She turned her head. “Sloan? Lucas is here.”
“Out on the porch,” Sloan called back.
“Does Sloan have a first name?” Lucas asked as he went past the woman.
“I don’t know. I never asked,” she said.
Sloan was sitting on the sun porch, smoking a cigarette and eating a cherry Moon Pie. A Coke sat on a side table by his hand.
“A real lumberjack breakfast,” Lucas said.
“Don’t talk loud,” Sloan said. “I’m not awake yet.”
“I need you to sweet-talk some people for me,” Lucas said. Sloan was the best interrogator on the force. People told him things. “I’ve got the names and addresses . . . .”
“What for?” Sloan asked, taking the slip of paper.
“Their kids died,” Lucas said. “We want to dig them up. We want to do it today.”
CHAPTER
29
Beauty danced and bled and danced and bled and danced until he fell down on his back, his arms thrown wide, his legs spread, a kind of crucifixion on the huge Oriental rug in the dining room. There were no dreams of eyes. There were no dreams of anything. There was nothing at all.
The pain woke him.
Daylight filtered past the blinds and his body trembled with cold, his muscles tight and shaking. He sat up and looked down, thought that somehow he’d gotten muddy, then realized that his chest was caked with dried blood. When he tried to stand, flakes of the blood broke away and fell on the carpet.
Something had changed. He felt it. Something was different, but he didn’t know what. Couldn’t remember. He tried to find it, but his mind seemed confused and he could not. Could not find it. He went to the bathroom, turned on the water for the tub, watched it pour, the water swirling, and he began to sing just like Mrs. Wilson had taught them in the fifth grade:
“Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques, dormez-vous, dormez-vous? . . .”
In the tub, the blood dissolved, pink in the water, and Beauty bathed in it, patted it on his astonishing face, and sang every song that a fifth-grader knew . . . .
The mirror was steamed over when he got out of the tub. He was annoyed when this happened, because he could not look into his face, he had to open the bathroom door, had to wait until the cool air cleared it. He always tried to rub the steam away with a towel, but he could never quite clear the mirror . . . .
He opened the door and the cold air flooded around him, and the stimulation almost brought the memory back. Almost . . . The first streak of condensation ran down the mirror. Bekker picked up a towel and wiped. Ah. There he was . . . .
The face was far away, he thought, puzzled. He wasn’t that far away. He was right here . . . . He reached out and touched the glass, and the face came closer, and the horror began to grow.
This wasn’t Beauty. This was . . .
Bekker screamed, stumbled back, unable to tear his eyes from the mirror.
A troll looked back. A troll with a patchwork face, the wide eyes staring, measuring him. And it all came back, the apartment, the gun, and Druze going down like a burst balloon.
“No!” Bekker screamed at the mirror. He grabbed the hair on both sides of his head, pulled at it, welcoming the pain, trying to rip the troll from his consciousness.
But the eyes, cool, cruel, floated in the mirror, watching . . . . Bekker ran into the hallway: another of her mirrors, mirrors everywhere, all with eyes. He stumbled, fell, crawled down the hall, scampering, naked, his knees burning from the carpet, down to his bedroom like a weasel, groping in panic for the brass cigarette case.
The eyes were everywhere, in the shiny surfaces of the antique bedstand, in the window glass, on the surface of the water in a whiskey tumbler . . . . Waiting. No place for Beauty. He gobbled three bloodred caps of Nembutal 100 mg pentobarbital and the green eggs, the Luminal 30 mg phenobarbital, three of them, four, six. And then the purple eggs, the Xanax 1 mg alprazolam. Too much? He didn’t know, couldn’t remember. Maybe not enough. He took an assortment of eggs with him, squinting through half-closed eyes, avoiding the shiny surfaces, and whimpering, he crawled into his closet, behind the shirttails and the pantlegs, with the shoes and the odors of darkness.
The Nembutal would be on him first; there was a mild rush as they came on, a Beauty rush. Bekker didn’t want that. He wanted the calming effect, the sedation; even as he thought it, the rush dwindled and the sedation came on. The Luminal would be next, in an hour or so, smoothing him out for the day, until he could make plans to get at Druze. The Xanax would calm him . . . .
