Eyes of Prey

CHAPTER 23

A thunderstorm was rolling across Minneapolis when Lucas left his house, lightning crackling through the clouds, storm-front winds lashing the elm branches overhead. He went north, up Highway 280, the lights of downtown Minneapolis to the west, barely visible through the advancing rain. The storm caught him just before he turned east, a few drops splatting off the windshield, and then a torrent, a waterfall, hailstones pecking on the roof, small white beads of ice bouncing off the road in his headlights. He turned east on I-694 and the rain slackened, then quit altogether as he outran the storm front.

From the highway, the mall was screened by an intervening block of buildings, but he could see red emergency lights flashing off window glass. The White Bear Avenue exit was jammed. He put the Porsche on the shoulder and worked his way to the front. A Minnesota highway patrolman ran toward him, and Lucas hung his badge case out the window.

"Davenport," the patrolman said, leaning in the window. "Stay behind me and I'll make a hole in this line."

The patrolman jogged along the shoulder, leading the Porsche to a roadblock. The street was a nightmare tangle of shoppers trying to get out of the mall, gawkers trying to drive past the murder scene, and the normal traffic on and off the interstate. The patrolmen had given up trying to control the crush and had settled for getting as many people out of the mall as possible. At the roadblock, the patrolman leading Lucas said something to the others, and they stopped traffic, directed a car out of the way and let Lucas slip through to the parking lot.

"Thanks," Lucas yelled as he went through. "I came through that storm-it's a bad one, with hail. If you got rain gear…"

The patrolman nodded and waved him on.

Television vans and reporters' cars were lined up on the perimeter of the lot, a hundred yards from a battered brown Chevy. All four doors on the car were open and emergency lights bathed it in a brilliant showroom illumination. Lucas left his Porsche in a pod of squad cars and walked toward the Chevy.

"Davenport, over here." A cop in a short blue jacket, who'd been talking to another cop in a sweater, called to him, and Lucas walked over.

"John Barber, Maplewood," said the cop in the jacket. He had pale blue eyes and a long lantern jaw. "And this is Howie Berkson… Howie, go on over and tell that TV bunch it'll be another twenty minutes, okay?"

As Berkson walked away, Barber said, "C'mon."

"Any question whether it's the same guy?" Lucas asked.

Barber shrugged. "I guess not. One of your people is running around out here… Shearson? He says the technique is the same. Wait'll you see her face."

Lucas went and looked, and turned away, and they started a circle around the car. "Looks like him," he said sourly. "A copycat couldn't get up that much enthusiasm for it…"

"That's what Shearson said…"

"Where is he, by the way?" Lucas asked, looking around the lot.

Barber grinned. "He said it looked like we had it under control. I heard he's looking at shirts over in the mall."

"Asshole," Lucas said.

"That's the feeling we got. By the way, we found a kid who saw the guy."

"What?" Lucas stopped short. "Saw him?"

"Don't get your hopes up," Barber said. "He was a hundred yards away and wasn't paying too much attention. Saw the guy's car, too, but doesn't have any idea about make or model or even color… Didn't get anything. Says the killer looked like a guy from some comic-book movie."

"Then how do you know he saw…"

"Because he saw the woman walking out toward her car. He wasn't paying any attention to her, just hanging out, but a minute later, he saw a man by her car, it looked like he was helping her inside. Then, a couple of minutes later, he really doesn't know how long it was, he sees the guy walking away. And the woman never backs the car out. So the kid thinks-he told us before his mother got here-he thinks this woman is a hooker maybe, doing blow jobs in her car, or maybe she's dealing dope. That's the way his head works. And he kind of casually strolls by to take a look…"

"So he saw the guy for sure."

"Seems like it," Barber said.

"Let me talk to him."

The kid was a slender, ragged teenager with skateboard pads on his knees, fingerless gloves, dirty blond shoulder-length hair and a complexion that was going bad. He wore a long-billed hat with the bill turned down and to the side, covering one ear. His mother hovered over him, throwing severe looks alternately at the kid and the police.

"You got a minute?" Lucas asked the kid, when Barber walked him up.

"I guess so, they won't let me go nowhere," the kid answered. He brushed his hair out of his eyes, the same gesture Cassie used, half defense, half necessity.

"We would like to go home sometime," his mother said, spotting Lucas as an authority. "It's not like…"

"This is pretty important," Lucas said mildly. To the kid, he said, "Why don't we take a walk down the mall…"

"Can I come?" asked the kid's mother.

"Sure," Lucas said reluctantly. "But let your boy tell the story, okay? Any help you give him… isn't help."

