Ripped his forehead, twice, three times, opened his eyebrows, carved bloody canyons across his nose, the left cheek, then the right, sliced through his lips, his hands a blur . . .
Sloan hit Lucas in the back, wrapped up one arm. Lucas flailed with the pistol, a last wild swing ripping across Becker’s chin, opening the flesh as effectively as a chainsaw.
Lucas, mind blank, focused, could barely feel Sloan’s arms binding him, barely feel the Intelligence cop sweeping him off his feet, barely feel the uniforms barreling into the room, pinning him.
Even as he went down, his eyes were focused on Bekker, his hands straining. Sloan had the pistol, was twisting, his thumb under the hammer . . . .
Lucas was aware of weight on his chest, and Sloan, then of Sloan looking away, looking back up at Bekker, who was sliding a bloody path down the plaster walls. Sloan was looking at Bekker’s face, and Lucas heard Sloan say, “Oh Christ, ah Christ, ah sweet Jesus . . .”
The doctor’s face was a mask of blood and curling, wounded flesh. Even Druze might have turned away, had he been alive to see it.
In ten minutes, the world was moving again.
Lucas sat on a hard wooden bench in the entry, Sloan next to him.
Del was down the hall, his hands in his pockets. The Intelligence man, two uniforms and the paramedics were with Bekker. When they brought him out, on a gurney, one of the paramedics held a drip bottle above him, the line plugged into one of Bekker’s arms. He was conscious. One of his eyes was puffed nearly shut, but the other was open.
He saw Lucas, recognized him, and a noise came through his ruined lips.
“What?” Lucas asked. “Hold it . . . . What’d he say?”
The paramedics stopped and looked down. Bekker, struggling, one eye open, blood running into it, tried to sit up, put the words together . . . .
“You should have . . .” He lost it for a moment, then came back, a red bubble of blood on his lips.
“What?” Lucas asked. He stooped over and the blood bubble burst.
“You should have . . .”
“What, what, motherfucker . . . ?” Lucas shouted down at him, Sloan on his arms again.
“ . . . killed me . . .” Bekker tried to smile. His lips, cut nearly in half, failed him. “Fool.”
CHAPTER
32
Lucas sat outside Daniel’s office, six feet from the secretary’s desk. She had tried talking to him but eventually gave up. When the secretary’s intercom beeped, she tipped her head toward the office door and Lucas went inside.
“Come in,” Daniel said. His voice was formal, his office was not. Papers were scattered across the top of his desk and an amber cursor blinked on his computer screen, halfway down a column of numbers. A veil of cigar smoke hung in the room. Daniel pointed to the good guest chair. “What a fuckin’ week. How are you?”
“Messed up,” Lucas said. “I’d only known Cassie for a few days, and I don’t think we would have lasted . . . but shit. She was pulling me up. I was feeling almost human.”
“Are you going back over the edge?” Daniel’s face was questioning, concerned.
“Christ, I hope not,” Lucas said, rubbing his face with his open hands. He was exhausted. After the arrest, he’d gone home and crashed, slept the night and the day through, until he was shaken out of bed by Daniel’s call. “Anything but that.”
“Hmm.” Daniel picked up a dead cigar, rolled it between his fingers. “You’ve heard about the answering machine.”
“No, I’ve been out of it . . . .”
“One of the crime-scene guys—you know Andre?”
“Yeah . . .”
“Andre was going through Bekker’s office, and a secretary said she’d seen Bekker coming out of the next office down from his. She thought he was just doing some housekeeping for his neighbor, who’s off in Europe on a fellowship. Anyway, Andre gets on the phone and calls this guy in Europe, tells him what happened, gets his okay, and they check out his office. There’s an answering machine in his desk and it’s turned on. Andre pushes the button and the tape just stops; it’s been rewound. But when he pushes it again, it starts running, and it’s a message from Druze to Bekker, telling him it’s done . . . . We went back to the phone company, checked it, and the call came in a half-hour after the woman was killed at Maplewood. There’s another fragment of conversation under that, just a few words, but it’s Bekker.”
“So that ties it,” Lucas said.
“Yeah. And there are a couple of other things, coming along.”
“What about Loverboy?” Lucas asked.
“I pulled Shearson off the shrink. Shearson thinks he’s the one, but we’ll never know. Not unless he just comes out and tells us.” Daniel rolled the cigar between his palms. He looked more than unhappy.
“What’s wrong?” Lucas asked.
“Shit.” Daniel backhanded the cigar butt at the wall, where it bounced off the black-and-white face of Robert Kennedy and fell to the floor.
“Let’s have it,” Lucas said.
Daniel swiveled his chair to look out the window at the street. Spring was definitely coming, the days stretching toward summer. The street was sunlit, although the temperatures hung in the forties. “Lucas . . . God damn it. You beat up Bekker. His fuckin’ face . . . And remember that pimp, that kid, Whitcomb? His goddamn attorney has been back to Internal Affairs—Whitcomb’s family don’t believe a word of that pimp story, they think their little boy fell into the hands of a bad cop. They’re talking about the courts . . . .”
