Silent Prey (12 page)

“Angela Arnold and Thomas Leese,” Lucas said to Fell. “Where’re these addresses?”

Fell looked and said, “Lower East Side. Never heard of them, though. Want me to run them?”

“Yes. Or just drop them off, get them run overnight,” Lucas said, looking at his watch. “Kennett wants to be careful, and I don’t want to step on him. Let’s not worry about talking to them until tomorrow.”

Fell dropped him at the hotel, then went on to Midtown South. Lucas cleaned up, ate dinner in the hotel restaurant, went back to his room and watched the Twins and Yankees through the seventh inning, then caught a cab for Lily’s apartment. She buzzed him up and came to the door in her bare feet.

“You’re late,” she said.

“Got hung up,” Lucas said, stepping inside. He’d stayed in her apartment almost two years earlier, when she’d just moved in: the furniture then had a temporary, scrounged look. Boxes had been stacked in the living room, a television had sat on two short metal file cabinets. The kitchen wallpaper had been a bizarre bamboo design, with monkeys; the countertops a well-chipped plastic. Now the place had a careful, colored look: warm rugs over a beige carpet; bright hand-printed graphics on the walls; sparse, but carefully chosen chairs and a broad leather couch. The kitchen was a subtle gold with hardwood counters. He’d stopped by the night before to drop off the key impressions, but hadn’t stayed long enough to look around. Now he took a few minutes. “The place looks good,” he said finally. He felt a pressure: when he’d been there two years before, they’d spent a lot of time in bed, Lily intent on exploring, feeling, desperate for the intensity of the sex. Now they were polite.

“That’s what happens when your marriage splits up. You work on the apartment,” she said. She stood close
to him, but not too close, one hand just touching the other at her waist, like a hostess. Polite and something else. Wary?

“Yeah, I know.”

“I made the back bedroom into an office, everything’s stacked up in there. Go on back. Want a beer?”

“Sure.” He wandered back to the office, yawned, sat down at the desk, pushed the chair back far enough that he could get his heels on a half-open drawer, picked up the first file. He’d been reading files all day; a million facts floating around free-form.

“Kays, Martin.” He flipped the file open. Kays had been arrested twice for rape. Served two years the first time, acquitted the second time. He was suspected in as many as thirty attacks on the Upper West Side. He had had it down to a science, attacking women at night in locked parking garages. He apparently entered when a car exited, ducking under the descending door, then waited until he caught a woman alone in the dark. Half-dozen busts on drug-possession charges, assault, theft, drunkenness.

“Kays,” Lily said, looking over his shoulder. “He should’ve gotten it five years earlier.”

“Wrong thinking,
mon capitaine,
” Lucas said, looking up at her. She handed him a Special Export.

“Yeah, but it’s part of the problem: with the exception of the three killings I told you about, including Walt, which they can deny, most people in town would be rootin’ for these guys if they knew about them. Especially when they’re doing guys like Kays. I doubt we could find a jury that’d convict them.”

“You mean it was all right, as long as they were hitting dirtbags?”

“No. Just that if you kill somebody who deserves to
die, and will anyway, someday, but maybe fuck up a hundred people’s lives before then . . . hurrying the due date along doesn’t seem that terrible. Compared to killing innocent people. But these guys aren’t hitting criminals anymore, they’re attacking . . . freedom.”

“I can’t operate at that kind of rarefied theoretical level,” Lucas said, grinning at her.

“It does sound like wimpy-ass bullshit, doesn’t it?” she said.

“It does.”

“But it isn’t,” she said.

“All right.”

“If you don’t feel it . . . why’d you sign on?” she asked.

He shrugged. “ ’Cause you’re a good friend of mine.”

“Is that enough?”

“Sure. As far as I’m concerned, it’s one of the few good reasons for doing anything. I’d hate to kill somebody out of patriotism or duty; I could never be a warden and throw the switch on somebody. But in hot blood, to protect family or friends . . . that’s all right.”

“Revenge?”

He thought for a minute, then nodded. “Yeah, revenge is in there. I like hunting Bekker. I’m gonna get him.”

“You and Barb Fell.”

“Yup. Speaking of whom . . .” He dug in his jacket shirt pocket. “Look at these. The guy looks like a cop and she’s tight with him, or was.” He handed her two of the Polaroids he’d taken at Fell’s.