"Okay." Her head bobbed: she understood that.

"So what does this guy feel like?" Lucas asked, as they started down the length of the mall.

The kid's forehead wrinkled. "Feel like?"

"What kind of vibrations did he give off? The Maplewood cop, Barber, says you couldn't see him too clearly, but you must've gotten some vibrations. Barber said you thought he looked like some comic-book guy…"

"Not a comic-book guy, a comic-book movie guy," the kid said. "Did you ever see the movie Darkman?"

"No, I haven't."

"You oughta. It's a great movie…"

"His favorite," his mother clucked. "These kids…"

Lucas put his index finger on his lips and she shut up, her face reddening.

"See, there's this guy Darkman, who gets his face all fuck… uh, messed up by these hoods," the kid said, glancing at his mother. "He tries to put his face back together with this skin that he makes-"

"Whoa, whoa," Lucas said. "There was something wrong with his face? The guy in the parking lot?"

"I couldn't see that much, he had this hat. But he moved like Darkman… You gotta see the movie," the kid said with wide-eyed seriousness. "Darkman moves like… I don't know. You gotta see it. This guy moved like that. Like, I couldn't see if there was anything wrong with his face, but he moved like there was. With his face kind of always turned away."

"Did you see him jump the woman?"

"No. I saw her walking out, then I was looking at something else, then I saw him. Then he got in her car, and then he got out, and then he moved away like Darkman. Kind of glided. With that hat."

"Glided?"

"Yeah. You know, like, most guys just walk. This guy kind of glided. Like Darkman. You gotta see the movie."

"All right. Anything else? Anything? Did you see him talk to anybody, did he do a little dance, did he do anything…?"

"No, not that I saw. I just saw him walking… Oh yeah, he was juggling his keys, that's all."

"Juggling his keys?"

"Yeah. Toss them up, then go like this…" The kid mimed a man throwing his keys up, made a quick little double step, snagged them with his off hand.

"Jesus," Lucas said. "Just once?"

"Naw, he did it a couple, three times."

They'd stopped walking outside a cutlery store. In the window, a two-foot-long model of a Swiss Army knife continuously and silently folded and unfolded. "What do you do for a living, kid?" Lucas asked. "Still in school?"

"Yeah."

"You got a good eye," Lucas said. "You might make a cop someday."

The kid looked away. "Naw, I couldn't do that," he said. His mother prodded him, but he went on. "Cops gotta fuck with people. I couldn't do that for a living." • • • Lucas left the kid and his anxious mother with a Maplewood cop and used a pay phone to call Cassie. She was supposed to be off, but there was no answer at her apartment. He tried the theater, but no one answered the phone.

"God damn it." He needed her. He went back outside and found Shearson and Barber standing at the mall entrance. Shearson had a sack under his arm that might have contained a necktie. Rain swept across the lot beyond them, and the floodlights around the death car had been turned off.

"Find everything you needed?" Lucas asked Shearson, tapping the sack with a finger.

"Hey, I'm out here on my own time," Shearson said. He was wearing a dark cashmere knee-length coat over a pearl-gray suit, with a white shirt, a blue tie with tiny crowns on it, and black loafers. His breath smelled of Juicy Fruit.

"You talk to the kid?" Barber asked.

"Yeah. I'd like to get a stenographer over to his place tomorrow, take a statement," Lucas said. "He told me the guy was juggling his keys, and doing a little dance step when he caught them. I'd like to get him on record for that."

"Give us a call with questions…" said Barber.

"You get something?" Shearson asked, eyebrows up.

"I don't know," Lucas said. He trusted Shearson about as far as he could spit a rat. "What's happening with this shrink you've been looking at?"

"He's the Loverboy, all right," Shearson said. "He's hiding something. There aren't a lot of loose ends to pull on. I think we oughta just sit back for a couple days. Until something new comes up. But Daniel's got me covering him like whip on cream."

"Okay… Well, I gotta get one last look at this car," Lucas said.

Barber went with him, the two of them hurrying through the rain with a kind of broken-field lope, shoulders hunched, as though they could dodge the raindrops.

"Your buddy's got a great wardrobe," Barber said, tongue in cheek.

"And he'd lose an IQ contest to a fuckin' stump," Lucas said.

The body was being moved out of the car, wrapped in sheets. Another Maplewood cop came over and said, "Nothing in the car that looks like a weapon. Nothing but paper-ice cream bar wrappers, candy wrappers, Ding Dong wrappers. The woman lived on junk."

