Текст книги "Lucas Davenport Novels 1-5"

Автор книги: John Sandford

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Текущая страница: 49 (всего у книги 105 страниц)

“Did he publish?” Lucas asked.

“Yes. I can give you the citations. Actually, I can probably have Clarisse scrounge up some photocopies.”

“I’d appreciate it,” Lucas said. “Well . . . You know what happened. The other night.”

“Bekker’s wife was killed.”

“We’re looking into it. Some people, frankly, think he might have had a hand in it.”

“I don’t know. I’d kind of doubt it,” Merriam said grimly.

“You sounded like you thought he’d be capable . . . .”

“I’d doubt it because if he knew his wife was going to be killed, he’d want to be there to see it,” Merriam said. Then, suddenly abashed, he added, “I don’t know if I believe that, really.”

“Huh,” Lucas said, studying the other man. “Is he still in the hospital, working with live patients? Bekker?”

“Yes. Not on this ward, but several others. I’ve seen him down in the ORs a couple of times and in the medical wards where they deal with the more extreme varieties of disease.”

“Did you ever mention to anyone . . . ?”

“Listen, I don’t know anything,” Merriam barked, his soft exterior dropping for a moment. “That’s my problem. If I say anything, I’m implying the guy is a killer, for Christ’s sakes. I can’t do that.”

“A private word . . .”

“In this place? It’d stay private for about thirty seconds,” Merriam said, running a hand through his thinning hair. “Listen, until you’ve worked in a university hospital, you’ve never really experienced character assassination. There are ten people on this staff who are convinced they’ll be on next year’s Nobel list if only some klutz in the next office doesn’t screw them up. If I suggested anything about Bekker, it would be all over the hospital in five minutes. Five minutes later, he’d hear about it and I’d be fingered as the source. I can’t do anything.”

“All right.” Lucas nodded. He stood, picked up his coat.

“Would you get me copies of those papers?”

“Sure. And if there’s anything else I can do for you, call, and I’ll do it. But you see the kind of jam I’m in.”

“Sure.” Lucas reached for the door, but Merriam stopped him with a quick gesture.

“I’ve been trying to think how to characterize the way Bekker acted around death,” he said. “You know how you read about these zealots on crusades against pornography, and you sense there’s something wrong with them? A fascination with the subject that goes way beyond any normal interest? Like a guy has a collection of two thousand porno magazines so he can prove how terrible it is? That’s how Bekker was. A kind of a pious sadness when a kid died, but underneath, you got the feeling of a real, lip-smacking pleasure.”

“You make him sound like a monster,” Lucas said.

“I’m an oncologist,” Merriam said simply. “I believe in monsters.”

Lucas walked out of the hospital, hands in his pockets, thinking. A pretty nurse smiled at him, and he automatically smiled back, but his head wasn’t smiling. Bekker killed kids?

The medical examiner’s investigator was a fat, gloomy man with cheeks and lips so pink and glossy that he looked as though he might have been playing with an undertaker’s makeup. He handed Lucas the file on Stephanie Bekker.

“If you want my opinion, the guy who did her was either a psycho or wanted it to look that way,” the investigator said. “Her skull was like a broken egg, all in fragments. The bottle he hit her with was one of those big, thick tourist things from Mexico. You know, kind of blue-green, more like a vase than a bottle. The glass must have been a half-inch thick. When it broke, he used it like a knife, and drove the edges right down through her eyes. Her whole face was mutilated, you’ll see in the photographs. The thing is . . .”

“Yeah?”

“The rest of her body was untouched. It wasn’t like he was flailing away, hitting her anyplace he could. You take somebody flying on crank or PCP, they’re just swinging. They go after a guy, and if the guy gets behind a car, they’ll go after the car. If they can’t hit you on the face, they’ll hit you on the shoulders or chest or back or the soles of your feet, and they’ll bite and claw and everything else. This thing was almost . . . technical. The guy who did it is either nuts and it has something to do with the face, with the eyes, or it’s supposed to look that way.”

