Silent Prey

reasons . . . .
    “This never ran in the paper?” Lucas asked, looking at O’Dell.
    “No. They’ve agreed to hold it at our request, but they’ve reserved the right to print it if it seems relevant.”
    “Do you have any idea who it is? This Thick guy?”
    He shook his head: “One of four or five hundred cops—if it’s a cop at all.”
    “You could probably narrow it more than that,” Lucas said.
    “Not without going public,” Lily said. “If we started checking out five hundred cops . . . Christ, the papers would be all over us. But the main thing is, you see . . .”
    Lucas picked up her thought: “Bekker can identify two cop killers and he’s willing to do it . . . .”
    “And for that reason, we think these guys’ll make a run at Bekker.”
    “To shut him up.”
    “Among other things.”
    “If they are coming out, they’re more likely to go for Bekker,” O’Dell said. “They might have to go for him anyway, if they think he can identify two of them. But there’s more than that: Killing Bekker would be one way to make their point, that some people have to be killed. Bekker’s a nightmare. Who can object to killing him? He’s made to order for them, if they can find him.”
    “This is getting complicated,” Lucas said. “I worry about Lily. She’s close to this thing, funneling stuff around. What happens if they come after her?”
    “They won’t,” O’Dell said confidently. “Two dead cops would be unacceptable . . . .”
    “I’d think one dead cop would be unacceptable.”
    “One dead cop can be finessed. Denied. Two is a pattern,” O’Dell said.
    “Besides, I’m not exactly a pushover,” Lily said, patting the purse where she kept her .45.
    “That’ll get your ass killed,” Lucas said, anger in his voice. They locked up again. “Anyone’s a pushover when the shooters are using a fuckin’ machine gun from ambush. You’re good, but you ain’t bulletproof.”
    “All right, all right . . .” She rolled her eyes away.
    “And there’s always Copland,” O’Dell said. “When Lily’s outside working, she’s usually with me in the car. Copland’s more than a driver. He’s tough as a nail and he knows how to use his gun. I’ll have him take her home at night.”
    “Okay.” Lucas looked at Lily again, just for a second, then shifted back to O’Dell. “How’d you get onto Fell? Exactly?”
    “Exactly.” O’Dell mopped up a river of syrup with a crust of the toast, looked at it for a minute, then popped it in his mouth and chewed, his small eyes nearly closing with the pleasure of it. He swallowed, opened his eyes. Like a frog, Lucas thought. “This is it, exactly. Once or twice a semester I go up to Columbia and lecture on Real Politics, for a friend of mine. Professor. This goes way back. So a few years ago—hell, what am I saying, it was fifteen years ago—he introduced me to a graduate student who was using computerized statistical techniques to analyze voting patterns. Fascinating stuff. I wound up taking classes in statistics, and a couple in computers. I don’t look like it”—he spread his arms, as if to display his entire corpulent body—“but I’m a computer jock.When these guys in intelligence found what they thought was a problem, I sorted the killings. There was a pattern. No mistake about it. I called in Petty, who specialized in computer searches and relational work. We turned up almost two hundred possibles. For one reason or another, we eliminated a lot of them and got it down to maybe forty. And twelve of those, we were just about sure of. I think Lily told you that . . .”
    “Yeah. Forty. That’s a pretty unbelievable number.”
    O’Dell shrugged. “Some of the killings are probably just what they seem to be—thugs getting killed on the street by other thugs. But not all of them. And I’m sure we missed some. So balancing everything out, I think forty, fifty aren’t bad numbers.”
    “How does Fell fit in?” Lucas asked.
    “Petty ran the bad guys against cops who’d know them—a lot of complicated name sorts here, but I’ve got total access.”
    “And Fell’s name came up . . . .”
    “Way too much.”
    “I hate statistics,” Lucas said. “The newspapers were always fuckin’ with them back in Minneapolis, drawing stupid conclusions from bad data.”
    “That’s a problem, the data,” O’Dell agreed. “We’d certainly never get Fell in court, based on my