Silent Prey

I say, ‘Say good-bye to your nuts, shitbag,’ and I punted the sonofabitch so hard his balls had to take a train back from Ohio.”
    “Yeah?” Lucas laughed. Cop stories were the best stories, and Fell looked positively merry.
    “So I tell this story to my lawyer friend and he freaks out. And he’s not worried about my eye,” she said wryly.
    “He’s worried about the guy on the wall?”
    “No, no. He knew that happened. He didn’t mind if somebody did it, he just didn’t want me to do it. And I think what really bothered him was my quote: ‘Say good-bye to your nuts, shitbag.’ I shouldn’t have told him that. It really bothered him. I think he wanted to join a country club somewhere, and he could see me sitting out on the flagstone terrace with a mint julep or some fuckin’ thing, telling the other country club ladies this, ‘Say good-bye to your nuts, shitbag.’ ”
    Lucas shrugged. “You ever tried a cop?”
    “Yeah, yeah.” She nodded, with a small smile, eyes unfocusing. “A trouser snake. We were hot for a while, but . . . You want a little peace and quiet when you’re home. He wanted to go out cruising for dopers.”
    Lucas took a bite out of a slice of pepperoni, chewed a minute and then said, “A couple of years ago, Lily and I were involved. This is between you and me?”
    “Sure.” The curiosity was wide on her face, unhidden.
    “We were getting intense, this was back in Minneapolis, her marriage was falling apart,” Lucas said. “Then this Indian dude shot her right in the chest. Goddamn near killed her.”
    “I know about that.”
    “I freaked out. Man. So then we saw each other a few times, but I’m afraid to fly, and she was busy . . . .”
    “Yeah, yeah . . .”
    “Then last year . . .”
    “The actress,” Fell said. “The one that Bekker killed.”
    “I’m like a curse,” Lucas said, staring past Fell’s head, eyes and voice gone dark. “If I’d been a little smarter, a little quicker . . . Shit.”
    After lunch, they went back to the paper, working through it, finding nothing. Fell, restless, wandered down to the team room as Lucas continued to read. Kennett brought her back a half-hour later.
    “Bellevue,” she said, plopping down in the chair across from Lucas.
    “What?” Lucas looked at Kennett, leaning in the door.
    “Bellevue lost some monitoring equipment from one of its repair shops. We never found out because it wasn’t too obvious—everything was accounted for, on paper. But when the stuff didn’t come back from repair, somebody checked, and it was gone. The repair people have receipts, they thought it was back on the floor. Anyway, it’s been gone for more than a month, and probably more like six or seven weeks. From before the time Bekker killed the first one,” Kennett said.
    “They lost exactly what Bekker’s been using in his papers,” Fell said.
    “He could’ve gotten the halothane there, too, and probably any amount of drugs,” Lucas said. “All from one source, if it’s a staffer.”
    “Sounds like him,” Fell said.
    “I’d bet on it,” Kennett said. He ran a hand through his hair, straightened his tie. Pissed. “God damn it, we were slow pulling this in.”
    “What’re you going to do?”
    “Move very quietly: we don’t want to scare anybodyoff,” Kennett said. “We’ll start processing Bellevue staffers against criminal records. And we’ll touch all the dopers we know, see who knows who on the inside. Then we do interviews. It’ll take a few days. Maybe you guys could get back to your fences? See if you could find somebody who handles Bellevue.”
    “Yeah.” Lucas looked at his watch. Almost three. “Let’s get back to Jackie Smith,” he said to Fell.
     
    Smith met them in Washington Square. The afternoon was oppressively hot, but Smith was cool: he arrived in a gray Mercedes, which he parked by a hydrant.
    “I don’t want to talk to you. You want to talk to somebody, talk to my lawyer,” Smith said as Lucas and Fell walked up. They stood just off the boccie ball courts, under a gingko tree, hiding from the sun.
    “Come on, Jackie,” Lucas said. “I’m sorry about the goddamn putting green. I got a little overheated.”
    “Overheated, my ass,” Smith snarled. “You know how long it’ll take to fix it?”
    “Jackie, we really need to make an arrangement, okay?” Lucas said. “Something new came up on this Bekker guy, and you’re in a position to help. Like I said last