“Thanks for the tip,” Lucas said. He sat down at an empty desk, opened the file and glanced at the photos.

Freak, he thought.

The file was technical. To judge from body temperature and lack of lividity, the woman had died just before the paramedics arrived. Stephanie Bekker had never had a chance to resist: she had been a strong woman, with long fingernails, and they were clean—no blood or skin beneath them. There were no abrasions on the hands. She’d had intercourse, while alive and probably an hour or so before she’d died. No bruising was evident around the vagina and there were indications that the intercourse had been voluntary. She had washed after the intercourse, and samples taken for DNA analysis might not prove valid. The samples had not yet been returned.

The medical examiner’s investigator noted that the house had been undisturbed, with no evidence of a fight or even an argument. The front door had been unlocked, as had a door into the kitchen from the garage. Bloody tracks led into the garage. The outer garage door had also been unlocked, so an intruder could have come through the house from the alley. There was a single bloody handprint on the wall, and a trail of blood from the point where she’d fallen in the initial attack. She’d lived, the medical examiner thought, for twenty to thirty minutes after the attack.

Lucas closed the file and sat staring at the desktop for a moment.

Loverboy could have done it. If the few solid facts of the case had been given him, Lucas would have bet money on it. But this kind of violence rarely came immediately after a successful sexual encounter; not without some preliminary crockery-tossing, some kind of mutual violence.

And then there was Bekker. Everybody had a nervous word for the man.

The fat investigator was washing his hands when Lucas left.

“Figure anything out?” he asked.

“Freak,” Lucas said.

“A problem.”

“If it’s not a freak . . .” Lucas started.

“Then you got a big problem,” the fat man finished for him, shaking water from his delicate pink fingers.

The days were getting longer. In the pit of winter, dusk arrives shortly after four o’clock. When Lucas arrived at City Hall, there was still light in the sky, although it was well after six.

Sloan had already gone, but Lucas found Del in Narcotics, flipping through a reports file.

“Anything good?” Lucas asked.

“Not from me,” Del said. He pushed the file drawer shut. “There were meetings all day. The suits were arguing about who’s going to do what. I don’t think you’ll get your surveillance team.”

“Why not?”

Del shrugged. “I don’t think they’ll do it. The suits keep saying that there’s nothing on Bekker, except that some dope cop thinks he did it. Meanin’ me—and you know what they think about me.”

“Yeah.” Lucas grinned despite himself. The suits would like to see Del in a uniform, writing tickets. “Is the press conference still on?”

“Two o’clock tomorrow,” Del said. “You been out on your net?”

“Yeah. Nothing there. But I talked to a doc at University Hospital, he thinks Bekker might have killed a kid. Maybe two.”

“Kids?”

“Yeah. In the cancer ward. I’ll use it to jack up Daniel on the surveillance, if I have to.”

“Awright,” Del said. “Nothing works like blackmail . . . .”

Lucas’ answering machine had half a dozen messages, none of them about Bekker. He made two answering calls, checked the phone numbers on the pen register and locked up. City Hall was almost dark and his footfalls echoed through the emptying corridors.

“Davenport . . .”

He turned. Karl Barlow, a sergeant with Internal Affairs, was walking toward him with a sheaf of papers in his hand. Barlow was small, square-shouldered, square-faced and tightly muscular, like a gymnast. He wore his hair in a jock’s crew cut and dressed in white short-sleeved shirts and pleated pants. He always had a plastic pocket protector in his breast pocket, filled with an evenly spaced row of ballpoint pens. He was, he professed, an excellent Christian.

An excellent Christian, Lucas thought, but not good on the streets. Barlow had trouble with ambiguities . . . .

“We need a statement on the brawl the other night. I’ve been trying . . .”

“That wasn’t a brawl, that was an arrest of a known pimp and drug dealer on a charge of first-degree assault,” Lucas said.

“A juvenile, sure. I’ve been trying to get you at your office, but you’re never in.”