Another voice spoke in his mind, far away, barely rational: Druze. Find Druze.
Bekker looked into his hand, half cupped around the pills. He would find Druze if the medicine held out.
Lucas waited.
The second house was on a slight rise above the street, a greening lawn, neat, flower beds still raw with the spring. A Ford Taurus station wagon was parked in the driveway, the husband’s car. He’d arrived just a minute after Sloan and Lucas. Lucas waited in the car while Sloan went inside.
The speed was beginning to bite. Lucas felt sharp and hard, like the edge of a pane of glass; and also brittle. He sat listening to Chris Rea on the tape player, singing about Daytona, his hand beating out the rhythm . . . .
Sloan came straight out the door and across the lawn, the paper in his hand.
“We’re clear,” he said. “The woman was okay, but I thought her husband was going to freak out.”
“As long as we got it,” Lucas said.
The machinery of exhumation was fussily efficient. A small front-loader took off the top five feet of dirt and piled it on a sheet of canvas. Two of the cemetery’s gravediggers took off the last foot with shovels, dropped hooks onto the coffin and pulled it out, a corroding bronze tooth.
Lucas and Sloan followed the M.E.’s van back downtown and, as the coffin was unloaded, walked inside to talk to the medical examiner.
When they found Louis Nett, he was pulling a gown over his street clothes. “Have you heard about the other one?” Lucas asked. The second child had been buried in the suburban town of Coon Rapids.
“It’s on the way,” Nett said. “If you guys want to hang around, I can give you a read in the next couple of minutes . . . depending on the condition of the body, of course.”
“What do you think?” Sloan asked.
“Well, she was done by the Saloman Brothers. They’re pretty careful, and she hasn’t been down that long. I think there’s a good chance, as long as the coffin is still tight. If it leaked, you know . . .” He shrugged. “All bets are off.”
“We’ll wait,” Lucas said.
“You can come watch . . .” Nett offered.
“No, no,” Lucas said.
“Well, if you don’t mind . . . I think I might,” Sloan said. “I’ve never seen one of these.”
The medical examiner’s office looked like the city clerk’s office, or the county auditor’s, or any place except one that dealt with the scientific dismemberment of the dead. Secretaries sat in front of smudged computer screens, each desk marked with idiosyncratic keepsakes: china frogs, pink-butted babies, tiny angels with their hands held in prayer, Xeroxed directives from the higher-ups, Xeroxed cartoons from the lower-downs.
In the back room, they were taking apart a long-dead teenage girl.
Lucas looked at one of the cartoons, cut from The New Yorker. It showed two identical portly, vaguely Scandinavian businessmen with brush mustaches, conservatively dressed with hats and briefcases, stopped at a receptionist’s desk, apparently in Manhattan. The receptionist was talking into an intercom, saying, “Minneapolis and St. Paul to see you, sir . . .”
He turned away from the cartoon, dropped on a couch and closed his eyes, but his eyes didn’t want to be closed. He opened them again and stared at the wall, fidgeted, picked up a nine-month-old magazine on bow-hunting, read a few words, dropped it back on the table.
The clock over a secretary’s empty desk said four-fiftee
n. Nett said it shouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes. At four-thirty, Lucas got up and wandered around the office, hands in his pockets.
Sloan came back first. Lucas stood up, facing him.
“You called it,” Sloan said.
Something unwound in Lucas’ stomach. They had him. “The eyes?”
“Cut. Nett says with an X-acto knife or something like it—I figure it was a scalpel. Something that really dug in.”
“Can they take photos or something . . . ?”
“Well . . . they’re taking the eyes out,” Sloan said, as though Lucas should have known. “They put them in little bottles of formaldehyde . . . .”.
“Aw, Christ . . .”
CHAPTER
30
The day started with an argument.
“I didn’t become a psychologist so I could advise you on ways to destroy a mind,” Elle Kruger snapped.
