Silent Prey (11 page)

“I don’t know, but it’s not enough,” Lucas said. He flipped his hand at the stack of paper. “Let’s look at the victims first . . . .”

They spent an hour at it. Bekker had killed six people in Manhattan, their bodies found scattered around Midtown, the Village, SoHo and Little Italy. Working on the theory he wouldn’t take them far, he was probably south of Central Park, north of the financial district. The zip codes on the envelopes he’d mailed to the medical journals suggested the same thing: three papers, three different zips: 10002, 10003 and 10013.

“He uses halothane?”

“That’s what they assume,” Fell said, nodding. “They found traces in three people when they were doing the blood chemistry. And that supposedly accounts for the lack of any sign of a struggle. The stuff is quick. Like one-two-three-gone.”

“Where did he get it?”

“Don’t know yet—we’ve run all the hospitals in Manhattan, northern Jersey, Connecticut. Nothing yet, but you know, nobody tracks exact amounts of the stuff. You could transfer some from one tank to another. If the tank wasn’t gone, how could you tell?”

“Nnn. Okay. But how does he get close enough to whip it on them?” Lucas got up and went out into the hallway, came back with a cone-shaped throwaway water cup. “Stand up.”

She stood up. “What?”

He thrust the cup at her face. “If I come at you like this, from the front, I can’t get the leverage.”

Fell stepped back and the cup came free.

“Even if they got some gas, they could get far enough back to scream,” he said.

“We don’t know that they didn’t scream,” said Fell.

“Nobody heard anything.”

She nodded. “So if he hits them on the street, he must come up from the back.”

“Yeah. He grabs them, pulls them in, claps it over their mouth . . .” He turned her around, clapped the cup over her mouth, his elbow in her spine, his hand hooked over her shoulder. “One, two, three . . . Gone.”

“Do it again,” she said.

He did it again, but this time, she grabbed his wrist and twisted. The paper cup crumbled and her mouth was open. “Scream,” she said. He let go and she said, “That doesn’t work too well, either.”

“This woman . . . Ellen Foen.” Lucas picked up the file, flipped it open. “Statements from her friends say she was very cautious. She’d had some trouble with street people—they hang out in the alley behind the place she worked, going through the dumpsters. She could look out through the glass port in the door while it was still locked, and she always checked before she went out. So if Bekker was there, she must have seen him.”

“It was late.”

“Nine o’clock. Not quite dark.”

“Maybe he was dressed okay. He’s not a real big guy—maybe she just wasn’t worried.”

“But with his face?”

“Makeup. Or . . . I don’t know. It makes more sense to me that he’s driving a cab. She gets in, he’s got one of the security windows between himself and the backseat. He’s got it sealed up somehow, and when she shuts the door, he turns on the gas. She passes out. I mean, I just can’t see a woman, somebody supposedly cautious,
letting a guy get that close to her. And even if he comes up from behind, she’d fight it. You’re a hell of a lot bigger than Bekker, but you’d have a hard time holding a mask over my mouth, even from behind.”

“Maybe that’s why he picks small people, women,” Lucas suggested.

“Even so, you just twist away. Even if he gets you, there’d be bruises—but the M.E. hasn’t found any bruises. It’s gotta be a cab, or something like it.”

“But why did Foen take a cab? She was running across the street to get Cokes for everybody. Her boyfriend was supposed to pick her up at nine-thirty, when she got off.”

“Maybe . . . fuck, I don’t know.”

“And look at Cortese. Cortese walks out of this club and across Sixth Avenue, down Fifty-ninth Street toward the Plaza. His friends saw him go in at the Sixth Avenue end. He apparently never arrived at the other end, because there was a phone message for him at the Plaza from nine o’clock on, and he never got it. So he gets picked up on Fifty-ninth between Fifth and Sixth. What happened in there? Why would he flag a cab? He only had to go a few hundred feet.”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. And it’s dark in there, so maybe he got jumped. But you gotta be careful when you start looking for logic, man . . . .”

“I know, I know . . . .”

“It could be anything. Maybe Cortese left his friends because he was looking for a little action.”

Lucas shook his head. “He sounds awful straight.”

“So does Garber . . . I don’t know.”

“Keep reading,” said Lucas.

She was watching him, he thought. Odd glances, wary. “Is there something wrong?” he asked finally.

After a moment, she asked, “Are you really here working on Bekker?”

“Well . . .” He spread his arms to the stack of paper on the table. “Yeah. Why?”