“I’ve been working this Bekker murder. Things are jammed up,” Lucas said shortly.

“Can’t help that,” Barlow said, planting one fist on his waist. Lucas had heard that Barlow was a Youth Football coach and had found himself in trouble with parents for insisting that a kid play hurt. “I’ve got to make an appointment with a court stenographer, so I’ve got to know when you can do it.”

“Give me a couple of weeks.”

“That might be too long,” Barlow said.

“I’ll come in when I can,” Lucas said impatiently, trying to get away. “There’s no rush, right? And I might bring an attorney.”

“That’s your right.” Barlow moved in closer, crowding, and poked the sheaf of papers at Lucas. “But I want this settled and I want it settled soon. If you get my drift.”

“Yeah. I get your drift,” Lucas said. He turned back toward Barlow, so they were chest to chest and no more than four inches apart. Barlow had to move back a half-step and look up to meet Lucas’ eyes. “I’ll let you know when I can do it.”

And I’ll throw you out the fuckin’ window if you give me any shit, Lucas thought. He turned away and went up the steps. Barlow called, “Soon,” and Lucas said, “Yeah, yeah . . .”

He stopped just outside the City Hall doors, on the sidewalk, looked both ways and shook himself like a horse trying to shake off flies. The day had a contrary feel to it. He sensed that he was waiting, but he didn’t know for what.

Lucas crossed the street to the parking garage.

CHAPTER

8

Pressure. He opened his fist, felt for the tab in his hand, licked it, felt the acidic cut of the drug as well as the salty taste of his own sweat. Too much? He had to be careful. He couldn’t bleed today, he’d be in the car. But then the speed was on him and he stopped thinking about it.

He called Druze from a pay phone.

“We have to risk it,” he said. “If I do Armistead tonight, the police will go crazy. Meeting could be tough after this.”

“Are the cops still hanging around?” Druze sounded not worried—his emotional range might not reach that far—but concerned. “I mean, Armistead’s still on, isn’t she?”

“Yes. They keep coming back. They want me, but they’ve got nothing. Armistead will steer them further away.”

“They might get something if they find the guy in the towel,” Druze said sullenly.

“That’s why we’ve got to meet.”

“One o’clock?”

“Yes.”

Stephanie’s keepsake photos were stuffed in shoe boxes in the sewing closet, stuck in straw baskets in the kitchen, piled on a drawing table in the study, hidden in desk and bureau drawers. Three leather-bound albums were stacked in the library, photos going back to her childhood. Bekker, nude, stopping frequently to examine himself in the house’s many mirrors, wandered through the antiques, hunting the photos. In her chest of drawers, he found a plastic bag for a diaphragm—at first he didn’t recognize it for what it was—shook his head and put it back. When he was satisfied that he had all the photos, he fixed himself a sandwich, punched up Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana on the CD player, sat in an easy chair and replayed the funeral in his mind.

He had been fine, he thought. The tough-guy cop. He couldn’t read the tough guy, but he had Swanson beat. He could sense it. The tough guy, on the other hand . . . his clothes were too good, Bekker decided.

As he chewed, his eye found a small movement in the far corner of the room. He turned to catch it: another mirror, one of a dozen or so diamond-shaped plates set in the base of a French lamp from the twenties. He moved again, adjusting himself. His eyes were centered in one of the mirrors and, at this distance, looked black, like holes. His genitals were caught in another plate, and he laughed, genuine enjoyment.

“A symbol,” Bekker said aloud. “But of what, I don’t know.” And he laughed again, and did his jig. The MDMA was still on him.

At noon he dressed, pulled on a sweater, loaded the photos into a shopping bag and went out through the breezeway to his car. Could the police be watching him? He doubted it—what else would they expect him to do? Stephanie was already dead; but he’d take no chances.

Out of the garage, he drove carefully through a snake’s nest of streets to a small shopping center. No followers. He cruised the center for a few minutes, still watching, bought toilet tissue and paper towels, toothpaste and deodorant and aspirin, and returned to the car. Back through the snake’s nest: nothing. He stopped at a convenience store and used the phone on the outside wall.