“Oh, Barbara,” Lily muttered, looking at them, shaking her head. “I know this guy. Vaguely. He’s a lieutenant in Traffic. We’ll run him against the killings and see what we get.”

“And I’ve got some names for you. Friends of hers. I
don’t know how many are cops, but if you could run them . . .”

“Sure.”

Lucas stayed until two o’clock, taking notes on a yellow legal pad, when Lily came in and asked, “Find anything?”

“No. And you were right. These guys were the scum of the scum. How many people could put together a list like this?”

“Hundreds,” she said. “But Barb Fell was at the intersection of a lot of possibilities.”

Lucas nodded, ripped the sheets off the legal pad, folded them and stuck them in his jacket pocket. “I’ll keep working her.”

Lily’s apartment was on the second floor of a converted townhouse. Lucas left at ten after two, the night just beginning to find the soft coolness that lay between the tropical days. He was a little tired, but still awake; at home he might have gone for a walk along the river, smoothing down for bedtime. In New York . . .

The street was reasonably well lit; a taxi loitered in the next block. He turned that way and started walking, hands in his pockets.

There were two of them.

They were big, quick, like professional linebackers.

The cars along the street were parked bumper-to-bumper. The guy behind the Citation got Lucas to turn toward him by dragging something metallic across the bumper, a chilling, ripping sound, like a knife dragged down a washboard.

Lucas instinctively stepped away and half-turned, pivoting toward the sound. Something was happening: a
sound like that had to be intentional. His hand dropped to the small of his back, toward the weight of his .45.

And as he turned, the second guy, the guy who’d hidden behind the stoop, charged onto the walk, slashed at Lucas’ elbow with a sap, hit him in the spine with a shoulder, and drove him into the Citation.

The pain from the sap was like an explosion, as clear as a star on a cold night, separate from the impact, standing by itself: a skillful, debilitating cop-pain. It began at his elbow and exploded up his arm to his shoulder, and Lucas screamed, thinking he might have been shot, his arm flopping uselessly as he was smashed into the car. He tried to swing the arm back, to clear out to the right, but it wouldn’t move.

He saw the other man’s hand coming down, and partially blocked it with his left, then was hit in the cheekbone with a fist and rocked back against the car.

The second man, coming over the car’s fender, hit him, leather gloves, the second punch in a quick one-two-three combo, and Lucas, back hunched, tried to cover.

Thought:
Clear out, clear out . . .

He was hit again, across the ear, but this time it didn’t hurt: it was stunning and he started down, rolling. A gloved hand struck at him and he grabbed it with his good left hand, pulled it under him, pinned it against his chest, let his weight fall on it. He heard what seemed to be a faraway screaming as they hit the concrete walk, felt a snap; he’d broken something. He felt a dim, distant satisfaction, because he was losing this, they were killing him . . . .

Heard glass breaking, registered it, didn’t know what it was, but felt the pressure change.

Thought:
Clear out, clear out.
Let go of the gloved hand, felt it wrench away, and the other man screaming
 . . . Tried to roll under the car, but it was too close to the curb. Tried to cover his head with his good arm . . .

The .45 was like a thunderbolt.

The muzzle-flash broke over them like lightning, freezing everything in a strobe effect. The attackers wore nylon ski masks and gloves, long-sleeved shirts. The one who’d hit him from behind was pivoting, already running. A sap dangled from his hand, long, leather-bound, with a rounded bulge at the business end. The one whose arm Lucas had broken scrabbled to his feet and screamed, “Jesus . . .” and ran.

The .45 struck down again as Lucas sat down on the curb, his legs gone, trying to roll under the car and away from the lightning, not knowing where it came from, groping in the small of his back with his good arm, but the holster was too far around, trying to free his pistol as the attackers faded like ghosts, without a word, down the sidewalk . . . .

Then silence.

And Lily was there in a cotton nightgown, the .45 in her fist, a ludicrous combination, the soft white human cotton and the dark steel killer Colt.

“Lucas . . .” She maneuvered toward him, controlling the .45, not really looking at him, her eyes searching for targets. “Are you okay?”

“Fuck no,” he said.

Bekker was first astonished, then swept away. When he returned to the bookstore, he glanced at the counterman with a sigh.