“Oh, the more I think about it, the odder it seems. We’ll catch him, you know.”

“Sure, I know,” Lucas said. “I’m mostly here for the publicity thing. Take some heat off.”

“That doesn’t seem quite right either,” Fell said. She studied him. “I don’t know about you. You hang out with O’Dell. You’re not Internal Affairs?”

“What?” He pulled back, surprised. “Jesus, Barbara. No. I’m not Internal Affairs.”

“You’re sure?”

“Hey. You know what happened to me in Minneapolis?”

“You supposedly beat up somebody. A kid.”

“A pimp. He’d cut up a woman with a church key, one of my snitches. Everybody on the street knew about it and I had to do something. So I did. He turned out to be a juvenile—I guess I knew that—and I got hammered by Internal Affairs. There was nothing particularly fair about it. I was just doing what I had to do, and everybody knew it. I got fucked because fucking me was safer than not fucking me. But I’m not Internal Affairs. You can check, easy enough.”

“No, no.”

She went back to her papers, and Lucas to his, but a minute later he said, “Jesus, Internal Affairs.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Well . . .”

They took a break, walked two blocks down, bumping hips, and got a booth in a Slice-o’-Pie pizza joint, with
gallon-sized paper cups of Diet Pepsi. She liked him: Lucas knew it and let the talk drift toward the personal. He told her about his onetime long-distance relationship with Lily; about the ambiguity now. About his kid.

“I wouldn’t mind having a kid,” Fell said. “My fuckin’ biological alarm clock is banging like Big Ben.”

“How old are you?” he asked.

“Thirty-six.”

“Any fatherhood prospects on the horizon?”

“Not at the moment,” she said. “All I meet are cops and crooks, and I don’t want a cop or a crook.”

“Hard to meet people?”

“Meeting them isn’t the problem. The problem is, the guys I like, don’t like me. Eventually. Like five years ago, I was going out with this lawyer dude. Not a big-time lawyer, just a guy. Divorced. Long hair, did a lot of pro bono. And pretty hip. You know.”

“Yeah. Exactly. Nice neckties.”

“Yeah. He was looking around to get remarried. I mighta. But then one day I was out decoying and this big asshole comes onto me really hard, gets me on a wall, whacks me—he’s getting off on whacking me. And I go down and I’ve got this little hideout piece on my leg, this .25 auto, and he’s just bending over to pick me up and I stick the piece in his teeth and his eyes get about the size of dishpans and I back him off, he’s saying, ‘Hold it, hold it . . .’ ”

“Where’s your backup?”

“They’re just running up. They put the guy on the wall and one of them says, ‘Jesus, Fell, you’re gonna have a mouse bigger’n Mickey’—the asshole’d whacked me right under the eye, right on the eye-socket bone, you know?” She rubbed her eye socket, and Lucas nodded. “Hurt like hell. And I say, ‘Yeah?’ And they got the guy
leaning on the wall with his legs apart, and I say, ‘Say good-bye to your nuts, shitbag,’ and I punted the sonofabitch so hard his balls had to take a train back from Ohio.”

“Yeah?” Lucas laughed. Cop stories were the best stories, and Fell looked positively merry.

“So I tell this story to my lawyer friend and he freaks out. And he’s not worried about my eye,” she said wryly.

“He’s worried about the guy on the wall?”

“No, no. He knew that happened. He didn’t mind if
somebody
did it, he just didn’t want me to do it. And I think what really bothered him was my quote: ‘Say good-bye to your nuts, shitbag.’ I shouldn’t have told him that. It really bothered him. I think he wanted to join a country club somewhere, and he could see me sitting out on the flagstone terrace with a mint julep or some fuckin’ thing, telling the other country club ladies this, ‘Say good-bye to your nuts, shitbag.’ ”

Lucas shrugged. “You ever tried a cop?”

“Yeah, yeah.” She nodded, with a small smile, eyes unfocusing. “A trouser snake. We were hot for a while, but . . . You want a little peace and quiet when you’re home. He wanted to go out cruising for dopers.”

Lucas took a bite out of a slice of pepperoni, chewed a minute and then said, “A couple of years ago, Lily and I were involved. This is between you and me?”

“Sure.” The curiosity was wide on her face, unhidden.

“We were getting intense, this was back in Minneapolis, her marriage was falling apart,” Lucas said. “Then this Indian dude shot her right in the chest. Goddamn near killed her.”

“I know about that.”

