Merriam’s secretary was short, overweight and worried, scurrying like a Disney churchmouse to locate her boss. Larry Merriam, when she brought him back from the lab, was a balding, soft-faced man in a white smock, with large dark eyes and tiny worried hands. He took Lucas into his office, pressed his fingertips to his lips and said, “Oh, dear,” when Lucas told him what he wanted. “This is totally off the record?”
“Sure. And nothing’ll come back to you. Not unless you confess that you killed Mrs. Bekker,” Lucas said, smiling, trying to loosen him up.
Merriam’s office overlooked a parking garage. The cinderblock walls had been painted a cream color; a small bulletin board was covered with medical cartoons. From behind the desk Merriam mouthed silently, Shut the door.
Lucas reached back and eased the door shut. Merriam relaxed, folding his hands over his chest.
“Clarisse is a wonderful secretary, but she does have trouble keeping a secret,” Merriam said. He stood, hands in his pockets, and turned to look out the window behind his desk. A man in a red jacket, carrying what looked like a doctor’s bag, was walking across the roof of the parking garage. “And Bekker is a troubling subject.”
“A lot of people seem to be troubled by Mr. Bekker,” Lucas said. “We’re trying to find an angle, a . . .” He groped for the right words.
“An entry wedge,” Merriam said, glancing back over his shoulder at Lucas. “You always need one, in any kind of research.”
“Exactly right. With Bekker—”
“What’s this man doing?” Merriam interrupted, staring down at the roof of the parking garage. The man in the red jacket stopped next to a midnight-blue BMW, glanced around, took a long silver strip of metal from his coat sleeve and slipped it between the window and the weather stripping, down into the door. “I think, uh . . . Is this man stealing that car?”
“What?” Lucas stepped over to the window and looked out. The man below stopped for a moment and looked up at the hospital building, as though he sensed Merriam and Lucas watching. He wouldn’t be able to see them through the tinted glass. Lucas felt a pulse of amusement.
“Yeah, he is. Gotta make a call, just take a minute,” Lucas mumbled, reaching for Merriam’s desk phone.
“Sure,” Merriam said, looking at him oddly, then back down at the thief. “Dial nine . . .”
Lucas dialed straight through to the dispatcher. “Shirl’, this is Lucas. I’m looking out a window at a guy named E. Thomas Little. He’s breaking into a BMW.” He gave her the details and hung up.
“Oh, dear,” Merriam said, looking out the window, his fingertips pressed to his lips again. E. Thomas Little finally got the door open and climbed into the front seat of the BMW.
“E. Thomas is an old client of mine,” Lucas said. The amusement pulsed through him again, felt good, like a spring wind.
“And he is stealing the car?”
“Yeah. He’s not much good at it, though. Right now he’s jerking the lock cylinder out of the steering column.”
“How long will it take a police car to get here?”
“Another minute or so,” Lucas said. “Or about a thousand bucks in damage.” They watched, silently, together, as Little continued to work in the front seat of the car. Sixty seconds after he got inside, he backed the car out of the parking space and started toward the exit. As he was about to enter the circular down ramp, a squad car, driving up the wrong way, jerked to a stop in front of him. Little put the BMW in reverse and backed away, but the squad stayed with him. A minute later he was talking to the cops.
“Very strange,” Merriam said, as the cops handcuffed Little and put him in the backseat of the squad. One of the patrolmen looked up at the hospital windows, as Little had, and waved. Merriam lifted a hand, realized that he couldn’t be seen, and turned back to Lucas. “You wanted to know about Michael Bekker.”
“Yeah.” Lucas went back to his chair. “About Dr. Bekker . . .”
“He’s . . . Do you know what I do?”
“You’re a pediatric oncologist,” Lucas said. “You treat kids with cancer.”
