Текст книги "Lucas Davenport Novels 1-5"

Автор книги: John Sandford

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Текущая страница: 61 (всего у книги 105 страниц)

No luxuries here, Doctor. No studies. Just do it and get out.

He paced, his legs seemingly in another country, working it out in his mind. If everything went right, it’d be so simple . . . . But he ought to check the gun. Go to Wisconsin, fire a couple of shots. He hadn’t fired it in years, not since a trip to New Mexico. He’d bought it originally in Texas, a casual purchase from a cowboy in El Paso, a drunk who needed money. Not much of a gun, a .38 special, but good enough.

As for the shot . . . he’d have to risk it. If she had a radio  . . . Maybe four o’clock would be better. They should be at home then, and the people in the apartments adjoining the woman’s would be less likely to be there.

He paced, working it out, working himself up, generating a heat, the light dose of PCP flipping him in and out of other-when.

At midnight, pressed by the needs of Beauty, he threw down two tabs of MDMA. The drug roared through him, hammered down the PCP, and he began to dance, to flap around the living room, on the deep carpets, and he went away . . . .

When he returned, breathing hard, he found himself half stripped. What now? He was confused. What? The idea came. Of course. If something went wrong tomorrow—unlikely, but possible; he was confident without being stupid about it—he would have missed an opportunity. Excited now, his hands trembling, he pulled his clothes back on, got his jacket and hurried out to the car. The hospital was only ten minutes away . . . .

He was stuck in the stairwell for five minutes.

He’d gone to his office first, done another MDMA for the creative sparkle and insight it brought, and a methamphetamine to sharpen the edge of his perceptions. Then he went to the locker room and changed into a scrub suit. The clean cotton felt cool and crisp against his skin, touching but not clinging to his chest, the insides of his arms, his thighs, like freshly starched sheets, the pleasure of its touch magnified by the ecstasy . . . .

He left then, alternately hurrying and restraining himself. He couldn’t wait. He crept up the stairs, not quite chortling, but feeling himself bursting with the joy of it. He was careful. If he was seen, it wouldn’t be a disaster. But if he was not, it would be better.

At the top of the stairs, he opened the door just a crack, enough so that he could see the nurses’ station fifty feet down the hall. He held onto the door handle: if anyone came through unexpectedly, he could react as though he were about to pull the door open . . . .

The nurse spent five minutes on the telephone, standing up, laughing, while he watched her through the crack and cursed her: the drugs were working in his blood, were demanding that he go to Sybil. He held back but wasn’t sure how long he could last . . . .

There. The nurse, still smiling to herself, hung up the phone, sat down and pivoted in her chair, facing away from Bekker. He opened the door and quickly stepped through, across the hall, to where her line of vision was cut off. He moved away silently, the surgical moccasins muffling his footsteps, down the hall to Sybil’s room.

Her television peered down from the ceiling; it was tuned to the word processor. He frowned. She wasn’t supposed to be able to use it. He stepped next to the bed and bent over in the dim light. The processor console sat on a table to the left side of her bed. He reached out, rolled her head: she was wearing the switch. Looking up at the screen, he used the keyboard’s arrow keys to move a cursor to the Select option, then pressed Enter. A series of options came up, including a dozen files. Nine of the files were named. Three were not: they had only numbers.

He was moving the cursor to select the first of the files when he realized that she was awake. Her eyes were dark and terrified.

“It’s time,” he whispered. The drugs roared and he moved closer to her bedside, peering down into her eyes. She closed them.

“Open your eyes,” he said. She would not.

“Open your eyes . . . .” Her eyes remained closed.

“Open your . . . Sybil, I really need to know what you see, there at the end; I need to see your reactions. I need your eyes open, Sybil . . . .” He rattled a key on the keyboard. “I’m looking at your files, Sybil . . . .”

Her eyes opened, quickly, almost involuntarily. “Ah,” he said, “so there is a reason I should look . . . .”

Her eyes were flashing frantically from Bekker to the screen. He moved the cursor to the first numbered file and pushed Enter. There were two letters on the screen: MB.

“Ah. That wouldn’t stand for ‘Michael Bekker,’ would it?” he asked. He erased the letters, moved to the next file. KLD. He erased them. “A little message here? Do you really think they would’ve understood? Of course, with a few more days, you might have been able to squeeze out some more . . . .”

Bekker went to the final file. ME. “Got the ‘me’ done, anyway,” he said. He backspaced over the letters, and they were gone.