"All right," said Lucas. To Barber, he said, "Can you keep me up-to-date?"

"I'll fax you everything we got in the morning, first thing. We don't need this clown killing people out here."

Lucas hadn't expected much from the scene itself. If a killer had no relationship with the victim, no apparent motive, no rational method of operation, the only things left to find were witnesses or traceable physical evidence. Because a serial killer could pick the time and place, he could pick a situation that minimized his exposure to witnesses. And evidence left behind-semen, in sex-related cases, or blood or skin samples-didn't help until after the killer was caught.

This attack had been almost perfect. Almost…

The storm was dying as Lucas headed west. There was another thunderstorm cell far down to the south, but from I-35W he could see distant jetliner landing lights, going into Minneapolis-St. Paul International from the south, so he knew the storm must be well out downstate.

By the time he got to Cassie's apartment, the rain had diminished to a barely perceptible drizzle. He went into the entry and rang the bell for her apartment, but there was no answer. He continued up the street to the theater, but the windows there were dark.

Damn. He needed her.

And he found her. She was sitting on his porch steps, a gym bag between her feet.

"How long have you been here?" he asked from the car, as she strolled out to the driveway. "How'd you get here?"

"About twenty minutes-I came on the bus. I would have broken in, but the woman next door keeps watching me out her window," Cassie said, grinning. She tipped her head toward a lighted window in the next house. An elderly woman peeked out a lighted window in a side door, and Lucas waved at her. She waved back and disappeared.

"She keeps an eye out," Lucas said. "Besides, you'd need a sledge to get through the doors… Let me get the car inside."

Cassie waited behind the car as he put it in the garage next to his battered Ford four-by-four.

"Sweatsuit and shoes," she said, holding up the gym bag as he dropped the garage door. "I thought we could run along the river."

"In the rain?"

"You could see it going over on the TV radar," she said.

"Okay," he said. He took her elbow in his hand and kissed her on the mouth. "Did you hear?"

"Hear what?" she asked, puzzled by his somber tone.

"We had another killing. Out in Maplewood."

"Oh, no," she said, pressing her fingertips to her lips. "Is it a theater person?"

Lucas shook his head. "Not as far as we know. It's a woman who worked at the mall. They're checking, but she doesn't seem like she'd be a playgoing type. Certainly didn't look like an actress."

"Jesus… Like he just picked her out at random?"

"Eenie meenie minie moe," Lucas said. "And I've got something to ask you… later."

"What's the mystery?"

"I can't tell you. I want your brain to be fresh. Let's run."

Cassie set the pace along the river until Lucas, puffing, slowed her down. "Take it easy," he said. "Remember, I'm old."

"Six years older than me," she said. "At your age, you ought to be able to run a marathon under four, just to be in fair shape."

"Bullshit," he grunted. "If you can run a marathon under six, you're in great shape, for a normal human being, anyway."

"See, you're not hurtin'," she said. "You can still talk." But she slowed the pace and they stopped at a scenic overlook, walked in circles for a minute, then took off again, this time running away from the river.

"I have to stop at a video store," Lucas said. "I want to pick up a movie."

"A movie?"

"A kid at the mall saw the killer. Said he looked like Darkman, in the movie. You see it?"

"No. Heard about it. Supposed to be pretty bad."

"So we watch it for a few minutes."

When they got back to the house, Lucas leaned against the garage door, gasping for breath, dangling the plastic bag with the videocassette in one hand.

"I gotta do this more often," he said. "How far do you think we ran?"

"Three miles, maybe. Enough to crack a sweat."

"I hate to tell you, but I cracked a sweat about two hundred yards out," he said.

"Better take a shower," she said in a low voice. She was standing next to him, and she slipped a hand under his sweatshirt and lightly drew her nails from his nipples to his navel. Lucas shivered and moved against her.

"We've got serious business here," he said, patting her on the butt with the plastic bag.

"Hey-what difference does it make if we look at it now or an hour from now?"

He seemed to think about it, stroking his chin. "Hmm. An argument with a certain persuasive force…"

"So let's take the shower…"

Lucas, still damp from a second shower, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, popped the cassette into his VCR and turned on the television.

"What are we looking for?" she asked.

"I want to see if this Darkman character brings anybody to mind. Don't study him-just let it percolate."

The movie unwound, Cassie sitting on the floor in front of the TV. "I see why the kid called it a comic-book movie," she said a few minutes into it, when Darkman was blown through his laboratory window by an enormous explosion. "It's all bullshit."

"Doesn't bring anybody to mind?"

