Silent Prey

CHAPTER
5

Early morning.

Lucas strolled along Thirty-fifth Street, sucking on half of an orange, taking in the city: looking at faces and display windows, at sleeping bums wrapped in blankets like thrown-away cigars, at the men hustling racks of newly made clothing through the streets.

The citric acid was sharp on his tongue, an antidote for the staleness of a poor night's sleep. Halfway down the block, he stopped in front of a parking garage, stripped out the last of the pulp with his teeth, and dropped the rind into a battered trash barrel.

Midtown South squatted across the street, looking vaguely like a midwestern schoolhouse from the 1950s: blocky, functional, a little tired. Six squad cars were parked diagonally in front of the building, along with a Cushman scooter. Four more squads were double-parked farther up the street. As Lucas paused at the trash basket, disposing of the orange, a gray Plymouth stopped in the street. A lanky white-haired man climbed out of the passenger side, said something to the driver, laughed and pushed the door shut.

He didn't slam the door, Lucas noticed: he gave it a careful push. His eyes came up, checked Lucas, checked him again, and then he turned carefully toward the station. The fingers of his left hand slipped under a brilliant-colored tie, and he unconsciously scratched himself over his heart.

Lucas, dodging traffic, crossed the street and followed the man toward the front doors. Lily had said Kennett was tall and white-haired, and the hand over the heart, the unconscious gesture…

"Are you Dick Kennett?" Lucas asked.

The man turned, eyes cool and watchful. "Yes?" He looked more closely. "Davenport? I thought it might be you… Yeah, Kennett," he said, sticking out his hand.

Kennett was two inches taller than Lucas, but twenty pounds lighter. His hair was slightly long for a cop's, and his beige cotton summer suit fit too well. With his blue eyes, brilliant white teeth against what looked like a lifetime tan, crisp blue-striped oxford-cloth shirt and the outrageous necktie, he looked like a doctor who played scratch golf or good club tennis: thin, intent, serious. But a gray pallor lay beneath the tan, and his eye sockets, normally deep, showed bony knife ridges under paper-thin skin. There were scars below the eyes, the remnants of the short painful cuts a boxer gets in the ring, or a cop picks up in the street-a cop who likes to fight.

"Lily's been telling me about you," Lucas said, as they shook hands.

"All lies," Kennett said, grinning.

"Christ, I hope so," Lucas said. Lucas took in Kennett's tie, a bare-breasted Polynesian woman with another woman in the background. "Nice tie."

"Gauguin," Kennett said, looking down at it, pleased.

"What?"

"Paul Gauguin, the French painter?"

"I didn't know he did neckties," Lucas said uncertainly.

"Yeah, him and Christian Dior, they're like brothers," Kennett said, flashing the grin. Lucas nodded and they went on toward the door, Lucas holding it open. "I fuckin' hate this, people holding doors," Kennett grumbled as he went through.

"Yeah, but when you croak, how'd you like it to say on the stone, 'Died opening a door'?" Lucas asked. Kennett laughed, an easy extroverted laugh, and Lucas liked him for it, and thought: Watch it. Some people could make you like them. It was a talent.

"I could die pulling the tab on a beer can, if they let me drink beer, which they don't," Kennett was saying, suddenly sober. "Hope the fuck it never happens to you. Eat aspirin. Stop eating steak and eggs. Pray for a brain hemorrhage. This heart shit-it turns you into a coward. You walk around listening to it tick, waiting for it to stop. And you're weak. If some asshole mugged me, I'd have to take it."

"I don't want to hear about it," Lucas said.

"I don't want to talk about it, but I do, all the time," Kennett said. "Ready to meet the group?"

"Yeah, yeah…"

Lucas followed Kennett through the entrance lobby, waited with him until the reception sergeant buzzed them through to the back. Kennett led the way to a conference room with a piece of notebook paper Scotch-taped to the door: "Kennett Group." The room had four corkboards hung from the walls, covered with notes and call slips, maps of Manhattan, telephones, a couple of long tables and a dozen plastic chairs. In the center of it, a burly, sunburned cop in a white shirt and a thin dog-faced detective in a sport coat were facing each other, both with Styrofoam coffee cups in their hands, voices raised.

