with Lucas. Could have killed Cassie. Could have killed Armistead. Could have killed woman at the shopping center—but why? She was entirely out of the pattern. Not at home; not with the academic/art crowd . . . And where did the photos come from, with the missing eyes?
Killer Two: Did he exist? Was it Bekker? Some tracks at the site of the George killing suggested a second man.
How would Druze have found George if Bekker hadn’t fingered him? (Possibility: He’d watched Stephanie’s funeral?) Why would he have driven George’s Jeep to the airport? How could he have killed Armistead? Why the phone call—a coincidence, somebody trying to get in free?
The answers were in the pattern, somewhere. Lucas could feel it but couldn’t see it.
He took the tire store receipt from his pocket. At the top he’d written “Loverboy.”
He looked at it, closed his eyes and let the circumstances flow through his mind.
At six in the morning, he phoned Del. “I gotta come over and talk to you,” he said. Del had an affinity for speed.
“Jesus Christ, man, what’re you doing up at six o’clock? You’re worse’n me . . . .”
Lucas drove across town with the breaking dawn, another cool, overcast day. The drive-time radio programs had started, and he dialed past the jock talk to ’CCO, half listening as he put the car on I-94 toward Minneapolis.
Del met him at the door in a pair of slightly yellowed jockey shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt that Clark Gable would have approved of. When Lucas told him what he wanted, Del shook his head and said, “Lucas, you’ll kill yourself.”
“No. I just need to stay awake for a while,” Lucas said. “I know what I’m doing.”
Del looked at him, nodded, went to the bedroom and came back with an orange plastic vial. “Ten hits. Heavy-duty. But don’t try to stretch it too far.”
“Thanks, man . . .” Lucas said.
A woman’s voice came from the back. “Del . . . ?”
“In a minute,” Del said. He smiled thinly at Lucas. “Cheryl. What can I tell you?”
The speed brightened him up. He turned south, looking at the clock. Almost seven. Sloan would be up.
“How’re you feeling?” Sloan’s wife asked as she opened the door.
“Everybody wants to know,” Lucas said, grinning at her. She was a short woman, slightly plump, motherly and sexy at the same time. Lucas liked her. “Is Sloan out of bed?”