“I freaked out. Man. So then we saw each other a few times, but I’m afraid to fly, and she was busy . . . .”

“Yeah, yeah . . .”

“Then last year . . .”

“The actress,” Fell said. “The one that Bekker killed.”

“I’m like a curse,” Lucas said, staring past Fell’s head, eyes and voice gone dark. “If I’d been a little smarter, a little quicker . . . Shit.”

After lunch, they went back to the paper, working through it, finding nothing. Fell, restless, wandered down to the team room as Lucas continued to read. Kennett brought her back a half-hour later.

“Bellevue,” she said, plopping down in the chair across from Lucas.

“What?” Lucas looked at Kennett, leaning in the door.

“Bellevue lost some monitoring equipment from one of its repair shops. We never found out because it wasn’t too obvious—everything was accounted for, on paper. But when the stuff didn’t come back from repair, somebody checked, and it was gone. The repair people have receipts, they thought it was back on the floor. Anyway, it’s been gone for more than a month, and probably more like six or seven weeks. From before the time Bekker killed the first one,” Kennett said.

“They lost exactly what Bekker’s been using in his papers,” Fell said.

“He could’ve gotten the halothane there, too, and probably any amount of drugs,” Lucas said. “All from one source, if it’s a staffer.”

“Sounds like him,” Fell said.

“I’d bet on it,” Kennett said. He ran a hand through his hair, straightened his tie. Pissed. “God damn it, we were slow pulling this in.”

“What’re you going to do?”

“Move very quietly: we don’t want to scare anybody
off,” Kennett said. “We’ll start processing Bellevue staffers against criminal records. And we’ll touch all the dopers we know, see who knows who on the inside. Then we do interviews. It’ll take a few days. Maybe you guys could get back to your fences? See if you could find somebody who handles Bellevue.”

“Yeah.” Lucas looked at his watch. Almost three. “Let’s get back to Jackie Smith,” he said to Fell.

Smith met them in Washington Square. The afternoon was oppressively hot, but Smith was cool: he arrived in a gray Mercedes, which he parked by a hydrant.

“I don’t want to talk to you. You want to talk to somebody, talk to my lawyer,” Smith said as Lucas and Fell walked up. They stood just off the boccie ball courts, under a gingko tree, hiding from the sun.

“Come on, Jackie,” Lucas said. “I’m sorry about the goddamn putting green. I got a little overheated.”

“Overheated, my ass,” Smith snarled. “You know how long it’ll take to fix it?”

“Jackie, we really need to make an arrangement, okay?” Lucas said. “Something new came up on this Bekker guy, and you’re in a position to help. Like I said last night, it’s personal with me. No bullshit. I just need a little information.”

“I don’t know fuckin’ Bekker from any other asshole,” Smith said impatiently.

“Hey, we believe you,” Lucas said. “And I had to do the green. I had to get your attention—you were blowing us off. Isn’t that right?”

Smith stared at him for a long beat, then said, “So what do you want? Exactly?”

“We need the names of guys who can get stuff out of Bellevue.”

“That’s all you want? Then you’ll get off my back?”

“We can’t promise,” Lucas said. “I can’t talk for Barbara—but
I’d
be a hell of a lot friendlier.”

“Jesus Christ, I’m dealing with a fuckin’ fruitcake,” Smith said. Then: “I don’t handle deals at that level. That’s small-time.”

“I know, I know, but we need a guy who does handle that kind of action. A couple of names, that’s all.”

“You gonna fuck them over?”

“Not if they talk to me. But if they fuck
me
over, I’ll be back to you.”

Fell jumped in with a sales pitch: “Jesus, Jackie, this’d be so easy if you just ride along. It’s no skin off your ass. You’re actually not helping the cops. You’re helping some poor woman who’s gonna get her heart cut out, or something.”

“Yeah, you’re the one who poured my coffee on the street,” Smith said, apropos of nothing at all. He looked across the plaza, where a group of black kids were working through a dance routine to rap music from a boombox. “All right,” he said. “Two guys. Well: a guy and a woman. They’re not actually inside the hospital, but they can put you onto guys who are inside.”

“That’s all we were asking for . . . .”

“Yeah, yeah. Jesus, you’re both full of shit . . . .” Then he started toward his car and said, “I’ll be a minute.”

“Making a call,” Fell said as Smith disappeared into the Mercedes.

He was back in two minutes, with two names and addresses. Lucas wrote the names in his notebook. Smith, with a snort of disgust, turned back to his car, shaking his head.