Eyes of Prey

CHAPTER 25

Lucas heard the first newspaper hit the front porch. That'd be the Pioneer Press. The StarTribune should be ten minutes later. He dozed, half listening, drifting from dream to linear thought and back to dream, dream editing reality, Jennifer and the baby, Cassie, other faces, other times. He inserted the thwap of the StarTribune; but the dream logic wouldn't buy it, and he woke up, yawned and stumbled out to get the paper. At five-thirty it was still dark, but he could see the heavy gray clouds groaning overhead and smell the rain heavy in the air.

Not responsible… Lucas Smith.

He glanced at the comics and went back to bed, falling facedown across the sheets. Cassie's perfume lingered on them, although she'd insisted on going back to her apartment.

"We're getting close on the play. I shouldn't fool around late and get up late. I have to work," she'd said as she dressed.

The perfume was comforting, a sign of society. He slept on her side, dreaming again, until the telephone rang. Startled, he thought, Loverboy, and rose through his dreams and snatched at the telephone, almost knocking the lamp off the bedstand.

"Davenport."

"Lucas, this is Del…"

"Yeah, what's happening?" He sat up, put his feet on the floor. Cold.

"I'm, uh, over at Cheryl's. We were talking last night, and she told me that Bekker has been creeping around her ward. He's been seeing a woman patient almost every day-and the thing is, this woman can't communicate."

"Not at all?"

"Not a thing. Her mind's still okay, but she's got Lou Gehrig's disease and she's, like, totally paralyzed. Cheryl says she's got maybe a week or two to live, no more. Cheryl can't figure Bekker-he's not exactly the social type. Anyway, I thought it might be something."

"Hmph. I got a guy over there. I'll give him a call," Lucas said. "Are you on Druze today?"

"Yeah, I'm about to go over."

"I may see you."

Lucas hung up, yawned, glanced at the clock. After ten, already: he'd slept more than four hours after looking at the paper. He dropped back on the pillow, but his mind was working.

He got up, called Merriam, was told the doctor wasn't in yet, left a message and went off to shave. Merriam called back just as he was about to leave the house.

"There's a woman there I'd like you to check," he said. "Her name is Sybil…"

Lucas stopped at Anderson's office first.

"Where's Druze?"

"Still bagged out at his apartment."

At his own office, the answering machine showed two messages. Loverboy? He punched the message button as he took off his jacket.

"Lucas, this is Sergeant Barlow. Stop and see me when you come in, please." God damn it, he had no time for this. If he could slip out without encountering Barlow… The machine clicked and started again.

"Lieutenant Davenport, this is Larry Merriam. You better come over here right away. I'll leave a note at the desk to send you up. Pediatric Oncology. I'll be out in the ward. Talk to the duty nurse and she'll chase me down."

Merriam sounded worried, Lucas decided. He put his jacket back on and was locking the office door when Barlow came down the steps at the end of the hall and saw him.

"Hey, Lieutenant Davenport, I need to talk to you," he called.

"Could I stop up later? I'm kind of on the run…"

Barlow kept coming. "Look, we gotta get this done," he said, his mustache bristling.

Lucas shook him off: "I'm up to my ass. I'll get back to you as soon as I can."

"God damn it, Davenport, this is serious shit." Barlow moved so that he was between Lucas and the door.

"I'll talk to you," Lucas said, irritated, letting it show. They stared at each other for a second; then Lucas stepped around him. "But I can't now. Talk to Daniel if you don't believe me."

Barlow hadn't been good on the street. He was a control freak and didn't deal well with ambiguities-and the street was one large ambiguity. He'd done fine with Internal Affairs, though.

IA usually went to work on a cop only if there was a blatantly public foul-up, and that was okay with most of the cops in the department, outside of a few hothead brother-cop freaks. Better IA, the feeling went, than some outside board full of blacks and Indians and who knows what, which seemed to be the alternative.

The department had barely managed to fight off a city council proposal that would have formed a review board with real teeth. The study commission on that-the commission Stephanie Bekker had served on-had gone a bit too far, though, had given the impression that it wanted to get on the cops a little too much. That hadn't gone down well with voters scared by crime…

So a gross screw-up in public would get you an IA investigation. A cop could find himself a target also if he got too deep into drugs, or started stealing too much. Screwing off and getting your partner hurt, that would do it too.