“I don’t need any ethical qualms dumped on me. I had enough of that in school,” Lucas answered. “I need to know what’ll happen, what you think’ll happen. If it won’t work, say so. If it will . . . we told you what he’s doing. You want this monster creeping around hospitals, snuffing kids? Because you’ve got a Catholic qualm?”
“That is an extremely offensive phrase,” the nun said angrily. “I won’t have it.”
“Just tell me,” Lucas said.
They argued for another fifteen minutes. In the end, she relented.
“If he’s the man you think, it could be effective. But if he’s as intelligent as you say and if he’s thinking clearly, he may see right through it. Then you’re ruined.”
“We have to push,” Lucas said. “We need some control.”
“I’ve told you what I think: It could work. You’d want to just give him a flash, so later he wouldn’t be sure if he actually saw it or just imagined it. You can’t let him experience the . . . materiality . . . of the image. You wouldn’t want to send him a photograph, or anything like that. If he has something solid in his hand, if he can sit and contemplate it, he’ll say to himself, Wait. This is real. How did this go from my mind to reality? And then he’ll be onto you. So you have to deal in images, the more ethereal the better. You need a will-o’-the-wisp.”
“A will-o’-the-wisp,” Lucas said. “That will do it?”
“There are no guarantees with the human mind, Lucas. You should know that, after last winter.”
They stared at each other across her desk until he stood up and started away.
“What’re you going to do?” she called after him.
“I’m going to push him,” he said.
“God, I need video, I can’t stand this.” Carly Bancroft sat in the passenger seat of Druze’s Dodge, working out of a professional makeup kit. The car was muggy inside, with the two of them working so close. The smell of sweat was pushing through her perfume; Lucas was sure he didn’t smell any better.
“You’ll be able to talk about it,” Lucas said. “That’ll be a hell of a story.”
“I don’t work for a fuckin’ newspaper. I don’t need words, I need pictures,” she said. Lucas had refused to let her bring in a cameraman. She had a thirty-five-millimeter Nikon in a shoulder bag but insisted she felt naked.
“This isn’t even supposed to be a story . . . .”
“Stop talking while I work around your mouth.”
He felt silly, sitting with his head cranked back, while the reporter worked on him. Lucas tipped the visor mirror down and looked at himself as she painted the side of his face. “It’s pretty crude,” he said tentatively, trying not to move his lips.
“It’s just fine,” Bancroft said. “This isn’t cosmetic makeup, it’s stage makeup. You’re lucky I took theater crafts. Hold still, dammit, I’ve got to shorten your nose.”
She’d started by scouring his face with a cleansing cream, then wiped most of it off with tissue. When she finished, his skin still felt oily.
“Supposed to,” she said. “That’s your base.”
His hair was already as dark as Druze’s had been, but she added a blue-gray tone to his beard area, and under his nose, to give him a heavier shadow. Using a powder puff, she put on a transparent powder to set the makeup.
Most of the time was spent blending a series of blue and reddish tones, to give his face the patchwork effect. Additional cosmetics made his face rounder; not quite Druze’s pumpkin, but it was the best they could do. A bath towel wrapped around his chest gave him Druze’s bulk. The whole process took twenty minutes.
Then they waited.
“On his way,” Sloan said with a voice like static.
“Give me the hat . . .” Lucas said. Bancroft passed him a felt snap-brim and he put it on his head. He picked up the handset, pressed the transmit button and asked, “Where is he?”
“He’s coming. Two minutes. You ready?”
“Ready,” Lucas said. To Bancroft, he said, “Get in the back, in case something weird happens. You try to peek over the door and I’ll pull your goddamned head off. And don’t stick that fuckin’ camera up, either.”
“Tell me what happens,” she said, as she climbed agilely over the seat. Lucas got a flash of long legs and then her blue eyes.
“You just stay out of sight . . . .”
“Can’t I just peek?”
“Two blocks,” said Sloan. “We can see the light. It’s red . . . .”
“Changing now,” said another voice. “Tell me when . . . .”