“Are you okay?” The counterman was concerned. He had a long neck and a narrow head with small features, like an oversized thumb sticking out of his shoulders. His face was cocked to one side and the store lights glittered off the right lense of his spectacles, lending him a Strangelovian menace.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” Bekker squeaked. He shuffled his feet and looked away, down the store.

The store was fifteen feet wide and forty deep. Vinyl paneling sagged away from the walls behind rough shelving; the linoleum floor was cracked and holed. The narrow aisles smelled of moldy paper, disintegrating bookcovers and the traffic of the unwashed. An obese man stood at a sale table halfway back, under a round antishoplifting mirror, a hardcover Spiderman anthology propped on his gut, feeding a nut-covered ice cream bar into his face. Bekker hadn’t even seen him come in.

He looked down at the book in his hands, the book that had taken him away. He’d dug it out of a pile of crap in the Medicine/Anthropology section . . . .

“You didn’t move for so long, I thought maybe, I don’t know . . .” thumb-face said, his Adam’s apple bobbing like a toy boat.

He’s trying to pick me up,
Bekker thought. The notion was flattering, but unwanted. Nobody was allowed too close. Before the Minneapolis cops had beaten him with their pistols, Bekker had been beautiful, but now Beauty was dead. And though he wore heavy Cover Mark makeup to hide the scars, they were visible in bright light. The
Post
had carried the pictures, with every cut and scar for the world to see . . . .

Bekker nodded, polite, not speaking, glanced at his watch. He’d been gone five minutes; he must have been an odd sight, a reader frozen, absolutely unmoving, unblinking, for five minutes or more.

Better leave.
Bekker walked to the counter, head down, and pushed the book across. He’d trained himself to speak as little as possible. Speech could give him away.

“Sixteen-fifteen, with tax,” the counterman said. He glanced at the book’s cover. “Pretty rough stuff.”

Bekker nodded, pushed seventeen dollars across the counter, accepted the change.

“Come back again,” thumb-face called, as Bekker went out into the street. The bell above the door tinkled cheerily as he left.

Bekker hurried home, saw his name on the front of a newspaper, and slowed. A picture, a familiar face. What?

He picked up a half-brick that held the newspapers flat. Davenport? Christ, it
was
Davenport. He snatched up the paper, threw a dollar at the kiosk man and hurried away.

“Want yer change?” The dealer leaned out of the kiosk.

No. He had no time for change. Bekker scuttled down the street, his heels scratching and rapping, trying to read the paper in the dim ambient light. Finally, he stopped in the brilliantly lit doorway of an electronics store, the windows full of cameras, fax machines, tape recorders, calculators, disc players, portable telephones, miniature televisions and Japanese telescopes. He held the paper close to his nose.

 . . . controversial former detective from Minneapolis who is generally credited with solving Bekker’s first series of murders and identifying Bekker as the killer. In a fight at the time of the arrest, Bekker’s face was badly torn . . .

 . . . could have shot him,” Davenport said, “but we were trying to take him alive. We knew he had an accomplice, and we believed that the accomplice was dead—but unless we took Bekker alive, we’d never know for sure . . .

Liar. Looking up from the paper, Bekker wanted to scream it:
Liar.
Bekker touched his face, hidden beneath the layers of special cosmetic. Davenport had ripped it. Davenport had destroyed Beauty. Bekker froze, was gone . . . .

A bum came up, saw him in the doorway.

“Hey,” the bum said, blocking the sidewalk, and Bekker came back. The bum was not particularly large, but he looked as though he’d been hit often and wasn’t afraid to be hit again. Bekker wasn’t buying it.

“Fuck off,” he bawled, his teeth showing. The bum
stepped aside, suddenly afraid, and Bekker went by like a draft of Arctic air. Cursing to himself, Bekker turned the corner, waited for a moment, then stepped back to see if the bum was coming after him. He wasn’t. Bekker went on to the Lacey building, muttering, growling, crying. He let himself in the front door, hurried down the basement, dropped into his reading chair.

Davenport in town.
The fear gripped him for a moment and he flashed back to the trial, Davenport’s testimony, the detective staring at him the whole time, challenging him . . . . Bekker lived through the testimony, mind caught, tangled in the random sparking of his mind . . . . And he came back, with a sigh.

