Eyes of Prey

back.
    Bekker walked down the aisle; one hand on the coffin, unbending, his eyes invisible behind dark sunglasses. Occasionally his lips moved, as though he were mumbling to himself, or praying. It did not seem an act: the woodenness appeared to be real.
    He followed the coffin to the hearse, waited until it was loaded, then walked down the block to his car. At the car he turned and looked directly at Lucas. Lucas felt the eyes and stood still, watching, letting their gazes touch. And then Bekker was gone.
    Lucas went to the cemetery, curious. What was it with Bekker? Grief? Despair? An act? What?
    He watched from a hillside as Stephanie Bekker’s coffin was lowered into the ground. Bekker never changed: his beautiful face was as immobile as a lump of clay.
    “What do you think?” Swanson asked, when Bekker had gone.
    “I think the guy’s a fruitcake,” Lucas said. “But I don’t know what kind.”
     
    Lucas spent the rest of the afternoon and early evening putting the word out on his network, a web of hookers, bookstore owners, barbers, mailmen, burglars, gamblers, cops, a couple of genteel marijuana dealers: Anything on a hit? Any nutso walking around with big cash?
    A few minutes after six, he took a call on his handset and drove back downtown to police headquarters in the scabrous wart of Minneapolis City Hall. Sloan met him in the hall outside the chief’s office.
    “You hear?” Sloan asked.
    “What?”
    “We got a letter from a guy who says he was there when Stephanie got killed. Loverboy.”
    “No ID?”
    “No. But there’s a lot of stuff in the letter . . . .”
    Lucas followed Sloan past the vacant secretary’s desk to the inner office. Daniel sat behind his desk, rolling a cigar between his fingers, listening to a Homicide detective who sat in a green leather chair in front of the desk. Daniel looked up when Sloan rapped on the open door.
    “C’mon in, Sloan. Davenport, how are you? Swanson’s filling me in.”
    Lucas and Sloan pulled up chairs on either side of the Homicide detective and Lucas asked him, “What’s this letter?”
    Swanson passed him a Xerox copy. “We were just talking about possibilities. Could be a doper, scared off by Loverboy. Unless Loverboy did it.”
    “You think it’s Loverboy?”
    The detective shook his head. “No. Read the letter. It more or less hangs together with the scene. And you saw Bekker.”
    “Nobody has a good word for the guy,” Sloan said.
    “Except professionally. The docs at the university say his work is top-notch,” Swanson said. “I talked to some people in his department. ‘Ground-breaking,’ is what they say . . . .”
    “You know what bothers me?” Lucas said. “In this letter, Loverboy says she was on her back in a pool of blood, dead. I saw the pictures, and she was facedown next to the wall. He doesn’t mention a handprint. I think he left her there alive . . . .”
    “He did,” Swanson said, nodding. “She died just about the time the paramedics got there—they even gave her some kind of heart shot, trying to get it going again. Nothing happened, but she hadn’t been dead very long, and the blood under her head was fresh. The blood on the floor, though, the blood bythe sink, had already started to coagulate. They figure she was alive for fifteen or twenty minutes after the attack. Her brain was all fucked up—who knows what she could have told us? But if Loverboy had called nine-one-one, she might still be around.”
    “Fucker,” Sloan said. “Does that make him an accomplice?”
    Swanson shrugged. “You’d have to ask a lawyer about that.”
    “How about this doctor, the guy she talked with at parties . . .” Lucas asked.
    “That’s under way,” Daniel said.
    “You doing it?” Lucas asked Sloan.
    “No. Andy Shearson.”
    “Shit, Shearson? He couldn’t find his own asshole with both hands and a pair of searchlights,” Lucas said in disbelief.
    “He’s what we’ve got and he’s not that bad,” Daniel said. He stuck the end of the cigar in his mouth, nipped it off, took the butt end from his mouth, examined it and then tossed it into a wastebasket. “We’re getting a little more TV on this one—random-killer bullshit. I’d hate to see it get any bigger.”
    “The story’ll be gone in a week. Sooner, if we get a decent dope killing,” Sloan said.
    “Maybe, maybe not,” Daniel said. “Stephanie Bekker was white and upper middle class. Reporters identify with that kind of