Eyes of Prey

surveillance on Bekker, and all that. We’re sorting it out now. I left some messages at your office, but when you didn’t get back, I figured you were on the street.”
    “Uh, yeah,” Lucas said. He looked around the kitchen. Unwashed dishes were stacked in the sink and microwave-dinner boxes were crushed into a plastic wastebasket. Bills were piled on the kitchen table with books, magazines, catalogues—two weeks’ worth of mail, unopened. He was living like a pig. “Just walked in the door.”
    “Well, we’re gonna do the conference early tomorrow afternoon. Probably two o’clock. We’ll want you around. You know, for the PR. Wear the usual undercover rig, you know they like that, the TVs . . . .”
    “All right. I’ll be down a little early tomorrow, talk it over. But today would be better.”
    “Can’t do it,” Daniel said. “Too many details to smooth out. You coming in?”
    “Maybe later. I’m trying to get an interview over at University Hospital with a guy who knows Bekker.”
    When Daniel got off the phone, Lucas peeked over the windowsill and found a redheaded woman staring vacantly at the front of his house while pretending not to see her dog relieve itself in Lucas’ bushes.
    “God damn it.” He crawled back to the bedroom, found his notebook, sat on his bed and called Webster Prentice atthe University of Minnesota. He got a secretary and was switched to Prentice’s office.
    “You think Bekker killed her?” Prentice asked, after Lucas introduced himself.
    “Who mentioned Bekker?”
    “Why else would a cop be calling me?” the psychologist said in a jovial fat-man’s voice. “Listen, I’d like to help, but you’re talking to the wrong guy. Let me suggest that you call Dr. Larry Merriam.”
     
    Merriam’s office was in a building that from the outside looked like a machine, with awkward angles, unlikely joints. Inside, it was a maze, with tunnels and skyways linking it to adjoining buildings, ground-level exits on different floors. Entire floors were missing in some parts of the structure. Lucas wandered for ten minutes, and asked twice for directions, before he found a bank of elevators that would take him to the sixth floor of the right wing.
    Merriam’s secretary was short, overweight and worried, scurrying like a Disney churchmouse to locate her boss. Larry Merriam, when she brought him back from the lab, was a balding, soft-faced man in a white smock, with large dark eyes and tiny worried hands. He took Lucas into his office, pressed his fingertips to his lips and said, “Oh, dear,” when Lucas told him what he wanted. “This is totally off the record?”
    “Sure. And nothing’ll come back to you. Not unless you confess that you killed Mrs. Bekker,” Lucas said, smiling, trying to loosen him up.
    Merriam’s office overlooked a parking garage. The cinderblock walls had been painted a cream color; a small bulletin board was covered with medical cartoons. From behind the desk Merriam mouthed silently, Shut the door.
    Lucas reached back and eased the door shut. Merriam relaxed, folding his hands over his chest.
    “Clarisse is a wonderful secretary, but she does havetrouble keeping a secret,” Merriam said. He stood, hands in his pockets, and turned to look out the window behind his desk. A man in a red jacket, carrying what looked like a doctor’s bag, was walking across the roof of the parking garage. “And Bekker is a troubling subject.”
    “A lot of people seem to be troubled by Mr. Bekker,” Lucas said. “We’re trying to find an angle, a . . .” He groped for the right words.
    “An entry wedge,” Merriam said, glancing back over his shoulder at Lucas. “You always need one, in any kind of research.”
    “Exactly right. With Bekker—”
    “What’s this man doing?” Merriam interrupted, staring down at the roof of the parking garage. The man in the red jacket stopped next to a midnight-blue BMW, glanced around, took a long silver strip of metal from his coat sleeve and slipped it between the window and the weather stripping, down into the door. “I think, uh . . . Is this man stealing that car?”
    “What?” Lucas stepped over to the window and looked out. The man below stopped for a moment and looked up at the hospital building, as though he sensed Merriam and Lucas watching. He wouldn’t be able to see them through the tinted glass. Lucas felt a pulse of amusement.
    “Yeah, he is. Gotta make a call, just take a minute,”