What? He had a package on his lap. He looked at it in puzzlement, dumped it. The book. He’d forgotten.
Final Cuts: Torture Through the Ages.
The book was filled with illustrations of racks and stakes, of gibbets and iron maidens. Bekker wasn’t interested. Torture was for freaks and perverts and clowns. But near the end of it . . .

Yes.
A photo taken in the 1880s. A Chinese man, the caption said, had assassinated a prince, and had been condemned to the death of a thousand cuts. The executioners had been slicing him to pieces as the photo was taken.

The dying man’s face was radiant.

This was what he’d sought in his own work, and here it was, in a century-old photo. This was the light, the luminance of death, pouring from the face of the Chinese man. It wasn’t pain—pain was disfiguring: he knew that from his work. He’d been doing his own photography, but had never achieved anything like this. Perhaps it was the old black-and-white film, something special about it.

Bekker sat and gnawed his thumb, Davenport forgotten, obliterated by the importance of this discovery.
Where did the aura come from? The knowledge of death? Of the imminence of it? Was that why old people, at the edge, were often described as radiant? Because they knew the end was there, they could see it, and understood there was no eluding it? Was the knowledge of impending death a critical point? Could that be it? An intellectual function, somehow, or an emotional release, rather than an autonomic one?

Too excited to sit, he dropped the book and took a turn around the room. The matchbox was there, in his pocket; three pills. He gobbled them, then looked at the now empty box.
Here
was a crisis. He’d have to go back out. He’d been putting it off, but now . . .

He glanced at his watch. Yes. Whitechurch would be working.

He stopped in the bathroom, clumsily fished himself out of the pants, peed, flushed, rearranged himself, then went to the telephone. He knew the number by heart and punched it in. A woman’s voice answered.

“Dr. West, please,” Bekker said.

“Just a moment, please, I’ll page.”

A moment later: “West.” The voice was cool, New Jersey, and corroded. The voice of a fixer.

“I need some angels,” Bekker breathed; he used a breathy voice with Whitechurch.

“Mmm, that’s a problem. I’m short. I’ve got plenty of white, though, and I’ve got crosses. Almost none of the other,” Whitechurch said. He sounded anxious. Bekker was an exceptional customer, white, careful, and paid in cash. A Connecticut schoolteacher maybe, peddling to the kids.

“That’s difficult,” Bekker said. “How much of the white?”

“I could give you three.”

“Three would be good. How many crosses?”

“Thirty? I could do thirty.”

“Good. When? Must be soon.”

“Make it a half-hour.”

“Excellent, half an hour,” Bekker breathed, and hung up.

When he’d cleaned out the basement, he’d found a pile of discarded sports equipment—a couple of dried-out leather first baseman’s mitts with spiderwebs in the pockets; a half-dozen bats, all badly marred, and one split; a deflated basketball; mold- and dirt-covered baseball shoes with rusted metal spikes; two pairs of sadly abused sneakers; and even a pair of shorts, a tank top and a jock. He’d thrown it all in a long box with a Frisbee, a croquet set and a couple of broken badminton racquets. He’d pushed the box into a dark corner. Anybody looking into it could see all the junk with a glance; nothing good; nothing you’d even want to touch.

Bekker had sliced a C-shaped hatch in the bottom of the basketball and stashed his cash inside. Now he picked up the ball, took out three thousand dollars and carefully put the ball back.

After a quick check in the mirror, he climbed the stairs to the ground floor and padded to the back. Just as he reached the back door, the old woman’s voice floated down the stairs. “Alex . . . ?”

Bekker stopped, thought about it, then exhaled in exasperation and walked back across the darkened floor to the staircase. “Yes?”

“I need the special pills.” Her voice was shadowy, tentative.

“I’ll get them,” Bekker said.

He went back down to his apartment, found the brown
bottle of morphine, shook two into his hand, and climbed back up the stairs, talking to himself. Images of the deathly radiance played through his mind, and, preoccupied, he nearly stumbled into Bridget Land. Land was standing at the base of the stairs that led up to Edith Lacey’s apartment.

“Ah,” she said, “I was just leaving, Alex . . . . You have Edie’s medicine?”

“Yes, yes . . .” Bekker kept his face turned away, head down, tried to brush past.

