Eyes of Prey

basement and they glow, and fuck ’em, let ’em glow.
    The gift shop was empty, except for a bored saleswoman who was dressed so well that Lucas guessed she was a volunteer.
    “Can I help you?” she asked.
    “Yeah. I’m interested in a dude named Odilon Redon. What’ve you got? Got any calendars?”
    Five minutes later he was back in the car, looking for a scrap of paper. He finally found a receipt from a tire store. He turned it over, flattened it against the Porsche owner’s manual on his leg and started a new list.
     
    And later, afraid of the bed, he sat in the spare bedroom with a bottle of Canadian Club and stared at his charts.
    The Killer One chart was complete: Druze. A troll, powerful, squat, odd head, murdering Stephanie. No question about that anymore. If he was working with Bekker, must have killed George, because Bekker was with Lucas. Couldhave killed Cassie. Could have killed Armistead. Could have killed woman at the shopping center—but why? She was entirely out of the pattern. Not at home; not with the academic/art crowd . . . And where did the photos come from, with the missing eyes?
    Killer Two: Did he exist? Was it Bekker? Some tracks at the site of the George killing suggested a second man. How would Druze have found George if Bekker hadn’t fingered him? (Possibility: He’d watched Stephanie’s funeral?) Why would he have driven George’s Jeep to the airport? How could he have killed Armistead? Why the phone call—a coincidence, somebody trying to get in free?
    The answers were in the pattern, somewhere. Lucas could feel it but couldn’t see it.
    He took the tire store receipt from his pocket. At the top he’d written “Loverboy.”
    He looked at it, closed his eyes and let the circumstances flow through his mind.
     
    At six in the morning, he phoned Del. “I gotta come over and talk to you,” he said. Del had an affinity for speed.
    “Jesus Christ, man, what’re you doing up at six o’clock? You’re worse’n me . . . .”
    Lucas drove across town with the breaking dawn, another cool, overcast day. The drive-time radio programs had started, and he dialed past the jock talk to ’CCO, half listening as he put the car on I-94 toward Minneapolis.
    Del met him at the door in a pair of slightly yellowed jockey shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt that Clark Gable would have approved of. When Lucas told him what he wanted, Del shook his head and said, “Lucas, you’ll kill yourself.”
    “No. I just need to stay awake for a while,” Lucas said. “I know what I’m doing.”
    Del looked at him, nodded, went to the bedroom and cameback with an orange plastic vial. “Ten hits. Heavy-duty. But don’t try to stretch it too far.”
    “Thanks, man . . .” Lucas said.
    A woman’s voice came from the back. “Del . . . ?”
    “In a minute,” Del said. He smiled thinly at Lucas. “Cheryl. What can I tell you?”
     
    The speed brightened him up. He turned south, looking at the clock. Almost seven. Sloan would be up.
    “How’re you feeling?” Sloan’s wife asked as she opened the door.
    “Everybody wants to know,” Lucas said, grinning at her. She was a short woman, slightly plump, motherly and sexy at the same time. Lucas liked her. “Is Sloan out of bed?”
    She turned her head. “Sloan? Lucas is here.”
    “Out on the porch,” Sloan called back.
    “Does Sloan have a first name?” Lucas asked as he went past the woman.
    “I don’t know. I never asked,” she said.
    Sloan was sitting on the sun porch, smoking a cigarette and eating a cherry Moon Pie. A Coke sat on a side table by his hand.
    “A real lumberjack breakfast,” Lucas said.
    “Don’t talk loud,” Sloan said. “I’m not awake yet.”
    “I need you to sweet-talk some people for me,” Lucas said. Sloan was the best interrogator on the force. People told him things. “I’ve got the names and addresses . . . .”
    “What for?” Sloan asked, taking the slip of paper.
    “Their kids died,” Lucas said. “We want to dig them up. We want to do it today.”

CHAPTER
29
    Beauty danced and bled and danced and bled and danced until he fell down on his back, his arms thrown wide, his legs spread, a kind of crucifixion on the huge Oriental rug in the dining room. There were no dreams of eyes. There were no dreams of anything. There was nothing at all.
     
    The pain woke him.
    Daylight filtered past the blinds and his body trembled with cold, his muscles tight and shaking. He sat up