Текст книги "Lucas Davenport Novels 1-5"

Автор книги: John Sandford

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Текущая страница: 46 (всего у книги 105 страниц)

CHAPTER

3

Bekker was of two minds.

There was an Everyday Bekker, the man of science, the man in the white lab coat, doing his separations in the high-speed centrifuge, the man with the scalpel.

And then there was Beauty.

Beauty was up. Beauty was light. Beauty was dance . . . .

Beauty was the dextroamphetamines, the orange heart-shaped tablets and the half-black, half-clear capsules. Beauty was the white tabs of methamphetamine hydrochloride, the shiny jet-black caps of amphetamine, and the green-and-black bumblebees of phendimetrazine tartrate. All legal.

Beauty was especially the illegals, the anonymous white tabs of MDMA, called ecstasy, and the perforated squares of blotter, printed with the signs of the Zodiac, each with its drop of sweet acid, and the cocaine.

Beauty was anabolic steroids for the body and synthetic human growth hormone to fight the years . . . .

Everyday Bekker was down and dark.

Bekker was blood-red capsules of codeine, the Dilaudid. The minor benzodiazepines smoothed his anxieties, the Xanax and Librium and Clonopin, Tranxene and Valium, Dalmane and Paxipam, Ativan and Serax. The molindone, for a troubled mind. All legal.

And the illegals.

The white tabs of methaqualone, coming in from Europe.

Most of all, the phencyclidine, the PCP.

The power.

Bekker had once carried an elegant gold pillbox for his medicines, but eventually it no longer sufficed. At a Minneapolis antique store he bought a brass Art Deco cigarette case, which he lined with velvet. It would hold upward of a hundred tablets. Food for them both, Beauty and Bekker . . .

Beauty stared into the cigarette case and relived the morning. As Bekker, he’d gone to the funeral home and demanded to see his wife.

“Mr. Bekker, I really think, the condition . . .” The undertaker was nervous, his face flickering from phony warmth to genuine concern, a light patina of sweat on his forehead. Mrs. Bekker was not one of their better products. He didn’t want her husband sick on the carpet.

“God damn it, I want to see her,” Bekker snapped.

“Sir, I have to warn you . . .” The undertaker’s hands were fluttering.

Bekker fixed him with a cold stare, a ferret’s stare: “I am a pathologist. I know what I will see.”

“Well. I suppose . . .” The undertaker’s lips made an O of distaste.

She was lying on a frilly orange satin pad, inside the bronze coffin. She was smiling, just slightly, with a rosy blush on her cheeks. The top half of her face, from the bridge of the nose up, looked like an airbrushed photograph. All wax, all moldings and makeup and paint, and none of it quite right. The eyes were definitely gone. They’d put her together the best they could, but considering the way she’d died, there wasn’t much they could do . . . .

“My God,” Bekker said, reaching out to the coffin. A wave of exultation rose through his body. He was rid of her.

He’d hated her for so long, watching her with her furniture and her rugs, her old paintings in the heavy carved frames, the inkwells and cruets and compotes and Quimper pots, the lopsided bottles dug from long-gone outhouses. She’d touch it, stroke it, polish it, move it, sell it. Caress it with her little piggy eyes . . . Talk about it, endlessly, with her limp-wristed antiquarian friends, all of them perched on rickety chairs with teacups, rattling on endlessly, Mahogany with reeded legs, gilt tooled leather, but you almost couldn’t tell under the horrible polish she’d absolutely poured on the piece, well, she obviously didn’t know what she had, or didn’t care. I was there to look at a Georgian tea table that she’d described as gorgeous, but it turned out to be really very tatty, if I do say so . . . .

And now she was dead.

He frowned. Hard to believe that she had had a lover. One of those soft, heavy pale men who talked of teapots and wing chairs . . . unbelievable. What did they do in bed? Talk?

“Sir, I really think . . .” The undertaker’s hand on his arm, steadying him, not understanding.

“I’m okay,” Bekker said, accepting the comforting arm with a delicious sense of deception. He stood there for another minute, the undertaker behind him, ignored. This was not something he’d want to forget . . . .

Michael Bekker was beautiful. His head was large, his blond hair thick and carefully cut, feathering back over small, perfect ears. His forehead was broad and unlined, his eyebrows light, near-white commas over his startlingly blue deep-set eyes. The only wrinkles on his face were barely noticeable crow’s-feet: they enhanced his beauty, rather than detracted from it, adding an ineffable touch of masculinity.