“Yes. Bekker asked if he could observe our work. He has excellent credentials in his own field, which is pathology, and he’s also developing something of a reputation among sociologists and anthropologists for work on what he calls the social organization of death. That’s what brought him up here. He wanted to do a detailed examination of the chemistry we use, and how we use it, but he also wanted to know how we handle death itself . . . what conventions and structures had grown up around it.”
“You agreed?”
Merriam nodded. “Sure. There are dozens of studies going on here all the time—this is a teaching and research hospital. Bekker had the credentials and both the studies had potential value. In fact, his work did result in procedural changes.”
“Like what?”
Merriam took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. He looked tired, Lucas thought. Not like he’d missed a night’s sleep, but like he’d missed five years’ sleep. “Some of it’s stuff you just don’t notice if you work with it all the time. When you know somebody’s about to die—well, there are things that have to be done with the body and the room. You have to clean up the room, you have to prepare to move the body down to Path. Some patients are quite clearheaded when they’re dying. So how must it feel when a maid shows up and peeks into the room with a bunch of cleaning stuff, checking to see if you’re gone yet? The patient knows we must’ve told her, ‘Well, this guy’ll be gone today.’ ”
“Ouch,” Lucas said, wincing.
“Yeah. And Bekker was looking at more subtle problems, too. One of the things about this job is that some medical people can’t handle it. We treat kids with advanced and rare types of cancer, and almost all of them eventually die. And if you watch enough kids die, and their parents going through it with them . . . well, the burnout rate with nurses and technicians and even doctors is terrific. And they sometimes develop problems with chronic incapacitating depression. That can go on for years, even after the victim has stopped working with the kids. Anyway, having Bekker look at us, we thought, might give us some ideas about how we might help ourselves.”
“That sounds reasonable,” Lucas said. “But the way you’re talking . . . did Bekker do something wrong? What happened?”
“I don’t know if anything happened,” Merriam said, turning to look out at the sky. “I just don’t know. But after he was here for a week or two, my people started coming in. He was making them nervous. He didn’t seem to be studying so much the routines of death . . . the structures, processes, the formalities, whatever you’d call them . . . as watching the deaths themselves. And enjoying them. The staff members were starting to call him ‘Dr. Death.’ ”
“Jesus,” said Lucas. Sloan had said that Bekker was known as “Dr. Death” in Vietnam. “He enjoyed it?”
“Yeah.” Merriam turned back and leaned over his desk, his hands clenched on the desktop. “The people who were working with him said he seemed to become . . . excited . . . as a death approached. Agitation is common among the medical people—you take a kid and he’s fought it all the way, and you’ve fought it all the way with him, and now he’s going. In circumstances like that, even longtime medical people get cranked up. Bekker was different. He was excited the way people get with an intellectual pleasure.”
“Not sexual?”
“I can’t say that. There was an intensity of feeling on the order of sexual pleasure. In any case, it seemed to people who worked with him that it was definitely pleasure. When a kid died, he registered a certain satisfaction.” Merriam stood and took a turn around his chair, stopping to look down at the parking garage. A patrolman had pulled the BMW back into its parking place and was standing beside it, writing out a note to its owner. “I don’t know if I should say this, I could expose myself to some criticism . . . .”
“We’re off the record. I mean that,” Lucas said.
Merriam continued to look out the window
and Lucas realized that he was deliberately avoiding eye contact. Lucas kept his mouth shut and let the silence stretch.
“There’s a rhythm to death in a cancer ward,” Merriam said eventually, and slowly, as though he were considering each word. “A kid might be an inch from death, but you know he won’t die. Sure enough, he improves. Everything backs off. He’s sitting up again, talking, watching TV. Six weeks later, he’s gone.”
“Remissions,” Lucas offered.
“Yeah. Bekker was here, off and on, for three months. We had an agreement: He could come in anytime, day or night, to watch. Not much to see at night, of course, but he wanted complete access to the life on the wards. There was some value in that, so we agreed. Remember: He’s a university professor with excellent credentials. But we didn’t want a guy wandering around the wards on his own, so we asked him to sign in and out. No problem. He understood, he said. Anyway, during his time here, a child died. Anton Bremer. Eleven years old. He was desperately ill, highly medicated . . .”
