Eyes of Prey

slowed, stopped, rolled down the window. “Can I help you?” he called.
    There was a long moment of silence, then the man sauntered out into the street. He was wearing a leather bomber jacket and boots.
    “Mr. Bekker, how are you?”
    “You’re a police officer?”
    “Lucas Davenport, Minneapolis police.”
    Yes. The man at the funeral, the tough-looking one. “Is the police department camped on my porch?” Bekker asked. Safe now—the man wasn’t a mugger or revenge-bound relative—the sarcasm knit through his polite tone like a dirty thread in a doily.
    “No. Only me,” the cop said.
    “Surveillance?”
    “No, no. I just like to wander by the scene of a crime now and then. Get a feel for it. Helps me think . . .”
    Davenport. A bell went off in the back of Bekker’s mind. “Aren’t you the officer that the FBI agent called a gunman? Killed some ridiculous number of people?”
    Even in the weak illumination from the corner streetlight, Bekker could see the flash of the cop’s white teeth. He was smiling.
    “The FBI doesn’t like me,” the cop said.
    “Did you like it? Killing all those people?” The interest was genuine, the words surprising Bekker even as they popped out of his mouth. The cop seemed to think about it for a moment, tipping his head back, as though looking for stars. It was cold enough that their breath was making little puffs of steam.
    “Some of them,” the cop said after a bit. He rocked from his toes to his heels, looked up again. “Yeah. Some of them I . . . enjoyed quite a bit.”
    Bekker couldn’t quite see the other man’s eyes: they were set too deep, under heavy brow ridges, and the curiosity was almost unbearable.
    “Listen,” Bekker heard himself say, “I have to put my car in the garage. But would you like to come in for a cup of coffee?”

CHAPTER
12
    Lucas waited at the front door until Bekker got the car in the garage and walked through the house to let him in. Bekker turned on the porch light as he opened the door. In the yellow light, his skin looked like parchment, stretched taut over the bones of his face. Like a skull, Lucas thought. Inside, in the soft glow of the ceiling fixtures, the skull illusion vanished: Bekker was beautiful. Not handsome, but more than pretty.
    “Come in. The house is a bit messy.”
    The house was spectacular. The entry floor was oak parquet. To the left was a coat closet, to the right a wall with an oil painting of a British Isles scene, a cottage with a thatched roof in the foreground, sailboats on the river beyond. Straight ahead, a burgundy-carpeted staircase curled up to the right. Off the entryway, a room with glass doors, full of books, appeared to the right, under a balcony formed by the stairs. To the left was the parlor, with Oriental carpets, a half-dozen antique mirrors and a stone fireplace. Beautiful and hot. Seventy-five or eighty degrees. Lucas unzipped his jacket and crouched to press his fingers against the parlor carpet.
    “Wonderful,” he said. The pile was soft as beaten eggwhites, an inch or more deep, and as intricately woven as an Arabian fairy tale.
    Bekker grunted. He wasn’t interested. “Let’s go back and sit in the kitchen,” he said, and led the way to a country kitchen with quarry-tile floor. Stephanie Bekker had been killed in the kitchen, Lucas recalled. Bekker seemed unaffected by it, pulling earthenware cups from natural oak cabinets, spooning instant coffee into them.
    “I hope caffeine is okay,” he said. Bekker’s voice was flat, uninflected, as though he daily drank coffee with a cop who suspected him of murder. He must know . . . .
    “Fine.” Lucas looked around the kitchen as Bekker filled the cups with tap water, stuck them in a microwave and punched the control buttons. The kitchen was as carefully crafted as the rest of the house, with folksy, turn-of-the-century wallpaper, dark, perfectly matched wood, and touches of flagstone. While the rest of the house felt decorated, Lucas thought, the kitchen felt lived in.
    Bekker turned back to Lucas as the microwave began to hum. “I know nothing at all about cooking,” Bekker said. “A little about wine, perhaps.”
    “You’re handling your wife’s death pretty well,” Lucas said. He stepped up to a small framed photograph. Four women in long dark dresses and white aprons, standing around a butter churn. Old. “Are these, what, ancestors?”
    “Stephanie’s great-grandmother and some friends. Sit down,