Eyes of Prey

wiped the log in case anybody ever went back to try to track unexplained deaths.”
    “That’s what she thought. We talked about it, and I said I’d look into it. I talked to a couple of other people, and thinking back, they weren’t sure whether he was here or not, but on the balance, they thought he was. I called Bekker, gave him this phony excuse that we were looking into a pilferage problem, and asked him if he’d ever seen anybody taking stacks of scrub suits out of the supply closet. He said no. I asked him if he’d always signed in and out whenever he visited, and he said he thought so, but maybe, at one time or another, he’d missed.”
    “You can’t catch him in a lie . . .” Lucas said.
    “No.”
    “Were there any other deaths? Like this kid’s?”
    “One. The second or third week he was on the wards. A little girl with bone cancer. I thought about it later, but I don’t know . . . .”
    “Were there postmortems on the kids?”
    “Sure. Extensive ones.”
    “Did he do them? Do you know?”
    “No, no, we have a fellow who specializes in that.”
    “Did he find anything unusual?”
    “No. The fact is, these kids were so weak, they were so near the edge, that if he’d simply reached out and pinched off their oxygen feeds . . . that might have been enough. We’d never find that on a postmortem—not enough to separate it from all the other wild chemical shit we see in cancer cases: massive loads of drugs, radiation reactions, badly disturbed bodily functions. By the time you do a postmortem, these kids are a mess.”
    “But you think he might have killed them.”
    “That’s too strong,” Merriam said, finally turning around and looking at Lucas. “If I really thought that, I’d have called the police. If there had been any medical indication or anybody who actually saw anything or had a reason to believe he’d done it, I’d have called. But there was nothing. Nothing but a feeling. That could simply be a psychological artifact of our own, the insider’s resentment of an outsider intruding on what Bekker called our ‘rituals of death.’ ”
    “Did he publish?” Lucas asked.
    “Yes. I can give you the citations. Actually, I can probably have Clarisse scrounge up some photocopies.”
    “I’d appreciate it,” Lucas said. “Well . . . You know what happened. The other night.”
    “Bekker’s wife was killed.”
    “We’re looking into it. Some people, frankly, think he might have had a hand in it.”
    “I don’t know. I’d kind of doubt it,” Merriam said grimly.
    “You sounded like you thought he’d be capable . . . .”
    “I’d doubt it because if he knew his wife was going to be killed, he’d want to be there to see it,” Merriam said. Then, suddenly abashed, he added, “I don’t know if I believe that, really.”
    “Huh,” Lucas said, studying the other man. “Is he still in the hospital, working with live patients? Bekker?”
    “Yes. Not on this ward, but several others. I’ve seen him down in the ORs a couple of times and in the medical wards where they deal with the more extreme varieties of disease.”
    “Did you ever mention to anyone . . . ?”
    “Listen, I don’t know anything,” Merriam barked, his soft exterior dropping for a moment. “That’s my problem. If I say anything, I’m implying the guy is a killer, for Christ’s sakes. I can’t do that.”
    “A private word . . .”
    “In this place? It’d stay private for about thirty seconds,” Merriam said, running a hand through his thinning hair. “Listen, until you’ve worked in a university hospital, you’ve never really experienced character assassination. There are ten people on this staff who are convinced they’ll be on next year’s Nobel list if only some klutz in the next office doesn’t screw them up. If I suggested anything about Bekker, it would be all over the hospital in five minutes. Five minutes later, he’d hear about it and I’d be fingered as the source. I can’t do anything.”
    “All right.” Lucas nodded. He stood, picked up his coat.
    “Would you get me copies of those papers?”
    “Sure. And if there’s anything else I can do for you, call, and I’ll do it. But you see the kind of jam I’m in.”
    “Sure.” Lucas reached for the door, but Merriam stopped him with a quick gesture.
    “I’ve been trying to think how to characterize the way Bekker acted around death,” he said. “You know how you read about these