Eyes of Prey

zealots on crusades against pornography, and you sense there’s something wrong with them? A fascination with the subject that goes way beyond any normal interest? Like a guy has a collection of two thousand porno magazines so he can prove how terrible it is? That’s how Bekker was. A kind of a pious sadness when a kid died, but underneath, you got the feeling of a real, lip-smacking pleasure.”
    “You make him sound like a monster,” Lucas said.
    “I’m an oncologist,” Merriam said simply. “I believe in monsters.”
    Lucas walked out of the hospital, hands in his pockets, thinking. A pretty nurse smiled at him, and he automatically smiled back, but his head wasn’t smiling. Bekker killed kids?
     
    The medical examiner’s investigator was a fat, gloomy man with cheeks and lips so pink and glossy that he looked as though he might have been playing with an undertaker’s makeup. He handed Lucas the file on Stephanie Bekker.
    “If you want my opinion, the guy who did her was either a psycho or wanted it to look that way,” the investigator said. “Her skull was like a broken egg, all in fragments. The bottle he hit her with was one of those big, thick tourist things from Mexico. You know, kind of blue-green, more like a vase than a bottle. The glass must have been a half-inch thick. When it broke, he used it like a knife, and drove the edges right down through her eyes. Her whole face was mutilated, you’ll see in the photographs. The thing is . . .”
    “Yeah?”
    “The rest of her body was untouched. It wasn’t like he was flailing away, hitting her anyplace he could. You take somebody flying on crank or PCP, they’re just swinging. They go after a guy, and if the guy gets behind a car, they’ll go after the car. If they can’t hit you on the face, they’ll hit you on the shoulders or chest or back or the soles of your feet, and they’ll bite and claw and everything else. This thing was almost . . . technical. The guy who did it is either nuts and it has something to do with the face, with the eyes, or it’s supposed to look that way.”
    “Thanks for the tip,” Lucas said. He sat down at an empty desk, opened the file and glanced at the photos.
    Freak, he thought.
    The file was technical. To judge from body temperature andlack of lividity, the woman had died just before the paramedics arrived. Stephanie Bekker had never had a chance to resist: she had been a strong woman, with long fingernails, and they were clean—no blood or skin beneath them. There were no abrasions on the hands. She’d had intercourse, while alive and probably an hour or so before she’d died. No bruising was evident around the vagina and there were indications that the intercourse had been voluntary. She had washed after the intercourse, and samples taken for DNA analysis might not prove valid. The samples had not yet been returned.
    The medical examiner’s investigator noted that the house had been undisturbed, with no evidence of a fight or even an argument. The front door had been unlocked, as had a door into the kitchen from the garage. Bloody tracks led into the garage. The outer garage door had also been unlocked, so an intruder could have come through the house from the alley. There was a single bloody handprint on the wall, and a trail of blood from the point where she’d fallen in the initial attack. She’d lived, the medical examiner thought, for twenty to thirty minutes after the attack.
    Lucas closed the file and sat staring at the desktop for a moment.
    Loverboy could have done it. If the few solid facts of the case had been given him, Lucas would have bet money on it. But this kind of violence rarely came immediately after a successful sexual encounter; not without some preliminary crockery-tossing, some kind of mutual violence.
    And then there was Bekker. Everybody had a nervous word for the man.
    The fat investigator was washing his hands when Lucas left.
    “Figure anything out?” he asked.
    “Freak,” Lucas said.
    “A problem.”
    “If it’s not a freak . . .” Lucas started.
    “Then you got a big problem,” the fat man finished for him, shaking water from his delicate pink fingers.
     
    The days were getting longer. In the pit of winter, dusk arrives shortly after four o’clock. When Lucas arrived at City Hall, there was still light in the sky, although it was well after six.
    Sloan had already gone, but Lucas found Del in Narcotics, flipping through a reports