"… your people'd get off their fuckin' asses, we could get somewhere. That's what's fuckin' us up, nobody wants to go outside because it's too goddamn hot. We know he's using the shit and he's got to get it somewhere."

"Yeah, well I'm not the asshole who told everybody we'd have him in a week, am I? That was fuckin' crazy, Jack. As far as we know, he's buying whatever shit he's using in Jersey, or down in fuckin' Philly. So don't give me no shit…"

A half-dozen more plainclothes cops, in thin short-sleeved shirts and wash pants, weapons clipped to their belts, watched the argument from the plastic chairs spread around the institutional carpet. Four of the six held Styrofoam coffee cups, and two or three were smoking cigarettes, snubbing them out in shallow aluminum ashtrays. One unattended cigarette continued to burn, the foul odor like a fingernail scratch on a blackboard.

"What's going on?" Kennett asked quietly, moving to the front of the room. The argument stopped.

"Discussing strategy," the sunburned cop said shortly.

"Any conclusions?" Kennett asked. He was polite, but pushing. Taking over.

The cop shook his head and turned away. "No."

Lucas found a seat halfway back, the other cops looking at him, openly, carefully, with some distance.

"That's Lucas Davenport, the guy from Minneapolis," Kennett said, almost absently, as Lucas sat down. He'd picked up a manila file with his name on it, and was flipping through memos and call slips. "He's gonna talk to the press this morning, then go out on the street this afternoon. With Fell."

"How come you let this motherfucker Bekker get out?" the sunburned cop asked.

"Wasn't me," Lucas said mildly.

"Should of killed him when you could," dog-face said. Dog-face's two top-middle teeth pointed in slightly different directions and were notably orange.

"I thought about it," Lucas said, staring lazily at dog-face until the other broke his eyes away.

Somebody laughed, and somebody else said, "Shoulda."

Kennett said, "You won't remember this, Davenport, but let me introduce Lieutenants Kuhn, Huerta, White, Diaz, Blake, and Carter, and Detectives Annelli and Case, our serial-killer specialists. You can get the first names sorted out later…"

The cops lifted hands or nodded at him as their names were called out. They looked like Minneapolis cops, Lucas thought. Different names, but the attitude was the same, like a gathering of paranoid shoe salesmen: too little pay, too many years of burgers and fries and Butterfingers, too many people with big feet trying to get into small shoes.

A red-haired woman walked into the room carrying a stack of files, and Kennett added, "And this is Barb Fell… Barb, that's Lucas Davenport in what appears to be a five-hundred-dollar silk-blend jacket and two-hundred-dollar shoes…"

Fell was in her mid-thirties, slender, her red hair just touched with gray. An old scar, shaped like a new moon, cupped one side of her long mouth, a dead-white punctuation mark on a pale oval Welsh face. She sat next to him, perching, shook hands quickly and turned back to the front of the room.

"John O'Dell's coming over, he's going to sit in," one of the cops was telling Kennett. Kennett nodded, dragged a chair around to face the others and said, "Somebody tell me we've got something new."

After a moment of silence, Diaz, a tall, gaunt detective, one of the lieutenants, said, "About the time Bekker would've got here, a cab disappeared. Three months old. One of them new, round Caprices. Poof. Gone. Stolen while the driver was taking a leak. Supposedly."

Kennett's eyebrows went up. "Never seen again?"

"Not as far as we can tell. But, ah…"

"What?"

"One of the guys checked around. The driver doesn't know anything from anything. Went into a bar to take a leak, comes out, and it's gone. But the thing had been in two accidents, and the driver says it was a piece of shit. Says the transmission was shot, there was something wrong with the suspension, the front passenger-side door was so tight you could barely open it. I'd bet the sonofabitch is in a river someplace. For the insurance."

Kennett nodded but said, "Push it. We've got nothing else, right?" He looked around. "Nothing from the Laski surveillance…?"

"No. Not a thing," said another of the lieutenants.

"Um…" Lucas lifted a finger, and Kennett nodded at him.

"Lily told me about the Laski scam, and I've been thinking about it."

The cops at the front of the room turned in their chairs to look at him. "Like what?" asked Kennett.