“Well,” he said, turning back to her. “Can I convince you to keep your eyes open?”

She closed them.

“Time,” he said. “And this time, we’re going all the way. Really, truly, Sybil. All the way . . .”

He stepped to the doorway and glanced down the hall. Nobody. Sybil’s eyes followed him across the room and back, dark, wet. Bekker, his eyebrows arched, placed his palm over Sybil’s mouth and gently pinched her nose with the thumb and index finger of the same hand. She closed her eyes. With the index and middle fingers of the other hand, he lifted her eyelids. She stared blankly, unmoving, for fifteen seconds. Then her eyes skewed wildly, from side to side, looking for help. Her chest began to tremble and then her eyes stopped their wild careen, fixed beyond him, and began to shine.

“What is it?” Bekker whispered. “Do you see? Are you seeing? What? What?”

She couldn’t tell; and at the end, her eyes, the shine still on them, rolled up, the pupils gone . . . .

“Hello?”

Panicked, he let go of her nose, backed away from the bed, the hair rising on the back of his neck. He was trembling violently, unable to control himself. She was so close. So close.

“Hello-o-o?”

He staggered to the door, barely able to breathe, peeked out. He could see a corner of the nurses’ station, but nobody there. Then a woman’s voice, two rooms down the hall toward the nurses’ station. The nurse: “Did you call me, Mrs. Lamey?”

Bekker chanced it, crossed the hall in three long strides and went out through the internal door. He let the door close of its own weight, let it slide shut with a barely audible hiss, then started down the stairs two at a time. Just as the door shut, he heard the nurse’s voice again.

“Hello?”

She must have seen or heard something, or sensed it. Bekker fled down the stairs, the moccasins muffling his footfalls. He opened the door on his floor, stepped through and from far above heard another, more distant “Hello?”

Ten seconds later he was in his office, the door locked, the lights out. Breathing hard, heart beating wildly. Safe. A Xanax would help. He popped one, two, sat down in the dark. He would wait awhile, get his clothes. The MDMA bit him again, and he went away . . . .

Lucas went to pick Cassie up at the theater, and waited while she scrubbed her face, watching again for Druze. And again, Druze was somewhere else.

“How’s the play going?” Lucas asked.

“Pretty good. We’re actually making some money, which is the important thing. It’s kind of funny, has its message. That’s a good combination in Minneapolis.”

“Sugar pill,” Lucas said.

“Something like that.”

They ate a midnight snack at a French café in downtown Minneapolis, then went for a walk, looking in the windows of art galleries and trendoid restaurants. Two of them featured raised floors, and the younger burghers of Minneapolis peered down at them through the windows, their fat legs tucked under tablecloths almost at eye level.

“I kept looking at Carlo, I couldn’t help it,” Cassie said. “I’m afraid he’s going to catch me and think I’m coming on to him or something.”

“Be careful around him,” Lucas said. “If he comes to your apartment, tell him you’re in the shower, still wet, or something. Or that you’ve got me in there . . . . Keep him out. Keep the door shut. Don’t be alone with him.”

She shivered. “No way. Though . . . there’s a funny thing about this. Before I saw those pictures, I might have said, ‘Yeah, Carlo could kill somebody.’ Now, it’s hard to believe that somebody you know could be doing this. Especially the business about the eyes. Carlo doesn’t seem out of control; I mean, he could be crazy, but you feel like it would be a real cold crazy. Not a hot crazy. I could see Carlo strangling somebody and never showing any expression: I just can’t see him in some kind of frenzy . . . .”

“Could he fake it? Could he be cold enough to do the eyes without feeling it?”

She thought for a moment, then said, “I don’t know. Maybe.” She shivered again. “But I’d hate to think anybody could be that cold. And why would he, anyway?”

“I don’t know,” Lucas said. “We don’t know what’s going on, yet.”

At Lucas’ house, in the bedroom, Cassie lay on top of him, a compact mass of muscle. She reached down and grabbed an inch of skin at his waist. “No love handles. Pretty impressive for a guy as ancient as yourself.”

Lucas grunted. “I’m in awful shape. I sat on my ass all winter.”

“Need a workout?”

“Like what?”

“No sex until you pin me for a three-count?”

“Aw, c’mon . . .”

“You c’mon, wimpy . . .”

They wrestled, and after a time, but not too long, she was pinned.