“We’ve handled it before . . .” Lucas suggested.
“Not like this. You’ve been in fights. These people . . . Shit, these people didn’t have much of a chance.”
“Whitcomb is a fucking violence freak,” Lucas said, leaning forward. “Has his attorney looked at the girl he worked over?”
“Yeah, yeah. Whitcomb’s a criminal—but you’re not supposed to be. And now there are rumors about you going into Druze’s apartment. Too many people know about it. If you tried to deny it at a hearing, you’d be perjuring yourself. And there’s more . . . .”
“Like what?”
“A guy from Channel Eight was talking about making a formal complaint that you gave special privileges to one of the reporters from TV3. That wouldn’t be any big deal, normally, except that Barlow picked it up, and decided that you fed her confidential investigatory material.”
“You could quash that,” Lucas said.
“Yeah. That. Or any one of the others. But the whole bunch . . .”
“Cut to the action,” Lucas said. “What’re you telling me?”
Daniel sighed, turned back and leaned over his desk. “I can’t fuckin’ save you.”
“Can’t save me?” Lucas said it quietly, almost pensively.
“They’re gonna hang your ass,” Daniel said. “The shooflies and a couple of guys on the council . . . And I can’t do a fuckin’ thing about it. I told them that you’d maybe had some psychological problems, they were straightening out. They said bullshit: If he’s nuts, get him off the street. And you’ve killed a few guys. You see that Pioneer Press editorial? Our own serial killer . . .”
“Jesus Christ,” Lucas said. He levered himself out of the chair and took a turn around the office, looking at all the black-and-white mug shots, the smiling sharks, a lifetime of politicians. He stopped at the color, the Hmong tapestry, the Minnesota weather calendar. “I’m gone?”
“You could fight it, but it’d be pretty bad,” Daniel said. “They’d be asking about the break-in, about the fight with Whitcomb and about Bekker’s face . . . . I mean, Jesus, you look at a picture of the way Bekker used to be, and his face now. Jesus, he looks like Frankenstein. On top of it all, you haven’t gone out of your way to win any popularity contests.”
“There are some people in the press . . . .”
“They’ll turn on you like rats,” Daniel said. “Nothing gives an editorial writer more satisfaction than seeing somebody else booted
out of his job.”
“I’ve got friends . . . .”
“Sure. I’m one. I’d testify for you . . . but like I said—and I’m a politician, I know what I’m talking about—I can’t save your ass. As a friend, I tell you this: If you resign, I can turn it all off. I can short-circuit it. You walk away clean. If you decide to fight it, I’ll stand with you, but . . .”
“It wouldn’t do any good.”
“No.”
Lucas stared bleakly at the weather calendar, then nodded and turned to face Daniel. “I knew I was getting close to the end of my string,” he said. “Too much shit coming down. I just kind of wish . . .”
“What?”
“I wish I’d dumped Bekker. Damn it . . . .”
“Don’t talk like that. To anybody,” Daniel said, pointing a finger at Lucas. “That can only bring you grief.”
“When do I go?”
Daniel tipped his head. “Soon. Like now.”
“Do you have a sheet of department paper?” Lucas asked.
Lucas hunched over Daniel’s desk, writing it out in longhand, two simple sentences. Please accept my resignation from the Minneapolis Police Department. I’ve enjoyed my work here, but it’s time to pursue new interests. “Twenty fuckin’ years,” he said, as he dotted the i and crossed the ts in interests.
“I’m sorry,” Daniel said. He had turned his back again, and was staring out the window. “The retirement’ll be there, of course, if you care . . . .”
“Fuck retirement . . . .” Lucas looked at his hand, found that he was holding a square of pink paper, a receipt from a tire store. On the back was a list, with the word “Loverboy” at the top. He crushed it into a tight little wad and tossed it toward the big plastic basket that stood in an alcove behind Daniel’s desk. The paper wad rimmed out, and they both watched it bounce across the rug. “I dated the letter tomorrow—I’ve got some official things to clean up. And I want to slide some of my files over to Del.”
“Okay. Del . . . I know he pounded on Bekker, but he doesn’t have the history . . .”
“Sure. If there’s a problem, if Internal Affairs gets on his case, tell them to talk to me. I’ll take the heat for it.”
“Won’t happen. Like I said, I can contain it, if you’re not around to goad them. And I can do something else, I think. I can take your resignation and put you on reserve . . . .”
“Reserve? What the fuck is that?”
Daniel gestured helplessly. “It’s nothing, right now. But maybe, if you get out clean, let things cool down, we could get you back . . . . If not full-time, in some kind of consultant capacity . . .”
“Sounds like bullshit,” Lucas said. He looked at Daniel for a moment, then said, “You could do more than contain it . . . but you can’t, can you?”
Daniel turned, uncertain. “What?”
“You can’t have me around. I’d . . .” He looked at Daniel for another long minute, then shook his head and said, “I’m outa here.”
