Eyes of Prey

opportunity, there was almost no chance of an arrest, much less a conviction. Lucas knew of at least two men who had killed their wives andgotten away with it, and a woman who’d killed a lover. There was nothing fancy about any of the murders. No exotic weapons, no tricky alibis, no hired killers. The men had used clubs: a grease gun and an aluminum camera tripod. The woman had used a wooden-handled utility knife from Chicago Cutlery.
    I just found her/him like that, they told the answering cops. When the cops read them their rights, all three asked for lawyers. After that, there wasn’t anything to go on. The pure, unvarnished and almost unbreakable two-dude defense: Some other dude did it.
    Lucas stared at the wall behind the desk. I need this fuckin’ case. If the Bekker investigation failed, if the spark of interest diminished and died, he feared, he might slip back into the black hole of the winter’s depression. Before the depression, he’d thought of mental illnesses as something suffered by people who were weak, without the will to suppress the problem, or somehow genetically impaired. No more. The depression was as real as a tiger in the jungle, looking for meat. If you let your guard down . . .
    Bekker’s beautiful face came up in his mind’s eye, like a color slide projected on a screen. Bekker.
    At twenty minutes after eleven, the phone rang. He looked at it for a moment, with a ripple of tension. Jennifer? He picked it up.
    “Lucas?” Daniel’s voice, hoarse, unhappy.
    “What happened?”
    “The sonofabitch did another one,” Daniel rasped. “The guy who killed the Bekker woman. Call Dispatch for the address and get your ass over there.”
     
    A little spark of elation? A touch of relief? Lucas hammered the Porsche through the night, across the Mississippi, west to the lakes, blowing leftover winter leaves over the sidewalks, turning the heads of midnight walkers. He had no troublefinding the address: every light in the little house was on and the doors were open to the night. Groups of neighbors stood on the sidewalk, looking down toward the death house; occasionally one would cross the street to a new group, a new set of rumors, walking rapidly as though his speed alone would prove to watching cops that he was on a mission of urgency.
     
    Elizabeth Armistead was lying faceup on her living room carpet. A bloodstain marked the carpet under the back of her head, like a black halo. One arm was twisted beneath her, the other was flung out, palm up, the fingers slightly crooked. Her face, from the nose up, had been destroyed. In place of her eyes was a finger-deep pit, filled with blood and mangled flesh. Another wound cut across her upper lip, ripping it, exposing white broken teeth. Her dress was pulled up high enough to show her underpants, which appeared to be undisturbed. The room smelled like a wet penny, the odor of fresh blood.
    “Same guy?” Lucas asked, looking down at her.
    “Gotta be. I caught the first one, too, and this one’s a goddamn carbon copy,” said a bright-eyed medical examiner’s investigator.
    “Anything obvious?” Lucas asked, looking around. The house seemed undisturbed.
    “No. No broken fingernails, and they’re clean. There doesn’t seem to have been a fight, and there’s no doubt she was killed right here—there are some blood splatters over there by the table. I didn’t look myself, but the other guys say there’s no sign of a door or window being forced.”
    “Doesn’t look like rape . . .”
    “No. And there aren’t any signs of semen outside the body.”
    A Homicide detective stepped up beside Lucas and said, “C’mere and look at the weapon.”
    “I saw it when I came in,” Lucas said. “The hammer?”
    “Yeah, but Jack just noticed something.”
    They went out in the hallway, where the hammer, wrapped in plastic, was being delicately handled by another cop.
    “What?” asked Lucas.
    “Look at the head and the claw. Not the blood, the hammer,” the second cop said.
    Lucas looked, saw nothing. “I don’t see anything.”
    “Just like the fuckin’ dog that didn’t bark,” the cop said with satisfaction. He held the hammer up to a lamp, reflecting light from the shiny hammerhead into Lucas’ eyes. “The first time you use a hammer, drive a nail or pull one, you start putting little nicks in it. Look at this. Smooth as a baby’s ass. The goddamn thing has never been used. I bet the guy brought it with him, to kill