“I’m on my way.”

“Fine. I’m alone.”

Druze lived in a medium-rise apartment at the edge of the West Bank theater district. Bekker, still wary, circled the building twice before he left the car on the street, cut through the parking lot and buzzed Druze’s apartment.

“It’s me,” he said. The door opened and he pushed through into the lobby, then took the stairs. Druze was watching a cable-channel show on scuba diving when Bekker arrived. Druze punched the TV out with a remote as Bekker followed him into the apartment.

“Those the pictures?” asked Druze, looking at the bag.

“Yes. I brought everything I could find.”

“You want a beer?” Druze said it awkwardly. He didn’t entertain; nobody came to his apartment. He had never had a friend before . . . .

“Sure.” Bekker didn’t care for beer, but enjoyed playing the relationship with Druze.

“Hope he’s here,” Druze said. He got a bottle of Bud Light from the refrigerator, brought it back and handed it to Bekker, who was kneeling on the front-room carpet, unloading the shopping bag. Bekker turned one of the shoe boxes upside down, and a clump of snapshots fell out on the rug.

“We’ll get him,” Bekker said.

“Big, flat, blond Scandinavian face. Head like a milk jug, pale, almost fat. Got pretty good love handles on him, a belly,” said Druze.

“We knew a half-dozen people like that,” Bekker said. He took a hit on the beer and grimaced. “Most likely he’s part of the antiques crowd. That could be tough, ’cause I don’t know all of them. There’s a possibility that he’s with the university. I don’t know. This affair is the only thing the bitch ever did that surprised me.”

“The bad thing is, antiques people are the kind of people who go to plays. Art people. He could see me.”

“Up on the stage, with the makeup, you look different,” Bekker said.

“Yeah, but afterwards, when we go out in the lobby and kiss ass with the crowd, he could see me up close. If he ever sees me . . .”

“We’ll figure him out,” Bekker said, dumping the last box of photos on the pile. “I’ll sort, you look.”

There were hundreds of pictures, and the process took longer than Bekker imagined it would. Stephanie with friends, in the woods, shopping, with relatives. No pictures of Bekker . . .

Halfway through the pile, Druze got to his feet, burped and said, “Keep sorting. I gotta pee.”

“Mmm,” Bekker nodded. As soon as Druze closed the bathroom door, he stood, waited a minute, then quickly padded across the front room to the kitchen and opened the end drawer on the sink counter. Maps, paid bills, a couple of screwdrivers, matchbooks . . . He stirred through the mess, found the key, slipped it into his pocket, eased the drawer shut and hurried back to the front room as he heard the toilet flush. He’d been here a few times, waiting for the chance at the key . . . . Now he had it.

“Any more candidates?” Druze asked, stepping out of the bathroom. Bekker was back in the center of the photo pile.

“A couple,” Bekker said, looking up. “Come on. We’re running late.”

There were several large blond men, but this was Minnesota. Twice Druze thought he’d found him, but after a closer look under a reading lamp, he shook his head.

“Maybe you should look at them in person. Discreetly,” Bekker suggested.

“They’re not the guy,” Druze said, shaking his head.

“You’re positive?”

“Pretty sure. I didn’t get the best look at him, I was on the floor, and he was standing up, but he was heavier than these guys. Fat, almost.” He picked up a photo of Stephanie and a blond man, shook his head and spun it sideways back into the pile around Bekker.

“God damn it. I was sure he’d be in here,” Bekker said. The photos were scattered around them like piles of autumn leaves; he grabbed a handful and threw them at an empty box, frustrated. “That bitch talked to everybody, took pictures of everybody, never gave anybody a minute’s rest. Why wouldn’t she have him in here? He’s got to be here.”

“Maybe he’s somebody new. Or maybe she took them out. Have you gone through her stuff?”