“Drugged?”
“Yes. He was close to death, but when he died, it came as a surprise. Like I said, there seems to be a rhythm to it. If you work on the ward long enough, you begin to feel it. Anton’s death was out of place. But you see, sometimes that does happen, that a kid dies when it seems he shouldn’t. When Anton died, I never thought much about it. It was simply another day on the ward.”
“Bekker had something to do with the death?”
“I can’t say that. I shouldn’t even suspect it. But his attitude toward the deaths of our patients began to anger our people. Nothing he said, just his attitude. It pissed them off, is what it did. By the end of the three months—that was the trial period of the project—I decided not to extend it. I can do that, without specifying a reason. For the good of the division, that sort of thing. And I did.”
“Did that make him angry?”
“Not . . . obviously. He was quite cordial, said he understood and so on. So two or three weeks after he left, one of the nurses came to me—she doesn’t work here anymore, she finally burned out—and said that she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about Anton. She said she couldn’t get it out of her head that Bekker had killed him somehow. She thought the kid had turned. He was going down, hit bottom and was stabilizing, beginning to rally. She was a second-shift nurse, she worked three to midnight. When she came in the next afternoon, Anton was dead. He died sometime during the night. She didn’t think about Bekker until later, and she went back to see what time he had signed out that night. It turned out our log didn’t show him signing in or out. But she remembers that he was there and had looked at the kid a couple of times and was still there when she left . . . .”
“So she thinks he wiped the log in case anybody ever went back to try to track unexplained deaths.”
“That’s what she thought. We talked about it, and I said I’d look into it. I talked to a couple of other people, and thinking back, they weren’t sure whether he was here or not, but on the balance, they thought he was. I called Bekker, gave him this phony excuse that we were looking into a pilferage problem, and asked him if he’d ever seen anybody taking stacks of scrub suits out of the supply closet. He said no. I asked him if he’d always signed in and out whenever he visited, and he said he thought so, but maybe, at one time or another, he’d missed.”
“You can’t catch him in a lie . . .” Lucas said.
“No.”
“Were there any other deaths? Like this kid’s?”
“One. The second or third week he was on the wards. A little girl with bone cancer. I thought about it later, but I don’t know . . . .”
“Were there postmortems on the kids?”
“Sure. Extensive ones.”
“Did he do them? Do you know?”
“No, no, we have a fellow who specializes in that.”
“Did he find anything unusual?”
“No. The fact is, these kids were so weak, they were so near the edge, that if he’d simply reached out and pinched off their oxygen feeds . . . that might have been enough. We’d never find that on a postmortem—not enough to separate it from all the other wild chemical shit we see in cancer cases: massive loads of drugs, radiation reactions, badly disturbed bodily functions. By the time you do a postmortem, these kids are a mess.”
“But you think he might have killed them.”
“That’s too strong,” Merriam said, finally turning around and looking at Lucas. “If I really thought that, I’d have called the police. If there had been any medical indication or anybody who actually saw anything or had a reason to believe he’d done it, I’d have called. But there was nothing. Nothing but a feeling. That could simply be a psychological artifact of our own, the insider’s resentment of an outsider intruding on what Bekker called our ‘rituals of death.’ ”
“Did he publish?” Lucas asked.
“Yes. I can give you the citations. Actually, I can probably have Clarisse scrounge up some photocopies.”
“I’d appreciate it,” Lucas said. “Well . . . You know what happened. The other night.”
“Bekker’s wife was killed.”
“We’re looking into it. Some people, frankly, think he might have had a hand in it.”
“I don’t know. I’d kind of doubt it,” Merriam said grimly.
“You sounded like you thought he’d be capable . . . .”
“I’d doubt it because if he knew his wife was going to be killed, he’d want to be there to see it,” Merriam said. Then, suddenly abashed, he added, “I don’t know if I believe that, really.”