Beauty arrived home at about the same time. The night’s work had been both frightening and exhilarating. A disappointment in some ways, true, but then again: he could go back. He still had Sybil to do. As Lucas and Cassie made love, Bekker ate two more MDMAs and danced to Carmina Burana, bouncing around the Oriental carpet until he began to bleed . . . .

CHAPTER

25

Lucas heard the first newspaper hit the front porch. That’d be the Pioneer Press. The StarTribune should be ten minutes later. He dozed, half listening, drifting from dream to linear thought and back to dream, dream editing reality, Jennifer and the baby, Cassie, other faces, other times. He inserted the thwap of the StarTribune; but the dream logic wouldn’t buy it, and he woke up, yawned and stumbled out to get the paper. At five-thirty it was still dark, but he could see the heavy gray clouds groaning overhead and smell the rain heavy in the air.

Not responsible . . . Lucas Smith.

He glanced at the comics and went back to bed, falling facedown across the sheets. Cassie’s perfume lingered on them, although she’d insisted on going back to her apartment.

“We’re getting close on the play. I shouldn’t fool around late and get up late. I have to work,” she’d said as she dressed.

The perfume was comforting, a sign of society. He slept on her side, dreaming again, until the telephone rang. Startled, he thought, Loverboy, and rose through his dreams and snatched at the telephone, almost knocking the lamp off the bedstand.

“Davenport.”

“Lucas, this is Del . . .”

“Yeah, what’s happening?” He sat up, put his feet on the floor. Cold.

“I’m, uh, over at Cheryl’s. We were talking last night, and she told me that Bekker has been creeping around her ward. He’s been seeing a woman patient almost every day—and the thing is, this woman can’t communicate.”

“Not at all?”

“Not a thing. Her mind’s still okay, but she’s got Lou Gehrig’s disease and she’s, like, totally paralyzed. Cheryl says she’s got maybe a week or two to live, no more. Cheryl can’t figure Bekker—he’s not exactly the social type. Anyway, I thought it might be something.”

“Hmph. I got a guy over there. I’ll give him a call,” Lucas said. “Are you on Druze today?”

“Yeah, I’m about to go over.”

“I may see you.”

Lucas hung up, yawned, glanced at the clock. After ten, already: he’d slept more than four hours after looking at the paper. He dropped back on the pillow, but his mind was working.

He got up, called Merriam, was told the doctor wasn’t in yet, left a message and went off to shave. Merriam called back just as he was about to leave the house.

“There’s a woman there I’d like you to check,” he said. “Her name is Sybil . . . .”

Lucas stopped at Anderson’s office first.

“Where’s Druze?”

“Still bagged out at his apartment.”

At his own office, the answering machine showed two messages. Loverboy? He punched the message button as he took off his jacket.

“Lucas, this is Sergeant Barlow. Stop and see me when you come in, please.” God damn it, he had no time for this. If he could slip out without encountering Barlow . . . The machine clicked and started again.

“Lieutenant Davenport, this is Larry Merriam. You better come over here right away. I’ll leave a note at the desk to send you up. Pediatric Oncology. I’ll be out in the ward. Talk to the duty nurse and she’ll chase me down.”

Merriam sounded worried, Lucas decided. He put his jacket back on and was locking the office door when Barlow came down the steps at the end of the hall and saw him.

“Hey, Lieutenant Davenport, I need to talk to you,” he called.

“Could I stop up later? I’m kind of on the run . . . .”

Barlow kept coming. “Look, we gotta get this done,” he said, his mustache bristling.

Lucas shook him off: “I’m up to my ass. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”

“God damn it, Davenport, this is serious shit.” Barlow moved so that he was between Lucas and the door.

“I’ll talk to you,” Lucas said, irritated, letting it show. They stared at each other for a second; then Lucas stepped around him. “But I can’t now. Talk to Daniel if you don’t believe me.”

Barlow hadn’t been good on the street. He was a control freak and didn’t deal well with ambiguities—and the street was one large ambiguity. He’d done fine with Internal Affairs, though.

IA usually went to work on a cop only if there was a blatantly public foul-up, and that was okay with most of the cops in the department, outside of a few hothead brother-cop freaks. Better IA, the feeling went, than some outside board full of blacks and Indians and who knows what, which seemed to be the alternative.

The department had barely managed to fight off a city council proposal that would have formed a review board with real teeth. The study commission on that—the commission Stephanie Bekker had served on—had gone a bit too far, though, had given the impression that it wanted to get on the cops a little too much. That hadn’t gone down well with voters scared by crime . . . .

