Eyes of Prey

up.
    “This is Mikkelson,” said a deputy medical examiner. “Things are getting strange outside.”
    “What’d you find?” Lucas asked.
    “All kinds of shit. There was fresh blood and fresh fecal matter in George’s clothing when he went into that grave. It mixed with the mud before it started to congeal, so it hadn’t congealed yet when he went into the hole.”
    “Which means he wasn’t killed until last night . . .”
    “That’s what you’d think, but that’d be wrong,” the medical examiner said. “The holes in his eyes were filled with mud, too, but the holes were made after all the blood had pooled into his chest and arms, a long time after he was killed.”
    “That doesn’t compute,” Lucas said, confused.
    “Only one way,” the deputy M.E. said with evident relish.
    “They had to bury him and then dig him up to do the eyes. We’ve got some more tests going, but from the tissue evidence, I’d say that’s what they did.”
    “Why?”
    “Shit, Lucas, I’m a goddamned doctor, not a fuckin’ psychic. But that’s what happened. And there’s something else,too—some people from your lab brought me over a bunch of footprints from the Bekker house?”
    “Yeah?”
    “Not a match in the bunch. Not even close.”

CHAPTER
18
    “I need help,” Daniel said. “Political help. You know how the city council gets. They think the voters are stupid, they think the voters are gonna run them out of office if we don’t catch the guy today. They’re getting pissy.”
    “You got a couple of bad columns, too,” Lucas said. They were sitting in Daniel’s office, under the watchful eyes of Daniel’s political mug shots.
    “Yeah, well, what do you expect?” Daniel said. He looked in his cigar humidor, then slammed the lid. “Column-writing is the only job I know where sarcasm passes for intelligence . . . . God damn it, Davenport. I need something, and I don’t care what it is.”
    “Stick full-time surveillance on Bekker,” Lucas suggested.
    “All right,” Daniel said, grasping. “Why?”
    “To settle him, one way or another. Tag everybody he talks to, track everywhere he goes. If he’s involved, he hired a really strange-looking dude for the killing. We need somebody on the team with enough brains to break off Bekker, if he has to, and go after a likely-looking killer. And we ought to get a court order, tap his phones both at home and at work. We either clear him or we hang him.”
    “What do you think? Is he the guy?” Daniel asked with genuine curiosity.
    “I don’t know.” Lucas shrugged. “He’s the only thing we’ve got, but everything points somewhere else.”
    “All right, I’ll get the surveillance going,” Daniel said. “I can give that out to a couple of people, that we’ve got a guy being watched. That’ll cool some of the council fever. But it’d be nice if we got a little decent PR for a change.”
    “I was talking to a snitch a few nights ago, and he said a mutual acquaintance came into a bunch of TV sets—maybe a couple hundred of them, a boxcarload from over in St. Paul. Then I talked to another guy and he says Terry—this is Terry Meller, you remember him? No? He’s a longtime semi-bad dude—he says Terry is working out of a rental warehouse off Two-eighty. He says the TVs are stuffed in there, and probably a bunch of other shit. We could get the ERU and a warrant, call up the TV and the papers . . . .”
    “I could tell the ERU guys to armor up some of the reporters—we got some extra vests . . .” Daniel said, brightening. The Emergency Response Unit always got airtime. “Give them some good film.”
    “We won’t lose the Bekker story, but we’ll look good on this other thing,” Lucas said. “And there’ll be film . . . .”
    “Get a warrant,” Daniel said enthusiastically, poking a finger at him. “I’ll get the ERU started and some Intelligence guys over to look at the warehouse. Stop down at Intelligence when you leave and give them the location.”
    “I’ve got a new friend at TV3, by the way,” Lucas said. “She kind of owes me . . . .”
    “You feed her that break on George’s body?” Daniel asked, looking sideways at Lucas.
    Lucas grinned and shrugged. “Maybe something slipped out. But since we’re not going to kill the Bekker story, anyway, I want to tell her that I’m going off the reservation. I want to tell her I don’t think George is the lover, and I wantto make it seem like