“Are the pills illegal? Are they illegal drugs?” Land asked. She had squared herself up to him, her chin lifted, tight, catching his shirt sleeve as he passed her. She had smart, dark eyes that picked at him.

Bekker, his voice straining, nodded and said, “I think so . . . . I get them from a friend of hers. I’m afraid to ask what they are.”

“What are you . . .” Land began, but Bekker was climbing the stairs away from her. At the top of the stairs, he glanced back, and Land was turning away, toward the door.

“Please don’t tell,” Bekker said. “She’s in pain . . . .”

“Did you see Bridget?” Mrs. Lacey asked.

“Yes, down below . . . .” He got a glass of water and carried the pills to Mrs. Lacey. She gulped them greedily, hands trembling, smacking her lips in the water.

“Bridget asked me if these were illegal drugs. I’m afraid she might call the police,” Bekker said.

Mrs. Lacey was horrified. “You mean . . .”

“They
are
illegal,” Bekker said. “You could never get these in a nursing home.”

“Oh no, oh no . . .” The old woman rocked, twisting her gnarled, knobby fingers.

“You should call her. Give her time to get home, and talk to her,” Bekker said.

“Yes, yes, I’ll call her . . . .”

“Her number’s on the emergency pad, by the telephone,” Bekker said.

“Yes, yes . . .” She looked up at him, her thin skin papery and creased in the moody light.

“Don’t forget . . .”

“No . . .” And then: “I can’t find my glasses.”

He found them near the kitchen sink; handed them to her without a word. She bobbed her head in thanks and said, “My glasses, my glasses,” and shuffled toward the TV. “Have you seen . . . No, you don’t watch. I saw Arnold on the news.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger. She expected him any day to clean the crooks out of New York.

“I’ve got to go.”

“Yes, yes . . .” She waved him away.

“Call Bridget,” Bekker said.

“Yes . . .” From the side, her face glowed blue in the light from the television screen, like a black-light painting. Like the face of the dying Chinese . . .

Ultraviolet.

The idea came from nowhere, but with a force that stopped him at the head of the stairs. Could the illumination of the dying man be related to a shifted spectrum? A light phenomenon that occurred in infrared or ultraviolet, that occasionally strayed into visible light? Was that why some people glowed and others didn’t? Was that how an old camera caught it, with the poor, wide-spectrum film of the nineteenth century? He’d seen both ultraviolet and infrared photography as a medical student. Ultraviolet could actually increase the resolution of a microscope, and highlight aspects of a specimen not
visible in ordinary light. And infrared could pick up temperature variations, even from dark objects.

But that was all he knew. Could he use his ordinary cameras? How to check?

Excited, excited, the science pounded in his brain. He hurried down the stairs, remembering Bridget Land only at the last minute. He slowed, looked ahead apprehensively, but she was gone.

He hurried out the back, got in the Volkswagen, drove it to the fence, hopped out, unlocked the fence, drove through, checked for intruders, climbed back out, locked the gate behind him. He was flapping, frantic, eager to get on his way, to sustain the insights of the evening.

North across Prince, east across Broadway, keeping to the side streets, the buildings pressing against him, working his way north and east. There. First Avenue. And Bellevue, an aging pile of brick.

Bekker looked at his watch. He was a minute or so early; no problem. He took it slowly, slowly . . . . And there he was, walking toward the bus stop. Bekker leaned across the car and rolled the passenger-side window halfway down, pulled to the curb.

Whitechurch saw him, looked once around, stepped to the window. “Three of the white, thirty crosses, all commercial. Two of the angels, good stuff . . .”

“Only two?” Bekker felt the control slipping, fought to retain it. “Okay. But I’ll be calling you in a couple of days.”

“I’ll have more by then. How many could you handle?”

“Thirty? Could you get me thirty? And thirty more of the crosses?”

“Yeah, I think so,” Whitechurch said. “My guy’s bringing out a new line. Call me . . . and I’ll need twenty-one hundred for tonight.”

Bekker nodded, peeled twenty-one one-hundred-dollar bills from the roll in his pocket and handed them to Whitechurch. Whitechurch knew Bekker carried a pistol; in fact, he had sold it to him. Bekker wasn’t worried about a rip-off. Whitechurch stuffed the bills in his pocket and dropped a bag onto the front seat.