Eyes of Prey

formally.
    At the front door, Cassie whispered, “Thanks. Davis can be an asshole. I’m at the bottom of the heap here.”
    “No problem,” Lucas said, grinning. “And I appreciate the tip on the guest list. It really could turn into something.”
    “You gonna ask me out?” she asked.
    She’d surprised him again. “Mmm. Maybe,” he said, smiling. “But why . . .”
    “Well, if you’re going to, don’t wait too goddamned long, okay? I can’t stand the suspense.”
    Lucas laughed. “All right,” he said. As he stepped out on the sidewalk, the door clicked shut behind him. He took another step away, toward the car, when he heard a rapping on the door glass. He turned around and Cassie lifted the front of her T-shirt, just for an instant, just a flash.
    Long enough: She looked very nice, he thought. Very nice, pink and pale . . .
    And she was gone.

CHAPTER
11
    Bekker walked in circles on the Heriz carpet, orbiting the Rococo revival sofa, watching cuts from the press conference on the noon news. He’d heard shorter cuts on his car radio on the way to the hospital, and had gone back home to see it on television. Most of the press conference was nonsense: the police had nothing at all. But the appeal to Stephanie’s lover could be dangerous.
    “We believe the man who called nine-one-one is telling the truth. We believe that he is innocent of the murder of Mrs. Bekker, especially in light of this second murder,” the cop, Lester, was saying into the microphones. He was sweating under the lights, patting his forehead with a folded white handkerchief. “After discussions with the county attorney, we have agreed that should Mrs. Bekker’s friend come forward, Hennepin County would be willing to discuss a guarantee of immunity from prosecution in return for testimony, provided that he was not involved in the crime . . . .”
    Lester went on, but Bekker wasn’t listening anymore. He paced, gnawing on a thumbnail, spitting the pieces onto the carpet.
    The police were all over the neighborhood. They weren’thiding. They were, in fact, deliberately provocative. Stephanie’s idiot cop cousin, the doper, had been going door to door around the neighborhood, soliciting information. That angered him, but his anger was for another time. He had other problems now.
    “Loverboy,” they called him on TV. Who was it? Who was the lover? It had to be somebody in their circle. Somebody with easy access to Stephanie. He had exhausted himself, tearing at the problem.
    Fuckin’ Druze, he thought. Couldn’t find the face. The face had to be there, somewhere, in the photographs. Stephanie took photographs of everybody, could never leave anybody alone, always had that fuckin’ camera in somebody’s face, taking snapshots. She had boxes, cartons, baskets full of photos, all those beefy blond Scandinavian males . . . .
    Could Druze be wrong? It was possible, but, Bekker admitted to himself uncomfortably, he probably wasn’t. He didn’t seem unsure of himself. He didn’t equivocate. He’d looked at the photos, studied them and said no.
    “Bitch,” Bekker said aloud to Stephanie’s house. “Who were you fucking?”
    He looked back at the television, at Lester yammering at the cameras. Anger surged in him: it was unfair, they had twenty men, a hundred, and he had only himself and Druze. And Druze couldn’t really look, because if he was seen first . . .
    “Bitch,” he said again, and gripped by the anger, he pounded out of the parlor, up the stairs, into the bedroom. The cigarette case was with his keys and a pile of change, and he snapped it open, popped two amphetamines and a sliver of windowpane, and closed his eyes, waiting for Beauty.
    There. The bed moved for him, melted, the closet opened like a mouth, a cave, a warm place to huddle. His clothes: they gripped him, and he fought the panic. He had felt it before, the shirt tightening around his throat, the sleeves gripping hisarms like sandpaper, tightening . . . . He fought the panic and stripped off the constricting shirt, slipped out of his pants and underwear, and threw them out into the room. The closet called, and he dropped to his knees and crawled inside. Warm and safe, with the musty smell of the shoes . . . comfortable.
    He sat for a minute, for five minutes, letting the speed run through his veins and the acid through his brain. Fire, he thought. He needed fire. The realization came on him suddenly and he bolted from the