“I spent half the morning at it. She had a diaphragm, can you believe it? I found this little plastic pack for it. Cops didn’t say anything about that . . . . But there’s nothing else. No more pictures.”

Druze began scooping the photos together and tossing them into the boxes. “So what do we do? Do we go ahead? With Armistead?”

“There’s a risk,” Bekker admitted. “If we don’t find him, and we do Armistead, he might decide to turn himself in. Especially if he’s got an alibi for the time that Armistead gets hit—as far as we know, he’s hiding out because he’s afraid the cops think he did it.”

“If we don’t do Armistead pretty soon, she’ll dump me,” Druze said flatly. “This turkey we’re working on now, this Whiteface, won’t last. And she hates my ass. We’re hurting for payroll and I’ll be the first to go.”

Bekker took a turn around the rug, thinking. “Listen. If this man, Stephanie’s friend, turns himself in to the police, they’ll tell me, one way or another. I wouldn’t be surprised if they have him come look at me, just to make sure I didn’t pull something out in San Francisco. Make sure I wasn’t the killer and somebody else was out there . . . Anyway, if I can find out who he is, before he has a chance to see you, we can take him. So if we take Armistead, and you stay out of sight, except when you’re working . . .”

“And then I’ll stay in makeup . . . .”

“Yeah.”

“That’s what we ought to do,” Druze said. “Maybe we can smoke the cocksucker out. If we can’t, we can keep working on it . . . .”

“I’ll figure him out, sooner or later,” Bekker said. “It’s only a matter of time.”

“How are we going to talk, if the cops stay on you?”

“I’ve worked that out.”

Bekker’s neighbor in the pathology department was working in England. Just before he had left, he and Bekker had chatted about their work and Bekker had noticed, idly at the time, that the other man had an answering machine in his bottom desk drawer, an operation manual peeking from beneath it. Late one night, when the office was empty, Bekker had slipped the old-fashioned lock on his neighbor’s door, turned the answering machine on and used the instruction manual to work out new access codes for the memo option. He now gave the touch-tone codes to Druze.

“You can call from any touch-tone phone, leave a message. I can do the same to get the message, or leave one for you. You should check every few hours to see if I’ve left anything.”

“Good,” Druze said. “But make sure you clean up the tapes . . . .”

“You can erase them remotely, too,” Bekker said, and explained.

Druze jotted the code numbers in an address book. “Then we’re all set,” he said.

“Yes. We should probably stay away from each other for a while.”

“And we’re gonna do Armistead like we planned?”

Bekker looked at the troll, and a smile touched his face. Druze thought it might be simple joy. “Yes,” he said. “We’ll do Armistead. We’ll do her tonight.”

The stained-glass windows in Bekker’s parlor came from a North Dakota Lutheran church that had lost its congregation to the attractions of warmer climates and better jobs. Stephanie had bought the windows from the church trustees, trucked them back to the Twin Cities and learned how to work in lead. The restored windows hung above him, dark in the night, ignored. Bekker focused instead on the coil that was unwinding in his stomach.

A dark exhilaration: but too soon.

He suppressed it and sat on a warm wine-and-saffron Oriental carpet with a wet clawhammer and the pile of paper towels. He’d bought the hammer months before and never used it. He’d kept it in the basement, hidden in a drawer. Bekker knew just enough about crime laboratories to fear the possibility that a chemical analysis would pick up something unique to the house—Stephanie’s refinishing chemicals, glass dust or lead deposits. There was no point in taking chances. He washed it with dishwashing detergent, then sat on the rug and patted it dry with the paper towels. From now on, he would handle it only wearing gloves. He wrapped the hammer in extra towels and left it on the rug.

Plenty of time, he thought. His eyes skittered around the room and found his sport coat hanging on a chair. He got the pill case from its breast pocket and peered inside, calculating. No Beauty tonight. This needed a cold power. He put a tab of PCP on his tongue, tantalized himself with the bite, then swallowed. And a methamphetamine, for the action; usually the amphetamines were Beauty’s ride, but not on top of the other . . . .