“It’ll be a goddamned short green light,” Lucas said to Bancroft. “Get the fuck down.”
“Last corner, Lucas. Roll now,” said Sloan. Lucas pulled away from the curve, topped a low rise and headed downhill to the light. He could see Bekker’s car rolling toward the traffic light, signaling a left turn. The light went yellow, then red, on command from the surveillance car.
Lucas pulled up to the light, stopped, stared through the tinted windshield at Bekker. They didn’t think he’d be able to see Lucas’ face from this distance, but they weren’t sure. Lucas could see Bekker. The traffic light for the cross street went yellow. “Here we go,” Lucas said. “Stay down.”
Bekker, still signaling a left turn, pulled into the intersection, the surveillance car right on his tail to block any possible pursuit. Lucas moved slowly through the intersection, and as he passed Bekker’s car, he looked left, out the window. The coat collar was up, the hat was pulled down, his face was shaded . . . .
His eyes caught Bekker’s, and Bekker’s head snapped around as though jerked by a wire. Lucas accelerated through the intersection and up the hill.
“He’s killed the fuckin’ car, I think, he’s rolling through the intersection, he can’t get the car started,” Sloan called.
“He saw me,” Lucas called back. To Bancroft, he said, “You can sit up.”
“I need some fuckin’ video,” she moaned. “Davenport, you’re killing me . . . .”
Bekker, shocked, sat in his car and cried, tried to start it, sent it bucking in first gear, killed it again, started again . . . .
Bekker didn’t think of pursuit. He knew who it was he’d seen.
He’d sat in the closet for a day and a night, alternating between sleep and a half-waking state. He had no idea how many pills he’d taken, or the dosages, but finally, seeing daylight again and the cigarette case empty, and hungry, he crawled out of the closet. The eyes waited in the glass. He stood up, stumbled toward the bathroom, his body racked with pain. He’d gotten cramped in the closet, he hurt everywhere. In the shower, he stood in scalding water, the pain driving the pictures out of his mind . . . .
Out of the shower, he dressed, took a careful black cap, amphetamine, just enough to keep him going, went to the car, saw the eyes in the rearview mirror, tilted the mirror away, started down the street. There was a deli less than a mile away. He was caught by a red light. A station wagon across the street . . .
“Is he going on?” Lucas asked.
“Yeah, he’s still going,” Sloa
n said. “He’s moving slow, though. I think there’s something wrong.”
“He’s freaked out,” Lucas said. “I told you he knew Druze.”
“Something definitely wrong,” Sloan said. “He’s turning around. He’s going back out to Twelve . . . .”
The net stayed with Bekker as he drove toward downtown.
“Could be heading for the hospital,” Sloan called.
Lucas stuck a borrowed police light in the window of the Dodge and raced for the university campus. Bancroft, who’d crawled back into the front seat, pulled a safety belt over his lap and snapped it. “You drive as bad as a cameraman,” she said, buckling herself in.
“Don’t have a lot of time,” Lucas said. “You know where to take the car?”
“Yes.” She sounded taut and he grinned. “You’ll be all paid off after this.”
“I’ll be paid off and a half,” she said. “If the station knew I was doing this . . .”
“What?”
“Now that I think about it, I don’t know what they’d do. If I had video, they’d probably be lined up outside the station with their lips puckered . . . .”
Lucas hopped out of the car on Washington Avenue, at the base of a footbridge. If Bekker followed his usual route to work, he’d drive beneath the footbridge; but from the roadway, there was no quick way up to it. If he stopped his car and climbed up as quickly as he could, Lucas would still have time to duck into a chemistry building at the end of the footbridge.
“Where is he?” Lucas asked on the handset. He hurried along the sidewalk toward the entry to the footbridge.
“He’s coming up to the exit, so you got time,” Sloan said. “There he goes, he’s off.”
Lucas climbed the footbridge, looked west across the Mississippi.
“Davenport . . .” He heard Bancroft, on the other side, and turned to look over the rail. She was standing on a wall by the student union, the Nikon to her face. He waved her off and went back to the other side of the footbridge.