Eyes of Prey

bought me a bottle of Glenfiddich, a single malt . . . . I won’t be going back to the other.”
    Lucas couldn’t tell one scotch from another. Bekker dropped ice cubes into a glass, poured two fingers of liquor over them and handed the glass to Lucas. He looked at his watch, and Lucas thought it odd that he would be wearing a watch with a dressing gown. “So what’d you find?” Lucas asked.
    “A couple of things,” Bekker said. He settled behind the desk, leaned back with the scotch and crossed his legs. They flashed from the folds of the dressing gown like a woman’s legs from an evening dress. Deliberately, Lucas thought. He thinks I might be gay, and he’s trying to seduce me. He took a sip of the scotch. “A couple of things,” Bekker repeated. “Like these.”
    He picked up a stack of colored cardboard slips, bound together with a rubber band, and tossed them across the desk. Lucas picked them up. They were tickets to shows at the Lost River. He thumbed through: eight of them, in three different colors.
    “Notice anything peculiar about them, Lucas?” Bekker asked. Using his first name again.
    “They’re from the Lost River, of course . . . .” Lucas rolled the rubber band off and looked at the tickets individually. “All for matinees . . . and there are eight tickets for three different shows. All punched, all different shows.”
    Bekker mimed applause, then held up his glass to Lucas, as if toasting him. “I knew you were intelligent. Don’t you find you can always tell? Anyway, the second woman who waskilled worked for the Lost River, correct? I went to a couple of evening performances with Stephanie, but I had no idea she was going in the afternoons. So I began to wonder: Could her lover . . . ?”
    “I see,” Lucas said. A connection. And it seemed to let Bekker out.
    “And I also found this,” Bekker said. He leaned forward this time, and handed Lucas several letter-sized sheets of paper. American Express account sheets, with various items underlined in blue ballpoint ink. “The underlined charges are for tickets at the Lost River. Six or seven times over the past few months, on her personal card. A couple of them match with the matinee dates and the charge amount is right. And then, on four of the days, there’s a dining charge, and none less than thirty dollars. I’d bet she was taking somebody to dinner. That restaurant, the Tricolor Bar, I’ve been there once or twice, but not in the afternoons . . . .”
    Lucas looked at the papers, then over the top of them at Bekker. “You should have shown these to Swanson.”
    “I don’t like the man,” Bekker said, looking at him levelly. “You, I like.”
    “Well, good,” Lucas said. He drank the last of the scotch. “You seem like a pretty reasonable guy yourself. Pathology, right? Maybe I’ll call you on one of my games; you could consult.”
    “Your games?” Bekker glanced at his watch again, then quickly looked away.
    What’s going on? “Yeah, I invent games. You know, historical strategy games, role-playing games, that sort of thing.”
    “Hmph. I’d be interested in talking sometime,” Bekker said. “Really.”

CHAPTER
14
    Bekker shut the door behind Lucas and dashed upstairs, leaving the lights out. He went to the window over the porch and split the curtains with an index finger. Davenport was just getting into his Porsche. A moment later the car’s lights came on, and in another minute it was gone. Bekker let the curtain fall back into place and hurried to his bedroom. He dressed in dark blue slacks, a gray sweatshirt and navy jacket, loafers. He gobbled a methamphetamine and went out the back, through the garage, and got in the car.
    A neighborhood restaurant had a pay phone just inside the door. He stopped, dialed, got the answering machine on the second ring—a message was waiting. He punched in the code, 4384. The machine rewound, paused, then Druze’s voice blurted a single syllable.
     
    Druze hunched over the wheel, the weight of the night pressing on him.
    Like the tarbaby. One foot stuck, then you have to kick with the other one, then you have to punch him, and your fist gets stuck.  . . .
    This would be the last for him. He’d talk Bekker out of thethird killing. There was no need for a third. Not now. He’d seen them on television, and the cops were convinced: one killer, a psycho.
    Druze was orbiting a red-brick university building, Peik Hall, watching. Lots of lights,