Eyes of Prey

CHAPTER 29

Beauty danced and bled and danced and bled and danced until he fell down on his back, his arms thrown wide, his legs spread, a kind of crucifixion on the huge Oriental rug in the dining room. There were no dreams of eyes. There were no dreams of anything. There was nothing at all.

The pain woke him.

Daylight filtered past the blinds and his body trembled with cold, his muscles tight and shaking. He sat up and looked down, thought that somehow he'd gotten muddy, then realized that his chest was caked with dried blood. When he tried to stand, flakes of the blood broke away and fell on the carpet.

Something had changed. He felt it. Something was different, but he didn't know what. Couldn't remember. He tried to find it, but his mind seemed confused and he could not. Could not find it. He went to the bathroom, turned on the water for the tub, watched it pour, the water swirling, and he began to sing just like Mrs. Wilson had taught them in the fifth grade:

"Frere Jacques, Frere Jacques, dormez-vous, dormez-vous?…"

In the tub, the blood dissolved, pink in the water, and Beauty bathed in it, patted it on his astonishing face, and sang every song that a fifth-grader knew…

The mirror was steamed over when he got out of the tub. He was annoyed when this happened, because he could not look into his face, he had to open the bathroom door, had to wait until the cool air cleared it. He always tried to rub the steam away with a towel, but he could never quite clear the mirror…

He opened the door and the cold air flooded around him, and the stimulation almost brought the memory back. Almost… The first streak of condensation ran down the mirror. Bekker picked up a towel and wiped. Ah. There he was…

The face was far away, he thought, puzzled. He wasn't that far away. He was right here… He reached out and touched the glass, and the face came closer, and the horror began to grow.

This wasn't Beauty. This was…

Bekker screamed, stumbled back, unable to tear his eyes from the mirror.

A troll looked back. A troll with a patchwork face, the wide eyes staring, measuring him. And it all came back, the apartment, the gun, and Druze going down like a burst balloon.

"No!" Bekker screamed at the mirror. He grabbed the hair on both sides of his head, pulled at it, welcoming the pain, trying to rip the troll from his consciousness.

But the eyes, cool, cruel, floated in the mirror, watching… Bekker ran into the hallway: another of her mirrors, mirrors everywhere, all with eyes. He stumbled, fell, crawled down the hall, scampering, naked, his knees burning from the carpet, down to his bedroom like a weasel, groping in panic for the brass cigarette case.

The eyes were everywhere, in the shiny surfaces of the antique bedstand, in the window glass, on the surface of the water in a whiskey tumbler… Waiting. No place for Beauty. He gobbled three bloodred caps of Nembutal 100 mg pentobarbital and the green eggs, the Luminal 30 mg phenobarbital, three of them, four, six. And then the purple eggs, the Xanax 1 mg alprazolam. Too much? He didn't know, couldn't remember. Maybe not enough. He took an assortment of eggs with him, squinting through half-closed eyes, avoiding the shiny surfaces, and whimpering, he crawled into his closet, behind the shirttails and the pantlegs, with the shoes and the odors of darkness.

The Nembutal would be on him first; there was a mild rush as they came on, a Beauty rush. Bekker didn't want that. He wanted the calming effect, the sedation; even as he thought it, the rush dwindled and the sedation came on. The Luminal would be next, in an hour or so, smoothing him out for the day, until he could make plans to get at Druze. The Xanax would calm him…

Another voice spoke in his mind, far away, barely rational: Druze. Find Druze.

Bekker looked into his hand, half cupped around the pills. He would find Druze if the medicine held out.

Lucas waited.

The second house was on a slight rise above the street, a greening lawn, neat, flower beds still raw with the spring. A Ford Taurus station wagon was parked in the driveway, the husband's car. He'd arrived just a minute after Sloan and Lucas. Lucas waited in the car while Sloan went inside.

The speed was beginning to bite. Lucas felt sharp and hard, like the edge of a pane of glass; and also brittle. He sat listening to Chris Rea on the tape player, singing about Daytona, his hand beating out the rhythm…

Sloan came straight out the door and across the lawn, the paper in his hand.

"We're clear," he said. "The woman was okay, but I thought her husband was going to freak out."

"As long as we got it," Lucas said.

The machinery of exhumation was fussily efficient. A small front-loader took off the top five feet of dirt and piled it on a sheet of canvas. Two of the cemetery's gravediggers took off the last foot with shovels, dropped hooks onto the coffin and pulled it out, a corroding bronze tooth.

Lucas and Sloan followed the M.E.'s van back downtown and, as the coffin was unloaded, walked inside to talk to the medical examiner.

When they found Louis Nett, he was pulling a gown over his street clothes. "Have you heard about the other one?" Lucas asked. The second child had been buried in the suburban town of Coon Rapids.

"It's on the way," Nett said. "If you guys want to hang around, I can give you a read in the next couple of minutes… depending on the condition of the body, of course."

"What do you think?" Sloan asked.

"Well, she was done by the Saloman Brothers. They're pretty careful, and she hasn't been down that long. I think there's a good chance, as long as the coffin is still tight. If it leaked, you know…" He shrugged. "All bets are off."

"We'll wait," Lucas said.

"You can come watch…" Nett offered.

"No, no," Lucas said.

"Well, if you don't mind… I think I might," Sloan said. "I've never seen one of these."

The medical examiner's office looked like the city clerk's office, or the county auditor's, or any place except one that dealt with the scientific dismemberment of the dead. Secretaries sat in front of smudged computer screens, each desk marked with idiosyncratic keepsakes: china frogs, pink-butted babies, tiny angels with their hands held in prayer, Xeroxed directives from the higher-ups, Xeroxed cartoons from the lower-downs.

In the back room, they were taking apart a long-dead teenage girl.

Lucas looked at one of the cartoons, cut from The New Yorker. It showed two identical portly, vaguely Scandinavian businessmen with brush mustaches, conservatively dressed with hats and briefcases, stopped at a receptionist's desk, apparently in Manhattan. The receptionist was talking into an intercom, saying, "Minneapolis and St. Paul to see you, sir…"

He turned away from the cartoon, dropped on a couch and closed his eyes, but his eyes didn't want to be closed. He opened them again and stared at the wall, fidgeted, picked up a nine-month-old magazine on bow-hunting, read a few words, dropped it back on the table.

The clock over a secretary's empty desk said four-fifteen. Nett said it shouldn't take more than a couple of minutes. At four-thirty, Lucas got up and wandered around the office, hands in his pockets.

Sloan came back first. Lucas stood up, facing him.

"You called it," Sloan said.

Something unwound in Lucas' stomach. They had him. "The eyes?"

"Cut. Nett says with an X-acto knife or something like it-I figure it was a scalpel. Something that really dug in."

"Can they take photos or something…?"

"Well… they're taking the eyes out," Sloan said, as though Lucas should have known. "They put them in little bottles of formaldehyde…".

"Aw, Christ…"