"I don't think Bekker'll go for it. He'd think of Laski as a wrong-headed colleague, not somebody he'd hit. Maybe somebody he'd debate. He's an equal, not a subject."

"We got nothing else going for us," snapped Carter, the sunburned cop. "And it's cheap."

"Hey, it's a smart idea," Lucas said. Laski was a Columbia pathologist who had agreed to analyze Bekker's medical papers for the media. He had condemned them, attacked their morality and science, attacked Bekker as a sadist and a psychotic and a scientific moron-all of it calculated to bring Bekker in. Laski, his apartment and his office were covered by a web of plainclothes cops. So far, Bekker hadn't touched any of the trip wires. "That's why I was thinking about it. About variations."

"Like what?" prompted Kennett.

"Back in the Cities, Bekker subscribed to the Times, and I bet he reads it here. If we could set somebody up to give a lecture, some kind of professional speech that would pull him in…"

"Don't tease me, darlin'," Kennett said.

"We have some guy lecture on the medical experiments done by Dr. Mengele," Lucas said. "You know, the Nazi dude…"

"We know…"

"So he lectures on the ethics of using Mengele's studies in research and the ethics of using Bekker's stuff," Lucas said. "And what might come out of their so-called research that's valuable. And we make an announcement in the Times. "

The cops all looked at each other, and then Huerta said, "Jesus Christ, man, half the fuckin' town is Jewish. They'd go batshit…"

"Hey, I don't mean any goddamn anti-Semite fruitcake lecture," Lucas said. "I mean some kind of, you know, soft, intellectual, theory thing. I read about this Mengele ethics debate somewhere, so there's something to talk about. I mean, legit. Maybe we get somebody Jewish to front it, so nobody gets pissed off. Somebody with credentials."

"You think that'd do it?" Kennett said. He was interested.

"Bekker couldn't resist, if he heard about it. He's nuts about the topic. Maybe we could arrange for this guy, whoever we get, to have a controversy with Laski. Something that would get in the papers."

Kennett looked at the others. "What do you think?"

Carter tipped his head, grudgingly nodded. "Could you fix it?"

Kennett nodded. "Somebody could. O'Dell, maybe. We could get somebody at the New School. We know Bekker's around there."

"Sounds okay," said Huerta. "But it'll take a while to set up."

"Two or three days," said Kennett. "A week."

"We oughta have him by then…"

"So we cancel. It's like Laski: I don't see any downside, frankly, and it's cheap," Kennett said. He nodded at Lucas. "I'll get it started."

"Quick."

"Yeah," Kennett said. He looked around the room. "All right, so let's go over it. John, what'd we have from Narcotics?"

"We're hassling everybody, but nothing sounds good," said Blake. "Lotsa bullshit, we're chasing it…"

As they reviewed the status of the case, and routine assignments, Fell whispered to Lucas, "Your interviews are all set up. A couple of reporters are already here, and three or four more are coming."

Lucas nodded, but as she was about to add something, her eyes shifted away from him toward the door. A fat man walked in, his body swaying side to side, bumping the door frame, small dark eyes poking into the corners of the room, checking off the detectives, pausing at Lucas, pausing at Fell. He looked like H. L. Mencken in the later years. Spidery veins crisscrossed the gray cheeks; his thinning reddish hair was combed straight back with some kind of oil. His jowls were emphasized by a brooding, liverish underlip that seemed fixed in a permanent pout. He wore a three-piece suit in a color that might have been called oxblood, if anyone made oxblood suits.

"O'Dell," Fell said under her breath, at his ear. "Deputy commissioner in charge of cutting throats."

Lily followed O'Dell into the room, picked out Lucas, tipped her head and lifted her eyebrows. She wore a tailored navy-blue suit and a long, mannish red necktie knotted with a loose Windsor. She carried a heavy leather cop's purse over her shoulder, her hand lying casually on the strap at the back of the purse. If she moved her hand four inches, she'd be gripping the butt of a.45. Lucas had seen her use it once, had seen her shove the.45 in a man's face and pull the trigger, the man's face smearing as though he'd been struck with a hammer, all in the space of a tenth of a second…

Lily touched O'Dell's elbow, guided him toward a chair, then moved around where she could sit next to Lucas. "Get a chance to talk to Dick?" she whispered.

