Silent Prey (15 page)

“I’m going back to the hotel. I need a nap, I feel like shit,” Lucas said.

“We’re stuck?”

“Except for Whitechurch, I don’t know where we go,” Lucas said. “Let’s think about it. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

At the Lakota, Lucas examined his swollen cheek in the mirror. The color of the bruise was deepening, a purple blotch that dominated the side of his face, shiny in the middle, rougher toward the edges. He touched the abraded skin and winced. He’d been hit before, and knew what would happen: the abrasions would scab over while the skin around them turned yellow-green, and in a week, he’d look even worse; he’d look like Frankenstein. He shook his head at himself, tried a tentative grin, ate a half-dozen aspirin and slept for two hours. When he woke, the headache had faded, but his stomach was queasy. He gobbled four more aspirin, showered, brushed his teeth, fished an oversize Bienfang art pad from under the bed and got a wide-tipped Magic Marker from his briefcase. He wrote:

Bekker.
Needs money.
Needs drugs.
Lives Midtown w/friend?
Has vehicle.
Hasn’t been seen. Disguise?
Chemist skills.
Medical skills.
Contact at Bellevue.
Night.

He tacked the chart to a wall and lay on his bed, studying it. Bekker needed money if he was buying drugs, and he almost certainly would be. In the Hennepin County Jail he’d begged for them, for chemical relief.

Therefore: he had to be talking to dealers, or at least one dealer. Could he be working for one? Not likely as a salesman: even the dumbest of the dumb would recognize him as a time bomb, if they knew who he was. But if he was working as a chemist—methedrine was simple to synthesize, with the right training and access to the raw materials. If he were running a crank line, that would explain where he’d get money, and drugs, and maybe even a place to stay.

The car was another problem. He was dumping the bodies, obviously from a vehicle. How would he get access? How would he license it? Everything pointed to an accomplice . . . .

He stood, wandered into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. The abrasion was stiffening. He probed it with a fingernail, lifting a flake of skin, and blood trickled down his cheek. Damn. He knew better. He got a wad of toilet paper, held it to his cheek, and went back to the bed.

He looked at the chart again, but his mind drifted away from Bekker, toward the other case. Why had they jumped him? And had they really gone after him,
or was something else happening? They could have taken him with guns: they had him cold. If they hadn’t wanted to kill him, they still could have gotten to him more quickly, with baseball bats. Why had they risked resistance? If he’d had a gun in his hand, he would have killed them . . . .

Why had Lily looked out the window when she did?

But the major puzzle was more subtle. He wasn’t getting anywhere, and Lily and O’Dell must see that. All he could do was look at paper, and listen to people talk. He had none of the insider information, the history, that could point him in the right direction. And yet . . . he was surrounded by people who might be involved: Fell, Kennett, O’Dell himself, even Lily. And not coincidentally.

At eight-thirty he got up; he dressed, went out to the street, flagged a cab, and rode ten minutes to Lily’s apartment. She was waiting.

“You still look rough,” she said as she opened the door. She touched his cheek. “Feels hot. Are you sure you want to do this? It’s a lot of running around.”

“Yeah,” he said, nodding. “Rich is set for nine?”

“Yes. He’s nervous, but he’s coming.”

“I don’t want him to see me,” Lucas said.

“Okay. You can sit in the kitchen with the lights out, talk to him down the hall.”

“Fine.” Lucas, hands in his pockets, wandered down toward the kitchen.

“Anything new on Bekker?” she asked, trailing behind.

“No. I was thinking, though, he must be out only at night.” Lucas perched on a tall oak stool and leaned on the breakfast bar. A handicraft ceramic bowl full of apples sat on the bar, and he picked one of them up and turned it in his fingers. “Even with stage makeup, his face would be too noticeable in daylight.”

“So?”

“Would it be possible to make random stops of single men driving inexpensive cars, after midnight, Midtown?”

“Jesus, Lucas. The chance of picking him up that way would be nil—and we’d probably get three cops shot by freaks in the meantime.”

“I’m trying to figure out ways to press him,” Lucas said. He dropped the apple back in the bowl.

“Do we really want to chase him out of here? He’d just go somewhere else, start again . . . .”

