Eyes of Prey

woman. They could keep it going for a while.”
    “We’ll push,” Swanson said. “Talk to Bekker some more. We’re doing the neighborhood. Checking parking tickets in the area, talking to Stephanie Bekker’s friends. The main thing is, find the boyfriend. Either he did it or he saw it.”
    “He says the killer looks like a goblin,” Lucas said, reading through the letter. “What the hell does that mean?”
    “Fuck if I know,” said Swanson.
    “Ugly,” said Daniel. “Barrel-chested . . .”
    “Do we know for sure that the goblin’s not Bekker? That Bekker was actually in San Francisco?” Lucas asked.
    “Yeah, we do,” Swanson said. “We wired a photo out, had the San Francisco cops show it to the desk people at Bekker’s hotel. He was there, no mistake.”
    “Hmph,” Lucas grunted. He stood up, slipped his hands in his pockets and wandered over to Daniel’s wall of trophy photos. Jimmy Carter’s smiling face looked back at him. “We’re leaning the wrong way with the media. If Bekker hired a killer, the best handle we’ve got is the boyfriend. The witness . . .”
    “Loverboy,” said Sloan.
    “Loverboy,” said Lucas. “He’s got some kind of conscience, because he called and he wrote the letter. He could’ve walked out and we might never have suspected . . .”
    “We would have known,” Swanson said. “The M.E. found that she’d had intercourse not too long before she was killed. And he did leave her to die.”
    “Maybe he really thought she was dead,” Lucas said.
    “Anyway, he’s got some kind of conscience. We ought to make a public appeal to him. TV, the papers. That does two things: it might bring him out of the woodwork, and it might put pressure on the killer, or Bekker, to make a move.”
    “No other options?” asked Daniel.
    “Not if you want to catch the guy,” Lucas said. “We could let it go: I’d say right now that the chance of convicting Bekker is about zero. We’ll only get him one way—the witness has to identify the killer and the killer has got to give us Bekker on a plea bargain.”
    “I hate to let it go,” Daniel said. “Our fuckin’ clearance rate . . .”
    “So we get the TV people in here,” Lucas said.
    “Let’s give it another twenty-four hours,” Daniel said. “We can talk again tomorrow night.”
    Lucas shook his head. “No. You need to think about itovernight, ’cause if we’re going to do it, we got to do it quick. Tomorrow’d be best, early enough for the early evening news. Before this boyfriend, whoever he is, gets his head set in concrete. You should say flatly that we don’t believe the boyfriend did the killing, that we need all the help we can get. That we need him to come in, that we’ll get him a lawyer. That if he didn’t murder the woman, we’ll offer him immunity—maybe you can get the county attorney in on this angle. And that if he still doesn’t think he can come in, we need him to communicate with us somehow. Send us letters with more detail. Cut out pictures from magazines, people who most look like the killer. Do drawings, if he can. Maybe we can get the papers to print identikit drawings, have him pick the best ones, change them until they’re more like the killer.”
    “I’ll think about it.”
    “And we watch Bekker. If we make a heavy-duty appeal to the boyfriend and if Bekker really did buy the hit, he’ll get nervous. Maybe he’ll give us a break,” Lucas said.
    “All right. I’ll think about it. See me tomorrow.”
    “We gotta move,” Lucas urged, but Daniel waved him off.
    “We’ll talk again tomorrow,” he said.
    Lucas turned back to Jimmy Carter and inspected the former president’s tweed jacket. “If it’s Bekker who did it, or hired it, if he’s the iceman Sloan thinks he is . . .”
    “Yeah?” Daniel was fiddling with his cigar, watching him from behind the desk.
    “We better find Loverboy before Bekker does,” Lucas said.

CHAPTER
5
    The evening sky shaded from crimson to ultramarine and finally to a flat gray; Lucas lived in the middle of the metro area, and the sky never quite got dark. Across the street, joggers came and went on the river path, stylish in their phosphorescent workout suits, flashing Day-Glo green and pink. Some wore headsets, running to rock. Beyond them, on the other side of the Mississippi, the orange sodium-vapor streetlights winked on as a grid set, followed by a sprinkling of bluer house lights.
    When the lights came on