"Yeah. He seems like a pretty good guy…"

She looked at him, as though checking to see if he was serious, then nodded and looked away.

O'Dell was up-to-date on the case's progress, and had no particular ideas about what to do next, he told the cops. He just wanted to sit in, to get a feel for the movement. "What about decoys?" he asked. "Somebody downtown suggested that we might put a few people on the street…"

They argued about decoys for a while, a last-resort effort, but Kennett shook his head. "The area's too big," he said. He wandered over to a bulletin board-sized map of Manhattan, ran a finger from Central Park to the financial district. "If he was hitting a specific group, like hookers or gays, then maybe. But there's no connection between the victims. Except some negatives. He doesn't take street people, who'd probably be the easiest…"

"He may specifically pick victims who look healthy," said Case, one of the serial-killer specialists. "This science thing he has-Danny and I think he rules out anybody who's too odd, or diseased or infirm. They'd mess up his findings. The medical examiner reports are all pretty much the same: these people are healthy."

"All right," said Kennett. "So he takes seven people, five female, two male, one black, six white. Two of the whites are Hispanic, but that doesn't seem to mean anything."

"They're all noticeably small, except the first one," Kuhn said. "The second guy was only five-six and skinny."

"Disposal," Huerta grunted.

They all nodded, and there was another long moment of silence, everybody in the room staring at the map of Manhattan.

"It's gotta be a cab," somebody said. "If he can't let anybody see him, and he's gotta have money for drugs, and he's gotta have someplace to gas these people…" One of the cops looked at Lucas: "What are the chances that he had some money stashed? He was pretty well-off, right? Could he have ditched…?"

Lucas was shaking his head. "When we took him, we blindsided him. He thought he was home free. When his wife's estate got into court, all their money was accounted for."

"Okay, that was pretty thin."

"It seems to me that somebody's protecting him," Lucas said. "An old friend or a new friend, but somebody."

Kennett was nodding. "I've worried about that, but if that's right, there isn't much we can do about it."

"We can try pushing his friend, using the media again," Lucas said. "If he depends on somebody else…"

O'Dell, seated heavily on a shaky folding chair, interrupted. "Wait, wait. You guys are getting ahead of me. How do we think this, that he has a friend?"

"We've papered the goddamn town with his picture and with simulations of what he'd look like if he dyed his hair or grew a beard or if he shaved his head," said Kennett. "These aren't identikit mock-ups, these are based on good-quality photographs…"

"Yeah, yeah…" O'Dell said impatiently.

"So unless he's invisible or living in the sewers, he's probably being protected," Lucas said, picking up the thread from Kennett. "He can't be a regular tenant somewhere. He'd have to pay rent and people'd see him on a regular basis. He can't risk landlords or nosy neighbors."

"And that means he's living with somebody or he's on the street," Kennett said.

"He's not on the street," Lucas said positively. "I can't see him living like that. He just wouldn't do it. He's… fastidious. Besides, he's got to have a vehicle. He didn't call a cab to haul these bodies around."

"Unless he drives a cab himself," said Huerta.

"Not much there," said Diaz, shaking his head. "We'll push the stolen one…"

"And it'd still be pretty risky," Lucas said.

"Yeah, but it answers a lot of questions: how he gets transportation, how he makes money and still keeps his face hidden," Kennett said. "If he worked a couple of hours a night, late, and picked his spots… maybe concentrated on the tourist and convention areas, you know, the Javits Center, places like that. He'd mostly be dealing with out-of-towners, which would explain Cortese. People trust cabbies. Like if he pretended he had a parcel, gets out and asks somebody where an address was…"

"I don't know," said Lucas.

They all stared at the map some more. Too much city; single buildings that would hold the populations of two or three small towns.

"But I still think you might be right, that he's living with somebody," Kennett said finally. "How he gets his money…"

"He's got skills," Lucas said. "He's got an M.D., he knows chemistry. A good chemist on the run…"

"Methedrine," said White, a bald man in gray knit slacks. "Ecstasy. LSD. It's all back, almost like the old days."

