Silent Prey

looked like Steve Martin in The Jerk, except skinny and old.”
    “Yeah, old, kiss my ass, Huerta,” Kennett said, laughing, straightening his hair.
    Lucas, astonished, watched Huerta walk away, then looked back at Kennett.
    “What?” Kennett asked, puzzled, raking at his hair again.
    “Steve Martin?” Lucas asked.
    “Asshole,” Kennett grumbled.
    “They’re probably calling you the same thing, you putting them on the street like that,” Lucas said. Switching the topic away from Steve Martin, covering, covering . . .
    “I know,” Kennett said soberly, looking after the detectives. “Jesus, roustin’ junkies in this heat . . . it’s gonna stink and the junkies’ll be pissed and the cops are gonna be pissed and somebody’s gonna get hurt.”
    “Not a hell of a lot of choice,” Lucas said. “Keep pushing everywhere. With Whitechurch dead, Bekker’s gotta find a new source.”
    • • •
    An hour later, Lucas lay on his bed at the Lakota and thought about what Huerta had said. That he looked like Steve Martin, with all that white hair . . .
    All right. You’re on the street. There’s been a killing. A car speeds by and inside is an old white guy. That’s what Cornell Reed told Bobby Rich’s snitch. An old white guy. How would you know he was old, when he was in a moving car? If he had white hair . . .
    And then there was Mrs. Logan, and what she’d said, in the apartment beneath Petty’s . . . .
    Kennett fit. He was a longtime intelligence operative. He was high up, with good access to inside information. He was tough but apparently well liked; he had charisma. He had white hair.
    Kennett was sleeping with Lily. How did that cut across it? How did she wind up in the sack with a guy who might be a suspect? And the biggest question: with several hundred possible suspects, how did Kennett wind up in Lucas’ lap, available for daily inspection?
    O’Dell was one answer. Lily was another. Or both together.
    He lay on the bed with the Magic Marker and his art pad, trying to put together a list. Finally he came up with:
    1. Cornell Reed.

CHAPTER
15
    Lucas was flat on his back, half asleep, when Fell called. The room was semidark; he’d turned out all the lights but the one in the bathroom, and then half closed the door.
    “I’m downstairs,” she said. “If you’re awake, let’s get something to eat.”
    “Anything at Bellevue?” Lucas asked.
    “I’ll tell you about it.”
    “Ten minutes,” he said.
    He was fifteen minutes. He shaved, going easy over the bruises, brushed his teeth and took a quick shower, put on a fresh shirt, dabbed on after-shave. When he got down to the lobby, Fell looked him over and said, “Great. You make me feel like a rag.”
    “You look fine,” he said, but she didn’t. She looked worn, dirty around the eyes. The dress that had been crisp that morning hung slackly from her shoulders. “There’s an Italian place a couple of blocks down that’s friendly.”
    “Good. I couldn’t handle anything complicated.” As they were going out the door, she said, “I’m sorry aboutditching you and going with Kennett, but this case really could mean a lot for me. And Mrs. Bedrick, she was mine . . . ours . . . and I wanted to be there to get the credit.”
    Lucas nodded and said, “No problem.” On the sidewalk, he added, “You don’t sound happy.”
    “I’m not. Bellevue’s a rat’s nest. They have a dial-in paging system, so now we’re trying to figure out if we can match up the calls. And we’re looking for people who might have been paging doctors who shouldn’t have, that somebody else might have noticed. There are about two thousand suspects.”
    “Can you thin them out?”
    “Maybe. We’re trying extortion. Kennett worked out a routine with an assistant D.A. Everybody we talk to, we tell them the same thing: if we find out who Whitechurch’s phone contact is before she comes forward, we’ll charge her as an accomplice in the Bekker murders. If she comes forward and cooperates, we’ll give her immunity on Bekker. And she can bring a lawyer and refuse to cooperate on anything else . . . . So there’s a chance. If we can scare her enough.”
    “How do you know it’s a her? ”
    Fell grinned up at him: “That’s Kennett. He said, ‘Have you ever heard a male voice on a hospital intercom?’ We all thought about it, and decided, Not very often. If a male voice kept calling out the names of nonexistent