But IA didn't worry much if a pimp got slapped around in a fistfight. Especially not if he'd pulled a knife. Half of the cops on the force would've shot him and let it go at that, and they would have been cleared by the board. And if the fight had taken place during an arrest on a warrant charging a violent crime, and if the victim of that crime was scarred for life and still around to testify, to be looked at…

Where was Barlow coming from? Lucas shook his head. It didn't compute. Anderson was going in the door and Lucas was going out, when Lucas hooked him by the arm.

"You think… the guys in the department would like to see me fall? Get taken off by IA?" Lucas asked.

"Are you nuts?" Anderson asked. "What's happening with IA?"

"They're on me for the fight with that kid, the pimp. I can't figure out where it's coming from."

"I'll ask around," Anderson said. "But when the guys decide somebody ought to fall, it's no big secret. You know that. And nobody's talking about you."

"So where's it coming from?" Lucas asked.

Barlow stayed in the back of Lucas' mind all the way to the university campus. He dumped the car in a no-parking zone outside the hospital, stuck a police ID card in the window and went inside. Pediatric Oncology was on the sixth floor. A nurse took him down through a warren of small rooms, past a larger room with kids in terry-cloth robes, sitting in wheelchairs and watching television, into another set of hospital rooms. They found Merriam sitting on a bed, talking to a young girl.

"Ah, Lieutenant Davenport," he said. He looked at the girl in the bed. "Lisa, this is Lieutenant Davenport. He's a police officer with the Minneapolis Police Department."

"What's he doing here?" she asked, cutting straight to the heart of the matter. The girl was completely bald and had a very pale face and unnaturally rosy lips. The chemotherapy aside, Lucas thought, touched with a cold finger of fear, she looked a lot like his daughter would in ten years.

"He's a friend of mine, stopping to chat," Merriam said. "I've got to go for a while, but I'll be back before they start setting up the procedure."

"Okay," she said.

Outside, in the hall, Lucas said, "I couldn't do this." And, "Do you have kids?"

"Four," Merriam said. "I don't think about it."

"So what happened?" Lucas asked. "You sounded a little tense."

"The woman you called about. I went down to see her. She has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis…"

"Lou Gehrig's disease…"

"Right. She's almost completely incommunicado. Her brain works fine, but she can't move anything but her eyes. She'll be dead in a week or two. And Bekker is trying to kill her."

"What?" Lucas grabbed Merriam by the arm.

"This absolutely defeats me: a goddamn doctor," Merriam said, pulling away. "But you have to see for yourself. Come along."

Lucas trailed behind him as they went down a flight of stairs.

"I went down to find her this morning and stopped to ask at the nursing station," Merriam said over his shoulder. He pushed through a door at the bottom of the stairs. "The duty nurse had worked overnight, and was working an extra half-shift because somebody was sick. Anyway, I mentioned that I was there to see Sybil and asked if Dr. Bekker had been around. The nurse said-you'll have to take this with a grain of salt-she said she didn't see him but she'd felt him. Late last night. She said it occurred to her that dirty old Dr. Death was around, because she shivered, and she always shivers when she sees him."

"She calls him 'Dr. Death'?"

" 'Dirty old Dr. Death,' " Merriam said. "Not very flattering, is it? So then I went down to talk to Sybil. She's going by inches, but the nurses say she's got an inch or two left…"

Merriam led him past the nurses' station and down the hall, past an exit door and three or four more rooms, then glanced inside a room and turned. Sybil lay flat on her back, unmoving except for her eyes. They went to Merriam, then to Lucas, and stayed with him. They were dark liquid pools, pleading.

"Sybil can't talk, but she can communicate," Merriam said simply. "Sybil, this is Lieutenant Davenport of the Minneapolis Police Department. If you understand, say yes."

Her eyes moved up and down, a nod, and stayed with Merriam.

"And a no," Merriam prompted.

They moved from side to side.

"Has Dr. Bekker been coming here?" Merriam asked.

Yes.

"Are you afraid of him?"

Yes.

"Are you afraid for your life?"

Yes.

"Have you tried to communicate with your eye switch?"

Yes.

"Did Dr. Bekker interfere?"

Yes.

