Eyes of Prey

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…