Silent Prey

Bellevue phones?” Lucas asked, watching the techs get ready to roll the woman’s body.
    Kennett’s forehead wrinkled. “Think about this, Davenport: We got a guy who deals drugs, but he gets no phone calls. I mean, like, almost none. He got six calls at his apartment last month. There was a phone in the maintenance office he could use, but he didn’t, much. At least, that’s what his supervisor says.”
    “Did he carry a beeper? Maybe a cellular?” Fell asked.
    “Not that we can find,” said Kennett.
    “That’s bullshit,” Lucas said flatly. “He was dealing, right? We know that for sure?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Then he’s got a phone. We’ve just got to find it . . . .”
    “Carter’s guys are interviewing people over there right now, at Bellevue. Maybe you could listen in for a while?” Kennett said. He looked at Fell. “You’re the only guys who’ve come up with anything.”
    At the bottom of the window well, the crime-scene techs rolled the body. The woman’s head flopped over, and her wide white eyes suddenly looked up at them.
    “Aw, shit,” Fell gagged. She turned away, hunched over the alley cobblestones, and a stream of saliva poured from her mouth.
    “You okay?” Lucas asked, his hand on her back.
    “Yes,” she said, straightening. “Sorry. That just caught me, the eyes . . .”
    Five minutes later, the body was out of the window well. The removal crew had wrapped it in a blanket, but Kennett ordered the wrapper peeled away. “I want to look,” he said evenly. “I wish the fuck I could have gotten down there . . . .”
    Kennett and Lucas squatted next to the collapsible gurney as the blanket was lifted. The woman’s face waslike marble, white, solid, her dying pain and fear still graven on her face. The gag was like the earlier ones, carved from hard rubber, held in place with a wire that had been twisted tight behind her ear.
    “Pliers,” Kennett said absently.
    “Treats them like . . . lumber,” Lucas said, groping for the right concept.
    “Or lab animals,” Kennett said.
    “Sonofabitch.” Lucas leaned to one side, almost toppled, caught himself with his hand, then knelt over the body until his face was only inches from the body’s left ear. He looked up at one of the techs and said, “Roll her a little to the right, will you?” He took a pen from his shirt pocket and, to Kennett, said, “Look at this.”
    Kennett knelt beside him and Fell squatted behind the two of them, the other detectives crowding in. Lucas used the pen to point at two oval marks on the dead woman’s neck muscle.
    “Have you ever seen anything like that?” Lucas asked.
    Kennett shook his head. “Looks like a burn,” he said. “Looks like a fuckin’ snakebite.”
    “Not exactly. It looks like a discharge wound from one of those electroshock self-defense gizmos, stun guns. The St. Paul cops carry them. I went over to see a demonstration. If you keep the discharge points on bare skin for more than a second or two, you can get this kind of injury.”
    “That’s why there’s no fight,” Fell said, looking at him.
    Lucas nodded. “He hits them with the shocker. When you get hit, you go down, like right now. Then he comes with the gas.”
    “Couldn’t be too many places around that sell those things,” Kennett said.
    “Police-supply places, but I’ve seen them in gun magazines, too, mail order,” Lucas said.
    Kennett stood and rubbed alley sand from his hands and tipped his head back, as though looking up to heaven. “Please, God, let me find a Midtown address on an order form.”
     
    Lucas and Fell took a cab to Bellevue, windows open, the hot popcorn smell of the city roaring in as they dodged through traffic, and got trapped for five minutes in a narrow one-lane crosstown street. Fell’s jaw was working with anger.
    “Thinking about Bekker?”
    “About the body . . . Jesus. I hope Robin Hood gets him,” she said. “Bekker.”
    “What? Robin Hood?” He looked at her curiously.
    “Nothing,” she said, looking away.
    “No, c’mon, who’s Robin Hood?”
    “Ah, it’s bullshit,” she said, digging in her purse for a cigarette. “Supposedly somebody is knocking off assholes.”
    “You mean, a vigilante?”
    She grinned. “How else you gonna run this place?” she asked, gesturing out the window. “It’s supposed to be cops, but I think it’s just bullshit. Wishful thinking.”
    “Huh.”
    She lit the cigarette, coughed, and looked out the