"Is Dr. Bekker trying to kill you?" Lucas asked.

Her eyes shifted to him and said, Yes. Stopped, and then again, Yes, frantically.

"Jesus Christ," said Lucas. He glanced at Merriam. "Has he been interested in your eyes? Said anything about…"

Her eyes were flashing up and down again. Yes.

"Jesus," he said again. He leaned across the bed toward the woman. "You hang on. We'll bring in a camera and an expert interrogator, and we're going to get you on videotape. We're going to slam this asshole in prison for so long he'll forget what the sun looks like. Okay?"

Yes.

"And excuse the 'asshole,' " Lucas said. "My language sometimes gets away from me."

No, her eyes said, sliding from side to side.

"No?"

"I think she means, Don't apologize, 'cause he is an asshole," Merriam said from beside the bed. "That right, Sybil?"

She was like a piece of modeling clay, unmoving, still, except for the liquid eyes:

Yes, she said. Yes.

"I'll have somebody here in a half-hour," Lucas said, when they were outside her door.

"You'll have to talk to her husband, just to make sure the legalities are right," Merriam said. "I'll see the director about this."

"Tell him the chief is going to call. And I'll have one of our lawyers talk to her husband. Can they get all the information from here at your desk?"

"Sure. Anything you need."

Lucas started away, then stopped and turned.

"The kids you think he killed. Did he go after their eyes? I mean, was there anything unusual about their eyes?"

"No, no. I was there for the postmortems, their eyes weren't involved."

"Hmph." Lucas started away again, stopped again.

"Don't let anyone close to her."

"Don't worry. Nobody gets in there," Merriam said.

Lucas called Daniel from a pay phone and explained.

"Sonofabitch," Daniel crowed. "Then we got him."

"I don't know," Lucas said. "But we got something. The lawyers will have to figure out if it'll hold up in court. And it doesn't tie him to these other things."

"But we're moving," Daniel insisted. "I'll send a tape unit over there right now, and Sloan to talk to her."

"Can we put a guy on her door?"

"No problem. Around the clock. You think we should stick a surveillance team on him again?"

Lucas considered, then said, "No. He'll be hyperaware of anything like that. We've got Druze going… Let's see what happens."

"All right. What are you doing?"

"I got a couple more ideas…"

A male duck cruised a female across the college pond, as Elle Kruger and Lucas climbed the sidewalk toward the main buildings. Spring, but a cold wind was blowing. Well off to the west, over Minneapolis, they could see darker clouds, and the blurring underedges that said it was raining.

"The eye fixation could have been created by some kind of traumatic incident, but that seems somewhat unlikely," Elle said. "It's more likely that he's always had a feeling of being watched, and this is his reaction…"

"Then why weren't the kids cut up?"

"Lucas, you're missing the obvious," the nun said. "No good for a gamer."

"All right, tell me the obvious, Sister Mary Joseph, ma'am," he said.

"Maybe he didn't kill the children."

Lucas shook his head. "Thought of that. But Merriam gets these vibrations, and it fits with what he's doing with this Sybil, and the interest in the eyes fits with these other killings. Could be a coincidence, but I doubt it."

"As I said, it is possible that he developed the fixation between killings."

"But not likely."

"No."

They walked with their heads down, climbing the hill, and Lucas said, "Would it make any difference when he did the eyes? I mean, could he do them later?"

Elle stopped and looked up at him. "Well. I don't know. This woman who died at the mall-her eyes weren't done until after death."

"Neither were George's, the guy they dug up in Wisconsin. He probably wasn't done for twenty-four hours…"

"That's your answer, then. He does it after death, but apparently it doesn't have to be right away. What are you thinking?"

"Just that if a kid dies and there's going to be a postmortem, you might not want to do the eyes right away. Especially if you had another shot, later."

"Like at the funeral home?"

"Sure. Anytime after the postmortem. He's a pathologist, he's right there with the bodies. He could do the eyes there, right in the hospital, or at the funeral home during a visitation. Who watches a dead body?"

"Do they do anything with the eyes at funeral homes? Would anybody notice?" Elle was doubtful.

"I don't know," Lucas said. "But I can find out."

"What time is it?" she asked suddenly. "I've got a four-o'clock class."

Lucas looked at his watch. "It's just four now."