Eyes of Prey

you on TV . . . .”
    They shook hands and Lucas said, “You were the first guy out here?”
    “Yes. The couple back there on the porch . . . ?”
    “I saw them,” Lucas said. He moved away from the hole with Swanson and Helstrom as they talked.
    “They saw some lights over here last night. We have a lot of break-ins in these lake cabins, so I came by and checked itout. There was nothing at the cabin, but I could see somebody had been through the bushes. I went along . . . and there was the grave.”
    “They didn’t try to hide it?” Lucas asked.
    Helstrom looked back along the track and cracked a thin grin. “Yeah, I guess, in a city way. Kicked some shit over the grave. Didn’t try too hard, though. They must have figured that with the rain, hell, in a couple of weeks there’d be nothing to find. And they were right. In a week, you couldn’t find that hole with three Geiger counters and a Republican water-witcher.”
    “We’re both saying ‘they,’ ” Lucas said. “Any sign of how many?”
    “Probably two,” Helstrom said. “They left tracks, but it was raining off and on all night, so the prints are pretty washed out. We’ve got one guy in gym shoes, for sure, ’cause we can still see the treads. Then there are prints that don’t seem to have treads on them, on top of the treaded prints—but we can’t be sure, because the rain might have taken them out . . . .”
    “Car?” Swanson asked.
    “You can see where the tires were. But I followed it all the way out to the road, and the tread marks were gone.”
    “But you think there were two,” Lucas said.
    “Probably two,” Helstrom said. “I looked at every track there is, marking the ones to cast; I couldn’t swear to it in court, but I’d be willing to bet on it in Vegas.”
    “You sound like you’ve done this shit before,” Lucas said.
    “I had twenty years in Milwaukee,” Helstrom said, shaking his head. “Big-city police work can kiss my ass, but I’ve done it before. We’re taking the body over to Minneapolis, by the way. We’ve got a contract with the medical examiner, if you need the gory details.”
    Swanson was looking back toward the hole. From where they were standing, all they could see was the foot sticking upand the two men working in the hole, getting ready to move the body. “Maybe we got us a break,” he said to Lucas.
    “Maybe. I’m not sure how it’ll help.”
    “It’s something,” Swanson said.
    “You know what I thought, when I first dug him up?” Helstrom asked. “I thought, Ah! The game’s afoot.”
    Lucas and Swanson stared at him for a moment, then simultaneously looked back to the hole, where the foot stuck up. “Jesus,” Lucas groaned, and the three of them started laughing.
    At that instant, one of the deputies, pulling hard, got the body halfway out of its grave. The head swung around to stare at them all with empty holes where the eyes should have been.
    “Aw, fuck me,” the deputy cried, and let the body slump back. The head didn’t turn, but continued looking up, toward the miserable gray Wisconsin sky and the black scarecrow twigs of the unclothed trees.
     
    He thought about it on the way back, weighing the pros and cons, and finally pulled into a convenience store in Hudson and called TV3.
    “Carly? Lucas Davenport . . .”
    “What’s happening?”
    “You had a short piece last night about a guy disappearing, a law professor?”
    “Yeah. Found his car at the airport. There’s a rumor flying around that he was Stephanie Bekker’s lover . . .”
    “That’s right—that’s the theory.”
    “Can I go with . . . ?”
    “ . . . and they’re taking him out of a grave in Wisconsin right this minute . . . .”
    “What?”
    He gave her directions to the gravesite, waited while shetalked to the news director about cranking up a mobile unit, then gave her a few more details.
    “What’s this gonna cost me?” she asked in a low voice.
    “Just keep in mind that it’ll cost,” Lucas said. “I don’t know what, yet.”
     
    Sloan was working at his desk behind the public counter in Violent Crimes when Lucas stopped by.
    “You’ve been over in Wisconsin?” Sloan asked.
    “Yeah. They did a number on the guy’s eyes, just like with the women. Did you talk to George’s wife yesterday?”
    “Yeah. She said it’s hard to believe that he was fuckin’ Stephanie Bekker. She said he wasn’t much interested in sex, spent all his time