"Be a good reason to protect him, too," said Kuhn. "He'd be a cash cow."

"Assuming this isn't just bullshit, what does it get us?" O'Dell asked impatiently.

"We start looking for ways to put pressure on whoever he's living with or who's covering for him," Lucas said. "We need some heavy-duty contact with the media."

"Why?" said O'Dell.

"Because we have to move them around. Get them to do a little propaganda for us. We need to talk about how anybody who's hiding Bekker is an accessory to mass murder. We need some headlines to that effect. That their only hope is to roll over on him, plead ignorance, get immunity. We've got to chase him out in the open."

"I could call somebody," O'Dell said.

"We need the right emphasis…"

"We can figure something out," O'Dell said. "Are you still talking to the reporters this morning?"

"Yeah."

"Throw something in, then…"

When the meeting broke up, O'Dell lurched ponderously out of his chair, leaned toward Lucas, and said, "We'd like to sit in on the press thing. Me and Lily."

Lucas nodded. "Sure." O'Dell nodded and headed toward the front of the room, and Lucas turned to Fell. "We're going out this afternoon?"

"Yeah. They've got us looking for fences," she said. She had gray eyes that matched the touch of gray in her hair; she was five-six or so, with a slightly injured smile and nicotine-stained fingers.

"Could I get copies or printouts of all the Bekker files, or borrow what I can't copy?"

"Right here," she said, patting the stack of manila folders in her lap.

From the front of the room, where he was talking to Kennett, O'Dell called, "Davenport." Lucas stood up and walked over, and O'Dell said, "Dick has been telling me about your idea, the lecture thing, the Mengele. I'll call around this afternoon and set it up. Like for next week. We'll play it like it's been set for a while."

Lucas nodded. "Good."

"I'll see you in the hall," O'Dell said, breaking away. Out of the corner of his eye, as O'Dell spoke to him, Lucas could see Kennett's mouth tic. Disgust? "I've gotta pee."

When he was gone, Lucas looked at Kennett and asked, "Why don't you like him?"

The distaste that had flicked across Kennett's face had been covered in an instant. He looked at Davenport for a long, measured beat and then said, "Because he never does anything but words. Maneuvers. Manipulations. He looks like a pig, but he's not. He's a goddamn spider. If he had a choice between lying and telling the truth, he'd lie because it'd be more interesting. That's why."

"Sounds like a good reason," Lucas said, looking after O'Dell. "Lily seems to like him."

"I can't figure that," Kennett said. They both glanced down the room at Lily, who was talking with Fell. "That pig-spider business, by the way… I put my ass in your hands. If he knew I thought that, my next job'd be directing traffic out of a parking garage."

"Not really," said Lucas. Power equations weren't that simple.

Kennett looked at him, amused. "No. Not really. But the asshole could be trouble."

They were both looking toward Lily, and when she tipped her head toward the hall, Lucas started for the door. "You coming?" he asked Fell.

She looked up from one of her files. "Am I invited?"

"Sure. Gotta be careful, though…"

Reporters from three papers and two television stations were waiting, along with two TV cameras. The reporters were in a good mood, joking with him, chatting with each other about problems at the papers. They didn't think much of the story: the interviews were easy and loose, focused on a trap that Lucas had built for Bekker in Minneapolis, and on Bekker himself.

"Really quick," one of the television reporters said to Lucas as the talk was wrapping up, " 'cause we're not going to have much time… You know Michael Bekker. You even visited with him in his home. How would you characterize him? From your personal acquaintance? He's been called an animal…"

"To call Bekker an animal is an insult to animals," Lucas said. "Bekker's a monster. That's the only word I can think of that's even close to what he is. He's a real, live horror-show freak."

"Far out," said the reporter, a harried blonde in a uniform blue blazer. She asked her cameraman, "How'd that look?"

"Looked good, that's what they'll use. Let's get a reverse shot on you, reacting…"

When the reporters were gone, O'Dell, sitting spread-legged on a folding chair, the way fat men do, nodded approvingly. "That was good. You say Bekker's smart and hard to catch and that everything is being done." His heavy lips moved in and out a couple of times. "Like the blonde broad said, 'Far out.' "