Eyes of Prey

Lucas mumbled, reaching for Merriam’s desk phone.
    “Sure,” Merriam said, looking at him oddly, then back down at the thief. “Dial nine . . .”
    Lucas dialed straight through to the dispatcher. “Shirl’, this is Lucas. I’m looking out a window at a guy named E. Thomas Little. He’s breaking into a BMW.” He gave her the details and hung up.
    “Oh, dear,” Merriam said, looking out the window, his fingertips pressed to his lips again. E. Thomas Little finallygot the door open and climbed into the front seat of the BMW.
    “E. Thomas is an old client of mine,” Lucas said. The amusement pulsed through him again, felt good, like a spring wind.
    “And he is stealing the car?”
    “Yeah. He’s not much good at it, though. Right now he’s jerking the lock cylinder out of the steering column.”
    “How long will it take a police car to get here?”
    “Another minute or so,” Lucas said. “Or about a thousand bucks in damage.” They watched, silently, together, as Little continued to work in the front seat of the car. Sixty seconds after he got inside, he backed the car out of the parking space and started toward the exit. As he was about to enter the circular down ramp, a squad car, driving up the wrong way, jerked to a stop in front of him. Little put the BMW in reverse and backed away, but the squad stayed with him. A minute later he was talking to the cops.
    “Very strange,” Merriam said, as the cops handcuffed Little and put him in the backseat of the squad. One of the patrolmen looked up at the hospital windows, as Little had, and waved. Merriam lifted a hand, realized that he couldn’t be seen, and turned back to Lucas. “You wanted to know about Michael Bekker.”
    “Yeah.” Lucas went back to his chair. “About Dr. Bekker . . .”
    “He’s . . . Do you know what I do?”
    “You’re a pediatric oncologist,” Lucas said. “You treat kids with cancer.”
    “Yes. Bekker asked if he could observe our work. He has excellent credentials in his own field, which is pathology, and he’s also developing something of a reputation among sociologists and anthropologists for work on what he calls the social organization of death. That’s what brought him up here. He wanted to do a detailed examination of the chemistrywe use, and how we use it, but he also wanted to know how we handle death itself . . . what conventions and structures had grown up around it.”
    “You agreed?”
    Merriam nodded. “Sure. There are dozens of studies going on here all the time—this is a teaching and research hospital. Bekker had the credentials and both the studies had potential value. In fact, his work did result in procedural changes.”
    “Like what?”
    Merriam took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. He looked tired, Lucas thought. Not like he’d missed a night’s sleep, but like he’d missed five years’ sleep. “Some of it’s stuff you just don’t notice if you work with it all the time. When you know somebody’s about to die—well, there are things that have to be done with the body and the room. You have to clean up the room, you have to prepare to move the body down to Path. Some patients are quite clearheaded when they’re dying. So how must it feel when a maid shows up and peeks into the room with a bunch of cleaning stuff, checking to see if you’re gone yet? The patient knows we must’ve told her, ‘Well, this guy’ll be gone today.’ ”
    “Ouch,” Lucas said, wincing.
    “Yeah. And Bekker was looking at more subtle problems, too. One of the things about this job is that some medical people can’t handle it. We treat kids with advanced and rare types of cancer, and almost all of them eventually die. And if you watch enough kids die, and their parents going through it with them . . . well, the burnout rate with nurses and technicians and even doctors is terrific. And they sometimes develop problems with chronic incapacitating depression. That can go on for years, even after the victim has stopped working with the kids. Anyway, having Bekker look at us, we thought, might give us some ideas about how we might help ourselves.”
    “That sounds reasonable,” Lucas said. “But the way you’retalking . . . did Bekker do something wrong? What happened?”
    “I don’t know if anything happened,” Merriam said, turning to look out at the sky. “I just don’t know. But after he was here for a week or two, my people started coming in. He was making them