“Huh,” Lucas said, studying the other man. “Is he still in the hospital, working with live patients? Bekker?”
“Yes. Not on this ward, but several others. I’ve seen him down in the ORs a couple of times and in the medical wards where they deal with the more extreme varieties of disease.”
“Did you ever mention to anyone . . . ?”
“Listen, I don’t know anything,” Merriam barked, his soft exterior dropping for a moment. “That’s my problem. If I say anything, I’m implying the guy is a killer, for Christ’s sakes. I can’t do that.”
“A private word . . .”
“In this place? It’d stay private for about thirty seconds,” Merriam said, running a hand through his thinning hair. “Listen, until you’ve worked in a university hospital, you’ve never really experienced character assassination. There are ten people on this staff who are convinced they’ll be on next year’s Nobel list if only some klutz in the next office doesn’t screw them up. If I suggested anything about Bekker, it would be all over the hospital in five minutes. Five minutes later, he’d hear about it and I’d be fingered as the source. I can’t do anything.”
“All right.” Lucas nodded. He stood, picked up his coat.
“Would you get me copies of those papers?”
“Sure. And if there’s anything else I can do for you, call, and I’ll do it. But you see the kind of jam I’m in.”
“Sure.” Lucas reached for the door, but Merriam stopped him with a quick gesture.
“I’ve been trying to think how to characterize the way Bekker acted around death,” he said. “You know how you read about these zealots on crusades against pornography, and you sense there’s something wrong with them? A fascination with the subject that goes way beyond any normal interest? Like a guy has a collection of two thousand porno magazines so he can prove how terrible it is? That’s how Bekker was. A kind of a pious sadness when a kid died, but underneath, you got the feeling of a real, lip-smacking pleasure.”
“You make him sound like a monster,” Lucas said.
“I’m an oncologist,” Merriam said simply. “I believe in monsters.”
Lucas walked out of the hospital, hands in his pockets, thinking. A pretty nurse smiled at him, and he automatically smiled back, but his head wasn’t smiling. Bekker killed kids?
The medical examiner’s investigator was a fat, gloomy man with cheeks and lips so
pink and glossy that he looked as though he might have been playing with an undertaker’s makeup. He handed Lucas the file on Stephanie Bekker.
“If you want my opinion, the guy who did her was either a psycho or wanted it to look that way,” the investigator said. “Her skull was like a broken egg, all in fragments. The bottle he hit her with was one of those big, thick tourist things from Mexico. You know, kind of blue-green, more like a vase than a bottle. The glass must have been a half-inch thick. When it broke, he used it like a knife, and drove the edges right down through her eyes. Her whole face was mutilated, you’ll see in the photographs. The thing is . . .”
“Yeah?”
“The rest of her body was untouched. It wasn’t like he was flailing away, hitting her anyplace he could. You take somebody flying on crank or PCP, they’re just swinging. They go after a guy, and if the guy gets behind a car, they’ll go after the car. If they can’t hit you on the face, they’ll hit you on the shoulders or chest or back or the soles of your feet, and they’ll bite and claw and everything else. This thing was almost . . . technical. The guy who did it is either nuts and it has something to do with the face, with the eyes, or it’s supposed to look that way.”
“Thanks for the tip,” Lucas said. He sat down at an empty desk, opened the file and glanced at the photos.
Freak, he thought.
The file was technical. To judge from body temperature and lack of lividity, the woman had died just before the paramedics arrived. Stephanie Bekker had never had a chance to resist: she had been a strong woman, with long fingernails, and they were clean—no blood or skin beneath them. There were no abrasions on the hands. She’d had intercourse, while alive and probably an hour or so before she’d died. No bruising was evident around the vagina and there were indications that the intercourse had been voluntary. She had washed after the intercourse, and samples taken for DNA analysis might not prove valid. The samples had not yet been returned.