Eyes of Prey

CHAPTER 28

Daniel prowled around his office with his hands in his pockets. He'd pulled the shades but hadn't turned on the lights, and the office was almost dark.

"Homicide is satisfied," he said. "You know I don't clear murder cases on the basis of politics-and there's every indication that we got him. You got him. Bekker is something else."

Lucas was also standing, propped against a windowsill, arms crossed. "If Bekker kills another one and carves her eyes out, then what'll you do? The goddamned press'll be down here with pitchforks and torches."

Daniel threw up his hands in exasperation. "Look, I know this actress woman and you…"

"Doesn't have anything to do with it," Lucas said. His head still felt like a chunk of wood. Cassie did have something to do with it, of course. Revenge wouldn't be enough, but it would be something. "Druze may have killed her, but Bekker was behind it."

"Have you talked to the lab people since you came in?"

"No…"

"They looked at that jacket in Druze's closet. There was blood on the back of it. You can't see it, because the fabric was black and the blood was soaked in. But it was there, and they've done some preliminary tests. The blood is the same type as Stephanie Bekker's…"

Lucas nodded. "I think Druze killed Stephanie, all right…"

"And George. We got a taxi routing from the airport to the Lost River Theater the night George was done."

"What about Elizabeth Armistead? I'm not so sure about that one. I asked that night, or the next day, and everybody agreed Druze was at the theater most of the afternoon."

Daniel jabbed a forefinger at Lucas: "But maybe not every minute. He could've been gone half an hour and that would have been enough. And the woman who saw the guy at Armistead's said he was in some kind of utility-man getup. That sounds like an actor to me-we've got Homicide guys over at the theater right now, going through their wardrobe."

"What about the phone call?"

"Come on, Lucas. That so-called phone call doesn't make sense no matter how you cut it. And the kid out in Maplewood is pretty sure that Druze is the guy who did the Romm woman." Daniel took a manila folder from his desk and handed it to Lucas. "They found these in Druze's apartment."

Lucas opened the folder: inside were photographs of Stephanie Bekker and Elizabeth Armistead. The eyes had been cut out. "Where'd they get these?"

"Druze's file cabinet. Stuffed in the back."

"Bullshit," said Lucas, shaking his head. "I went through the file cabinet. These weren't there."

"Maybe he carried them with him."

"And puts them in the file cabinet before he goes upstairs to blow his brains out?" Lucas said. "Look, take this any way you want: as a continuing homicide investigation or just covering your political ass. We've got to stay with Bekker. We can tell the press that the case is cleared, but we've got to stay on him. We can start by exhuming these kids."

"What do we say about that?" Daniel asked. "How do we explain…"

"We don't say anything. Why should we say anything to anybody? If we can convince the parents to keep quiet…"

Daniel walked around the quiet office, head down, rubbing his hands. Finally he nodded. "Damn, I'd hoped we'd finished with it."

"We're not finished until Bekker falls. You saw the tapes with Sybil, for Christ's sake…"

"And you heard what the lawyers said. A dying woman, maybe paranoid, loaded with drugs? C'mon. I believe her, Merriam believes her, Sloan does, so do you-but there's no way a judge is going to put that in front of a jury."

"Dying declaration…"

"Oh, bullshit, Lucas-she didn't make it while she was dying, for Christ's sake…"

"You know what Cassie couldn't understand about the killings? The eyes. She said Druze would never do the eyes. You know what my friend Elle says about them? The shrink. She says he has to do the eyes. So if Bekker is nuts, and he kills somebody else… Jesus, can't you see it? He'll do the eyes again, and your balls will be hanging from a pole outside the City Hall door."

Daniel pulled on his lip, sighed and nodded. "Go ahead. Talk to the kids' parents. If they say okay on an exhumation, do it. If they say no, come back here and we'll talk. I don't want to go for a court order."

Lucas met Anderson in the hallway.

"You've heard?" Anderson asked.

"What?"

"The lab guys say that Druze didn't have much in the way of nitrites on his hands. He may have had a handkerchief on the gun, but still…"

"So what are they saying?"

"Maybe he didn't kill himself. The M.E. says the whole scene is a little weird, the way he did it, the way he must have been standing when he pulled the trigger. Can't figure out how the gun got underneath him, either. The muzzle was three or four inches from his temple when he pulled the trigger, and with the shock of the bullet and the recoil, he should have gone one way and the gun another. Instead, it beat him to the floor."

"The M.E. still working on him?"

"Oh, yeah. They've got samples of everything. I don't know, it's getting curiouser."

Lucas sat in his office, thinking it over, feeling the rats of depression galloping just below the surface of his mind. If he stopped concentrating, they'd be out. He forced his mind into it: Did Druze kill Cassie? Despite the questions, it seemed likely. In most murders, the most obvious answer is correct-and in any crime investigation, there are always anomalies. The gun shouldn't have beaten Druze's body to the floor, but maybe it did.

One of the rats slipped out: If only Cassie had identified him a day earlier and Loverboy had called with a definite identification…

Fuckin' Loverboy…

Lucas frowned, picked up the phone and called Violent Crimes. Sloan was at home, they said, trying to get some sleep. Lucas called, got him out of bed.

"Last night, when I was doped up. Did anybody call?"

"No."

"Hmph. What time did we identify Druze for television and release the news that it was part of the series…?"

"This morning-I mean, they had Druze's name last night, midnight or so, but just the name. We didn't release the serial-killing business until this morning."