Below his eyes, his nose was a narrow wedge, his nostrils small, almost dainty. His chin was square, with a cleft, his complexion pale but healthy. His lips were wide and mobile over even white teeth.

If Bekker’s face was nearly perfect, a cinema face, he had been born with a body no better than average. Shoulders a bit too narrow, hips a little too wide. And he was, perhaps, short in the leg.

The faults gave him something to work for. He was so close . . . .

Bekker exercised four nights a week, spending a half-hour on the Nautilus machines, another hour with the free weights. Legs and trunk one night, arms and shoulders the next. Then a rest day, then repeat, then two rest days at the end of the week.

And the pills, of course, the anabolic steroids. Bekker wasn’t interested in strength; strength was a bonus. He was interested in shape. The work broadened his apparent shoulder width and deepened his chest. There wasn’t anything he could do about the wide hips, but the larger shoulders had the effect of narrowing them.

His legs . . . legs can’t be stretched. But in New York, just off Madison Avenue, up in the Seventies, he had found a small shop that made the most beautiful calfskin half-boots. The leather was so soft that he sometimes held the boots against his face before he put them on . . . .

Each boot was individually fitted with the most subtle of lifts, which gave him an inch and made him as near to perfect as God would come with Nordic man.

Bekker sighed and found himself looking into the bathroom mirror, the bathroom down the hall from his bedroom, the cold hexagonal tiles pressing into his feet. Staring at his beautiful face.

He’d been gone again. How long? He looked at his watch with a touch of panic. Five after one. Fifteen minutes gone. He had to control this. He’d taken a couple of methobarbitals to flatten out the nervous tension, and they’d thrown him outside himself. They shouldn’t do that, but they had, and it was happening more and more often . . . .

He forced himself into the shower, turned on the cold water and gasped as it hit his chest. He kept his eyes closed, turned his back, lathered himself, rinsed and stepped out.

Did he have time? Of course: he always had time for this. He rubbed emollients into his face, dabbed after-shave along his jawline, cologne on his chest, behind his ears and under his balls, sprinkled powder across his chest, under his arms, between his buttocks.

When he was done, he looked into the mirror again. His nose seemed raw. He considered just a touch of makeup but decided against it. He really shouldn’t look his best. He was burying Stephanie, and the police would be there. The police investigators were touchy: Stephanie’s goddamned father and her cop cousin were whispering in their ears.

An investigation didn’t much worry him. He’d hated Stephanie, and some of her friends would know that. But he’d been in San Francisco.

He smiled at himself in the mirror, was dissatisfied with the smile, wiped it away. Tried a half-dozen new expressions, more appropriate for the funeral. Scowl as he might, none of them detracted from his beauty.

He cocked his head at himself and let the smile return. All done? Not quite. He added a hair dressing with a light odor of spring lilacs and touched his hair with a brush. Satisfied, he went to the closet and looked at his suits. The blue one, he thought.

• • •

Quentin Daniel looked like a butcher in good clothes.

A good German butcher at a First Communion. With his lined red face and incipient jowls, the stark white collar pinching into his throat, the folds of flesh on the back of his neck, he would look fine behind a stainless-steel meat scale, one thumb on the tray, the other on your lambchops . . . .

Until you saw his eyes.

He had the eyes of an Irish Jesuit, pale blue, imperious. He was a cop, if he was one at all, with his brain: he’d stopped carrying a gun years before, when he’d bought his first tailored suits. Instead, he had spectacles. He wore simple military-style gold-rimmed bifocals for dealing with the troops, tortoise-shell single-vision glasses for reading his computer screen, and blue-tinted contact lenses for television appearances.

No gun.

Lucas pushed through the heavy oak door and slouched into Daniel’s office. He was wearing the leather bomber jacket from the night before but had shaved and changed into a fresh houndstooth shirt, khaki slacks and loafers.

“You called?”

Daniel was wearing his computer glasses. He looked up, squinted as though he didn’t recognize his visitor, took the computer glasses off, put on the gold-rimmed glasses and waved Lucas toward a chair. His face, Lucas thought, was redder than usual.

“Do you know Marty McKenzie?” Daniel asked quietly, his hands flat, palms down, on his green baize blotter.

