Silent Prey

lived alone. He’d been waiting when she came home, and killed her with ahammer. Before he left in her car, he’d used a knife to slash her eyes, so her ghost couldn’t watch him from the other world.
    And then he disappeared.
    McCain’s car was eventually found in an airport parking lot in Cleveland, Bekker long gone. On the day the car was found, Lucas put the .45 back in the gun safe. He never got the carry permit. Sloan forgot, and then after a while, it didn’t seem important.
    Lucas had temporarily gone off women, and found it hard to focus on the idea of a date. He tried fishing, played golf every day for a week. No good. His life, he thought with little amusement, was like his refrigerator—and his refrigerator contained a six-pack of light beer, three cans of diet caffeine-free Coke, and a slowly fossilizing jar of mustard.
    At night, unable to sleep, he couldn’t get Bekker out of his head. Couldn’t forget the taste of the hunt, of closing in, of cornering him . . .
    He missed it. He didn’t miss the police department, with its meetings and its brutal politics. Just the hunt. And the pressure.
    Sloan called twice from Minneapolis, said it looked like Bekker was gone. Del called once, said they’d have to get a beer sometime.
    Lucas said yeah.
    And waited.
    Bekker was a bad penny.
    Bekker would turn up.

CHAPTER
3
    Louis Cortese was dying.
    A brilliant floodlight lit his waxy face and the blood on his cheeks, and emphasized the yellow tint in his eyes. His lips were twisted, like those of an imp in a medieval painting.
    Bekker watched. Touched a switch, heard the camera shutter fire. He could feel death swooping down on them, in the little room, in the lights, as Louis Cortese’s life drained into a plastic jug.
     
    Bekker’s brain was a calculator, an empty vessel, a tangle of energy, a word processor, and an expert anatomist. But never more than one thing at a time.
    Three months in the Hennepin County Jail had changed him forever. The jailers had taken away his chemicals, boiled his brain, and broken forever the thin electrochemical bonds that held his mind together.
    In jail, lying in his cell in his rational-planner mode, he’d visualized his brain as an old-fashioned Lions Club gumball machine. When he put in a penny, he got backa gumball—but he never knew in advance what color he’d get.
    The memory of Ray Shaltie, of the escape, was one color, a favorite flavor, rattling down the payoff chute of his psyche. When he got it, it was like a wide-screen movie with overpowering stereo sound, a movie that froze him in his tracks, wherever he was. He was back there with Ray Shaltie, with the steel fist, smashing . . . .
     
    Bekker, real time.
    He sat in a chromed-steel chair and watched Cortese’s death throes, his eyes moving between the monitor screens and the dying subject’s face. A clear plastic tube was sewn into Cortese’s neck, piping the blood from his carotid artery to an oversized water jug on the floor. The blood was purple, the color of cooked beets, and Bekker could smell it, his fine nostrils twitching with the scent. On the EKG, Cortese’s heart rate soared. Bekker trembled. Cortese’s consciousness was moving outward, expanding, joining with . . . what?
    Well. Nothing, maybe.
    Cortese’s . . . essence . . . might be nothing more than a bubble reaching the top of a cosmic glass of soda water, expanding only to burst into oblivion. The pressure of the thought made Bekker’s eyebrow jump uncontrollably, twitching, until he put a hand to his forehead to stop it.
    There had to be something beyond. That he himself might just blink out . . . No. The thought was insupportable.
    Cortese convulsed, a full-body rictus throwing him against the nylon restraining straps, his head cranking forward, his eyes bulging. Air squeezed from his lungs, past the elaborate gag, a hoarse bubbling release. Hewas looking at nothing: nothing at all. He was beyond vision . . . .
    The alarm tone sounded on the blood-pressure monitor, then on the EKG, twin tones merging into one. With his left hand still clapped to his forehead, restraining the unruly eyebrow, Bekker turned toward the monitors. Cortese’s heart had stopped, blood pressure was plummeting toward zero. Bekker felt the large muscles of his own back and buttocks tighten with the anticipation.
    He looked at the EEG, the brain-wave monitor. A jagged, jangled line just seconds before, it began flattening,