Eyes of Prey

back to you as soon as I can.”
    “God damn it, Davenport, this is serious shit.” Barlow moved so that he was between Lucas and the door.
    “I’ll talk to you,” Lucas said, irritated, letting it show. They stared at each other for a second; then Lucas stepped around him. “But I can’t now. Talk to Daniel if you don’t believe me.”
    Barlow hadn’t been good on the street. He was a control freak and didn’t deal well with ambiguities—and the street was one large ambiguity. He’d done fine with Internal Affairs, though.
    IA usually went to work on a cop only if there was a blatantly public foul-up, and that was okay with most of the cops in the department, outside of a few hothead brother-cop freaks. Better IA, the feeling went, than some outside board full of blacks and Indians and who knows what, which seemed to be the alternative.
    The department had barely managed to fight off a city council proposal that would have formed a review board withreal teeth. The study commission on that—the commission Stephanie Bekker had served on—had gone a bit too far, though, had given the impression that it wanted to get on the cops a little too much. That hadn’t gone down well with voters scared by crime . . . .
    So a gross screw-up in public would get you an IA investigation. A cop could find himself a target also if he got too deep into drugs, or started stealing too much. Screwing off and getting your partner hurt, that would do it too.
    But IA didn’t worry much if a pimp got slapped around in a fistfight. Especially not if he’d pulled a knife. Half of the cops on the force would’ve shot him and let it go at that, and they would have been cleared by the board. And if the fight had taken place during an arrest on a warrant charging a violent crime, and if the victim of that crime was scarred for life and still around to testify, to be looked at . . .
    Where was Barlow coming from? Lucas shook his head. It didn’t compute. Anderson was going in the door and Lucas was going out, when Lucas hooked him by the arm.
    “You think . . . the guys in the department would like to see me fall? Get taken off by IA?” Lucas asked.
    “Are you nuts?” Anderson asked. “What’s happening with IA?”
    “They’re on me for the fight with that kid, the pimp. I can’t figure out where it’s coming from.”
    “I’ll ask around,” Anderson said. “But when the guys decide somebody ought to fall, it’s no big secret. You know that. And nobody’s talking about you.”
    “So where’s it coming from?” Lucas asked.
     
    Barlow stayed in the back of Lucas’ mind all the way to the university campus. He dumped the car in a no-parking zone outside the hospital, stuck a police ID card in the window and went inside. Pediatric Oncology was on the sixth floor. A nurse took him down through a warren of small rooms, pasta larger room with kids in terry-cloth robes, sitting in wheelchairs and watching television, into another set of hospital rooms. They found Merriam sitting on a bed, talking to a young girl.
    “Ah, Lieutenant Davenport,” he said. He looked at the girl in the bed. “Lisa, this is Lieutenant Davenport. He’s a police officer with the Minneapolis Police Department.”
    “What’s he doing here?” she asked, cutting straight to the heart of the matter. The girl was completely bald and had a very pale face and unnaturally rosy lips. The chemotherapy aside, Lucas thought, touched with a cold finger of fear, she looked a lot like his daughter would in ten years.
    “He’s a friend of mine, stopping to chat,” Merriam said. “I’ve got to go for a while, but I’ll be back before they start setting up the procedure.”
    “Okay,” she said.
    Outside, in the hall, Lucas said, “I couldn’t do this.” And, “Do you have kids?”
    “Four,” Merriam said. “I don’t think about it.”
    “So what happened?” Lucas asked. “You sounded a little tense.”
    “The woman you called about. I went down to see her. She has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis . . .”
    “Lou Gehrig’s disease . . .”
    “Right. She’s almost completely incommunicado. Her brain works fine, but she can’t move anything but her eyes. She’ll be dead in a week or two. And Bekker is trying to kill her.”
    “What?” Lucas grabbed Merriam by the arm.
    “This absolutely defeats me: a goddamn doctor,” Merriam said, pulling away. “But you have to see for yourself. Come along.”
    Lucas trailed