Silent Prey

to stay anyway,” she said. “It’s all we’ve got.”
    All we’ve got, Lucas thought. Yeah. We find Bekker’s supplier, the best damned lead all week, and Bekker kills him right under our noses. Some hotshot cops they were. There had to be another way to approach this situation, to find a way in . . . .
    At Midtown South, Lucas could hear Kennett all the way out to the reception desk.
    “ . . . know it’s hot, but I don’t give a shit,” he was saying. “I don’t want people around here reading the goddamn reports, I want everybody out on the street. I want the fuckin’ junkies to know there’s a war going on.Instead of coming in here, I want you out on the street with your people, rousting these assholes. Somebody knows where he’s at . . . .”
    Lucas leaned in the door. Seven or eight detectives were sitting uncomfortably around the conference room, while Kennett sat on a folding chair at the front, his fingers over his heart, an angry flush on his face. He looked over the cops to Lucas and snapped, “Tell me something good.”
    “Did you talk to Carter?”
    “I’m supposed to call him back,” Kennett said, looking at a phone slip. “What happened?”
    “An old lady maybe told us how Whitechurch got his calls.”
    “Well, goddamn,” somebody said.
    Lucas shook his head: “But it might not be good. He may have had doctor code names for his clients. When a buyer needed to call in, the switchboard—or somebody—would page the doctor. Whitechurch would pick up a phone and answer the page. There are thousands of doctors in there every day, thousands of phone calls. Hundreds of pages.”
    “Sonofabitch,” Kennett said. He ran his hand through his hair, and a swatch of it stood up straight, in a peak. “Carter’s pushing it?”
    “Yeah. Six guys and Fell stayed to help.”
    Kennett thought about it for a second, then exhaled in exasperation and asked, “Anything else?”
    “No. I’m still reading paper on him, but I think . . . Look, I had an idea on the way over. Entirely different direction. Carter’s taking the phone angle, you got guys on everything else. I was thinking again about how hard Bekker is to find, about where he’s getting his money, about all the things we don’t know about him. So I wasthinking, maybe I should talk to the guys who did know Bekker.”
    “Like who?”
    “Like the guys who were in jail with him. Maybe I ought to go back to the Cities. I could run down the people who were in the next cells to his. Maybe he said something to somebody, or somebody gave him an idea of how to hole up . . . .”
    “That’s not bad,” said Kennett, scratching his breastbone. “Kind of a long shot, though, and it takes you out of the action here.” He thought about it some more. “I’ll tell you what. Read paper for the rest of the day, think about the phones. Day after tomorrow’s the lecture. If we’ve got nothing by then, let’s talk about it . . . . You see the art?”
    “Art?”
    Kennett said, “Jim . . .”
    One of the detectives handed Lucas a brown envelope. Lucas opened it and found a sheath of eight-by-ten color photos. Whitechurch, dead in the hallway, flat on his back. Blood on the tile behind his head, and on the wall. A twenty-dollar bill half pinned under the body.
    “What’s the money?” Lucas said.
    “They must have been hassling over the cash when Bekker shot him,” said the cop named Jim. “One of the janitors heard the shots. Not being stupid, he hollered before he went to look. Then he kind of carefully stuck his head through a fire door and saw Whitechurch on the ground. The outside door was just closing. Bekker must’ve grabbed what he could and run for it.”
    “He didn’t take the eyelids,” Lucas said. Except for the blood, Whitechurch might have been a sleeping drunk.
    “Nope. Just poked him in the eyes and grabbed thedope, if there was any. They got a print, by the way, off a bill. It was Bekker.”
    “All right, let’s get out there,” Kennett said to the cops. There was an unhappy silence, all of them on their feet and moving through the door, shaking heads. “Hey. Everybody. Tell your people to put on the vests, huh? They’re gonna be talking to some pissed-off people.”
    Huerta, bumping past Kennett, stopped to pat him on the head, pushing his hair down.
    Kennett said, “What?” and Huerta, grinning, said, “Just knocking down your mohawk. With all that white hair stickin’ up you