"Huh. Okay, thanks." He let Sloan go, dialed TV3 and got Carly Bancroft. "This is Lucas. Did you make Druze's name on the news last night?"

"No, we had it for the wake-up report," she said. "I could have used a little help…"

"I was… out of shape," Lucas said. "What about the other channels? Did they have it?"

"Not as far as I know. We picked up the news release on morning cop checks. Nobody was bitching about getting beat, and they would have, on something like this. When can you talk to us? You found them, right? What-"

"I really can't talk," Lucas said. "I'll call you later."

He hung up and sat in his chair, rubbing his temples. Loverboy hadn't called.

Jennifer's car was in the driveway when he got home. He rolled past it slowly as the garage door went up, and parked and walked out of the garage as she got out of her car.

"How are you?" she asked. She was wearing a black turtleneck under a cardigan, with gold loop earrings visible under her short-cropped blond hair.

"What do you want?" His voice was so cold that she stepped back.

"I wanted to see how you were…"

"Did Elle put you up to this?" Jennifer had her back to the car door and he loomed over her. His hands were in fists, inside his jacket pockets.

"She said you were in trouble."

"I don't need your help. The last time I needed your help, I got my head pushed under," he said. He turned away, walked back into the garage.

"Lucas…"

His mind was moving like a freight train, all the facts and suppositions and memories and plans and possibilities flying like boxcars just behind his eyes, unsuppressible. Jennifer. Green eyes. Full lips. Sarah, a bundle, squealing when he tossed her in the air. Jennifer and Sarah together in the delivery room, up at the lake cabin, Jennifer skinny-dipping in the moonlight, Sarah starting to crawl…

He was at a branch, he felt, when ten thousand things were possible, but he couldn't deal with that, with all the branches…

"Just… go away," he said.

He tried, but couldn't sleep. Too many suppositions. Finally, glancing at the clock, he called the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and asked how late the gift shop was open. He had just enough time.

He hurried, trying not to think. Just keep moving. Don't worry about the guns. They sit there in the basement and they glow, and fuck 'em, let 'em glow.

The gift shop was empty, except for a bored saleswoman who was dressed so well that Lucas guessed she was a volunteer.

"Can I help you?" she asked.

"Yeah. I'm interested in a dude named Odilon Redon. What've you got? Got any calendars?"

Five minutes later he was back in the car, looking for a scrap of paper. He finally found a receipt from a tire store. He turned it over, flattened it against the Porsche owner's manual on his leg and started a new list.

And later, afraid of the bed, he sat in the spare bedroom with a bottle of Canadian Club and stared at his charts.

The Killer One chart was complete: Druze. A troll, powerful, squat, odd head, murdering Stephanie. No question about that anymore. If he was working with Bekker, must have killed George, because Bekker was with Lucas. Could have killed Cassie. Could have killed Armistead. Could have killed woman at the shopping center-but why? She was entirely out of the pattern. Not at home; not with the academic/art crowd… And where did the photos come from, with the missing eyes?

Killer Two: Did he exist? Was it Bekker? Some tracks at the site of the George killing suggested a second man. How would Druze have found George if Bekker hadn't fingered him? (Possibility: He'd watched Stephanie's funeral?) Why would he have driven George's Jeep to the airport? How could he have killed Armistead? Why the phone call-a coincidence, somebody trying to get in free?

The answers were in the pattern, somewhere. Lucas could feel it but couldn't see it.

He took the tire store receipt from his pocket. At the top he'd written "Loverboy."

He looked at it, closed his eyes and let the circumstances flow through his mind.

At six in the morning, he phoned Del. "I gotta come over and talk to you," he said. Del had an affinity for speed.

"Jesus Christ, man, what're you doing up at six o'clock? You're worse'n me…"

Lucas drove across town with the breaking dawn, another cool, overcast day. The drive-time radio programs had started, and he dialed past the jock talk to 'CCO, half listening as he put the car on I-94 toward Minneapolis.

Del met him at the door in a pair of slightly yellowed jockey shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt that Clark Gable would have approved of. When Lucas told him what he wanted, Del shook his head and said, "Lucas, you'll kill yourself."

"No. I just need to stay awake for a while," Lucas said. "I know what I'm doing."

Del looked at him, nodded, went to the bedroom and came back with an orange plastic vial. "Ten hits. Heavy-duty. But don't try to stretch it too far."

"Thanks, man…" Lucas said.

A woman's voice came from the back. "Del…?"

"In a minute," Del said. He smiled thinly at Lucas. "Cheryl. What can I tell you?"

The speed brightened him up. He turned south, looking at the clock. Almost seven. Sloan would be up.

"How're you feeling?" Sloan's wife asked as she opened the door.

"Everybody wants to know," Lucas said, grinning at her. She was a short woman, slightly plump, motherly and sexy at the same time. Lucas liked her. "Is Sloan out of bed?"

She turned her head. "Sloan? Lucas is here."

"Out on the porch," Sloan called back.

"Does Sloan have a first name?" Lucas asked as he went past the woman.

"I don't know. I never asked," she said.

Sloan was sitting on the sun porch, smoking a cigarette and eating a cherry Moon Pie. A Coke sat on a side table by his hand.

"A real lumberjack breakfast," Lucas said.

"Don't talk loud," Sloan said. "I'm not awake yet."

"I need you to sweet-talk some people for me," Lucas said. Sloan was the best interrogator on the force. People told him things. "I've got the names and addresses…"

"What for?" Sloan asked, taking the slip of paper.

"Their kids died," Lucas said. "We want to dig them up. We want to do it today."