Silent Prey

spread wide, held open by a hard-rubber cone: the subject could breathe through the nose, but not through the mouth. His screams, when he tried to scream, sounded like a species of humming, though not quite humming.
    Mostly, he’d been as silent as a book.
    At the head of the table, Bekker had stacked his monitoring equipment in what a discount stereo store had called a home entertainment center. The arrangement was pleasingly professional. The monitors measured body temperature, blood pressure, heartbeat, and brain-wave activity. He also had a neuro-intracranial pressure monitor, but hadn’t used it.
    The room around the equipment was also carefully finished: he’d worked on it for a week before he was satisfied. Scrubbed it with disinfectant. Installed an acoustic-tile ceiling and Formica wall panels in a smooth oyster-white finish. Put down the royal-blue carpet. Brought in the equipment. The monitors had been the hard part. He’d finally gotten them from Whitechurch, a dealer at Bellevue. For two thousand in cash, Whitechurch had taken them out of a repair shop, first making sure they’d been fixed . . . .
    Sigh.
    One of the monitors was telling him something.
    What was it? Hard to concentrate . . .
    Body temperature, eighty-four degrees.
    Eighty-four?
    That was too low. He glanced at the clock. 9:07 . . .
    He’d been gone again.
    Bekker rubbed the back of his neck, disturbed. He would go away, sometimes for an hour. It never seemed to happen at critical times, but still: he should have recognized it, the sigh when he came back. When he went away, he always came back with a sigh . . . .
    He stepped to the tape recorders, looked at the counters. They were slightly out of sync, one of them at 504, the other at 509. He rewound them to 200 and listened to the first.
    “ . . . direct stimulus brings only a slight reaction, no more than one millimeter  . . .”
    His own voice, hoarse with excitement. He turned off the first recorder, turned on the second. “ . . . no more than one-millimeter reflex in the iris followed by immediate release of  . . .”
    He turned off the second one. The recorders were working fine. Identical Sonys, with battery backup in case of power failure, they were better than the ones he’d used at the University of Minnesota.
    Bekker sighed, caught himself, looked quickly at the clock, afraid that he’d been away again. No. 9:09. He had to clean up, had to get rid of Cortese’s body, had to process the Polaroid color-slide film in the cameras. And he had some ideas about the taking of the specimens, and those ideas should be noted. Many things to do. But he couldn’t, not at just this moment. The PCP hadn’t arrived, and he felt . . . serene. The session had been a good one.
    Sigh.
    He glanced at the clock, felt a tiny thrill of fear. Nine twenty-five. He’d been gone again, frozen in one place; his knees ached from the unmoving stance. It was happening too much. He needed more medication. Street cocaine was good, but not precise enough . . . .
    Then: Dink.
    Bekker turned his head. The intrusive sound came from a corner of his basement apartment. Almost a bell, but not quite. Instead of ringing, it simply struck once each time the old woman pushed the button.
    Dink.
    Bekker frowned, walked to the intercom, cleared his throat, and pressed the talk button. “Mrs. Lacey?”
    “My hands hurt.” Her voice was shrill and ragged. Old. She was eighty-three, hard of hearing, nearly blind in one eye. Her arthritis was bad and growing worse. “My hands hurt so much,” she complained.
    “I’ll bring a pill . . . in a few minutes,” Bekker said. “But there are only three left. I’ll have to go out again tomorrow . . . .”
    “How much?” she asked.
    “Three hundred dollars . . .”
    “My golly . . .” She seemed taken aback.
    “It’s very difficult to find these days, Mrs. Lacey,” Bekker said. And it had been for decades. She knew that. Morphine had never been street-legal in her lifetime. Neither had her marijuana.
     
    A few days after he’d taken the job as a live-in helper—the old woman’s word, she didn’t need bathroom assistance—he’d shown her a Wall Street Journal story about bank failures. She’d read it, nearly whimpering. She had her Social Security, she had her savings, some $370,000, and she had her building. If any of them broke down . . .
    Edith Lacey had watched the old street women as they went by,