"Not yet." She stood up. "Is that peach ice cream still in the freezer?"

"Sure."

She sat with the ice cream, sucking on the spoon, watching intently. During a scene in which Darkman did a macabre dance, an oil funnel on his head, she frowned and shook her head.

"What?" Lucas asked.

"Run that again."

He stopped the movie and reran the dance scene.

"Don't tell me yet," he said.

"Okay. Keep going."

He watched her as the movie continued and she got more and more into it. At the end, she said, "Junk, but some parts were strong."

"So what'd you see?"

She studied him for a moment and then said, "You know, I'm your basic 'Off the Pigs' sort of person."

"Yeah, yeah…"

"Me and the people I hang out with."

"Uh-huh."

"And I really hate the idea of police creeping around and monitoring people and all that…"

"Come on, come on…"

She looked at the blank TV screen, wrinkled her forehead and said, "Darkman reminds me of a guy at the theater. I mean, he's completely different. He's built different, he looks different, but he sort of has… the aura of Darkman. He moves like Darkman, sometimes."

"Okay. Don't move."

He hurried back to the spare bedroom, looked around and spotted the Xerox of Redon's Cyclops still lying on the bed.

"Close your eyes," he told her, when he got back. "I'm going to hold a paper in front of your face. I want you to look at it for a second, no more, then close your eyes again. You're trying for a momentary impression… Open your eyes when I say 'Open.' "

"Okay…"

He held the Xerox in front of her face and said, "Open."

Her eyes opened but didn't close again, and after a little more than a second, he whipped the paper behind his back.

"Jesus," she whispered. "I feel like a fuckin' Judas."

"Who is it?"

"It could be Carlo Druze. You saw him the first day you were at the theater. He was the guy practicing onstage."

"I knew it," Lucas said. The thrill of it ran down his spine, and he shuddered. "He's the goddamned juggler, right? The guy you never see without makeup. I knew I'd seen him."

"I feel like…"

"Fuck that," he barked. "You saw your friend Elizabeth. You want to look at this woman up in Maplewood? We think he used a screwdriver on her…"

"No, no…"

"Are there any good photos of him at the theater? Publicity stuff, anything?"

Cassie nodded, but tentatively. "He's a very scarred man. He doesn't like photo sessions. Sometimes he uses cosmetics to cover up… but he's most comfortable in stage makeup. That's how you usually see him in the publicity shots. Full makeup. I don't know if there'd be any raw photos…"

"Can we get in?"

She hesitated. "I could get us inside the building, but the office is locked. And letting you go through the files… I don't know."

"C'mon, Cassie," Lucas said, a little less harshly. He reached out and touched her. "You can keep the plans for the fuckin' revolution. I just need a photo of the guy…"

"All right," she said. Then, following him back to the bedroom, she added, "I feel like a shit for saying this, but I keep thinking of more things… Carlo didn't like Elizabeth and she didn't like him."

Lucas, pulling on a shirt, said, "Was she planning to fire him?"

Cassie shrugged. "Who knows? The feeling was, she didn't like him because of his looks. As an actor, he's not bad."

Lucas stopped and looked at her: "Could Druze do this? Is he capable of it? Killing people?"

She shivered. "Of all the people I know… yeah, I'd say he's the most likely. But not with passion. I don't understand the eyes. If he wanted to kill somebody, he'd just do it, and walk away."

"Huh. Interesting," said Lucas. He put on a sport jacket, then dug through the bottom drawer of his bureau, found a leather wallet and stuck it in his jacket pocket. "Let's go look." • • • On the way across town, Lucas said, "When I saw him that time at the theater, I asked you where he was when Armistead was killed. You told me he'd been around all afternoon."

"Yeah…" Her forehead wrinkled. "He was around. But people come and go all the time. Run across the street for a cinnamon roll, down Cedar for a cheeseburger. Nobody notices. The theater's only ten minutes from Elizabeth's house."

"But your impression was that he'd been around…"

"Yeah. I really can't remember, though… A cop interviewed him the day after, maybe he'd know."

"But if he killed Armistead, how does the phony phone call fit?" Lucas asked. "We figured the killer was calling to find out if she was at work…"

"Maybe… this sounds stupid, but maybe somebody was just trying to get a free ticket?"

"That's usually what fucks up an investigation, trying to find a reason for everything," Lucas admitted. "But the call was odd. I still think… I don't know." They parked in front of a rock bar and looked across the street at the theater's dark windows.

"I don't like this," Cassie said nervously, looking up and down the street. "People come in and out of here all the time. And if anybody found out, I'd lose my job. For sure."