“Yeah.” Lucas nodded as he sat down. He crossed his legs. “He’s got a practice in the Claymore Building. A sleaze.”

“A sleaze,” Daniel agreed. He folded his hands over his stomach and peered up at the ceiling. “The very first thing this morning, I sat here smiling for half an hour while the sleaze lectured me. Can you guess why?”

“Randy . . .”

“ . . . Because the sleaze had a client over in the locked ward at Hennepin General who had the shit beat out of him last night by one of my cops. After the sleaze left, I called the hospital and talked to a doc.” Daniel pulled open a desk drawer and took out a notepad. “Broken ribs. Broken nose. Broken teeth. Possible cracked sternum. Monitored for blunt trauma.” He slapped the pad on the desktop with a crack like a .22 short. “Jesus Christ, Davenport . . .”

“Pulled a knife on me,” Lucas said. “Tried to cut me. Like this.” He turned the front panel of the jacket, showed the deep slice in the leather.

“Don’t bullshit me,” Daniel said, ignoring the coat. “The Intelligence guys knew a week ago that you were looking for him. You and your pals. You’ve been looking for him ever since that hooker got cut. You found him last night and you kicked the shit out of him.”

“I don’t think . . .”

“Shut up,” Daniel snapped. “Any explanation would be stupid. You know it, I know it, so why do it?”

Lucas shrugged. “All right . . .”

“The police department is not a fuckin’ street gang,” Daniel said. “You can’t do this shit. We’ve got trouble and it could be serious . . . .”

“Like what?”

“McKenzie went to Internal Affairs before he came here, so they’re in it and there’s no way I can get them out. They’ll want a statement. And this kid, Randy, might have been an asshole, but technically he’s a juvenile—he’s already got a social worker assigned and she’s all pissed off about him getting beat up. She doesn’t want to hear about any assault on a police officer . . . .”

“We could send her some pictures of the woman he worked over . . . .”

“Yeah, yeah, we’ll do that. Maybe that’ll change her around. And your jacket will help, the cut, and we’re getting statements from witnesses. But I don’t know . . . . If the jacket wasn’t cut, I’d have to suspend your ass,” Daniel said. He rubbed his forehead with the heel of his hand, as though wiping away sweat, then swiveled in his chair and looked out the window at the street, his back to Lucas. “I’m worried about you, Davenport. Your friends are worried about you. I had Sloan up here, he was lying like a goddamn sailor to cover your ass, until I told him to can it. Then we had a little talk . . . .”

“Fuckin’ Sloan,” Lucas said irritably. “I don’t want him . . . .”

“Lucas . . .” Daniel turned back to Lucas, his tone mellowing from anger to concern. “He’s your friend and you should appreciate that, ’cause you need all the friends you’ve got. Now. Have you been to a shrink?”

“No.”

“They’ve got pills for what you’ve got. They don’t cure anything, but they make it a little easier. Believe me, because I’ve been there. Six years ago this winter. I live in fear of the day I go back . . . .”

“I didn’t know . . .”

“It’s not something you talk about, if you’re in politics,” Daniel said. “You don’t want people to think they’ve got a crazy man as police chief. Anyway, what you’ve got is called a unipolar depression.”

“I’ve read the books,” Lucas snapped. “And I ain’t going to a shrink.”

He pushed himself out of the chair and wandered around the office, looking into the faces of the dozens of politicians who peered from photos on Daniel’s walls. The photos came mostly from newspapers, special prints made at the chief’s request, and all were black-and-white. Mug shots with smiles, Lucas thought. There were only two pieces of color on the government-yellow walls. One piece was a Hmong tapestry, framed, with a brass plate that said: “Quentin Daniel, from His Hmong Friends, 1989.” The second was a calendar with a painting of a vase of flowers, bright, slightly fuzzy, sophisticated and childlike at the same time. Lucas parked himself in front of the calendar and studied it.

Daniel watched him for a moment, sighed and said, “I don’t necessarily think you should see a shrink—shrinks aren’t the answer for everybody. But I’m telling you this as a friend: You’re right on the edge. I’ve seen it before, I’ll see it again, and I’m looking at it right now. You’re fucked up. Sloan agrees. So does Del. You’ve got to get your shit together before you hurt yourself or somebody else.”

“I could quit,” Lucas ventured, turning back to the chief’s desk. “Take a leave . . .”