• • •

Elizabeth Armistead was an actress and a member of the board of directors of the Lost River Theater. She’d once played on Broadway.

“Bitch’ll never give me a part.” Druze had been drunk and raving, the night six months earlier when the deal had occurred to Bekker. “Just like that movie—what was the name? On the train . . . ? She’s gonna dump me. She’s got the pretty boys lined up. She likes pretty boys. With this face . . .”

“What happened?”

“The company voted to do Cyrano. Who gets the lead? Gerrold. The pretty boy. They made him ugly and I’ll carry a goddamn pike in the battle scenes. Before this bitch joined up—she supposedly played on Broadway, big deal, but that’s why they took her, she can’t act—I used to be something. The next thing I know, I’m carrying fuckin’ pikes.”

“What’re you going to do?”

Druze had shaken his head. “I don’t know. Finding a job is tough. Up on the stage, with the lights, with makeup, this face is okay. But getting in the door—people look at me, theater people, and they say, Whoa, you’re ugly. Theater people don’t like ugly. They like pretty.”

Bekker had asked, “What if Elizabeth Armistead went away?”

“What do you mean?” But Bekker had caught the quick, feral glint when Druze looked toward him, and he knew the idea was there in the back of Druze’s head. If Armistead went away, things would be different. Just like they would be for him, if Stephanie went away . . . .

Bekker had kept the coveralls in a sack at the back of his chest of drawers since he bought them, at a Sears, three months earlier. They were blue, the kind a mechanic might wear. He pulled them over his jeans and sweatshirt, found the matching hat in the closet and put it on. Druze knew about costumes and had put it together for him. This costume said service. Nobody would look at him twice.

Bekker glanced at his watch, and the first dislocation occurred, thrilling him: the watch elongated, a Dalí watch, draped over his wrist like a sausage. Wonderful. And the power was coming, darkening his vision, shifting everything to the ultraviolet end. He groped in his pocket for the cigarette case, found a tab of the speed and swallowed it.

So good . . . He staggered through the room, feeling it, the power surging along his veins, a nicotine rush times two hundred. He pushed the power back in a corner, held it there, felt the tension.

The time was getting tighter. He hurried down the steps, checked a window to see how dark it was, then carefully picked up the hammer and slid it into his right-hand pocket. The rest of his equipment, the clipboard, the meter and the identification tag, were piled on Stephanie’s desk.

The clipboard, with the paper clipped to it, went with the service costume. So did the meter. Druze had found the meter in an electronics junk store and bought it for almost nothing: it was obsolete, with a big analog dial on top, originally made for checking magnetic fields around power lines. The identification tag was Bekker’s old hospital ID. He’d laminated it and punched a hole in one end, and hung it from his neck by an elastic string.

He took a breath, did a mental checklist, walked out through the breezeway to the car and used the automatic garage-door opener to lift the door. He drove the long way out of the alley, then continued through the next alley, watching his mirror. Nobody.

Traveling by back streets, he made it to Elizabeth Armistead’s house in a little over eight minutes. He would have to remember that. If Druze was suspected, he should know the time of his arrival. He just hoped she would be there.

“She does one half-hour of meditation, then drinks an herb tea, then comes down for the warm-ups,” Druze said, prepping him. “She’s fussy about it. She missed her meditation once and spent the whole show dropping lines.”

Druze . . . The original plan had called for Bekker to phone Druze just before he left the house on the way to Armistead’s. As soon as Druze got the call, at a remote phone in the theater’s control booth, he would call the ticket office with his best California-cool accent. My name is Donaldson Whitney. Elizabeth Armistead said that she would put me on the guest list for two tickets. I’m in a rush through town, but I have time for her play. Could you call her and confirm?

They would call and confirm. They always did. Too many bullshitters trying to get in free. Donaldson Whitney, though, was a theater critic from Los Angeles. Armistead would gush . . . and the ticket people would remember. That was the point of the exercise: to create a last man to talk to the dead woman, with Druze already in makeup, onstage, warming up . . . alibied. Druze had suggested it and Bekker had found no way to demur.