Daniel, still confused, said in a rush, “Do something, Lucas. You’re one of the smartest guys I’ve ever known. Go to law school. You’d make a great attorney. You got money: see the world for a while. You’ve never been to fuckin’ Europe . . . .”
As Lucas was going out the door, he stopped, and he turned back again to look at Daniel, who was standing behind his desk, his hands in his pockets. Lucas looked for a long three seconds, opened his mouth to say something, then shook his head and walked out, pulling the door closed behind him.
From the chief’s office he went down to the evidence room, signed for the box on Bekker and started through it. The physical evidence was there—plaster casts of the footprints at the Wisconsin burial site, the pieces of the bottle used to kill Stephanie Bekker, the hammer used to kill Armistead, the notes from Stephanie’s lover.
Tape pickups had been used to preserve the lover’s footprints from the floor of Stephanie Bekker’s bedroom. They’d been sealed in plastic bags, with a label stapled to the top of the bag. They were gone.
After checking out of the evidence room, Lucas got his jacket, locked his office and walked up the stairs to the street level, out past the bizarre but strangely interesting statue of the Father of Waters, and onto the street.
Where to go? He waited for the pull of the guns, down there in the safe in the basement. They’d be glowing, wouldn’t they, like a luminescent brand of gravity . . . .
“Not a lot left, fuckhead,” he said aloud to himself as he wandered toward the corner.
• • •
“Hey, Davenport.” A uniformed cop was calling from the door to City Hall. “Somebody looking for you.”
“I don’t work there anymore,” Lucas shouted back.
“Neither does this one,” said the cop, holding the door open and looking down.
Sarah, in a pink frock and white shoes, toddled through the door looking for him, her face breaking into a happy smile when she spotted him. She had a pacifier in one hand, waved it and gurgled. Jennifer was a step behind, her face flushed with what might have been embarrassment. The whole scene was so blatantly contrived that Lucas started to laugh.
“Come here, kid,” he said, squatting, clapping his hands. Sarah’s face turned determined and she came on full-steam, dashing toward a soft landing in Lucas’ hands.
“So we start talking, if it’s not too late,” Jennifer said as Lucas tossed the kid in the air.
“It’s not too late,” Lucas said.
“The way you were the other night . . .”
“I was full of shit,” Lucas said. “You know about . . . ?”
“Sloan heard rumors, and called me,” Jennifer said. She poked her daughter in the stomach and Sarah clutched Lucas’ neck and grinned back at her mother. “I think Sarah’s got a future in the TV news business. I coached her on going through the door, and she did it like a natural. She even got her lines right.”
“Smart kid . . .”
“When do we talk?”
Lucas looked down the street toward the Metrodome. “I don’t want to do anything today. I just want to sit somewhere and see if I can feel good. There’s a Twins game . . . .”
“Sarah’s never been.”
“You wanna see a game, kid? They ain’t the Cubs, but what the hell.” Lucas lifted Sarah to straddle the back of his neck and she grabbed his ear and him with the pacifier. What felt like a gob of saliva hit him in the part of his hair. “I’ll teach you how to boo. Maybe we can get you a bag to put on your head.”
When Lucas had gone, Daniel gathered his papers together, stacked them, dropped them into his in tray, shut down the computer and took a lap around the office, looking at the faces of his politicians. Hard decisions. Hard.
“Jesus Christ,” the chief said quietly, but aloud. He could hear his heart beating, then a rush of adrenaline, a tincture of fear. But now it was ending, all done.
He stepped back toward his desk, saw the paper wad that Lucas had fired at the wastebasket. He picked it up, meaning to flip it at the basket, and saw the ballpoint ink on the back. He smoothed the paper on his desk.
In Davenport’s clear hand, under the heading “Loverboy”:
—Heavyset, blond with thinning hair. Looks like Philip George.
—Cannot turn himself in, or even negotiate: Cop.
—No hair in drain or on bed: Cop.
—Called me through Dispatch on nontaped line: Cop.
—Extreme voice disguise: Knows me.
—Served with S. Bekker in police review board study.
—Knew Druze was the killer.
—Didn’t call back after advertisement in newspaper and pictures on TV: Already knew Druze was dead and that he was S. Bekker’s killer.
—Had Redon flower painting on calendar; same calendar at Institute of Arts has cyclops painting for November; changed it for weather calendar.
—Assigns fuck-up to chase phony Loverboy.
Then there was a space, and in a scrawl at the bottom, an ad
ditional line:
—Has to get rid of me—that’s where IA is coming from . . .
“Jesus Christ,” Daniel said to himself.
He looked up, across the office at the weather calendar, which hung on the wall amid the faces of the politicians, all staring down at him and the crumpled slip of paper. Stunned, he looked out the window again, saw Davenport tossing a kid in the air.
Davenport knew.
Daniel wanted to run down after him. He wanted to say he was sorry.
He couldn’t do that. Instead he sat at his desk, head in his hands, thinking. He hadn’t been able to weep since he was a child.
Loverboy wished, sometimes, that he still knew how.
• • •
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John Sandford, Eyes of Prey
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