So a gross screw-up in public would get you an IA investigation. A cop could find himself a target also if he got too deep into drugs, or started stealing too much. Screwing off and getting your partner hurt, that would do it too.

But IA didn’t worry much if a pimp got slapped around in a fistfight. Especially not if he’d pulled a knife. Half of the cops on the force would’ve shot him and let it go at that, and they would have been cleared by the board. And if the fight had taken place during an arrest on a warrant charging a violent crime, and if the victim of that crime was scarred for life and still around to testify, to be looked at . . .

Where was Barlow coming from? Lucas shook his head. It didn’t compute. Anderson was going in the door and Lucas was going out, when Lucas hooked him by the arm.

“You think . . . the guys in the department would like to see me fall? Get taken off by IA?” Lucas asked.

“Are you nuts?” Anderson asked. “What’s happening with IA?”

“They’re on me for the fight with that kid, the pimp. I can’t figure out where it’s coming from.”

“I’ll ask around,” Anderson said. “But when the guys decide somebody ought to fall, it’s no big secret. You know that. And nobody’s talking about you.”

“So where’s it coming from?” Lucas asked.

Barlow stayed in the back of Lucas’ mind all the way to the university campus. He dumped the car in a no-parking zone outside the hospital, stuck a police ID card in the window and went inside. Pediatric Oncology was on the sixth floor. A nurse took him down through a warren of small rooms, past a larger room with kids in terry-cloth robes, sitting in wheelchairs and watching television, into another set of hospital rooms. They found Merriam sitting on a bed, talking to a young girl.

“Ah, Lieutenant Davenport,” he said. He looked at the girl in the bed. “Lisa, this is Lieutenant Davenport. He’s a police officer with the Minneapolis Police Department.”

“What’s he doing here?” she asked, cutting straight to the heart of the matter. The girl was completely bald and had a very pale face and unnaturally rosy lips. The chemotherapy aside, Lucas thought, touched with a cold finger of fear, she looked a lot like his daughter would in ten years.

“He’s a friend of mine, stopping to chat,” Merriam said. “I’ve got to go for a while, but I’ll be back before they start setting up the procedure.”

“Okay,” she said.

Outside, in the hall, Lucas said, “I couldn’t do this.” And, “Do you have kids?”

“Four,” Merriam said. “I don’t think about it.”

“So what happened?” Lucas asked. “You sounded a little tense.”

“The woman you called about. I went down to see her. She has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis . . .”

“Lou Gehrig’s disease . . .”

“Right. She’s almost completely incommunicado. Her brain works fine, but she can’t move anything but her eyes. She’ll be dead in a week or two. And Bekker is trying to kill her.”

“What?” Lucas grabbed Merriam by the arm.

“This absolutely defeats me: a goddamn doctor,” Merriam said, pulling away. “But you have to see for yourself. Come along.”

Lucas trailed behind him as they went down a flight of stairs.

“I went down to find her this morning and stopped to ask at the nursing station,” Merriam said over his shoulder. He pushed through a door at the bottom of the stairs. “The duty nurse had worked overnight, and was working an extra half-shift because somebody was sick. Anyway, I mentioned that I was there to see Sybil and asked if Dr. Bekker had been around. The nurse said—you’ll have to take this with a grain of salt—she said she didn’t see him but she’d felt him. Late last night. She said it occurred to her that dirty old Dr. Death was around, because she shivered, and she always shivers when she sees him.”

“She calls him ‘Dr. Death’?”

“ ‘Dirty old Dr. Death,’ ” Merriam said. “Not very flattering, is it? So then I went down to talk to Sybil. She’s going by inches, but the nurses say she’s got an inch or two left . . . .”

Merriam led him past the nurses’ station and down the hall, past an exit door and three or four more rooms, then glanced inside a room and turned. Sybil lay flat on her back, unmoving except for her eyes. They went to Merriam, then to Lucas, and stayed with him. They were dark liquid pools, pleading.

“Sybil can’t talk, but she can communicate,” Merriam said simply. “Sybil, this is Lieutenant Davenport of the Minneapolis Police Department. If you understand, say yes.”

Her eyes moved up and down, a nod, and stayed with Merriam.

“And a no,” Merriam prompted.

They moved from side to side.

“Has Dr. Bekker been coming here?” Merriam asked.

Yes.

“Are you afraid of him?”

Yes.

“Are you afraid for your life?”

Yes.

“Have you tried to communicate with your eye switch?”

Yes.

“Did Dr. Bekker interfere?”

Yes.