He could, however, go early; Druze wouldn’t have to know. But the cops would figure it out . . . .

And after doing Armistead, he could call as though he were just leaving his house. Then Druze would make his Donaldson Whitney call, and if Armistead didn’t answer the phone when the ticket office called her, well, she simply wasn’t home yet. That could hardly be Bekker’s fault . . . .

Bekker took it slowly the last few minutes down to Armistead’s. He’d cruised her house before, and there were no changes. The lots were small, but the houses were busy. One man coming or going would never be noticed. A light burned in Armistead’s house, in the back. Her silver Dodge Omni was at the curb, where it usually was. He parked at the side of the house, under a tree heavy with bursting spring buds, got his equipment, leaned back in the seat and closed his eyes.

Like a digital readout: one-two-three-four-five. Easy steps. He let the power out, just a bit; when he looked, the steering wheel was out-of-round. He smiled, thinly, allowed himself to feel the burn in his blood for another moment, then got out of the car, changed the thin smile for a harassed look and walked around the corner to Armistead’s house. Rang the doorbell. And again.

Armistead. Larger than he thought, in a robe. Pale oval face; dark hair swept back in a complicated roll, held with a wooden pin. Face slack, as though she’d been sleeping. Door on a chain. She peered out at him, her eyes large and dark. She’d look good on a stage. “Yes?”

“Gas company. Any odor of gas in the house?”

“No . . .”

“We show you have gas appliances, a washer and dryer, a hot-water heater?” All that from Druze’s reconnaissance at an Armistead party. Bekker glanced down at the clipboard.

“Yes, down in the basement,” she said. His knowledge of her home had confirmed his authority.

“We’ve had some critical pressure fluctuations up and down the street because of a main valve failure. We have a sniffer here”—Bekker hefted the black box, so she could see the meter—“and we’d like to take some readings in your basement, just in case. There could be a problem with sudden flareups. We had a fire over on the next block, you probably heard the fire trucks.”

“Uh, I’ve been meditating . . . .” But she was already pulling the chain. “I’m in a terrible rush, I’ve got to get to work . . . .”

“Just take a minute or two,” Bekker assured her. And he was in. He slipped his hand in his pocket, gripped the hammer, waited until he heard the door close firmly.

“Through the kitchen and down the stairs,” Armistead said. Her voice was high and clear, but there was an impatient edge to it. A busy woman, interrupted.

“The kitchen?” Bekker glanced around. The drapes had been closed. The smell of prairie flowers was in the air, and spice, and Bekker realized that it must be her herb tea. The power came out now, out of the corner of his head, and his vision went momentarily blue . . . .

“Here. I’ll show you,” Armistead said impatiently. She turned her back on him, walking toward the rear of the house. “I haven’t smelled a thing.”

Bekker took a step behind her, began to draw the hammer, and suddenly blood gushed from his nose. He dropped the meter and caught the blood with his hand, and she saw the motion, turned, saw the blood, opened her mouth . . . to scream?

“No, no,” he said, and her mouth closed, halfway . . . everything so slow. So slow, now. “Ah, this is the second time today . . . . Got hit in the nose by my child, just a five-year-old. Can’t believe it . . . Do you have any tissue?”

“Yes . . .” Her eyes were wide, horrified, as the stream of blood dripped down his coveralls.

They were on the rug in the front room, and she started to pivot, going for the tissue. The power slowed her motion even more and demanded that he savor this. There could be no fights, no struggles, no chances. She couldn’t be allowed to scratch him, or bruise him . . . . This was business, but the power knew what it wanted. She was saying, “Here, in the kitchen . . . ,” she was pivoting, and Bekker, one hand clenched to his face, stepped close again, pulled the hammer from his pocket, swung it like a tennis racket, with a good forehand, got his back and shoulder in it.