"I doubt it," Lucas said, smiling at her. She didn't like his smile. There was an edge of cruelty to it. "Things can be arranged."

"Like what?"

He looked past her at the front of the theater. "You'd be surprised how many building, zoning and health violations you can find in a place like that. I doubt an old theater could survive, if somebody really wanted to tote them all up."

"Blackmail," she said.

"Law enforcement."

"Sure," she said, with distaste. "I don't think I could live with that."

She got out of the car and led the way across the street. The theater was dark, but as she opened the door with her key, she called, "Hello? Anybody here?"

No answer. "This way," she said in a hushed voice. They crossed the lobby in the weak light from the street and started down a hallway. Cassie patted the left wall, found a light switch and turned on a single hall light. Lucas followed her to a red wooden door. She tried the doorknob and found it locked. "Damn it. I was hoping it'd be open," she said.

"Let me look," Lucas said. He took a small metal flashlight from his jacket pocket, knelt at the lock, shined the light into the crack between the door and the jamb, turned the knob as far as he could, then turned it back.

"Can you open it?"

"Yeah." He took the wallet, a trifold, from his pocket. He opened it, laid it flat on the floor and slipped out a thin metal blade.

"What're you doing?"

"Magic," he said. He put the blade in the crack between the door and the jamb, and rotated the blade downward; the bolt slipped back. "Shazam."

The office was small, untidy, with lime-green walls, a metal desk with a phone, four chairs, a bulletin board and file cabinets. A faint smell of mildew and old cigarette smoke hung in the air. As Lucas put his lock set back into his pocket, Cassie stepped to one of the file cabinets and pulled open a drawer. Hundreds of eight-by-ten photos were jammed into manila folders. She took out two, a bulging pair, and laid them on the desk.

"He'll be in these," she said. She started going through them, tapping Druze's face wherever she found it. "Here… here… here he is again."

"He's good at avoiding the camera," Lucas said. He took several of the photos and held them under the light. Druze was always in stage paint or makeup. Sometimes his face was obscured by a hat; at other times by a hand gesture.

"Here's the best one so far," Cassie said, flipping a photo out to Lucas.

Troll, he thought. Druze had a round head, too large for his body. And although he was wearing makeup, there were obvious changes in his skin texture, as if his face had been quilted together. His nose was shortened, ruined.

"That's the best," Cassie said, finishing with the pictures. "But, ah…" She glanced at another file cabinet.

"What?"

"If we can get this other cabinet open, we could look through the personnel files. There may be a straight head-shot… The cabinet's always locked."

"Let's look," Lucas said. He glanced at the lock on the cabinet, took a pick out of the wallet and had the lock open in less than a second.

"That's fast," Cassie said, impressed.

"For office file cabinets, you get more of a master key than a pick," Lucas said. "I'm not that good with the picks."

"Where do you get them?" she asked.

"I know a guy," Lucas said. He pulled open the top drawer and found a file labeled "Druze." Inside was a block of what once had been eight wallet-sized photos, headshots, straight on, no makeup. Two of them had been cut away with scissors. "Passport shots. And he does look like the cyclops, kind of," Lucas said. He went to the office desk, found a pair of scissors in the top drawer, cut out one of the photos and showed it to Cassie.

"Uh-huh." She glanced at it, then went back to the file she was holding.

"What's that?"

She looked up, a piece of notebook paper in her hand, a sad smile on her face. "It's my file. There's a note from Elizabeth. It says my work has to be evaluated in case financial circumstances worsen."

"What does that…?"

"She was going to fire me," Cassie said. A tear trickled down her cheek. "Fuckin' theater people, man…"

Lucas used the pick to lock the cabinet. The office door locked from the inside, then simply pulled shut. On the way out, they turned off the lights.

Cassie had taken Armistead's note, and when they were back in the car again, she reread it under the dome light. "I can't believe it," she said. "I can't believe she'd do this."

"Well, she's gone-things have changed," Lucas said. "I've seen you act, and you're good…"

"But she was supposed to be my friend," Cassie said, wadding up the note. "We talked together. We were always talking about what we wanted to do."

"Your friends… are sometimes different people than you think they are. Most of your friends are halfway made-up. They're what you'd like them to be."

"Do you mind if I sit here and cry for a couple of minutes?"

"C'mon," said Lucas, "that'd really bum me out." He put an arm around her shoulder and kissed her on the forehead, and she grabbed his jacket lapel and buried her face on his shoulder. "C'mon, Cassie…"

He stroked her hair and she cried.