“That wouldn’t be so good,” Daniel said, shaking his head. “People with a bad head need to be around friends. So let me suggest something. If I’m wrong, tell me.”

“All right . . .”

“I want you to take on the Bekker murder. Keep your network alive, but focus on the murder. You need the company, Lucas. You need the teamwork. And I need somebody to bail me out on this goddamn killing. The Bekker woman’s family has some clout and the papers are talking it up.”

Lucas tipped his head, thinking about it. “Del mentioned it last night. I told him I might look into it . . . .”

“Do it,” Daniel said. Lucas stood up, and Daniel put on his computer glasses and turned back to a screen full of amber figures.

“How long has it been since you were on the street?” Lucas asked.

Daniel looked at him, then up at the ceiling. “Twenty-one years,” he said after a moment.

“Things have changed,” Lucas said. “People don’t believe in right and wrong anymore; if they do, we write them off as kooks. Reality is greed. People believe in money and power and feeling good and cocaine. For the bad people out there, we are a street gang. They understand that idea. The minute we lose the threat, they’ll be on us like rats . . . .”

“Jesus Christ . . .”

“Hey, listen to me,” Lucas said. “I’m not stupid. I don’t even necessarily think—in theory, anyway—that I should be able to get away with what I did last night. But those things have to be done by somebody. The legal system has smart judges and tough prosecutors and it don’t mean shit—it’s a game that has nothing to do with justice. What I did was justice. The street understands that. I didn’t do too much and I didn’t do too little. I did just right.”

Daniel looked at him for a long time and then said soberly, “I don’t disagree with you. But don’t ever repeat that to another living soul.”

Sloan was propped against the metal door of Lucas’ basement office, flipping through a throw-away newspaper, smoking a Camel. He was a narrow man with a foxy face and nicotine-stained teeth. A brown felt hat was cocked down over his eyes.

“You been shoveling horseshit again,” Lucas said as he walked down the hall. His head felt as if it were filled with cotton, each separate thought tangled in a million fuzzy strands.

Sloan pushed himself away from the door so Lucas could unlock it. “Daniel ain’t a mushroom. And it ain’t horseshit. So you gonna do it? Work Bekker?”

“I’m thinking about it,” Lucas said.

“The wife’s funeral is this afternoon,” Sloan said. “You oughta go. And I’ll tell you what: I’ve been looking this guy up, Bekker. We got us an iceman.”

“Is that right?” Lucas pushed the door open and went inside. His office had once been a janitor’s closet. There were two chairs, a wooden desk, a two-drawer filing cabinet, a metal wastebasket, an old-fashioned oak coatrack, an IBM computer and a telephone. A printer sat on a metal typing table, poised to print out phone numbers coming through on a pen register. A stain on the wall marked the persistent seepage of a suspicious but unidentifiable liquid. Del had pointed out that a women’s restroom was one floor above and not too much down the hall.

“Yeah, that’s right,” Sloan said. He dropped into the visitor’s chair and put his heels up on the edge of the desk as Lucas hung his jacket on the coatrack. “I’ve been reading background reports, and it turns out Bekker was assigned to the Criminal Investigation Division in Saigon during the Vietnam War. I thought he was some kind of cop, so I talked to Anderson and he called some of his computer buddies in Washington, and we got his military records. He wasn’t a cop, he was a forensic pathologist. He did postmortems in criminal cases that involved GIs. I found his old commanding officer, a guy named Wilson. He remembered Bekker. I told him who I was, and he said, ‘What happened, the sonofabitch kill somebody?’ ”

“You didn’t prompt him?” Lucas asked, settling behind his desk.

“No. Those were the first words out of his mouth. Wilson said Bekker was called ‘Dr. Death’—I guess he liked his work a little too much. And he liked the hookers. Wilson said he had a rep for pounding on them.”

“How bad?”

Sloan shook his head. “Don’t know. That was just his rep . . . . Wilson said a couple of whores got killed while Bekker was there, but nobody ever suggested he did it. The cops were looking for an Army enlisted man. They never found anybody, but they never looked too hard, either. Wilson said the place was overrun with AWOLs, deserters, guys on leave and pass, guys going in and out. He said it was an impossible case. But he remembers people around the office talking about the killings and that Bekker was . . . he was spooky. Since there were GIs involved, Bekker was in on the autopsies. He either did them himself or with a Vietnamese doc, Wilson couldn’t remember. But when he came back, it was like he was satisfied. Fucked out.”

