Silent Prey

Arnold?”
    The woman’s smile sagged into a frown. “Yeah. What’d you want?”
    “We’re looking for a guy,” Lucas said. “We thought you could help.”
    “I ain’t been here all that long . . . .”
    Lucas dug in his pocket, took out his money clip, freed his driver’s license and handed it to Arnold. “Barbara here”—he nodded at Fell—“is a New York cop. I’m not. I’m from Minneapolis. They brought me in to help look for this Bekker dude who’s chopping people up.”
    “Yeh?” Arnold was giving nothing away, watching him with her small wandering eyes like a pullet who suspects the axe.
    “Yeah. He killed my woman out there. Maybe you read about it. I’m gonna catch him and I’m gonna do him.”
    Arnold nodded and asked, “So what’s that got to do with me?”
    “We think he’s getting stuff—drugs and medical equipment—from Bellevue. We know that you handle stuff out of Bellevue.”
    “That’s bullshit, I never touch nothing . . . .”
    “You moved five hundred cases of white Hammermill Bond copy paper out of there two weeks ago, paid a dollar a case, and sold it to a computer supply place for three dollars a case,” Fell said. “We could bust you if we wanted to, but we don’t want to. We just want some help.”
    She looked at them, quietly, a gleam of strong intelligence in her eyes. Calculating. Lucas had a quick vision of her jerking some crappy piece of hillbilly iron out of a drawer, something like a rusty Iver Johnson .32, and popping him in the chest. But nothing happened, except the sound of flies bumping against the front window.
    “Killed your woman?” she asked. She tipped her head, looking at him from the corner of her eyes.
    “Yeah,” he said. “It’s real personal.”
    She mulled it over for another few seconds, then asked, “What do you want?”
    “I need the name of a guy who rips stuff out of there on a regular basis.”
    “Will this come back on me?”
    “No way.”
    She thought about it, then mumbled: “Lew Whitechurch.”
    “Lew . . .”
    “Whitechurch,” she said.
    “Who else?”
    “He’s the only one, right out of Bellevue . . . .”
    “Any chance he might be peddling pills, too?”
    “I think he might. I never touch them, but Lew . . . he’s got a problem. He takes a little nose.”
    “Thanks,” Lucas said. He took a personal business card from his pocket, turned it over, wrote his hotel phone number on it. “Have you handled, or know anybody who has handled, a load of emergency-room monitoring equipment?”
    “No.” Her voice was positive.
    “Ask around. If you find somebody, have them call me. It’ll never get past us, I swear it on a Bible. I’m only in this because Bekker cut my woman’s throat.”
    “Cut her throat?” The fat woman touched her neck.
    “With a bread knife,” Lucas said. He let the bitterness flow into his voice. “Listen: anybody dealing with Bekker is liable to find himself strapped to an operating table, eyelids cut off, getting his heart sliced out while he’s still alive . . . . You read the papers.”
    “Watch TV.” She nodded.
    “Then you know.”
    “Fuckin’ lunatic, is what he is,” Arnold said.
    “So ask around. Call me.”
     
    Outside, Fell said, “You’re a scary sonofabitch sometimes. You sorta used your friend . . .”
    “My friend’s dead, she doesn’t care,” he said. And he shrugged. “But hillbillies understand that revenge shit.”
    “What’s the name?”
    “Lew Whitechurch. And she thinks he might deal pills.”
    “Let’s get him,” Fell said. As they were flagging the cab, she said, “If I bust Bekker myself, I’ll make detective first before I get out.”
    “That’d be nice.” A cab zigged through the traffic toward them.
    “More pension. I could probably afford a straight waitress job. I wouldn’t have to dance topless,” Fell said.
    “Aw,” he said. “I was planning to come down for your first night.”
    “Maybe we could work something out,” she said, and climbed into the cab before he could think of a comeback.
     
    They caught Lewis Whitechurch pushing a tool cart through a basement hallway at Bellevue. His supervisor pointed him out, the hospital’s assistant administrator hovering anxiously in the background. Kennett’s people had been there earlier, had talked to two employees, she said, but not Whitechurch.
    “What?” Whitechurch said.
    Fell flashed her badge, while Lucas blocked the hall. “We need to