“I don’t know if he can. Somehow, I don’t know how, he’s got a unique situation here. He can hide, somehow,” Lucas said. “If he travels, he loses that—I mean, look, right now Bekker’s one of the most famous people in the country. He can’t go to motels or gas stations, he can’t take any kind of public transportation. He can’t really ride in a car without a lot of tension—if he gets pulled over by a cop, he’s done. And he needs his dope, he needs his money. If we pushed him out, if he tried to run, he’d be finished.”

She thought about it, then nodded. “I suppose we could do something. I wouldn’t want to make a lot of stops, but we could
announce
that we are, and ask for cooperation from the public. Maybe make a couple of stops for the TV crews . . .”

“That’d be good.”

“I’ll talk to Kennett tomorrow,” she said. She perched on a stool opposite from him, crossed her legs and wrapped her hands around the top knee.

“How’d he get on this case? Kennett?” Lucas asked.

“O’Dell pulled some strings. Kennett’s one of the best we’ve got on this kind of thing, organizing and running it.”

“He and O’Dell don’t like each other.”

“No. No, they don’t. I don’t know why O’Dell pulled him, exactly, but I can tell you one thing: he wouldn’t have done it unless he thought Kennett would find Bekker. Back in Minneapolis, you can control the bureaucratic fallout, because the department’s small and everybody knows everybody else. But here . . . We’ve got to find Bekker, or heads’ll start rolling. People are pissed off.”

Lucas nodded, thought about it for a second, and said, “Kennett’s an intelligence guy: are you sure he’s not involved with Robin Hood?”

Lily looked down at her hands. “In my heart, I’m sure. I couldn’t prove it, though. Whoever’s running this thing must have a fair amount of charisma, to hold it together, and good organizational skills . . . and certain political opinions. Kennett fits.”

“But . . . ?”

“He has too much sense,” Lily said. “He’s a believer in, what? Goodness, maybe. That’s what I feel about him, anyway. We talk about things.”

“Okay.”

“That’s not exactly proof,” Lily said. She was tight, unhappy with the question, chewing at it.

“I wasn’t asking for proof, I was asking for an opinion,” Lucas said. “What about O’Dell? He seems to be running everything. He runs you, he runs Kennett. He’s running me, or thinks he is. He picked Fell out of the hat . . . .”

“I don’t know, I just don’t know. Even the way he picked Fell, it seems more like magic than anything. We may be on a complete wild-goose chase.” She was about to go on, but chimes sounded from the door. She hopped off her stool and walked down the hall and pushed her intercom button. A man’s voice said, “Bobby Rich, Lieutenant.”

“I’ll buzz you in,” Lily said. To Lucas, she said, “Get the lights.”

Lucas turned off the lights and sat on the floor, legs crossed. Sitting in the dark, he watched Lily as she waited by the door, a tall woman, less heavy than she once was, with a long, aristocratic neck.
Charisma. Good organizational skills. Certain political opinions.

“How did you talk O’Dell into bringing me here?” he asked abruptly. “Was he reluctant? How hard did you have to press?”

“Bringing you here was more his idea than mine,” Lily said. “I’d told him about you and he said you sounded perfect.”

Rich knocked on the door as Lucas thought,
Really?

Rich was a tall black man, balding, athletic, hair cropped so closely that his head looked shaven. He wore a green athletic jacket with tan sleeves, and blue jeans. He said, “Hello,” and edged inside the apartment. Lily pointed him at a chair where Lucas could see his face, and then said, “There’s another guy in the apartment, in the kitchen.”

“What?” Rich, just settling on the chair, half rose and looked down the hall.

“Don’t get up,” Lily snapped. She pointed him back into the chair.

“What’s going on here?” Rich asked, still peering toward the kitchen.

“We have a guy who’s getting close to Robin Hood. Maybe. He doesn’t want you to see his face. He doesn’t know who to trust . . . . If you don’t want to talk about it, with him back there, we can cut it off right here. You can go back into the bedroom while he leaves. Then it’ll be just you and me . . . but I wanted you to know.”

Rich’s tongue slid over his lower lip, his hands gripping the arms of the chair. After a minute, he relaxed. “I don’t see how he can hurt me,” he said.

“He can’t,” Lily said. “He’s mostly going to listen, maybe ask a couple of questions. Why don’t you just tell me what you told Walt? If either of us has questions, we’ll break in.”

Rich thought about it for another moment, looked into the dark, trying to penetrate it, then nodded. “Okay,” he said.

He’d been at home when he got a call from an ex-burglar he’d busted a couple of times, a man named Lowell Jackson. Jackson was trying to go straight, as a sign painter, and was doing okay.