“Huh.” The printer burped up a number. Lucas glanced at it, then turned back to Sloan. “Did Bekker kill Stephanie? Hire it done?”

Sloan pulled the wastebasket over to his chair and carefully snubbed out his cigarette. “I think it’s a major possibility,” he said slowly. “If he did, he’s cold: we checked on her insurance . . . .”

“Ten million bucks?” Lucas’ eyebrows went up.

“No. Just the opposite. Stephanie was starting a business. She was gonna sell architectural artifacts for restoring old homes. Stained-glass windows, antique doorknobs, like that. An accountant told her she could save money by buying all the family insurance through the company. So she and Bekker canceled their old life insurance and bought new insurance through the company. It specifically won’t pay off on any violent nonaccidental death—murder or suicide—in the first two years of coverage.”

“So . . .”

“So she had no insurance at all,” Sloan said. “Not that Bekker can collect on. A month ago she had a hundred grand, and she’d had it for a while.”

Lucas’ eyes narrowed. “If a defense attorney got that into court . . .”

“Yeah,” Sloan said. “It’d knock a hell of a hole in a circumstantial case.”

“And he’s got an alibi.”

“Airtight. He was in San Francisco.”

“Jesus, I’d find him not guilty myself, knowing all that.”

“That’s why we need you. If he’s behind it, he had to hire a hitter. There are only so many guys in the Cities who’d do it. You probably know most of them. Those you don’t, your people would know. There must have been a big payoff. Maybe somebody came into a big hunk of unexplained cash?”

Lucas nodded. “I’ll ask around. What about the guy who was in the sack with Bekker’s old lady? Loverboy?”

“We’re looking for him,” Sloan said. “So far, no luck. I talked to Stephanie’s best friend and she thought something might be going on. She didn’t know who, but she was willing to mong a rumor . . . .”

Lucas grinned at the word: “So mong it to me,” he said.

Sloan shrugged. “For what it’s worth, she thinks Stephanie might have been screwing a neighborhood shrink. She’d seen them talking at parties, and she thought they . . . She said they quote stood in each other’s space unquote.”

“All right.” Lucas yawned and stretched. “Most of my people won’t be around yet, but I’ll check.”

“I’ll Xerox the file for you.”

“You could hold off on that. I don’t know if I’ll be in that deep . . . .” Sloan was standing, ready to leave, and Lucas reached back and punched the message button on his answering machine. The tape rewound, there was an electronic beep and a voice said: “This is Dave, down at the auto parts. There’re a couple of Banditos in town, I just did some work on their bikes. I think you might want to hear about it . . . . You got the number.”

“I’ll Xerox it,” Sloan said with a grin, “just in case.”

Sloan left and Lucas sat with a yellow legal pad in his lap, feet up, listening to the voices on the answering machine, taking numbers. And watched himself.

His head wasn’t working right. Hadn’t been for months. But now, he thought, something was changing. There’d been just the smallest quieting of the storm . . . .

He’d lost his woman and their daughter. They’d walked: the story was as simple as that, and as complicated. He couldn’t accept it and had to accept it. He pitied himself and was sick of pitying himself. He felt his friends’ concern and he was tired of it.

Whenever he tried to break out, when he worked two or three days into exhaustion, the thoughts always sneaked back: If I’d done A, she’d have done B, and then we’d have both done C, and then . . . He worked through every possible combination, compulsively, over and over and over, and it all came up ashes. He told himself twenty times that he’d put it behind himself, and he never had. And still he couldn’t stop. And he grew sicker and sicker of himself . . . .

And now Bekker. A flicker, here. An interest. He watched the first tickle, couldn’t deny it. Bekker. He ran his hand through his hair, watching the interest bud and grow. On the legal pad he wrote:

Elle

Funeral

How can you lose with a two-item list? Even when—what was it called? a unipolar depression?—even when a unipolar depression’s got you by the balls, you can handle two numbers . . . .

Lucas picked up the phone and called a nunnery.

