Eyes of Prey

Bekker know you’re seeing her?”
    Del sounded surprised. “What for?”
    “Maybe push him a little? We got the surveillance running, so there shouldn’t be any problem for her.”
    “Well . . . yeah, I guess we could work something out. Maybe I could get her to call him, let it slip somehow . . . .”
    “Try,” Lucas said.

CHAPTER
19
    The phone rang at three in the morning.
    Cassie lay on her back, barely visible in the light from a streetlamp filtering through the blinds, the sheet pulled up around her throat, clutched there with two fists, as though she were dreaming sad dreams.
    Lucas tiptoed into the kitchen and picked it up.
    The dispatcher, with an overlay of personal concern: “Lucas, this is Kathy, at Dispatch. Sorry to wake you up, but there’s a guy on the phone, says he’s a doctor, says it’s about your daughter . . . .”
    His heart stopped. “Jesus. Patch him through.”
    “I’ll push the button . . . .”
    There was a moment of electronic vacancy, then the sound of somebody breathing, waiting.
    “This is Davenport,” Lucas snapped.
    There was no immediate response, but the feeling of a presence, a background sound that might have been a distant highway.
    “Hello, God damn it, this is Davenport.”
    A man’s voice came back, low, gravelly, atonal, artificially clipped, the words evenly spaced, as though a robot werereading from a script: “There is nothing wrong with your daughter. Do you know who this is?”
    Lucas had listened to the tapes. Loverboy. “I . . . yes, I think so.”
    “Give me your phone number.” The voice was from Star Wars, from Darth Vader. No contractions. No sloppy constructions. Scripted and pared to the bone. “Do not make a call. I will call you back within five seconds. If your line is busy, I will be gone. I have a pencil.”
    Lucas gave him the phone number. “You’re gonna call . . .”
    “Five seconds.” There was a click and Lucas said, “Kathy, Kathy? Are you still on the line? God damn it.” The dispatcher was gone, and Lucas hung up. A second or two later, the phone rang once.
    Lucas snatched it up. “Yeah.”
    “I want to help, but I can not help directly,” the voice grated, still on the script. “I will not come out. How can I help?”
    “Did you send us a picture? I gotta know, just for identification.”
    “Yes. The cyclops. The killer does not look like the cyclops. The killer feels like the cyclops. His head looks like a pumpkin. There’s something wrong with it.”
    “Not to say you’re lying, but that sounds like the one-armed man, in that TV show a long time ago,” Lucas said, letting a tint of skepticism color his voice. Reaching for control. Cassie came into the kitchen, sleepy, rubbing her eyes, drawn by the tone of his voice.
    “Yes, The Fugitive,” Loverboy said. “I thought of that. Where did you get an artist’s drawing of me?”
    Loverboy had seen Carly Bancroft on TV3. “Let me ask the questions for a minute, okay? If you get spooked, I don’t want you ditching me before I get them out. Do you know of anyconnection between either of the Bekkers and Philip George?”
    “No.” There was a moment of hesitation, and then, off the script, voiced a notch higher, inflection: “I’ve speculated . . .” He changed his mind, and his voice, in midsentence: “No.” The robot control again.
    “Look,” Lucas said. “You’ve got a conscience. We’ve got a fuckin’ monster out there killing people and he might not be done yet. We need every scrap we can get on the case.”
    “Get Michael Bekker.”
    “We don’t know he’s involved.”
    Back on script, all inflection gone: “He is a monster. But he did not kill Stephanie personally. I did not make that mistake.”
    “Look, give me the connection between you and George, if you think there is one,” Lucas said, going soft. “If you want to stay out there, and you get caught later, I’ll testify that you were feeding me information, that you helped, okay? Maybe help you out.”
    Another pause. Then: “No. I can not. You have thirty more seconds.”
    “Hold on . . . why?”
    “Because you may trace the call. I budgeted two minutes. You have twenty-five seconds left . . . .”
    “Wait, wait, we’ve got to set up some way for me to reach you . . . . If I need you, bad . . .”
    “Put an advertisement in the Tribune personals . . . . Say you are no longer responsible for the debts of your wife. Sign it