“He said an acquaintance of his had called, a kid named Cornell, nicknamed Red. Cornell had said he’d seen Fred Waites go down and that it wasn’t no gang-bangers—that one of the guys in the car was an old white guy and Cornell thought he was a cop. Jackson gave me an address.”

Old white guy?

“Did you go after Cornell?” asked Lily.

“Yeah. Couldn’t find him. So I went and talked to Jackson.”

“What he say?”

“He said right after he talked to me, that same day, he saw Cornell at this playground on 118th—this is all in my report . . . .”

“Go ahead,” Lily said.

“Cornell came down to a playground on 118th and said he was going home. Getting out of town. Nobody knew where he went. His last name is Reed. Cornell Reed. He’s got a sheet. He’s a doper, into crack. But he used to be some kind of college kid. Not a regular asshole.”

“How old is he?” Lily asked.

“Middle twenties, like that.”

“New York guy?”

“No. Supposedly he came from down south somewhere, Atlanta maybe. Been here a few years, though—Jackson said he didn’t talk about where he came from. There was something . . . wrong. He just wouldn’t talk about it. Used to cry about it, though, when he was drunk.”

“How many times was he busted?”

“Half-dozen, nothing big. Theft, shoplifting, minor possession. We looked for background on him, NCIC, but there’s nothing—his first busts were here in New York, addresses up in Harlem.”

“And he’s gone.”

“Nowhere to be found. We checked Atlanta, but they don’t know him.”

“Dead?”

Rich frowned. “Don’t think so. When he took off from the playground, he had some new shoes and a big nylon suitcase. That’s what the guys at the playground say. He came up to 118th to say good-bye, they were sitting around. Then he jumped a cab and that’s the last they saw of him.”

“You wrote a report on all of this?”

“Yeah. And we’re still looking for him. To tell you the truth, he’s about the only thing we ever got on the case.”

“What were you doing for Petty?” Lucas asked.

“Just looking at guys, mostly,” Rich said. “Made me a little nervous, tell you the truth. I tried to get off it. I don’t like looking at our own people.”

“How’d you get assigned to the case?” Lucas asked.

“I don’t know. Someone downtown, I guess,” Rich
said, his forehead wrinkling as he thought about it. “My lieutenant just said to report down to City Hall for a special assignment. He didn’t know what was going on either.”

“All right,” said Lucas. Then, “How did Cornell know the white guy was old?”

“Don’t know; if I find him, I’ll ask him. Maybe just because he knows him from somewhere . . .”

They talked for another half hour, but Rich had almost nothing that wasn’t in the reports. Lily thanked him and let him go.

“Waste of time,” Lily said to Lucas.

“Had to try. What do you know about him? Rich?”

“Not much, really,” she said.

“Good detective?”

“He’s okay. Competent. Nothing spectacular.”

“Hmp.” Lucas touched the sore cheek, head down, considering.

“Why?”

“Just wondering,” he said, looking back up. “You ready to go?”

“Want to walk? Down to the restaurant?”

“How far?” Lucas asked.

“Ten, fifteen minutes, taking it easy.”

“Are we gonna get shot, going out the door?”

“No. O’Dell had a couple of people talk to the supers all along the block,” Lily said. “They’re looking for strange people wandering around their apartments.”

The street outside the apartment was clear, but before they went out through the lobby door, Lucas scanned the windows across the street.

“Nervous?”

“No. I’m trying to figure it,” he said.

She studied his face. “What?”

“Nothing.” He shook his head. Rich had seemed straight enough.

“C’mon . . .”

“Nothing, really . . .”

“All right,” Lily said, annoyed, still watching him.

The Village was pretty, quiet, well-tended brick townhouses with flowers in window boxes, touches of wrought iron, the image wounded here and there by a curl of concertina, a touch of razor wire. And the people looked different, Lucas thought, from the people farther uptown; a deliberate touch of the Bohemian: sandals and canvas shorts, beards and waist-length hair, old-fashioned bikes and wooden necklaces.

The Manhattan Caballero was buried in a street of red stone buildings, a small place, its name and logo painted on one window, a beer sign in the other.

“They shot from up there, the third window in, second floor,” Lily said, standing on the sidewalk outside the Caballero door, pointing across the street.

“Couldn’t miss with a laser sight,” Lucas said, looking up at the window, then down at the sidewalk. “He must’ve been about right here, you see the chip marks.”