“Is Dr. Bekker trying to kill you?” Lucas asked.

Her eyes shifted to him and said, Yes. Stopped, and then again, Yes, frantically.

“Jesus Christ,” said Lucas. He glanced at Merriam. “Has he been interested in your eyes? Said anything about . . .”

Her eyes were flashing up and down again. Yes.

“Jesus,” he said again. He leaned across the bed toward the woman. “You hang on. We’ll bring in a camera and an expert interrogator, and we’re going to get you on videotape. We’re going to slam this asshole in prison for so long he’ll forget what the sun looks like. Okay?”

Yes.

“And excuse the ‘asshole,’ ” Lucas said. “My language sometimes gets away from me.”

No, her eyes said, sliding from side to side.

“No?”

“I think she means, Don’t apologize, ’cause he is an asshole,” Merriam said from beside the bed. “That right, Sybil?”

She was like a piece of modeling clay, unmoving, still, except for the liquid eyes:

Yes, she said. Yes.

“I’ll have somebody here in a half-hour,” Lucas said, when they were outside her door.

“You’ll have to talk to her husband, just to make sure the legalities are right,” Merriam said. “I’ll see the director about this.”

“Tell him the chief is going to call. And I’ll have one of our lawyers talk to her husband. Can they get all the information from here at your desk?”

“Sure. Anything you need.”

Lucas started away, then stopped and turned.

“The kids you think he killed. Did he go after their eyes? I mean, was there anything unusual about their eyes?”

“No, no. I was there for the postmortems, their eyes weren’t involved.”

“Hmph.” Lucas started away again, stopped again.

“Don’t let anyone close to her.”

“Don’t worry. Nobody gets in there,” Merriam said.

Lucas called Daniel from a pay phone and explained.

“Sonofabitch,” Daniel crowed. “Then we got him.”

“I don’t know,” Lucas said. “But we got something. The lawyers will have to figure out if it’ll hold up in court. And it doesn’t tie him to these other things.”

“But we’re moving,” Daniel insisted. “I’ll send a tape unit over there right now, and Sloan to talk to her.”

“Can we put a guy on her door?”

“No problem. Around the clock. You think we should stick a surveillance team on him again?”

Lucas considered, then said, “No. He’ll be hyperaware of anything like that. We’ve got Druze going . . . . Let’s see what happens.”

“All right. What are you doing?”

“I got a couple more ideas . . . .”

A male duck cruised a female across the college pond, as Elle Kruger and Lucas climbed the sidewalk toward the main buildings. Spring, but a cold wind was blowing. Well off to the west, over Minneapolis, they could see darker clouds, and the blurring underedges that said it was raining.

“The eye fixation could have been created by some kind of traumatic incident, but that seems somewhat unlikely,” Elle said. “It’s more likely that he’s always had a feeling of being watched, and this is his reaction . . . .”

“Then why weren’t the kids cut up?”

“Lucas, you’re missing the obvious,” the nun said. “No good for a gamer.”

“All right, tell me the obvious, Sister Mary Joseph, ma’am,” he said.

“Maybe he didn’t kill the children.”

Lucas shook his head. “Thought of that. But Merriam gets these vibrations, and it fits with what he’s doing with this Sybil, and the interest in the eyes fits with these other killings. Could be a coincidence, but I doubt it.”

“As I said, it is possible that he developed the fixation between killings.”

“But not likely.”

“No.”

They walked with their heads down, climbing the hill, and Lucas said, “Would it make any difference when he did the eyes? I mean, could he do them later?”

Elle stopped and looked up at him. “Well. I don’t know. This woman who died at the mall—her eyes weren’t done until after death.”

“Neither were George’s, the guy they dug up in Wisconsin. He probably wasn’t done for twenty-four hours . . . .”

“That’s your answer, then. He does it after death, but apparently it doesn’t have to be right away. What are you thinking?”

“Just that if a kid dies and there’s going to be a postmortem, you might not want to do the eyes right away. Especially if you had another shot, later.”

“Like at the funeral home?”

“Sure. Anytime after the postmortem. He’s a pathologist, he’s right there with the bodies. He could do the eyes there, right in the hospital, or at the funeral home during a visitation. Who watches a dead body?”

“Do they do anything with the eyes at funeral homes? Would anybody notice?” Elle was doubtful.

“I don’t know,” Lucas said. “But I can find out.”

“What time is it?” she asked suddenly. “I’ve got a four-o’clock class.”

Lucas looked at his watch. “It’s just four now.”