Silent Prey

The working group appointed a new lead investigator, an unassigned captain, but he’s not doing anything. He’s just there to cover our asses, in case something leaks. You know, so we can say we’ve got an active case under investigation by a ranking officer.”
    “And you want me to look into it,” Lucas said.
    Lily nodded. “My boss and I talked it over. We need the work done off the books. Nobody will know but the two of us. It’s the only way. And because of Bekker, you’re a perfect fit. The goddamn media’s going nuts about Bekker, of course, the TV and the Post and News, Doctor Death and all that. You can’t get in a cab without hearing a radio talk show about him. So we bring you in,the guy who caught him last time. A consultant. But while you’re looking, we’re going to put you close to a couple of people Walt was looking at.”
    “Huh.” Lucas sat and thought for a long moment, then he looked up. “This guy who got shot,” he said. “You called him Walt, like . . . he wasn’t just another guy. Is there something I should know?”
    She looked at his face, but not into his eyes: her eyes seemed suddenly blank, as though she were seeing another face. “Walt was my oldest friend,” she said.
    And she told him about the dream . . . .
     
    The dream had started the night Petty was killed; it began not with a vision, but with an odor, the smell of ozone, as if electrical circuits were burning somewhere. Then she saw herself, through a haze, but with increasing clarity, seated on a simple marble bench, the kind found in cemeteries, with Petty’s bleeding, shattered body stretched across her lap. A pietà. She did nothing at all, but simply sat there, looking into his face. In the dream, the point-of-view closed on the face, like a camera creeping forward, and at the last moment, focused not on an image of Christ-like peace, but on a face that had been shredded by high-velocity slugs, at yellow molars slick with drying blood.  . . .
    A ludicrous image, but one that came, night after night.
    But that wasn’t the way it had been, the night Petty was killed.
    Petty’s seventy-one-year-old mother had called, confused, incoherent. Her only child had been killed, she said, her voice an ancient moan. Walt was dead, dead . . . Lily could see the old woman in her mind’s eye, the narrow gray face bent over the black telephone, body shaking, twitching, the withered hand with the handkerchief, the doilies on the TV behind her, the Sacred Heart on the wall. Lily could even smell it, cabbage and bread dough . . . .
    The old woman said that Lily had to go to Bellevue to identify Walter. Was there a cop there, Lily asked? Yes, right here, and Father Gomez. And the mayor was coming.
    Lily spoke to the cop. Take care of Gloria Petty, she said, the wife of a cop, the mother of a cop. The last one alive in this family. Then, trembling with fear and grief, she’d gone to Bellevue.
    No pietà at Bellevue.
    Just a body, waxlike, dead, sprawled on a blood-soaked gurney, raw from the pickup. The body was wrapped in layers of plastic, like beef being moved. She noted professionally that one of the slugs had ripped off Petty’s cheek, exposing his molars; a preview of Petty as a naked skull, a reminder of Petty’s naive, happy smile. The smile that flashed every time he saw her, delighted with her presence.
    She recalled a day from their Brooklyn childhood, when the two of them were seven or eight. Late fall, blue skies, crisp weather, a hint of Halloween. There were maple trees on the block, turning red. She’d been sick and had been kept home from school, but her mother let her out in the afternoon to sit on the stoop.
    And here was Walter, running down the street, a paper held overhead, flapping, joy in his eyes. Her spelling test from the day before. A perfect score. Common enough for Lily, but Walter, so generously pleased for her, that smile, that young blond hair slicked down with Vaseline . . .
    Come to this, the bloody teeth.
    “That’s Walter Petty,” she told a tired assistant M.E.
    At home again, changing clothes, preparing herself to see Petty’s mother, she thought of her school yearbook. She went into the living room, pulled a box from a built-in cupboard, and found three of them. And his senior picture: his hair never quite right, his face too slender, the slightly dazed smile.
    Lily broke and began to weep. The spasm was uncontrollable, unlike anything she’d experienced