Sister Mary Joseph was talking to a student when Lucas arrived. Her door was open a few inches, and from a chair in the outer office he could see the left side of her scarred face. Elle Kruger had been the prettiest girl in their grade school. Later, after Lucas had gone, transferred to the public schools, she’d been ravaged by acne. He recalled the shock of seeing her, for the first time in years, at a high school district hockey tournament. She had been sitting in the stands, watching him on the ice, eyes sad, seeing his shock. The beautiful blonde Elle of his prepubescent dreams, gone forever. She’d found a vocation with the Church, she had told him that night, but Lucas was never quite sure. A vocation? She’d said yes. But her face . . . Now she sat in her traditional habit, the beads swinging by her side. Still Elle, somewhere.

The college girl laughed again and stood up, her sweater a fuzzy scarlet blur behind the clouded glass of Elle’s office door. Then Elle was on her feet and the girl was walking past him, looking at him with an unhidden curiosity. Lucas waited until she was gone, then went into Elle’s office and sat in the visitor’s chair and crossed his legs.

Elle looked him over, judging, then said, “How are you?”

“Not bad . . .” He shrugged, then grinned. “I was hoping you could give me a name at the university. A doctor, somebody who’d know a guy in the pathology department. Off the record. A guy who can keep his mouth shut.”

“Webster Prentice,” Elle said promptly. “He’s in psychology, but he works at the hospital and hangs out with the docs. Want his phone number?”

Lucas did. As she flipped through a Rolodex, Elle asked, “How are you really?”

He shrugged. “About the same.”

“Are you seeing your daughter?”

“Every other Saturday, but it’s unpleasant. Jen doesn’t want me there and Sarah’s old enough to sense it. I may give it up for a while.”

“Don’t cut yourself off, Lucas,” Elle said sharply. “You can’t sit there in the dark every night. It’ll kill you.”

He nodded. “Yeah, yeah . . .”

“Are you dating anybody?”

“Not right now.”

“You should start,” the nun said. “Reestablish contact. How about coming back to the game?”

“I don’t know . . . what’re you doing?”

“Stalingrad. We can always use another Nazi.”

“Maybe,” Lucas said noncommittally.

“And what’s this about talking to Webster Prentice? Are you working on something?”

“A woman got killed. Beaten to death. I’m taking a look,” Lucas said.

“I read about it,” Elle said, nodding. “I’m glad you’re working it. You need it.”

Lucas shrugged again. “I’ll see,” he said.

She scribbled a phone number on an index card and passed it to him.

“Thanks . . .” He leaned forward, about to stand.

“Sit down,” she said. “You’re not getting out of here that easy. Are you sleeping?”

“Yeah, some.”

“But you’ve got to exhaust yourself first.”

“Yeah.”

“Alcohol?”

“Not much. A few times, scotch. When I’d get so tired I couldn’t move, but I couldn’t sleep. The booze would take me out . . . .”

“Feel better in the morning?”

“My body would.”

“The Crows beat you up pretty bad,” Elle said. The Crows were Indians, either terrorists or patriots. Lucas had helped kill them. Television had tried to make a hero out of him, but the case had cost him his relationship with his woman friend and their daughter. “You finally found out that there’s a price for living the way you do. And you found out that you can die. And so can your kid.”

“I always knew that,” Lucas said.

“You didn’t feel it. And if you don’t feel it, you don’t believe it,” Elle rapped back.

“I don’t worry about dying,” he said. “But I had something going with Jennifer and Sarah.”

“Maybe that’ll come back. Jennifer’s never said it was over forever.”

“Sounds like it.”

“You need time, all of you,” Elle said. “I won’t do therapy on you. I can’t be objective. We’ve got too much history. But you should talk to somebody. I can give you some names, good people.”

“You know what I think about shrinks,” Lucas said.

“You don’t think that about me.”

“Like you said—we have a history. But I don’t want a shrink, ’cause I can’t help what I think about them. Maybe a couple of pills or something . . .”

“You can’t cure what you’ve got with pills, Lucas. Only two things will do that. Time or therapy.”

“I’ll take the time,” he said.

She threw up her hands in surrender, her teeth flashing white in a youthful smile. “If you really get your back against the wall, call me. I have a doctor friend who’ll prescribe some medication without threatening your manhood with therapy.”

She went with him to the exit and watched as he walked out to his car, down the long greening lawn, the sun flicking through the bare trees. When he stepped from the shelter of the building, the wind hit him in the face, with just a finger of warmth. Spring wind. Summer coming. Behind him, on the other side of the door, Elle Kruger kissed her crucifix and began a rosary.