Eyes of Prey

of dirt and piled it on a sheet of canvas. Two of the cemetery’s gravediggers took off the last foot with shovels, dropped hooks onto the coffin and pulled it out, a corroding bronze tooth.
    Lucas and Sloan followed the M.E.’s van back downtown and, as the coffin was unloaded, walked inside to talk to the medical examiner.
    When they found Louis Nett, he was pulling a gown over his street clothes. “Have you heard about the other one?” Lucas asked. The second child had been buried in the suburban town of Coon Rapids.
    “It’s on the way,” Nett said. “If you guys want to hang around, I can give you a read in the next couple of minutes . . . depending on the condition of the body, of course.”
    “What do you think?” Sloan asked.
    “Well, she was done by the Saloman Brothers. They’re pretty careful, and she hasn’t been down that long. I think there’s a good chance, as long as the coffin is still tight. If it leaked, you know . . .” He shrugged. “All bets are off.”
    “We’ll wait,” Lucas said.
    “You can come watch . . .” Nett offered.
    “No, no,” Lucas said.
    “Well, if you don’t mind . . . I think I might,” Sloan said. “I’ve never seen one of these.”
    The medical examiner’s office looked like the city clerk’s office, or the county auditor’s, or any place except one that dealt with the scientific dismemberment of the dead. Secretaries sat in front of smudged computer screens, each desk marked with idiosyncratic keepsakes: china frogs, pink-butted babies, tiny angels with their hands held in prayer,Xeroxed directives from the higher-ups, Xeroxed cartoons from the lower-downs.
    In the back room, they were taking apart a long-dead teenage girl.
    Lucas looked at one of the cartoons, cut from The New Yorker. It showed two identical portly, vaguely Scandinavian businessmen with brush mustaches, conservatively dressed with hats and briefcases, stopped at a receptionist’s desk, apparently in Manhattan. The receptionist was talking into an intercom, saying, “Minneapolis and St. Paul to see you, sir . . .”
    He turned away from the cartoon, dropped on a couch and closed his eyes, but his eyes didn’t want to be closed. He opened them again and stared at the wall, fidgeted, picked up a nine-month-old magazine on bow-hunting, read a few words, dropped it back on the table.
    The clock over a secretary’s empty desk said four-fifteen. Nett said it shouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes. At four-thirty, Lucas got up and wandered around the office, hands in his pockets.
    Sloan came back first. Lucas stood up, facing him.
    “You called it,” Sloan said.
    Something unwound in Lucas’ stomach. They had him. “The eyes?”
    “Cut. Nett says with an X-acto knife or something like it—I figure it was a scalpel. Something that really dug in.”
    “Can they take photos or something . . . ?”
    “Well . . . they’re taking the eyes out,” Sloan said, as though Lucas should have known. “They put them in little bottles of formaldehyde . . . .”.
    “Aw, Christ . . .”

CHAPTER
30
    The day started with an argument.
    “I didn’t become a psychologist so I could advise you on ways to destroy a mind,” Elle Kruger snapped.
    “I don’t need any ethical qualms dumped on me. I had enough of that in school,” Lucas answered. “I need to know what’ll happen, what you think’ll happen. If it won’t work, say so. If it will . . . we told you what he’s doing. You want this monster creeping around hospitals, snuffing kids? Because you’ve got a Catholic qualm?”
    “That is an extremely offensive phrase,” the nun said angrily. “I won’t have it.”
    “Just tell me,” Lucas said.
    They argued for another fifteen minutes. In the end, she relented.
    “If he’s the man you think, it could be effective. But if he’s as intelligent as you say and if he’s thinking clearly, he may see right through it. Then you’re ruined.”
    “We have to push,” Lucas said. “We need some control.”
    “I’ve told you what I think: It could work. You’d want to just give him a flash, so later he wouldn’t be sure if he actually saw it or just imagined it. You can’t let him experience the . . . materiality . . . of the image. You wouldn’t want to send him a photograph, or anything like that. If he has something solid in his hand, if he can sit and contemplate it, he’ll say to himself, Wait. This is real. How did this go