Eyes of Prey

kitchen to phone Daniel. He caught the chief at breakfast and told him about the call from Stephanie’s lover.
    “Sonofabitch,” Daniel sputtered. “So you’re right. But why’d they kill George?”
    “He said he didn’t know. Actually, he said he’d speculated about it, but didn’t want to talk about it. But I know what he was thinking: that he looks like George. And when you sort through all the implications of that, it points at Bekker,” Lucas said, and explained.
    Daniel listened and agreed. “Now what? How do we get to the guy?”
    “We could maybe invent a crisis, put an ad in the paper, stake people out all over town, wire up my line, and when he calls—bam, we’re tracing. We might get him.”
    “Hmph. Maybe. I’ll talk to some of the techs about it. But what happens if he calls from Minnetonka?”
    “I don’t know. The thing is, he’s smart,” Lucas said. “If we fuck with him, he might just go back into the woodwork. I don’t want to risk chasing him away. He can put the finger on a suspect, if we ever come up with one.”
    “Okay. So let’s keep this tight between us,” Daniel said. “I’ll order a tap on your line and we’ll monitor calls. I’ll talk with Sloan and Anderson and Shearson and see if we can come up with some kind of pressure that’ll get to him to call back.”
    “I could do that. I figure . . .”
    “No. I don’t want you chasing Loverboy. I want youfocused on the killer or the killers—Bekker and whoever he’s working with.”
    “There’s not much there.”
    “You just keep pushing. Keep moving around. I got all kinds of guys who can do the pony work. I want you on the killer before he does it again.”

CHAPTER
20
    Not knowing the nature of neighborhood friendships around Bekker, and afraid to ask, the surveillance team decided not to seek a listening post among Bekker’s neighbors.
    Instead the team keyed on the intersections around the front and back of his house. From two parked cars, they could watch the front door directly, and both ends of the alley that ran behind his house. The cars were shuffled every hour or so, both to relieve the tedium and to lessen the possibility that Bekker might grow suspicious of one particular car.
    Even so, a jogger, a woman lawyer, spotted one of the surveillance cars within an hour of the beginning of the watch on Bekker and reported it to police. She was told that the car belonged to an undercover detective on a narcotics study, and was asked to keep it confidential. Later that same day she saw a second car and realized that Bekker was being watched. She thought about mentioning it to a neighbor but did not.
    The surveillance began in the evening. The next morning, four tired cops took Bekker to work. Four more monitored him in the hospital, but quickly understood that a perfect net would be impossible: the hospital was a warren of passageways, stairs, elevators and tunnels. They settled forcontaining him within the complex, with occasional eyeball checks of his location. While he was pinned, a narc stuck a transmitter under the rear bumper of his car.
     
    The discovery of George’s body was a sensation and a shock. Bekker watched, aghast, a TV3 tape of khaki-clad deputies marching through the brambles near the lakeside cabin, horsing out a litter. The body was covered with a pristine white sheet, wrapped like a chrysalis. A blonde newscaster, with a face as stylistically and cosmetically appropriate for the scene as a Japanese player’s is for Noh, intoned a dirgelike report, with the gray skies hanging theatrically in the background.
    Bekker, not a watcher of television, found a newspaper TV guide and marked the newscasts. The other stations were on the story, although none had TV3’s film.
    The next evening, fearing more bad news, he was nonplussed to find himself watching a seemingly interminable story about the recovery of a boxcar full of television sets from a warehouse someplace in Minneapolis. Television sets? He began to relax, switching channels, found television sets everywhere, and television reporters in flak jackets . . . .
    If anything important had happened, surely he wouldn’t be seeing television sets . . . .
    He nearly missed it. He was switching through the channels when he found the blonde again, back in the studio and out of her flak jacket. She delivered another body blow: Davenport, she said, did not believe that Philip George was Stephanie’s lover, believed that the