Eyes of Prey

across the river, Lucas pulled the window shade and forced himself back to the game. He worked doggedly, without inspiration, laying out the story for the programmer. A long ribbon of computer paper flowed across the library table, in and out of the puddle of light around his hands. With a flowchart template and a number-two pencil, he blocked out the branches of Druid’s Pursuit. He had once thought that he might learn to program, himself. Had, in fact, taken a community college course in Pascal and even dipped into C. But programming bored him, so he hired a kid to do it. He laid down the stories with the myriad jumps and branches, and the kid wrote the code.
    The kid programmer had no obvious computer-freak personality flaws. He wore a letter jacket with a letter and told Lucas simply that he’d gotten it in wrestling. He could do chin-ups with his index fingers and sometimes brought a girlfriend along to help him.
    Lucas, tongue in cheek, thought to ask him, Help you do what?, but he didn’t. Both kids came from Catholic colleges in the neighborhood and needed a cheap, private space. Lucas tried to leave them alone.
    And maybe she was helping him. The work got done.
    Lucas wrote games. Historical simulations played on boards, to begin with. Then, for the money, he began writing role-playing quest games of the Dungeons & Dragons genre.
    One of his simulations, a Gettysburg, had become so complicated that he’d bought an IBM personal computer to figure times, points and military effects. The flexibility of the computer had impressed him—he could create effects not possible with a board, such as hidden troop movements and faulty military intelligence. With help from the kid, he’d moved the entire game to an IBM 386 clone. A computer database company in Missouri had gotten wind of the game, leased it from him, altered it and put it on line. On any given night, several dozen Civil War enthusiasts would be playing Gettysburg via modem, paying eight dollars an hour for the privilege. Lucas got two of the dollars.
    Druid’s Pursuit was something else, a role-playing game with a computer serving as game master. The game was becoming complex . . . .
     
    Lucas stopped to change discs in the CD player, switching Tom Waits’ Big Time for David Fanshawe’s African Sanctus, then settled back into his chair. After a moment, he put the programming template down and stared at the wall behind the desk. He kept it blank on purpose, for staring at.
    Bekker was interesting. Lucas had felt the interest growing,watching it like a gardener watching a new plant, almost afraid to hope. He’d seen depression in other cops, but he’d always been skeptical. No more. The depression—an unfit word for what had happened to him—was so tangible that he imagined it as a dark beast, stalking him, off in the dark.
    Lucas sat in the night, staring at his patch of wall, and the sickly smell of Stephanie’s funeral flowers came back, the quiet dampness of the private chapel, the drone of the minister, . . . all who loved this woman Stephanie . . .
    “Dammit.” He was supposed to be concentrating on the game, but he couldn’t. He stood and took a turn around the room, the Sanctus chants banging around in his head. A manila folder caught his eye. The case file, copied by Sloan and left on his desk. He picked it up, flipped through it. Endless detail. Nobody knew what might or might not be useful, so they got it all. He read through it and was about to dump it back on the desk, when a line of the lab narrative caught his eye.
    “Drain appeared to have been physically cleaned . . .”
    The bedroom and the adjoining bath had been wiped, apparently by Loverboy, to eliminate fingerprints. That demonstrated an unusual coolness. But the drain? That was something else again. Lucas looked for returns on Stephanie Bekker’s bed but found nothing in the report. The lab report was signed by Robert Kjellstrom.
    Lucas dug in his desk and found the internal police directory, looked up Kjellstrom’s phone number and called. Kjellstrom had to get out of bed to take the call.
    “There’s nothing in the report on hair in the bed . . . .”
    “That’s ’cause there wasn’t any,” Kjellstrom said.
    “None?”
    “Nope. The sheets were clean. They looked like they’d just been washed.”
    “The report said Stephanie Bekker had just had intercourse . . . .”
    “Not on those sheets,” Kjellstrom said.
    • • •
    Lucas