Silent Prey

he—”
    “Go on home and Sloan can fill you in,” Anderson said, interrupting. “I gotta go. This goddamn place is a madhouse.”
    And he was gone. Police work to do, no time for civilians. Lucas got off at University Avenue, took it to Vandalia, across I-94 and down Cretin, then over to the tree-shaded river road. Brooding. No time for Davenport.
    Feeling sorry for himself, knowing it.
    Two blocks before he got to the house, he slowed, watching, then turned a block early. The neighborhood offered few places to hide, other than inside the houses. The yards were open, tree-filled, burning with color: crabapple blossoms and lines of tulips, banks of iris, pink peonies and brilliant yellow daffodils, and the odd patch of buttery dandelions that had somehow escaped the yard-service sprayers. The day was warm, and people were working in their yards or on their houses; a couple of kids in shorts shot baskets at a garage-mounted hoop. Bekker couldn’t hide in the open yards, and breaking into a house would be tough. Too many people around. He turned a corner and idled down toward his house.
    Lucas lived in what a real estate woman had once called a soft rambler: stone and clapboard, a fireplace, big trees, two-car garage. At the end of the asphalt drive, he slowed, punched the garage-door opener, and waitedat the end of the driveway until the door was all the way up. A curtain moved in the front room.
    When Lucas pulled into the garage, Sloan was waiting in the door between the house and the garage, hand in his jacket pocket. He was a thin man with high cheekbones and deep-set eyes. As Lucas got out of the car, Del drifted up behind Sloan, the butt of a compact 9mm pistol sticking out of his waistband. Del was older, with a face like sandpaper, a street burnout.
    “What the hell happened?” Lucas asked as the garage door rolled down.
    “An old-fuck deputy uncuffed him so he could take a shit,” Sloan said. “Bekker’d been telling everybody that he had hemorrhoids and he always went to the can at the noon recess.”
    “Setting them up,” Lucas said.
    Del nodded. “Looks like it.”
    “Anyway, the jury went out and the deputy took him to the bathroom before hauling him down to the holding cell,” Sloan continued. “Bekker unscrewed a steel toilet-paper holder from the wall of the stall. Came out of the stall and beat the shit out of the old guy.”
    “Dead?”
    “Not yet, but he’s leaking brains. He’s probably paralyzed.”
    “I heard he hit two guys?”
    “Yeah, but the other was later . . .” Del said, and explained. Witnesses waiting outside a courtroom had seen Bekker leave, without knowing until later who he was. Others saw him cross the government-center plaza, running past the lunchtime brown-baggers, through the rafts of pigeons, heading down the street in his shorts. “He went about ten blocks, to a warehouse by the tracks, picked up a piece of concrete-reinforcement rod, went inthe warehouse and whacked a guy working at the dispatch desk. A clerk. Took his clothes and his wallet. That’s where we lost him.”
    “The clerk?”
    “He’s fucked up.”
    “I’m surprised Bekker didn’t kill him.”
    “I don’t think he had time,” Del said. “He’s in a hurry, like he knows where he’s going. That’s why we came here. But it don’t feel right anymore, the longer I think about it. You scare the shit out of him. I don’t think he’d take you on.”
    “He’s nuts,” said Lucas. “Maybe he would.”
    “Whatever, you got a carry permit?” asked Sloan.
    “No.”
    “We’ll have to fix you up if we don’t get him . . . .”
     
    They didn’t get him.
    Lucas spent the next forty-eight hours checking old sources, but nobody seemed much inclined to talk to him, not even the cops. Too busy.
    He brought a Colt Gold Cup .45 up from the basement gun safe, cleaned it, loaded it, kept it under the bed on a book. During the day, he carried it hidden in the Porsche. He enjoyed the weight of the gun in his hand and the headache-making smell of the gun-cleaning solvent. He spent an hour in a Wisconsin gravel pit, shooting two boxes of semi-wadcutters into man-sized silhouettes.
    Then, two days after Bekker broke out of the courthouse, neighbors found the body of Katherine McCain. She’d been an antiques dealer and a friend of Bekker’s wife, and she’d had the Bekkers to a party six or eight weeks before Bekker’s wife had been murdered. Bekker knew the house and knew she